And yet the python 2.7 and python 2.6 versions still both work fine on python 2.6 (except that installing the python 2.7 version requires --force-depends, obviously). Have you got around to seeing if it's possible to statically link the python interpreter? It doesn't look like these problems are going to go away as long as dynamic linking is involved.

But people who can't produce or secure bitcoins for themselves can buy them and pay for their storage for a fair price from those who can. Is it highly unfair that I have to buy my shoes from someone else because I don't have the tools or experience to make my own? Is it highly unfair that I charge people money to fix their computers when they don't know how to do it themselves? People producing things that other people can't and needing things they can't produce on their own is the very reason trade exists, and money is the thing that makes fair trade possible. And Bitcoin is the fairest form of money in this sense.

It is also not unfair that late adopters pay a higher exchange rate, since early adopters are taking a much greater risk with their money, because nobody really knows for sure whether Bitcoin will succeed. Late adopters pay extra for the assurance that their money isn't likely to just vanish if Bitcoin suddenly fails for some unforeseen reason, and there's nothing unfair about that. This is how all investments work.

According to legend, there exists a world outside the Internet, in which women are real and not actually men. Some claim to have visited this strange land, and they tell fantastic stories of their travels, though few believe them without photographic evidence.

That's an annual interest rate of 3650 percent! Who the Hell do you think's going to accept such a loan? Who do expect to ever be able to pay it back?!?

It's no good, Algy! We're going to crash! We've got to bail out!

Explain how you would go about doing this in a way that doesn't harm innocent users. Or at least harms innocent users less than the criminals.

Explain how.

The fundamental purpose of money is to give you a means of trading with other people without having to worry about whether you happen to have what they want, because everyone wants money equally. If some people don't want money under certain circumstances, the whole system breaks down. Though, as a general rule, refusing to accept money which is accepted by your competitors is pretty damn stupid, regardless of whether it's technically viable.

That prices should be the same for everyone is not an assumption, it's a basic economic fact stemming from the fungibility of money: If everyone's dollars are equal, then everyone's prices should be equal. To suggest that prices should not be equal for everyone is to suggest that everyone's dollars are not equal, which is not only absurd, it's downright stupid if you are in a competitive business. (Note that things like loyalty discounts are no exception to this rule, since the customer to whom the discount applies is providing a service (namely, their continued patronage) to the store which is of equal value (in the store management's opinion) to the discount received.)

I admire your optimism, but unfortunately assuming that people aren't idiots always ends badly.

Most likely, you are experiencing an error that has nothing to do with your wallet.dat file. Restoring your wallet from a backup won't fix anything because there was nothing wrong with your wallet.dat file in the first place. Your bitcoins are probably still safe, you just can't access them. What exactly is the problem you are having? Are you getting any sort of error message or is it just showing a balance of 0 BTC?

Because Block Explorer is currently having problems and their database is out of date, as you can clearly see by looking at the "latest blocks" on their home page (note that the latest block Block Explorer has is from nearly 5 days ago).

The problem is that the people who respond with violence are not bad actors, they are honest people who have had their money taken without compensation based on nothing more than the belief that the money might have been involved in an illegal transaction at some point in its history. Remember, YOU CANNOT CONTROL WHO SENDS YOU BITCOINS! If an honest person happens to receive "tainted" bitcoins from someone else, there is absolutely nothing that they or anyone else can do about it, and any attempt to do something about it will simply be punishing innocent users for other people's actions.

Here's another experiment you can try: Open a store and keep a drug kit behind the counter. Drug test every note a customer pays you with, and if the result is positive, refuse to accept the money but don't give it back. See how long you can last without either getting punched in the face or having the cops called on you. I guarantee you'll be out of business one way or another before the day is out.

No, it's not like that at all, and I'm not sure why you even think that. They are different because the exchange rate assumes that bitcoins (and dollars, for that matter) are fungible, meaning that one bitcoin (or dollar) is just as good as any nother. This is because when you make an offer to buy bitcoins on an exchange, you have absolutely no way of knowing who, out of thousands of other traders, will actually be providing your bitcoins, and so you have no way of knowing whether you'll end up with good bitcoins or "tainted" ones. As I have already pointed out, setting prices will be impossible if "tainted" bitcoins are valued differently from "clean" bitcoins.

Because you can't control who sends you coins. If somebody sends you tainted coins, what are you going to do about it? You can't send them back, since the address they came from may not be under the sender's control (eg, e-wallets), and you can't keep them but refuse to accept them as payment. Can you imagine if that happened with cash? "Sorry, we can't accept this $100 note as payment, you'll have to give us another one. No, you can't have this one back; no, it's not counterfeit, we just think it might have been involved in some form of criminal activity at some point in the past." You'd have some use of force directed at your face if you tried that in real life.

