It's difficult to understand when women are truly not given the same consideration as men. As a young man I had a hard time getting a job, it was hard going on construction sites and having no experience to prove myself. Women face the same problem but throughout their lives, except they are women so they can be stereotyped and written off. a friend of mine told me a story of when she went to a construction site, with little experience but a willingness to work, they pretty much told her not to come back... why? because she was a woman and didn't know what she was doing.  At least as a young man, the foreman would tolerate my inexperience as a greenhorn, but as a woman stereotypes of why woman can't do things dominate, making women lose faith in themselves when interacting with men... written off and never given a chance.

Women comprise 50% of the population, this is a major untapped demographic, wherever inroads can be made it should be done. I'm all for empowering women.

I chose independent hacker, I just have to look at the effect. My reasoning is that whether something is intentional or not... it has the same result; What has been accomplished? 4 million of the worlds smartest people have been gathered to this honey pot, it has been built for exploration and experimentation(personal opinion, the flaws in Bitcoin seem intentional for experimentation) anyone can copy it, anyone can modify it, all opinions are explored and understood(like the blockchain), the system is being improved and all parts of the system are being analyzed and improved in a grand evolutionary algorithm run by millions of human minds... There is no doubt in my mind this group of people built this to inspire humanity to find the true answer about what money is and how to implement it.
   Hell I even read in the namecoin forum that Vinced was Satoshi! he made the first alt-coin!! what can we gather from this if it is true? Satoshi aimed to inspire creators and explorers. I'm still learning as much as I can about Namecoin right now and am looking forward to try to understand the C++ code to see what the purpose was. This is deep man, I am excited to discover new concepts and ideas in this grand puzzle.

OP It is a great idea, how do we make it happen?

I personally believe that power itself has to be understood to create a proper governance system,

What is power? Power is the ability to act.

How is power magnified? Through collaboration, through manipulation(positive or negative), through increasing force, by gaining a edge above normal, etc.  There are many ways to gain it, by understanding how power manifests itself can create a properly built system. for example: person A has an idea, understands that they simply do not have the resources to bring about their idea by themselves, they convince others in one way or another to help them, for every person they have convinced 100%  means they have gained someone that has doubled the power of that idea and halved the time for it to exist. Person B comes along and likes the argument, sees it as a promising solution, but thinks they can improve it... they remix it and modify the idea enabling the idea to go places it could not go before... the power of action has just been enhanced. Person B's improvement is great but person C wants it to go further so they try harder and look for ways to improve beyond what others are seeing.

This force is not simply based on opinion... governance is about the power to act on that information, who has the power to act upon these " actionable items"? the individual, the more connections and proper modifications an idea gets the wider it spreads giving individuals the power to act individually... but can they? are they informed enough? do they have the knowledge to tackle these problems? do they even have the time? knowledge and experience can be very exclusionary.

We can gather all the information we want but if there is no one designated to create a precise and proper response in a timely manner can we ever consider a poll system adequate?

I'm not destroying your idea but putting it into perspective... what is Governance? what is this idea? that is were you must begin. Letting everyone know what governance is as an idea.

why do I think this way? because I know there are many solutions but not everyone will like them... why not make a massive big data gathering mission organize information precisely with gps data on utilities, buildings, trains, planes and automobiles, who works in what government building, how the entire system is running not just at a utility level, or a singular problem but as an entire planet with massive infrastructure deployed, who fixes the problems? hire the nearest plumber to fix the pipes? the best one? the one that gives us the best deal? who will judge? all of us? who will pay? who controls who gets paid? who makes sure the job is done? properly? it will be an interesting journey and I hope you can handle the millions of ideas and the endless variations that you will find.

but on the blockchain and crypto question.

