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?

It's not the pyramid aspect of something that makes it illegal. Rather, it is damaging someone through the use of a pyramid that makes it illegal.

There are loads of network marketing programs out there that are based on pyramid form for their compensation plan. Yet they sell a product so that when you join, you are buying a product.

The world banking system is by far the biggest pyramid in the world. The thing that makes it legal is that it is formally voluntary, and that the banks have provided, among others, these two documents that you can find online just to see that they ARE pyramids:
Modern Money Mechanics
Two Faces of Debt.

The banking system realizes how powerful a pyramid is. That's why they try as best they can to make pyramids appear illegal. They don't want any competition.

Bitcoin is competition enough. A bitcoin pyramid, one that spells out the inherent dangers of pyramids, and then leaves the freedom up to the individual, is something that can reduce the world banking system to ashes in short order. The bankers know this. And because of it they send their trolls into the Bitcoin forums to make pyramids sound bad. All they want to do is take away your freedom, even your freedom to play the pyramid game if you want.

In America, wasn't it the banking pyramid that caused a whole lot of people to lose their homes, and their life savings in the crash of 2008? Isn't it the banking pyramid that caused citizens of Cyprus, Greece, Spain and Italy to lose a lot of money? They did it by not informing the people about the dangers of making certain kinds of pyramid investments, while at the same time promoting those investments.

I want the freedom to make an informed decision about whether or not to join a pyramid program. I don't want anybody telling me I can't. I want freedom, and if I hurt myself in my freedom, that's my business.

The banks are ripping EVERYBODY off. and they are working as hard as they know how to keep on doing it. If Bitcoin pyramids were promoted with full understanding, they would virtually destroy the banking system overnight. The bankers know this, and send their trolls into forums to badmouth pyramids in general.

Here is a practical idea that would work for some people. It involves using a large random character list. Use your imagination to make it stronger than it is explained in the link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=435050.msg4779209#msg4779209.

The Bitcoin core Devs don't need to get into the middle of a fight between people and the exchanges. Such interference would look bad to as many people as it would look good. Then there would be people who would attempt to sue the core Devs for the interference.

While I never used MtGox, I also was taken in by what seemed to be their stability. Their crash is a good reminder to me that Bitcoin is FREE to use, and that means free from standard security as well as free from the banking industry's supposed security. Since Bitcoin is free for me to use without interference, if I use my freedom, I need to learn to take responsibility for my actions.

If we all had done the secure thing, if we all had transacted in small amounts so that we wouldn't lose much when failure came, Bitcoin would not have had the wild fluctuations that it has had. It would be far more stable as a medium of trade. Its foundations would be stronger, and we would have more people moving into it for buying and selling, rather than for speculating.

Keep the core Devs out of the battles. They have enough to do simply considering the technical side of things.

Private judges, like from Robert Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."

----------

 A boy about fourteen spoke up. “Say! Aren’t you Gospodin O’Kelly?”

 “Right.”

 “Why don’t you judge it.”

 Oldest looked relieved. “Will you, Gospodin?”

 I hesitated. Sure, I’ve gone judge at times; who hasn’t? But don’t hanker for responsibility. However, it troubled me to hear young people talk about eliminating a tourist. Bound to cause talk.

 Decided to do it. So I said to tourist, “Will you accept me as your judge?”

 He looked surprised. “I have choice in the matter?”

 I said patiently, “Of course. Can’t expect me to listen if you aren’t willing to accept my judging. But not urging you. Your life, not mine.”

 He looked very surprised but not afraid. His eyes lit up. “My life, did you say?”

 “Apparently. You heard lads say they intend to eliminate you. You may prefer to wait for Judge Brody.”

 He didn’t hesitate. Smiled and said, “I accept you as my judge, sir.”

...

 “Kids are paying seventy dollars Hong Kong for judgment. You should match it. If you can’t, open pouch and prove it and can owe it to me. But that’s your share.” I added, “Cheap, for a capital case. But kids can’t pay much so you get a bargain.”

 “I see. I believe I see.” He matched with seventy Hong Kong.

 “Thank you,” I said. “Now does either side want a jury?” Girl’s eyes lit up. “Sure! Let’s do it right.” Earthworm said, “Under the circumstances perhaps I need one.”

 “Can have it,” I assured. “Want a counsel?”

 “Why, I suppose I need a lawyer, too.”

 “I said ‘counsel,’ not ‘lawyer.’ Aren’t any lawyers here.” Again he seemed delighted. “I suppose counsel, if I elected to have one, would be of the same, uh, informal quality as the rest of these proceedings?”

 “Maybe, maybe not. I’m informal sort of judge, that’s all. Suit yourself.”

...

 I went behind desk, sat down, put on Brody’s plug hat—wondered where he had found it. Probably a castoff from some lodge. “Court’s in session,” I said. “Let’s have names and tell me beef.”

----------

Point is, we don't need any governmental judges to judge in practical situations. We all live life. We all understand what's right and wrong... at least in the more evident cases. We don't need reversability of Bitcoin. We may want private judges, and for a judicial fee. People could build a rep as an impartial, fair, private Bitcoin judge.

This about JW might be true. But it isn't evident from his statement at the beginning of this thread. Rather, he is simply being practical. For example. At the height of the Bitcoin flurry, when China surpassed MtGox in volume, when they were going strong before they dropped more or less out of the picture, Bitcoin moved about as much in that whole month as the Forex does in $dollars in one day.

In the scheme of things, Bitcoin is nothing. To Bitcoiners, it might mean almost everything. That's all Jimmy Wales meant. It has nothing to do with his likes or dislikes of Bitcoin.

One thing granted. If everything in the world and finance continues on, basically as it is going right now, Bitcoin has the chance of dramatically changing the world way more than any Forex fiat currency.

With a few tweaks, couldn't escrow be made friendly, right inside the client? And wouldn't that be just about the same thing as reversability? Should a date be added where the escrow would be cancelled, and the transaction would automatically go through?

Actually, the whole idea of reversability beyond escrow is stupid. Escrow is almost like reversability as it is. Either you give the other guy his money or you don't. If you can't trust him at a distance, then get face-to-face with him and use cash. And keep your gun with you in case he grabs the product back out of your hands after you pay him. And if he has a bunch of his buddies along with him, come back when you have your buddies with you - all heavily armed, of course.

The point is, escrow companies are all that we need. The next best thing is the thing that LocalBitcoins and Bitcoin-Otc are doing. Rating the users so that we know who to deal with.

In all events, only trade small amounts until you are certain you are dealing with reputable people. Reversability amounts to built-in stealability.

Bitcoin is becoming very popular. BitcoinTalk is going to have to increase bandwidth.

Of course, it may have been a DDoS attack.

How about: "I'm not going to read the comments in this thread, because some of them might be mine."