Thanks for your good wishes. There are holes in everything, even potential holes in Bitcoin.

If Hitler had only waited a year longer, we might all be speaking German as our first language. There are holes in everything.

Forget the pyramid scheme aspect, and focus on Bitcoin and Gifting.

Lots of folks play cards and other games around the table, and bet for matchsticks or toothpicks. Matchsticks and toothpicks have value. They can be used for something useful... just like Bitcoin. Folks play the games for fun and bet for excitement, not to get rich. And this is all that people would be using the gifting for, at least at its beginning. After awhile, they would be thanking their lucky stars that they had been shown a way to give gifts to their kids and grand-kids while letting them get in on the greatest freedom-maker in the economic world.

I agree. "Bitcoin is the way forward," at least until something better comes along.

Freedom from the centrally controlled banking system that siphons off value whenever you use their fiat currencies, and more if you simply save them in a bank.

The only problem is the active supply in use. Imagine that there was only one bitcoin actively traded, because all the rest of them were hoarded or lost. That one bitcoin would have long since been split into its basic satoshis, each of which would be worth a fortune. Perhaps some form of scripting would be applied to the clients that would make satoshi kids and grand-kids (dividing the satoshi), just so that there would be enough of that single bitcoin to go around the world.

Then, watch the bubble burst when 90% of the rest of the bitcoins come into action in one day. Never happen.

There is no problem with lost or hoarded bitcoins.

The one major reason Bitcoin matters is

FREEDOM

The whole idea is to get experienced bitcoiners to have a purpose / direction / goal to strive for, for introducing Bitcoin to those who haven't heard of it or begun to use it yet. If the amounts were a little less, so that your average, say, Walmart worker could afford to get in, this idea might be a terrific method for promoting the whole Bitcoin idea, sort of like a game. Now for the advertising.

Get some locals together who have the funds to start and back an exchange for the poor locals. Find the business folks who want to improve Africa and the people, rather than line their own pockets. Hold local meetings. Make kiosks available to the people who can't afford computers. But do it locally at first. Then expand to nearby areas.

The core Bitcoin developers are hoping that someone will improve the idea of Bitcoin. One potential improvement might be to design a client that can attach specific property to certain bitcoins. If the bitcoins are transferred, the backing by the property goes along with them. The owner of the property has placed the property in trust with the specified bitcoins, so that he cannot transfer the property until such a time that it is no longer the backing for the specified bitcoins involved. What this would in effect do is to make the bitcoins in question to be redeemable by the property stated in the transaction, something like dollars were redeemable by gold and silver in the old days. Making a client like this would tend to bring Bitcoin into the realm of REAL trading and usefulness among the people.

The blockchain is all the Bitcoin cop we need. It's about time that people start to take responsibility for doing due diligence in their transactions, rather than relying on someone else to do it for them. Transact in small amounts or use escrow.

But... Bitcoin will destroy the fiat currencies. They will fail at exponentially greater rates. Their final crash will come all at once.

Bitcoin will survive. But there are very few people who understand it, and who use it to trade for THE THINGS THEY NEED TO SURVIVE. Think of all the elderly and sick who will die because they no longer receive a government check in the mail.

If governments can't destroy the blockchain by hacking it, and if they attempt to ban Bitcoin, they will destroy themselves.

They know this, and so they will try to use Bitcoin and incorporate it into their operations. Watch out for regulation rather than banning. The regulation will happen in areas that they can watch - NSA spying - like what products are transferred where without some regular fiat currency payment.

There just might be a way around the state. This doesn't mean they won't give you a hassle.

See my post on page 13 of "Why Bitcoin is doomed to fail, and there's nothing you can do about it."

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=372303.240

No wonder people are losing their bitcoins to hacking.

Government will ban Bitcoin simply by perfecting the quantum computer, and then attacking by virus every instance of the blockchain. Perhaps they have already done it, and that's the real reason Bitcoin is not at $10,000 per Btc.

If you are interested about how to bypass government, consider this. The constitution, Article 1, Section 10, Clause 1 has a statement in it that says: "No State shall ... make any ... Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts ..." The Federal Government has been adjudicated to be a state. See: Enright v. U.S., D.C.N.Y., 437 F.Supp. 580, 581.

Here's what to get pushed through the courts. Form contracts for any business that you do with other people. Let the contracts invoke the above Article 1 wording along with wording stating that it is the intent of the contract and the parties to the contract that no state laws apply except upon an explicit allowance by the parties to the contract that they are accepting certain stated laws. Throw in the wording that the Federal Government is a state. Say, also, that not answering a challenge by some some state authority in no way waives any part of the contract.

Apply the above with enumerations of specific laws that you do not want to apply to the contract or the parties thereof - IRS taxation, and business licensing, for example.

Doing this will make your Bitcoin transacting to match your terms and not government terms.

Why would anyone want to open the history books? The 1% who won wrote and published them. There are so many lies scattered among the truth in the history books, that it's hard to tell what the truth was!

Of course, this is the same reason that Bitcoin and the Internet stand a chance of winning. After all, when you take freedom away from the people, the people don't flourish for you. So what do you do? You give them the illusion of freedom so that they work hard for you, and in doing so, you give them some real freedom.

What happens next is that the people start to want more freedom. But you can't ever give them the illusion of 100% freedom without giving them 100% freedom. This is why the 1% ultimately fail every time.

There's a lot of mental work that goes into scripting code.

There are a lot of geniuses out there. Yet geniuses often are such in one or two directions rather than in everything in life.

There are two basic positions that geniuses hold in life:
1. The successful genius;
2. The poverty-stricken genius.

Successful geniuses don't want to lose their success. So they often cause a monopolization of their field. That's why we have so many lies being told by professionals in all the professions, like the medical, who don't have much of an answer for curing anything, except their own poverty.

The poor geniuses are being stymied by the successful geniuses, except if they get on the bandwagon and try to strengthen the monopolies. Internet and Bitcoin scripting and hacking allow a genius in those area to be free. And it will until the governments and banks figure out ways to shut them down.

But consider. Scripting, whether it be ligit, or whether it be hacking, is not easy work. If it were, we all would have scripted our way out of poverty.

Any talk against a poor, genius scripter is an attempt to lock him into poverty while maintaining one's own monopoly.

Gifting is giving. It is giving gifts. When you give something, you no longer have it. Someone else has it. A person can get awfully thin gifting, especially when nobody gives gifts to him.

What does "business" have to do with giving or gifting? I mean, if you do it in a business-like fashion, don't you do your dishes and laundry in a business-like fashion? Does that make them businesses?

A "legit business" business is only such because governments say it is or not. In fact, it's only a business because someone says it is. Governments define "business" so that they can make excuses to get part of the profit in the form of licenses, which are really taxes, or in the form of taxes directly as such. Or else they are being used by companies to monopolize a market - like the money market, banks.

Giving gifts to your children with the idea that they will give gifts to theirs is a gifting thing. It isn't a business even though it might be done in business-like fashion. For example, how many people GIVE / send Christmas cards, in business-like fashion, year after year, to all their friends and relatives. Yet it isn't a business. So why would gifting to strangers be a business?

If you want to call it a business, then it is a business as far as you are concerned. If governments want to call it a business, then it is for the governments. Governments would like to get their little fingers into a slice of every pie, and so would the banks.

Giving and gifting don't have to be businesses, and basically aren't.