So, everyone's bitcoins will have a different value to everyone elses? How exactly are you supposed to set prices with such a scheme? "This product costs 10 BTC, but only 8 BTC if the coins come from a verified Mt Gox account, with a 50% surcharge if the coins ever touched SR, plus 10% if they came from a coin mixing service... etc" Is that pretty much how it's supposed to work? And if so, how does that make any sense? That would cause problems if you tried it in real life, too.

Have you ever tried not paying federal taxes? By that logic, you don't actually "own" anything. But I (like most people) define "ownership" to mean "right of property", regardless of whether such rights can be revoked at the whim of the government.

No, it's completely different. The blockchain is more like a title deed, giving property rights to certain individuals, who can sign over all or part of their ownership to anyone else in a publicly witnessed manner. While it is true that nobody "owns" the blockchain, the rights that the blockchain provides (namely, the right to spend one's own bitcoins) are genuine property rights, and to suggest otherwise makes about as sense as suggesting that the deed to your house is worthless because you don't really own the piece of paper it's printed on.

I don't know anything about BitBid, but I'm pretty sure that ads for Viagra, Cailis, et al, (covering 95% of the home page ) is not normal, and highly suspicious even if it is. Does anyone else know what's going on here?

Block Explorer is currently lagging behind a few hundred blocks for some reason, and this is completely unrelated to any issues with BitBid. The information in Bitcoin-Qt is almost certainly correct (and the fact that BitBid has approved your membership and you have a balance with them indicates that nothing went wrong with your transaction).

Your blockchain file got corrupted. Delete blk0001.dat and blkindex.dat from C:\Users\leigh\Appdata\Roaming\Bitcoin and restart Bitcoin and it will re-download the blockchain. Don't worry, your bitcoins are safe as long as you don't delete wallet.dat (which you might want to back up while you're at it).

What problems are you having, exactly?

While Bitcoin is in many ways just another currency, it differs from fiat money in than no government (or anyone else) can decide to issue more of it, and there is only so much of it that can ever exist. In this respect it is more like commodity money, but unlike commodity money, the number of bitcoins that will ever exist and the rate at which they will be distributed is known in advance, and as a result its value is not subject to supply shocks. These are features which no form of money has ever had before.

No. Bitcoins cannot be created by banks (or anyone) out of thin air. When a bank (or anyone else) loans bitcoins to other people, it must already own these bitcoins. What happens is Alice deposits some bitcoins in her bank account, then the bank loans those same bitcoins out to Carol figuring that Carol will pay them back before Alice tries to withdraw her bitcoins. This is basically how fraction reserve banking works already, except in this case if Alice tries to withdraw her money and the bank doesn't have it, there is no way for the government to bail them out, and the bank is instantly bankrupt. Alice will probably be able to eventually get her money from Carol, but whether she does or not, nobody will ever be using that bank ever again. So it is most unlikely that banks will act as irresponsibly with bitcoins as they do with fiat money.

No. Bitcoin mining is not a "lottery", it is actually more like a business. What miners are really doing is verifying transactions and securing the Bitcoin network, and they receive a payment for providing this service. The payment currently consists of "new" coins, however there is only a limited amount of coins that can be created this way, which is why miners also receive transaction fees. Eventually, when the "new" coins run out, the whole network will be supported entirely by transaction fees (the way it should be) and the economy will be a totally closed system (again, the way it should be). The whole "new coins" business is just a way to bootstrap the economy by distributing the initial coins to the people who contribute the most resources to the network, which is the fairest way of doing it.

No. If large-scale adoption by banks increases the demand for bitcoins, no new bitcoins will or even can be created to meet the demand. Instead, the value of individual bitcoins will increase, exactly the same as if it were a scarce commodity like gold.

I reuse addresses only when receiving multiple payments from the same person for the same reason. You should create new addresses for payments from different people or from the same person but for different reasons, because otherwise it just becomes too difficult to keep track of who's paying you for what.

I guess it depends on your definition of "approximately". There are actually about 70 times as many atoms in the Earth as there are bitcoin addresses:

Number of bitcoin addresses (2^160): 1.462 quindecillion
Number of atoms in the Earth (according to Wolfram Alpha): 100 quindecillion

Bitcoin is not an alternative to private banking, it is an alternative to fiat money. Private banks and fractional reserve banking will still exist with Bitcoin - in fact, existing private banks could start accepting Bitcoin deposits and making Bitcoin loans right now if they wanted to. The just don't want to because there's no government to bail them out at the taxpayer's expense if things go wrong. For this reason, banks and other institutions dealing with Bitcoin will be far less likely to take unnecessary risks with other people's money, and that's a good thing.