Introducing Bitcoins to the people of Central African Republic, and to Mozambique people, would start to take the funding away from the militaries that are trying to enslave the people.

And there are ways to do it. Ways to make it legal to drink unpasteurized milk. Ways to trade property without sales tax. Ways to avoid property tax and income tax on the use of the property.

Bitcoin is an innovation. Counterparty and Mastercoin are innovations built on Bitcoin. MaidSafe is coming.

It seems that the people who know how to work with land, and the people who know the best ways of owning land, and the people who know the major loopholes around the taxes, are not all that interested in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the key that ties it all together, at least until MaidSafe is fully online and operating worldwide.

So why is it that all kinds of folks ponied up multiple $thousands to buy Bitcoin? There isn't anything substantial backing Bitcoin. Land is always there. If the Internet or the power grid failed, Bitcoin could conceivably be gone. Land is always there. Do you think the land people maybe used the wrong approach? (Mastercoin Counterparty)

Did you say "make?" as in "force?"

Hey, it was swell knowing you. Perhaps again sometime.

Actually, a government may need a currency to make trading between its departments easier. The people should not be required to use it. Of course, the people are idiots and will go and voluntarily make agreements with government anyway. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc11mJGre10.

Actually, we need a floating island, so that all the subs of all the nations can blast our bottom out from under us.

If you have to learn how to understand government, it is too complicated already. All of us are reasonably smart. We all understand when things are right and when they are wrong, if we have all the details. Make it simple, or it will always be prone to corruption.

For example, the Constitution of the United States is reasonably simple when compared with all the laws and codes. Somewhere in the range of 99+% of the codes and laws are unnecessary. Democracy and voting are the things that generally try to encroach on the freedom of others by introducing laws and codes.

Actually, this isn't a bad thought. A computer built on sound would be naturally quantum. Here's what I mean. Sound and electromagnetic vibration are more or less the same thing. They are vibration of particles, which are themselves vibration across the phases of the "aether."

Check into it. Anyone can build a "sound" computer at home by pin-point layering auto-body resins with different "impurity substances" placed in them to cause different vibrational frequencies. Electronics are not needed, but are helpful for detecting changes in the sound vibrations.

This goes both ways. Let's centralize them all so that we know where they are when we decide to take them out!

Actually, you can find all kinds of different country ratings about all kinds of things, if you search. United States is 12th economically - http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking.

General freedom - http://www.freedomhouse.org/report-types/freedom-world#.Uztl6ldcMcg.

Health freedom, U.S. is last - http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/new-health-rankings-of-17-nations-us-is-dead-last/267045/.

If you have to pay property tax, do you really have freedom? Isn't it the boss who tells us what we must do and not do? No freedom if there is taxation.

Africa is coming out of the dark ages in some areas. Let's start them off right. Bitcoin rather than fiat.

Forget the democracy idea. Democracy means that if 51% of the people decide on something, the 49% have to follow, even if they are adamantly against it. Rather, make it NO government, except...

If anyone damages someone's property, he must repay 4 times the expense of repairing the damage, and litigation expenses, as well. But if he harms someone, the same thing must be done to him as he harmed the other:
eye for eye;
tooth for tooth;
hand for hand;
life for life.

There should be judges elected by qualifications set down in a protocol like Mastercoin or Counterparty, based on Bitcoin. While there is no democracy, but rather freedom, said qualifications for judges should be voted on using Bitcoin-style security as to voting qualifications.

Judges would judge on whether harm or damage was the fault of someone, or whether it was simply the negligence of the one harmed or damaged.

Threats must be taken into account the same as harm or damage, based on judges determining whether or not the threat is valid. After all, we all say things like "f*** y**" to somebody sometime, yet we don't really mean that person any harm. But the kind of threat that would exist from someone building an atomic bomb in his garage should be judged and voted on by democratic voting, first by the judges, and then by the people.

However, if there is controversy regarding whether or not a judge judged faithfully, there should be a democratic vote by the people on the judges actions and judgement. There might be punishment for a judge who judged criminally incorrectly.

The only additional job of the judges would be to draft warnings, not laws. For example, if there is an area where it is dangerous to swim, the judges should see to it that there are signs put up that warn people from swimming there. The people would be free to swim there, but if they did, their harm and medical care would be on their own heads.

Also, judges should cause certain kinds of training to come about. For example, if a woman becomes pregnant, there should be no abortion, because it is murder. Rather, there should be warnings taught among the people that if a woman gets pregnant, she and the man have essentially agreed in advance, with the child-to-be, simply by getting together, that they will support that child until the child is strong enough and old enough to take care of himself/herself. It's on their heads for getting together in the first place, so that the child can live a reasonable life.

Let's not have direct democracy where people are controlled by the voting of other people. Let us rather have freedom and decentralization throughout the whole Bitcoin Island. The above is only some idea on how we can do it. Obviously, there would need to be a lot of details worked out.

Soon MaidSafe, Counterparty and others will make it practical and profitable to be paid in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

Presently in the U.S., what a business should do is start to reduce wages to their key people, slowly so that government and the IRS doesn't take note. Then they should use a Bitcoin holding company - kinda like offshore - to pay the people the rest of their pay in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin only seems environmentally toxic to some because they are mentally toxic to themselves.

If you are sitting all day reading the sometimes goofy comments in Bitcoin forums, are you really doing something with Bitcoin? Get out there and make Bitcoin work in a unique way.

