It would be great if something like this was real, but it isn't.

Although they make a big fuss about trade secrets, scientists can confirm the working of their device without needing to see trade secrets. All they need is a "black box" experiment.

Unfortunately, the "black box" demonstration wasn't run for long enough to rule out an ordinary chemical reaction. Nor was it properly audited (the measurement devices were not under the control of the observers).

If this thing had the slightest bit of legit, there's no reason why they wouldn't have shown a "black box" demonstration whose audited power output (minus power input - remember this thing is plugged into the mains) unambiguously exceeds the amount of chemical energy that can be produced from a device of that volume.

I think the purpose of the "demonstrations" might be to part investors from their money. The demonstrations certainly don't prove any new scientific effect.

Notice Greg Maxwell's Bitcoin donation address at the end of the README file? This Bitcoin thing sure is catching on.

The debt of "a country" isn't really of interest to the individuals of that country. It's not your problem if your neighbor has shares in a company that is in debt to an overseas entity.

To a taxpayer, the relevant figure is public (i.e. government) debt, because that's what the taxpayer pays interest on, and in theory might be called upon to repay the principal. Here's a map of Public Debt as a percent of GDP for 2009/10 from Wikipedia. Green is good, brown is bad. Basically, Europe and North America are in a bad position, plus Japan and a sprinkling of other countries.

Yes, but what if you are mistaken?

I'd be interested to see a pointer to the code in the client that checks the coinbase reward, if anyone is able to post it. I'd also be interested to see the block number of the legendary block with less than 50BTC reward in it.

[edit: The wiki has a Protocol Rules page which is consistent with what elggawf said: "when the transaction is accepted into the memory pool, an additional check is made to ensure that the coinbase value does not exceed the transaction fees plus the expected BTC value (50BTC as of this writing)" ]

If you mine and then barter I don't see how this would necessarily be taxable.

I was thinking that the reference to capital gains tax related to investment profits (e.g. someone who bought some bitcoins three months ago, then sold them now at a higher price).

Or even the "Original Bitcoin Forum". Anyway, whatever Sirius decides to do is OK.

As I understand it, the effect goes beyond that cause.

Some anti-depressants have two effects: they lift your mood, and they increase your general level of motivation. If a patient's motivation increases before their mood lifts, the patient feels that their life still sucks but is more likely to do something about it, and that something might be suicide.

In any case, for most people, the following things are way better than any prescription: sunshine, exercise, laughter, and friendly company. I suppose that sometimes the medication can make it easier to achieve laughter and friendly company, but sunshine and exercise are available to most people and are not plagued by side-effects.

Why not join Plato on his Bitcoin roadtrip (if that's still underway)? You'd do some cool and enjoyable things with like-minded people.

Same thing really. Walk, sun and trees cause certain types of changes in brain chemistry. Immersion in virtual worlds in front of a glowing screen causes other types of changes in brain chemistry.

The first type tends to lessen the feeling that one is burdened by paranoia and depression. The second type tends to increase those same feelings.

Nothing about Bitcoin is official. Even the Satoshi client software is "original" rather than "official".

I liked the interview.

Max really does seem to get what it's all about, especially that Bitcoin shares some characteristics with gold.

Amir didn't give direct answers to some of Max's questions, but it wasn't supposed to be an interrogation. Amir made some very good points, and he always got around to answering Max eventually (although it would have been better without the detour into explaining Linux).

Piper67, how many overseas bank accounts have you tried to open? It's incredibly difficult nowadays if you have an uncommon business model. I spent 6 months trying to get a US bank account for my business. I ended up opening accounts at three different US banks. Each account was closed by the bank before it was fully operational, with no explanation other than that they didn't want my business, even though I gave them all the paperwork and documents that they requested.

Banks are terribly risk-averse. They don't make much of their profit from retail banking anymore, so it's not worth their while to accept anything other than boring run-of-the-mill businesses. For any other business, I guess they are worried about the risk of getting too much grief from their regulators.

The (fairly hostile) mailing list discussion is here:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=CAJNQ0ssAgx%2BFS_LZmEDRXsdKpC4M5xaegJh4%2BvGv0Au%2BCmi6Dw%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=bitcoin-development

You can take the Bitcoin code and create a separate coin (i.e. a new block chain), but you will need to make some changes including coding a new genesis block. You will also want to change filenames, IRC ports, etc, so that Bitcoin and your coin can coexist on the same computer.

It's interesting that Ruxum is also serious about namecoin.

Asicminer, you have two choices:

1. Insist on payment being made "on faith", and get few if any sales, or

2. Lend an evaluation unit to someone trustworthy in the community, and when they confirm your specifications you will sell all of your stock very quickly.

Your call.

I think you're assuming that each bitcoin will only turn over once per year. If you assumed that each coin would be spent once per week, you get a price of about €8.

I love the way that a discussion about individuals building WMDs has morphed into a discussion about cooling GPU cards in outer space!

Apropos the WMDs, there's an interesting short story about an atheist talking to god, where god discusses the evolution of intelligent civilizations. God says that civilizations inevitably go through a number of phases (for example the discovery of flight), and the most dangerous phase is the one where any one individual has the ability to kill off the whole civilization.

I think it's safer for WMDs to be controlled by individuals than by governments, because individuals will put more effort into defending against WMDs than into aggressing with WMDs. Governments tend to have psychopathic behaviours which make them not well-suited to be the ones with their "finger on the button".

It was over five years ago when I read the short story that contained the notion of individuals being able to destroy their entire civilization. I looked for it again, and found the relevant paragraph, but it wasn't quite as I had remembered it. Here's this part of the story:

An algorithm? Our species needs to grow up considerably before we can afford to make the discovery? Bitcoin? Too late to stop that algorithm being discovered!

PS: Yikes! While I was composing this post, enmaku posted similar ideas but from a non-fiction perspective...

I'm not sure why a new economy would need to be debt-ridden. It's a bit like people telling Henry Ford that they wanted his new technology to be like a faster horse.

In the Bitcoin economy, perhaps investors will buy equity rather than making loans. It could be quite a positive thing, because the investor has a bigger stake in ensuring the profitability of the business in which they are investing.

Also, saving works well using Bitcoin so people with a productive idea for a business can save for a little while, then invest in their own ideas.