I dispute that law, or the idea of property "comes from" the state. I will however assume that it does so for the sake of argument.

That the idea of property, as a legal concept, comes from the state does not imply that it those same arrangements/services could not be provided at least as efficiently by a private market (not geographical monopolies).

What you don't seem to grasp is that there is a demand for law, it's merely that the state has a violent monopoly on the market. Take away the state, and you don't take away the demand, you just take away the monopoly. In the absence of a perceived legitimate monopoly, competition flourishes, just as it does in any market.

Only if you make an unjustified assumption that given a demand for law, the market would not satisfy this demand.

Let me clarify, when I say stateless society, I mean one in which the people willfully desire and achieve the lack of a state. Iraq was an invaded and failed state, big difference.

Let's say that Hakwer is right, and (from some perspective) he is morally justified in taking one of my cows. Well, then it is your equally valid moral opinion that he has too many cows and you have too few, and you are exactly as justified in taking his (your) cow back from him as he was taking it from you in the first place. Now, I'm going to assume that at this point he will argue that he is justified in using violence to prevent you from taking the cow, but that's merely because it's his cow, not yours. See, moral opinions are only legitimately backed by force when the opinion works in the statist's favor.

Are you claiming that in a stateless society that values the NAP, all individuals will feel they have the right to initiate violence against any other individual? What?

Those things are behaviors of states, entities which have geographic monopolies on the initiation of violence. There is no realistic analog to a state in a stateless society. Yes, as a property owner I would have a "monopoly on the initiation of violence" on my property, but it is a very limited monopoly, both in size and scope. However, you are correct that statism, the current societal paradigm, "is rife with problems, wars, takeovers, complete disregard for contracts, power plays, allies ganging up on others, and [...] the only model under which nuclear arms have been used against others".

Then I think you fundamentally misunderstand the non-aggression principle. My understanding of the way the NAP is generally accepted is that it allows for the use of violence in response to violence, but only to an extent that is necessary to put an end to the initial violence. So, just because someone steals a thing from you, it doesn't give you the right to kill them. You would however be completely justified taking it back. If they tried to use violence to prevent you from doing so, then you are justified in defending yourself. After all, how could they possibly be more justified using violence to defend your thing that they possess than you are in taking it back?


In order for there to be no way to get food without aggression (if we assume theft or trespassing is the initiation of force), all of the following must be true:

• There is no unclaimed property
• There is no way for you to hunt/gather without trespassing
• Your labor was worth absolutely nothing to anybody
• Nobody will charitably give you food or a way to get it

While you could come up with a thought experiment where all that is true, I find it highly unrealistic that this scenario occurs (edit... a chronically unemployed person's labor is not worth zero, it's just worth less than the legal minimum wage. Think about it.)

The only valid objection I've heard to the non-aggression principle is that the definition of force or violence is disputed. As a response to this, I would merely say that a stateless society provides a better way to come to agreement on the definition of violence than through the use of a state.

I think to Luke-Jr, Bitcoin is merely a vehicle by which to deliver the tonal number system...

So let's say there was a consensus, either by the community as a whole or just the developers that he should no longer take part in development. How would that be enforced?

cunicula: Since you think proof of stake is better (more efficient, as secure, as "fair") than proof of work, are you working to create a new cryptocurrency based upon those rules? If it is truly better, it should replace Bitcoin, or at least force it to change.

Yeah, this topic is seriously conflicting for me...

I dislike Luke-Jr, but I also dislike CoinHunter.

I dislike the DMCA (and copyright in general), but I also dislike SolidCoin.

Really though, this is just going to give CoinHunter more ammo for martyrdom argument.

Hey now, there's some common ground between Luke-Jr and CoinHunter... they both have a persecution complex.

It's not a backup script.


As I mentioned, this occurred after the release of 0.5.0. The first time that version runs it rewrites your wallet, which entails creating a new key pool. If I had realized this at the time, I would not have deleted wallet.dat and would not have had this problem. Since I didn't, though, I deleted it and lost the completely new pool, from which the ~77 BTC change address pulled.

After every payment, you send your digital tokens to Paul Krugman who destroys them, creates new ones, and sends them back to you. If it's a double spend, Krugman slaps you in the face and you in turn slap your customer in the face. Voila!

I lost some partially due to my own stupidity, partially due to not realizing that this change occurred.


I keep multiple wallets, encrypted with GPG. I have a script that lets me choose a wallet, unpacks it to the ~/.bitcoin directory, waits for Bitcoin to close, and then encrypts and securely deletes the wallet. For this reason, if something goes wrong, I feel comfortable deleting the wallet.dat file since I have a very recent (encrypted) backup.

So, I updated to the new version, it futzed around with my wallet, I sent some coins to myself (change going to an address from the (fresh) key pool). Then I closed Bitcoin and something went wrong with my script, so I deleted wallet.dat, along with the private key used for the change. I lost 77 BTC that day and it has made me much more cautious.

No way, man. Don't you see?

To what are you referring?

I think this is going to be an issue with any implementation allowing payment to a script hash, and I agree with others that this is the correct way to go moving forward.

Source?

(accidentally posted this in the other thread)

Steve, don't both BIP16 and BIP17 satisfy your complaint that the scriptPubKey should not contain the rules for redeeming a transaction, only the script hash to be validated upon redemption?

Current:
scriptPubKey
scriptSig

BIP16:
scriptPubKey
scriptSig

BIP17:
scriptPubKey
scriptSig

So does the BIP16/BIP17 argument come down to whether the validation script should be encoded so that a new opcode is not necessary, or to introduce a new opcode so that encoding is not necessary?

edit... oops, posted in the wrong thread

Have you tested the 0.5 (or whatever) migration to qt? It's a pretty slick interface.