I think a common Libertarian view is that unions are unfairly and massively promoted by the State. (For example, the absurd laws against 'retaliation'.) There is no objection to unions that arise through purely voluntary associations. However, employers should be permitted to do the same thing, and they currently are not.

Yes. In fact, the more better bots overall and the smarter they are, the more stable the market is for everyone.

Suppose a supply/demand imbalance causes widgets to sell for $8 in Chicago but $10 in Pittsburgh. A widget stabilizing bot will buy widgets for $8 in Chicago and sell them for $10 in Pittsburgh, until the prices converge at, say, $9. He'll make $2/widget. And he'll fix the imbalance that was resulting in people getting paid too much in Pittsburgh and too little in Chicago. The bots make money and they stabilize the market. It's pure win/win.

Umm, that's how exchanges work.

Right. If you're rational, they'll do the former. If you're irrational, they'll do the latter. It is the same as inflation but in reverse. An irrational employer who refuses to raise wages to combat inflation will lose employees. A rational one will raise wages.

Because he couldn't afford to. If he can't afford to hire 10 employees at market rates today, why would you think he would magically be able and willing to do so in 10 years?

It's precisely the same problem, which is why it's no problem at all. You can make the same argument about inflation -- employees constantly demanding raises will piss off employers and hurt employment longevity and job stability. But that's obviously not true. It really makes no difference.

Even a dedicated machine uses the same physical network interface on the same router. If sharing network hardware were a problem, every system on the Internet would have it. And yes, C++ is very powerful. So what?

No. If you could, what incentive would they have to give you the item

A private key grants the ability to transfer BitCoins out of any given address. If you have lost that private key, your coins are gone forever. If you still have that private key (say because you backed it up) then you can still transfer the coins. You must guard your private key -- anyone who has it can irrevocably transfer away your BitCoins.

It is to some extent unfortunate the private key file is called a 'wallet'. It is most unlike a wallet and is in fact more like a keyring.

That wouldn't solve the problem. Even if you specify a required previous block, there is still no way to know whether the subsequent block that contains this transaction will "win" until sufficient blocks have passed.

In fact, this would make things worse. In the present system, if the block containing the transaction doesn't win, at least you can still perform the transaction if the sender hasn't maliciously attempted a double spend. With your scheme, if the block containing the transaction doesn't win, there is no chance to still perform the transaction.

By losing the coins, the "attacker" would also lose whatever value he had exchanged to accumulate those coins. If he stole the coins or acquired them through other nefarious means, the attack doesn't add anything except it reduces his ability to cash out.

Theoretically, a person could acquire a large number of bitcoins and then use some kind of attack to destroy other people's bitcoins. His goal would be to increase the value of the bitcoins he didn't destroy. The logic would have to be that he couldn't steal those bitcoins as easily as he could destroy them (otherwise, stealing them gives him 100% of their value, obviously more). While he would benefit from this attack (just as he would benefit from simply stealing bitcoins) he would have to divide his gain with everyone else who holds bitcoins. So it seems like it would be so inefficient that it's not worth worrying about.

Do we worry that someone will buy all the coffee in the world and then resell it for much higher prices? This would only be even remotely worth worrying about if bitcoins were so dominant that using other currencies was impractical.

They wouldn't be living with pay decreases. If I pay one week with 50 one dollar bills and the next day with one 50 dollar bill, has your pay decreased because you received fewer dollars?

There is no reason job stability would suffer. You can make the same argument in an inflationary economy and it's equally wrong. Here it goes: "Suppose I get a job for $55,000 per year. Two years later, due to inflation, I'm not being paid enough. So unless my boss is willing to raise my salary, I'll take a new job for a higher wage. So job stability will suffer due to inflation." But we all know that's not right. Both participants have an incentive to restore the wage to market value.

I don't understand what you mean by verifying the IP address has not changed. Are you suggesting that if my ISP goes out of business, I should lose all my money?

And how will IP addresses be verified? If you say you got something from 1.2.3.4, how do I confirm or deny that? And what happens when two different clients see a site as having a different IP address? Say it uses different IP addresses on different networks. And what of nodes that have no IPv4 connectivity?

Honestly, it seems to cause way more problems than it solves.

Since the deflation in bitcoins is predictable, a bitcoin's value today already includes the present value of holding the bitcoin as it deflates. There can't be a significant actual increase in value just from predictable factors.

To give an analogy, suppose everyone knew for a fact that gold would hit $2,500/oz in two years. What would happen to the price of gold today? The assumption that something will go way up in value in the future will cause it to go way up in value today, preventing the future rise because it will have already happened.

Yes, it does. Otherwise, you could hand the money over the counter and the store owner could simply put it in his pocket and kick you out of the store. An offer (with precise terms) and acceptance (with consideration) is approximately equivalent to a written contract in every legal jurisdiction I know of and by common sense.

IMO, the client needs to be modified to tell the user what the results of the transaction are going to be. The current method of silently doing something the user can't easily understand is, IMO, unacceptable.

I don't follow the logic of your argument. What do you think is special about a signed contract?

If I walk into a store that has a sign, "Bubble gum, $1" and I hand $1 across the counter and ask for some bubble gum, do you think there's any legal, moral, or practical difference between the sign being up and a signed contract?

I believe that if you return it to a different client and that client had accepted a different list of transactions, it won't be able to claim the block.

For the record, it was $500,000 worth of bitcoins that was being talked about -- 25,000 BTC.

If he can't lower your wage, he won't hire you at $10/hour in the first place. He'll hire you at $9/hour or he'll insist on the right to lower your wages to keep up with their declining value. Just as people get cost of living increases, they'll get cost of living decreases. *Predictable* deflation is easily accounted for.

This is the error in the argument that bitcoin deflation will cause hoarding. Unless you want to hold the bitcoins for some reason, you don't need to hold them to get the value they will gain through deflation. The value of each bitcoin includes the value of the right to hold that bitcoin and watch it increase in value. So if you transfer the bitcoin today, you can collect on that expected deflation immediately. There is no need to wait -- the expected inflation or deflation is already built into the price of things.

Mt. Gox didn't roll back *bitcoin* transactions. They rolled back Mt. Gox transactions. The bitcoins (except for about $1,000 worth) never left Mt Gox's internal accounts. So Mt. Gox can give them to whoever they please. There is no mechanism for rolling back bitcoin transactions other than convincing their present owner to give them back or convincing everyone else to pretend that they have done so.

And a new client only needs to validate the entire block chain when it first starts up. After that, it only needs to keep its database up to date. There has been discussion of the ability to create a 'lite' version of the client that wouldn't ever need to do this but in exchange would have slightly weaker security properties. This is a problem that will likely be solved long before it's a real problem.

Is my math wrong? There are about 130,000 blocks now. We are generating a new block about every 400 seconds. That's about 80,000 blocks per year. That's 170,000 in the beginning of 2012 and 250,000 in the end of 2012.

He made 8 connections.