start simple, use what works and add to what works, beginning with polls and categories, but do to the nature of human knowledge, that it constantly changes, flexibility is paramount. Keep adding information real information about the world to be available infrastructure, statistics, arial views, latest government research, all information for a people to make proper decisions... accurate information. Everyone can give their opinion but people like the blockchain have to be verified to know they are a trustworthy source of information on a specific subject, the person becomes a blockchain of verified knowledge viewable by others to gauge properly their domain expertise, this person can form groups with other experts forming chains of trust, they have no more power than other citizens but in polls you can see how knowledgeable the voting citizens are on the subject. The polls are created by anyone so are the tests to gauge expertise to reflect a changing understanding of the world... in a properly working system it gets expanded and changes over time, yet retaining it's historical fields of knowledge.
The blockchain for the whole system would be the history of all previous decisions and polls. To avoid the problem of having joe from montana sent to idaho to repair the pipes, because 9 out of 10 people voting for who does the job did not even live where the plumbing was broken, who gets to vote for something to be done actually has to be within the problems area of effect. verifying this would be done through cryptography, your information is on the public blockchain your public key is on there and is part of the voting system, you update the information yourself and since it is public... if your lying someone will notice you change your location every few minutes so you can mess with their plumbing. The people who vie to provide services have to prove they can to the people who are most affected... if their not happy they'll tell everyone what a crappy job they did and even that they got swindled, nothing got done. A chain of trust develops the fly by nights die off and the resilient committed business owners remain and everyone knows they can trust them.
Developing proper law enforcement would still require laws, laws are the rights that every individual must have historically considered and modified by every person who has thought about it. Why? because a large group can infringe against these rights easily against an individual, the government is big because it has to be bigger than all competing groups to enforce these rights. In a Direct Democracy system certain parts of government have to be designated and verified to be able to act not just by the individual but by the collective.. ie. people trained designated and verified to uphold the individuals rights even at the cost of their own. people need to be able to respond and assemble in force fast, verified trained and equipped citizens... the key to creating parallels from government. military, police, legislation, judicial etc is this verification process that is transparent... the system would have to be fully open for all military, police, infrastructure support volunteers to be verifiable by non-trained civilians.  but the big part is knowing an individuals web of knowledge, their emotional state, their preparedness.... informed, educated, empowered citizens taking on the responsability at an individual level to act, defend, judge every other citizen by the common consensus on the rights of an individual.

Build a Hadoop cluster and distribute the hard drive over a network and connect it. It could work.

I don't think satoshi did things lightly, I've started understanding Bitcoin more and more and now I'm looking into C++ code and I think he had very carefully thought out systems but brushed off the questions to encourage exploration.

This algorithm is fast and not implemented widely so it would be less exploited, and the internal structure could have something to do with it... but what would the insight have been? I'm intrigued to find out.

I also thought about the size of ecdsa... it's tiny when compared to similar schemes.

 It's all part of the experiment, a deep complex web of choice; for the last few thousand years we have had no choice on how we wanted to achieve mass consensus, yet we have had choice on what we can immediately choose. The technology that has emerged has allowed us now to reach the furthest corners of the earth and maybe beyond, by simply sharing our views we have gained someone to share our dreams and learn with us.  I can imagine there will be people who prefer their money to act a certain way, why not let them choose what they believe in?

  Though I must say, what an interesting suggestion it is to have an infinite cap on money... it can make naming conventions hard to follow and might become a yearly ritual. The keynesian model is quite exhaustive... infinite inflation? that's rough, it moves individuals to keep busy by economic demand.

though how would you distribute it? That can make a huge difference.

what if he was using bi-endian machines? A single segment of servers? I can see Itanium processors doing this.

What about Namecoin? The .bit domain may be censorship resistant, would the ISPs be able to block transactions by refusing connections if you already have the addresses?

I just recently found out about Namecoin and am quite intreagued by the possibilities of a distributed DNS system.

Money I believe is a signalling system within a society to expend resources, the proof of work is analogous to the day to day work that everyone must do to prove that they have been of some benefit to someone and therefore have earned the right  to acrue points to signal release of resources.

But bitcoin is definitely memory... it tracks down and maintains a snapshot of the economy for everyone to see and to interpret for future action... this type of memory is truly mind-blowing.

You could call receipts and business records memory as well, but the fact that it is public and reviewable by anyone makes a huge difference. In essence treating Bitcoin as memory could create further public memory spaces with condensed information occuring in real time, maybe side chains built on top of Bitcoin like Namecoin; These side chains work as memory for all sorts of data that needs to be considered and interpreted sooner or later as an ongoing ledger of truth.

remember namecoin? I think merged mining is a very quick way to establish equal security. add that plus truly innovative features and a great distribution system and presto you have a succesful alt-coin. It is simply finding the correct values, ideologies etc that really resonate not just with it's users but with ecosystem around it(it does great things for the internet and society)

We basically have a choice: Pre-emptive measures proving ones ownership, proven security measures while having ownership or penalties of some sort to discourage theft. the other options are math based proofs...

1) Establish clear ownership, pre-taint the coins with a tertiary encryption with verifiable proof of ownership that can only be removed when legal ownership is finished(spent at a store). The business would have the right and legal standing to demand that it be removed, simply by the fact they are a established legally run business.  They can be transferred too.

2) Defend that wallet with every safe guard available.

3) or some unknown penalty, in a way this option is the POW for those who infringe the rights of others.

