No, encourage them.

If there is a secret key owned by the government, and a copy of it exists on one computer system in every post office in America, I'd give it two weeks before that key is on Wikileaks.  If, instead, the government chooses to not put it on the computer itself, but to use a VPN that is also connected to one computer in every post office in America; I'd give them 2 months before the key is on Wikileaks and Anon or LulSec is posting child porn on the VPN's main portal site.

Postal clerk is an entry level job.  Security that is dependent upon a large number of postal clerks is security theater.  If that security theater is actually there to protect something that needs real security, somewhere in America there is going to be a hacker group that draws straws to choose the smuck that has to actually get up each morning and go to a job at the post office.

I'm honestly offended.  Just because you might not like the "hand's off" moderation style of a predominately libertarian forum, doesn't mean that we aren't paying attention.  There's way too much volume for the number of mods to police all the posts, but that is what the 'report to moderator' button is for.  Even most of them are just one user complaining about another that s/he doesn't like, so very few of them are honest complaints from our perspectives.  If you don't like how we do things here, you're welcome and encouraged to start your own Bitcoin forum.  Trust me, we won't mind.

They already do.  I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that at least half of the top ten pools have direct links to each other.  However, in a future that Bitcoin is wildly successful, single hop peer connections to those major miners (whether they continue to be user pools, or Wal-Mart's own datacenter) will be valuable enough to companies that serve mom & pop stores, smaller retail chains, and business associations that the major miners could stand to charge connection fees to those groups.  When that happens, the clients of those 2nd tier mining/POS companies will have lower average latency than the end user, and thus would be better protected from casual theft/fraud attempts, but the average network latency for the average end user/Android client could be terrible.  It's not unreasonable to expect there to be five hops or more from the largest miner to the average droid wallet in another two years.  Since blocks can be expected to be much larger on average as well, the CPU times and transmission times for each hop are going to start to tally up.  The average is over 2 seconds now, and the network is relatively small and low volume.  Imagine 500 times the nodes, 100+ times the transaction volume and an average block size of 700 Kilobytes.  The end to end network latency could easily push 2 minutes.

Like anything else, whether the repudiation of the debt is a good or bad thing depends upon who you are just as whether the secession of the Republic of Texas is good or bad depending mostly upon which side of the Texas border one happens to live on.

That's actually pretty hard to do.

Like I said, nearly zero industrial uses.  A few of those mentioned are only potential uses of gold.  For example, Silver is a far better conductor, and is used in aerospace for this purpose.  When is the last time you actually heard of anyone getting a gold filling?  That use has been replaced outright by enameled plastics and porcelin techniques. 

Deflation actually favors the consumer, generally.  But inflation steals the gains due to increased productivity.

This is what you get when you have increases in productivity....

http://cafehayek.com/2011/07/stagnating-middle-class.html

Have you ever watched Fox News?

I didn't write them, and they are not ordered based on importance.  The first is the root of all contract law, the second of all criminal & tort law.  They are called 'Mayburys Two Laws'

I should have been more explict in my double-spend attack comment.  The reason that I said that decreasing the average block interval could increase the risks of a double spend attack is because at some latency level blockchain splits become the norm.  Under these conditions, it's possible for an unscrupulous person to have his client hacked in such a manner that, for every honest spending transaction he engages in, another dishonest transaction is produced that spends those same coins back to another of his own addresses is produced 20 seconds later and sent to a random but topographicly distant node.  As long as latency is significantly below the average block interval, this would never matter.  And if many people started to do this as a matter of course, the present node permits the savvy user to monitor transactions, and if a double spend attempt is seen within the average latency time, both transactions are rejected by such nodes.

Yet, if the latency crosses that afore mentioned point, and blockchain splits become the norm, it then becomes possible for that unscrupulous user to time the release of his second transaction so that, even though it's practically impossible for the second one to gain the majority of nodes before the first one does, the possibilty exists that a multi-block chain split could permit the honest transaction to be confirmed for one or more blocks without destroying the dishonest transaction.  There then remains a (still fairly remote) possiblity that the honest transaction, even confirmed, isn't in the majority blockchain and is reversed once the block split is repaired by normal operations.  If that is the case, then the dishonest transaction has a better than even chance of becoming the transaction accepted into the permanent chain.  This would mean that opprotunisticly dishonest clients would exist that run in an honest manner so long as there was no blockchain split, but anytime that they detected a blockchain split (yes, they are detectable, most of the time) this kind of opprotunistic attack would be seen.

