That's f'ing awesome!

Even that is easy to check for, since the packets entering or leaving your computer are not encrypted.

www.bitcoinwatch.com


Transaction fees are added to the block reward given to the miner who finds the solution to the block your transaction is included within.

Just because someone once published a book on the topic, doesn't make them right.

The Federal Reserve would crush iCoin before it had a chance to finish the job.  Paper, rock, scissors.

It's not even a decent hit piece.  I don't think the author is being malicious, he is just poorly informed.  There will come a day that he will regret his current position.

I couldn't possibly answer that question.  Exchanges are a good thing, my point is that they are not critical to the functions of Bitcoin.  As Bitcoin matures, exchanges will become even less relevant until they are as necessary to the average bitcoiner as the Forex is to the average first world citizen, which is almost zero.

I keep hearing about this comparison of Bitcoin to failed digital currencies, and specificly Beans and Flooz.  Yet I had never even heard of either of them before Bitcoin.  I can't see how either of them could still compare at all, did either make a market cap of over $100 million?

Nobody with an IQ lower than 40 could feed themselves, much less make any rational choice about currencies.

First, let me state that I actually agree with your position that a complete anarchy is impossible for reasons similar to your line of thought above.  Which is why I'm a lib and not an anarchist.

That said, that above statements have an unstated assumption.  Namely that there isn't such a thing as a natural or common body of law.  Thus, although #1 is true on it's face, it's not likely in practice.  Mediation is just another service, and people will seek out those who have a history dealing with this topic.  More likely, contract level disputes will already have a named court system to act as an arbitraitor, similar to the merchant courts of the last several centuries and the International Business Court of London.  Neither had any government backing, but their decisions are binding because businesses specificly refer to them as the court in juristiction in contracts.

#2 then falls flat, in most cases, because not only would most explicit contracts have a named court (and if that court is suspected of bias or corruption, a competing arbitraitor will take their business) but there will settle to be local arbitraitors to settle civil disputes among locals that didn't have such a contract.

#3 does not follow, because the meaning of words are not relevant in a natural law/common body of law court.  If the court tries to start making crap up that doesn't fit the public's understanding of the common law, they will start losing business.

And therefor #4 fails.

But I honestly don't know how to respond to #5, because just because a court makes a decision, doesn't make force lawful.  And words on paper and declared law by a group of rich men, democraticly elected or not, doesn't make force lawful either.  If you want to get technical, those aren't laws, they are statutes.  And if pressed, even they will make that distinction.  The term "the Law" used to have a very specific meaning in former colonies of the British Empire, and referred to the body of law that we now call British Common Law.  I live in a commonwealth state, that explicitly refers back to British Common Law as it's default body of law.

Till they die.

You can't possiblely know this with any certainty.

That's astronomicly unlikely to occur, but even if it did, all the clients have benchmarking hard coded into them that prevents them from going back and reorging beyond their latest benchmarked block.  The benchmarking basicly involves a list of block numbers chosen largely at random, and their established hash values.  If there is any kind of blockchain attack that tries to convince one or more clients that there is a differnet true chain, it must also be able to match hashs with these benchmarks as far back as they go, and not all of the clients have the same benchmarking list, so even diving into your own client to find the list to match won't necessarily mean that an attacker won't run into a client with a different benchmarked list.

Yes, but bots won't be able to do anything outside of the newbie forums, and bots posting in the newbie forums are easy to identify and destroy.

That's just the ebb and flow of markets, as applied to bitcoin mining.  I'm in the market for some used mining gear to build my mining heater for my garage.  It might need to be as large as a rack for an electric heater as powerful as I can buy at Wal-Mart for $30, but this one has the potential of paying for itself.  Any miners who live in climates with a heating season longer than 6 months should really consider shutting down, but waiting until fall before considering selling.  Any miners in  tropical climates really shouldn't be mining at all.  The thread with the miner in Hawaii, with year round AC demands and 25 cents per KWH, just made me laugh. 

Or mod powers.

EDIT: keep your money.

I don't need an exchange now.  I've never cashed out.  I've bought many physical and digital goods, but never cash.  I'm sure that day will come, but I'm not really willing to do so before Bitcoin is big enough that local people are asking for exchange.

We don't need the FDIC.  If you can get the explict backing of some early adopter with substantial reserves, who is willing to function in the position of the FDIC, that would be grand.  This alone would give any wallet service a huge advantage over the others, whether they offer dividends or not.

Is this bank going to be fractional?  If so, what will the ratio be?  What kind of loans, CD's, etc do you plan to offer?  I can imagine that such a bank that offers a 50% reserve ratio, and invests into it's own mining hardware, might be able to make this all work; but some kind of major backing would certianly quiet my nerves.

If you were my student, you would be held back.  The part that I find most amusing is that some teenager actually believes that he is giving me an economics lesson.

EDIT:  BTW, mine were not assumptions.

This is the title...

"Could BitCoin be a decentralized password cracking system?"

This is the money quote...

"Could these mining processes be used to crack highly encrypted passwords and encryption keys by linking together computers for unmatched processing power?"

The answer is, no it cannot.  Thus continuing is not worth my time.  Anyone who can read the code, read the packets leaving their own computer, or even read blockexplorer.com, would know the answer to this question.  Nothing, and I mean nothing is actually being encrypted or decrypted in the bitcoin system, and certainly not in the p2p portion.  Bitcoin doesn't even use methods capable of encryption or decryption of arbitrary data.  Bitcoin uses secure hashing methods and secure public/private digital signature methods.  Nothing in bitcoin can actually do what it is accused of doing.  The open nature of Bitcoin aside for just a moment, the code cannot actually do it.  This crap is just FUD, and doesn't deserve the attention that I've already granted it.

That said, pool mining potentially could be used as cover for a distributed brute force cracking network, but pools are not Bitcoin.