Everybody can teach himself/herself programming. Everyone can see a need. Learn programming and fill the need. You just might become rich doing it... rather than sitting around and waiting for Bitcoin to become less toxic so that you can ride to fame and fortune on the coattails of the likes of Satoshi and the Bitcoin devs.

 

Well, if he isn't dead, he will be sometime. We all die.

The important point for all of us is the next life. The important thing in this life regarding Satoshi is that we take his example and run with it.

Every average person can innovate more than he does when he sits on the couch and watches football all day. The example that Satoshi left us is not simple innovation, simple inventing a new method of turning on the couch to see the tube better. His big example is that he made an innovation innovation. He innovated innovation. He taught us all how to think about improving thinking. And he opened it up in such a way that we can ALL use it.

Most of us, at least those of us who are middle-aged or older, have been set in a thinking rut by schools, our jobs, and years and years of "practice" at remaining in the rut. Satoshi showed us a way to actually, practically, pick ourselves up out of the rut. We may not be the genius that he was, and probably not in the way that he was, but we are ALL unique, virtually genius in some little way known only to ourselves. Lets get out and innovate like Satoshi innovated.

The bad thing about innovating like Satoshi is that, we won't have time for meaningful talk in Bitcointalk, and the whole forum will become boring.

 

What if someone found a way to uniquely identify matchsticks. Could you imagine gambling with matchsticks that were identifiable to certain people in such a way that they could not be double spent, and that their identity could not be stolen? Poker for matchsticks.

Government controlled gambling is supposed to be about keeping people from hurting each other and themselves. And it IS about that, a tiny bit. But mostly it is about making sure that big business isn't hurt by people encroaching on big business's profits. Government has become the pivot point of big business, allowing enough freedom to people so that they are happily productive, yet keeping them in bondage enough so that they are profitable for big business as much as possible.

Who am I hurting if I gamble? Myself? Isn't that MY business as long as I am not hurting anyone else? If I cause big business to be less profitable by my freedom, am I hurting them? Or are they hurting me by not letting me be free, just so that they can profit a little more?

Some lady in India has a political beef with some local government over there. So, in 2000 she went on a hunger strike, a total fast. They have a law, that attempted suicide is punishable by one year in prison. When it became apparent that she was going to starve herself to death, they called that attempted suicide, threw her in jail for a year, and force fed her through a tube in her nose. After the year was up, they freed her, and she picked up where she left off with her hunger strike. And the cycle continues until today.

The point is, Bitcoin is going to allow freedom in such a way that big business will be destroyed. It may not happen fast. It might not be easy. But the banking system on which big business rides is just about destroying itself already.

Of course, it won't be Bitcoin entirely. Counterparty is active. Mastercoin (not the coin) is coming online. MaidSafe is activating. There are many free Internet protocols like Tor and I2P that are eating into big business right now. As people innovate using all of these and others, soon they will figure out ways to bypass governments and big business, become behind-the-scenes freedom governments, and freedom will abound for a while.

Then, people using Bitcoin-style freedom will attempt to enslave other people, and the cycle will start all over again. Who knows what havoc or freedom the quantum computer will reek when it comes online?

Unlike the United States where the President is elected by the Electoral College rather than the people.

When you use Bitcoin, if at some time Government agents attempt to tell you that you are using money, if you don't have an agreement with them already (like being a corporation or other entity), don't accept their offer.

http://www.abodia.com/ucc/
http://www.abodia.com/ucc/articles/UCC-Connection-Howard.htm

All bank loans are really creations of new money. Google "Modern Money Mechanics" and "Two Faces of Debt." It might take a little study to see this. But it is there in these Federal Reserve Bank documents.

Soon companies like Mastercoin (http://www.mastercoin.org/) and Counterparty (https://www.counterparty.co/) and others will start to build Apps on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. This will drive the blockchain way out of proportion in short order. In the next year we can expect to easily see a doubling in size of the blockchain. But it might be a ten-fold increase in size or more. So what's the answer?

The blockchain will need to be archived on a regular basis in several (multiple) locations in its entirety. These locations will need to constantly update the blockchain record. The Bitcoin-Qt client will need to be adjusted so that newcomers will only need to download the latest portions of the blockchain. They will have the option of how much of the latest to download. There would be a minimum, of course, to make transacting practical.

Currently, there are other Bitcoin clients that do this, or something like it. Multibit and Electrum are two good examples. The important thing is that the complete blockchain record needs to be maintained in multiple locations, the more the better.



EDIT: Consider. There are still probably less than 500,000 people/addresses in the blockchain. The world has a population of over 7 billion. Bitcoin has just barely started. The blockchain is microscopic compared with what it will become if the process isn't adjusted somehow.

Seems to me that an ISP being able to track your usage might not be relevant. The information you access would be chunked. This means that you would receive parts of it from all over the place. It would all be decrypted inside your computer, so nobody would know what you had received anyway. The chunked data constantly moves in the network from computer to computer as it is accessed and changed by the owner, and as computers shut down for the evening and re-start the next morning. It would take a tremendous amount of tracking capability to track this and algorithmically guess what it was that was being tracked and why. In fact, the tracking capabilities would need to be on an order of what it would take to crack the Bitcoin encryption. Can't be done without quantum computers, and it might even be difficult for them. Or does someone have an idea how to do it?