Latency can increase due to both an increase in the nodes of the network as well as a concurrent increase in per node bandwidth.  As more transactions are flying around, the load upon the nodes' cpu's also increase as this cannot be performed by GPUs at this point, and must be performed by the CPU.  High loads will result in a buildup of unconfirmed transaction queues, at least occasionally, even on dedicated hardware.  The transactions cannot propogate to the next set of nodes until they are verified, so this compounds the latency.  The same is true with a released block solution, as they cannot propogate until they are verified.  Increasing the number of peer connections would compensate for this effects somewhat by reducing the average number of hops necessary to flood the network, but at the cost of permanently increased bandwidth consumption.  At some point of increase, the cost of adding new peers outweighs the value of lower latency, and then new peer connections will cease.  Some nodes won't even have as many peer connections as the current client expects, as I already intentionally limit the number of peers my own node communicates with.  It's not in my own interest to have more than enough peers to be fairly certain that I'm not being screwed with, since I don't mine.  I'd say that it's a reasonable expectation to expect that average network latency will increase at a rate greater than linear against the growth rate of network nodes.

Mathmaticly, one department of the federal government owing money to another department of the federal government is comparable to your left pocket owing money taken from your right pocket.  For all practial purposes, that money is a fiction even when one doesn't consider the underlying fiat currency to, itself, be a fiction.  There is no SS trust fund, as all FICA taxes collected for SS that are not immediately sent back out to pay current beneficiaries is used to buy US Treasury Notes.  Which is then used to pay the current bills of the federal government.  Thus, when the day comes that the cost of beneficiaries of SS exceed the revenue from FICA taxes, congress must raise taxes on the working population to pay for the differences.  And they will no longer have the ability to finance current government largess on SS future payouts.  Thus, SS is, by definition, the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of this country.  Maybe the world.  By the time that this happens, the cost of refinancing the federal debt will have become so burdensome as to make the option of raising taxes to pay for SS beneficiaries a practical and political impossibility.  So the only options that will exist for congress is to either default and repudiate all or part of the federal debt, or simply inflate the currency to the point that the SS checks (which cannot practically maintain cost of living increases at the same time) are worth less then the new revenue provided by FICA taxes.  Of course, such inflation rates tend to be a vicious cycle unto themselves.

Mining for gold is also a net waste of energy, from the perspective that gold has nearly zero industrial uses outside of the monetary functions of gold.  Societies that produce more than they need to persist can afford to commit resources to such endeavors.  Societies that are on the edge of starvation, cannot.

Sure, as long as the 'owe' is the taxpayer and the 'ourselves' is the entire class of government parasites.  Under very rare circumstances is a actual net taxpayer also a beneficiary of government largess.

Keep in mind, that if the average interval were reduced, then the incidence of a blockchain split increases dramaticly.  In a future with many times the number of nodes in the p2p network, the odds that such a blockchain split could persist beyong one block, and even split again, also increases.  There is some, largely unknown, point of network size (and thus average network latency) with a low enough interval that such network splits become the norm, rather than the exception.  Although this is a self-healing issue, as network splits also split the hashing pool while maintaining the difficulty for both sides; frequent and persistant blockchain splits not only increase the average time between confirmations (from the perspective of any single transaction, not the network as a whole) it also could introduce a double spending 'window of opprotunity' on an often enough basis to make it a viable attack.  Mostly, the 10 minute interval was an arbitarty design decision, with a best guess as to the future size of the network.

I didn't have a say.  Am I responsible?  Collective responsibility is an evil fiction.