I truthfully do not like the idea of bringing more coins into the pit of oblivion, there aren't that many and once they are lost they are lost permanently. The current system employed by Bitcoin of collective civil vigilance over the blockchain works, but... man it is expensive... 20,000 coins lost forever for fear of being exposed and what of those who do it to spite others? They have nothing to lose never to be exposed.

some sort of coin retrieval system has to be employed on a personal level to mitigate legal costs and lost revenue.

the coins always belong to the person who has control over the wallet; If the key is given to a significant other and they spend them, then the person who makes the first transaction had the power, but how do you prove it was them and not someone else?

If they are stolen then you lose control immediately after the transaction, and who is to say if they can ever be prosecuted if someone does not find the identity of the person who did the next transaction? the power has already been ceded cryptographically to the thief, they now have control to return or maintain the coins in limbo.

 Legally the coins are yours... but you have lost control over them. A completely different system would have to be used to return those coins back... like mandatory work camps to re-emburse the victims lost revenue and with Bitcoin that would be brutal, the coin keeps appreciating.

But don't worry, we are all smart people helping each other, in one way or another, we'll think of something and someone will figure out how to counter that until the perfect solution is found... good or bad.

The only way to counter it is to protect that private key any way you can. I can only think of one way to prosecute thieves; setting up a service to follow the coins and notify businesses of the theft so they can act on the information and deny any possibility of spending or benefiting from that theft.

for the records, Bitcoin only uses the amount being transferred with ECDSA encryption, a very compact form of encryption, to verify transactions. it is very small using no more that .1kb per record, gets bigger if you take many inputs and make it into one output.

The Bitcoin system was definitely thought out carefully, but the settings were made for maximum security reasons. Starting out something new and knowing that there could be a slight chance of it screwing up on the network side of things definitely demands caution, better settings for alt-coins could be implemented to enhance proven features. A sub 10 minute confirmation time is acceptably secure, most forks in the system never go beyond two blocks before being abandoned... so at what point do the forks start to get bigger with smaller confirmation times?

I just learned about namecoin; I knew about it when I first learned about Bitcoin months ago... but not till recently did I really understand it. Reading the thread about satoshi's words on bitdns. I was quite amazed... shared cpu power, resources, etc. Wow what a thought. none of these new cryptocurrencies need to be competing for security all the currencies with similar POWs could be securing themselves, but it is quite amazing when they get attacked by powerful ASICs.

I'm figureing that namecoin was incorporated into Bitcoin for network rerouting at somepoint. right now it's not that useful since we still have to go through the normal openDNS system to get into the .bit domain. but I do think this thing is crazy, incorporating it on top of bitcoin, guarantees network security.

no choice on the volatility, just not enough regular movement and each area of the globe has different demand and persieved value to it. It's mostly controlled by liquidity and it's asking price, someone goes too low and has a lot of it, no choice this thing will tank until that trader gets bought out. The lowest bid controls the price... temporarily.

Not if it is done right, we are a network of humans interacting with computers to access the internet. The core group of any community will have common goals with other societies that will interpret the information in a different way and develop it differently, but they will advance the concept forward. This simply has to be accelerated by attracting the direct attention of the groups that will propagate the ideas most easily.

It is simply logical that all things interact, it's just a matter of putting the dots together where they meet.

Yup they have had this stuff for years, peripherals like printers have back doors programmed into them by law.

But the movement is already beginning with the opensource/openhardware movement. We'll be securing our own chip designs pretty soon. and fortunately the smartest members of the population which this community is composed of probably know how to protect themselves if cautioned about this.

an active, intelligent, informed, educated, highly interconnected community can counter any threat as long as it is identified.

I figure we better continue with the FPGA chips, build custom rigs secure from outside interference with custom opensource operating systems and the foundries can churn out backdoor free chips, couple that with advances in secure meshnetworks and we are homefree.

If it is in our collective best interest, we will solve it sooner or later, every thing is discovered sooner or later; we can learn from History and adapt to new conditions as long as we clearly communicate our ideas to each other sharing what we know to be true.

Bitcoin's technology can be used as the underlying system for their network, saving them billions. They can use it as an instant payment system, functioning as a front end for the Bitcoin network providing a known secure payment service; They of course can wait for the confirmations and using the blockchain, can immediately verify that the funds were in the account at a fraction of the time it takes for the first confirmation.

Keep it positive, make Bitcoins community shine, a dedicated community of the smartest 1 percent of the population backing and supporting the cryptocurrency movement; with them all problems can be solved.

Edit: They can also access other markets that were not available before because of fraud costs... Bitcoin makes fraud impossible if the right infrastructure and a Honest business is running it.