I never said that mining was free, only that energy costs were effectively free if you had a use for that heat.  If I lived in Iceland, where the heating season lasts roughly 50 out of 52 weeks per year, a miner tied to my thermostat is a great thing.  However, if the odds of my success at mining profits were to suddenly jump up due to temporal conditions, I might as well move the thermostat to 72 from 69 and enjoy the warmth.  (F not C, but you get the idea)  The rest of the time I just leave it set on 69 and run on auto.  If it finds a block, I get a bonus.  If it never finds a block, I've not lost anything for doing it, as the heat bill is still the same.
I contest your numbers are accurate, as I think that users that want to get their transactions processed will pay more than otherwise, but I'm not willing to do the math to see what that would be.


I don't know why, neither do you.  This is the point.  You're just guessing as much as I am.

This is true, but it doesn't change anything.  You can search your own addresses and see what you paid for because you have the secret knowledge necessary to make sense of that info because you were the one who did it.  Give those same addresses to your cop buddy, and send him to the blockexplorer site, and ask him if he can figure out what you bought or from whom without your help.

Hidden dead short across a pair of pins?

Don't assume that all miners have the same primary costs as yourself, or even most.  Mining is literally free if you heat with electric anyway, and it's winter where you are.

It's not an issue of feasibility, tracking an address's trades are certainly feasible.  The question is resources.  An entity with unlimited human resources could track down the payments of a person, but there isn't a way to do this without human intervention.  The data just doesn't exist to automaticly tie an address to a human being, although that might be made easier using data mining techniques.  For example, in a normal transaction a human being would be able to look at the transaction and guess that the smaller of the two outputs is the change, but a computer program doing the same thing is going to be unreliable.  The idea that all of the addresses in bitcoin can be traced back to an individual real identity is rediculous because that would literally require limitless human resources, primarily in the form of trained detectives doing classical detective work.  That's simply impossible, and that is why bitcoin is as anonymous as the user is willing|able to be.  Anonimity is inconvient, and most people don't need that much of it.  Bitcoin doesn't really promise anominity, it just makes it possible.

No, do waste the nuke on these guys.  They are actually helping, although that is not their intent.

I'm pretty confident that real members of Anonymous are reading this forum, and when a real threat to Bitcoin appears, we will see which side they are on.

If the hashing power drops significantly enough to drag out the average block time above an hour, than not only does the odds of a particular miner catching the next block increase (even if it takes longer) but the odds of catching transactions due to backups of processing increases.  So there is certainly an economic incentive for a miner on the sidelines to jump in if some major miners were to suddenly drop out, even before the difficulty is adjusted.

Two things.

1) At this particular moment, the entire Internet seems to be bogged down.

2) Tor does run slower than surfing normally, by it's nature.  That's unavoidable.  But you should still be able to get there if your tor client has reported that a circut has been established.  It can take a while for a new install to establish a first circut.

Perhaps.  It's a good reason to be suspicious of using an online wallet provider if one intends to do anything that would get your government upset, but for the kinds of trades that one would use paypal for, mybitcoin.com is ideal.

Yes, if legally ordered by a court in New Zealand.  How responsive NZ's legal system to the want's and needs of other nations remains to be seen.

I've never cashed out, not even a little.  I've bought many things besides other currencies.

Why would we delete this?  This is comic gold!  If any fool is stupid enough to send you anything, (s)he deserves to part with his|her bitcoin.

Not sure if this is your issue or not, but if by saying card slot #1 you actually mean the first card slot (number zero) then the bios might be misidentifying the card as a bootable network card, waiting for it to initialize.

Yes, that is the whole point.  It's true that payments can be tracked from a known user to other known users, and in this manner establish a chain of custody.  The problem for LEOs is that establishing a trustworthy link between a bitcoin address (or even an online identity and a real world identity, as one particular government contractor found out to his own detriment recently due to trying to link members of Anonymous to real users on Facebook) to a particular person or organization is not trivial.  And this issue become more difficult with the increase in data set size (the number of bitcoin users) and economic velocity (how fast the currency travels from one person to the next).  So the difficulty that LEOs will have is that they literally will not be able to maintain the resources to pursue all these avenues of activity.  Only the most important (in the eyes of government) activity to prosecute will be actively tracked, which in practice means "terrorism".  The units with the budgets to actually figure who owns which bitcoin address will not care about some random geek ordering LSD for a rave.

Not really, but go ahead.

Because they know it's not funny.  That's the mockability rule, if you can't mock it, you're probably wrong.

Switzerland is close, but their cantons are even closer.  There is at least one better example, but if you elect representatives, it's not democracy.  Still, Switzerland is a European parlimentary model, wherein voters elect a party not an individual.

I witnessed this particular fistfight at a church business meeting wherein the church elders had decided to fire the preacher because that same preacher had a gambling addiction, a fact that they were aware of when they hired him a decade prior.  For nine years he was prohibited from any personal access to the church funds, and then suddenly the elders gave him an expense fund with a credit card.  Three months later he was back into his addiction, exactly as they expected he would be.  It was rude.  The elders had county sherriffs at the meeting, and members were prohibited from entering the church armed.  The fights broke out when the elders also announced that they had called the state police about theft of funds for gambling purposes.  The irony is that the state couldn't get him on charges, because he was a sports gambler and he was good.  Not only was there no money lost, he actually turned a profit.  OF course they ended up getting him anyway because gambling profits are taxable income even if you are exempt from income taxes because you are a preacher, so in the end that preacher spent four years in federal prison for tax evasion while the majority of the church ejected six of nine elders who participated in the event.  Roughly a third of the church membership left with them and started another church down the road about a half mile.  That was six years ago, so by now that preacher is out of prison.

Search google for "bitcoin fallback nodes" and you will get a wiki page with a list of stable IP addresses that you can use.  Then start your client with -nolisten to reject incoming peer connections, -noirc to not bother listing on the irc channel so there won't be as many clients trying, and -connect=ip.address two or three times to specify the fallback nodes you wish to use.

Representative republics are not democracies.  Wikipedia is only as accurate at the people who contribute articles.  The distinction between a representative republic and a democracy is not trivial.  I've witnessed real democracy up close, and larger than a church business meeting or a town hall, (roughly 800 voting members) democracy becomes unscalable.  The results are not pretty.  I've actually personally witnessed fistfights at contentious church meetings.  This is why church splits are so common among Baptist congregations.

Democracy is one person, one vote; all votes equal.  I challenge you to find that at a nation-state level.