"I propose, then, a seemingly drastic but actually far less destructive way of paying off the public debt at a single blow: out-right debt repudiation. Consider this question: why should the poor, battered citizens of Russia or Poland or the other ex-Communist countries be bound by the debts contracted by their former Communist masters? In the Communist situation, the injustice is clear: that citizens struggling for freedom and for a free-market economy should be taxed to pay for debts contracted by the monstrous former ruling class. But this injustice only differs by degree from "normal" public debt. For, conversely, why should the Communist government of the Soviet Union have been bound by debts contracted by the Czarist government they hated and overthrew? And why should we, struggling American citizens of today, be bound by debts created by a past ruling elite who contracted these debts at our expense? One of the cogent arguments against paying blacks "reparations" for past slavery is that we, the living, were not slaveholders. Similarly, we the living did not contract for either the past or the present debts incurred by the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington."

http://mises.org/daily/1423

This is the only way to save the US FRN, which is the only scenario that Bitcoin (or some derivitive) doesn't become the next international trade currency.

I haven't bought any in a long time, decades even, but when I did they were 99 cents.  Which was on the low end of competitive with other such money orders.

My family wasn't some exception.


Maybe the corporate structure is inheriently flawed, as it's certainly amoral, but that isn't the implication of your statements.  Whether you intended it to mean it or not, your words implicated Wal-Mart as some kind of corporate criminal.  Which is an opinion that I encounter often within the union culture.  I never see those people shopping at wal-mart, but I've seen many of my union brothers who wouldn't raise their voices in support of my position shopping there.  I am offended by this kind of propoganda, in part, because I now understand that I was a victim of it.  And so are you.  I would imagine that, considering your youth, this is an opinion that you have picked up from either family or peers.  Well, they are victims too.  The truth shall set you free.


The terms 'good' and 'evil' are very subjective, but I'll hazard miscommunications and say, yes.


The corporate institution isn't rationally comparable to the systemic subjigation of an entire race/culture/religion of people over the course of generations.  Just trying to make this comparision drops your credibility about three points in my opinion.  I shouldn't even have to support that position.  Such a statement is comparable to violating Godwin's Law, as anyone who trys to play that card loses the argument by default.

When I was a younger man, and new to the union world, I used to eat this crap up.  Then my wife applied for a job there, just to piss me off.  She had a BS in Biology at the time and even with the low wages (not minimum, BTW) for a cashier; to this day she will tell you that it was the best job she has ever had.  She worked at Wal-Mart for four years as a cashier, for a Vet clinic for seven years as a vet assistant, and five years at Proctor & Gamble as a lab tech in their microbiology lab testing the anti-microbial effects of both P&G products as well as competitors.  The stories that she would tell me honestly shocked me.  Wal-Mart would go out of their way to improve the lives of their 'associates' in ways that I've never even heard of another employer doing.  For example, what my wife earned wouldn't have supported a single mother, and there were several that worked as cashiers at the Wal-Mart that she worked at.  The corporate office would sponser 'meetings' with the part-time & low wage employees to inform them of state and federal grants & programs that they might be eligible for, and would provide for the forms and some legal help to apply.  This is exactly why there are twice as many working poor who receive state and federal benefits such as welfare or food stamps at Wal-Mart than Target or KMart.  Granted, that might cost Wal-Mart next to nothing to help apply, rather than just raise their wages, but it's not something that they have to do, and even informing someone that external help might be available is more than half the trouble.

They would do other, less noble, things as well for their 'associates', such as have regular 'pep rallies' to improve moral.  As well as a (voluntary) daily exercise routine, intended to stretch out the legs of those who stand all day for a living, preventing chronic stress health problems later.  And no, they didn't save enough from the health care plan doing this to pay for the costs of having the manager and 20+ employees do this for 7 minutes each start of shift.

They also provided for a discount for direct family members, and a card for said family members.  Lots of retail chains give the employee a token discount during and after their shift, but who gives the spouse a discount card for 10% discount on everything in the store, all of the time and honors coupons and sales while doing so?  The only thing that I bought there in those four years that was not covered by that discount card was milk.  But baby formula was.

So anymore I tend to get a bit sideways when I see tis kind of anti Wal-MArt propoganda being presented without citations as if they were commonly accepted facts.  I've been a member of a union for nigh on 20 years now, and Wal-Mart has done more for my family than you can ever know; and that goes beyond what Wal-Mart does for everyone by the simple act of trying to sell everything that they can cheaper than anyone else.

Don't get me started on their optional health plans.  They were great.  The only fault that I could find with them, if it can be called a fault, is that they exposed the actual costs of health care to the associate, and then gave them the option of not buying in.