I just got my bitcoin client working on my thumbdrive in a truly portable fashion, i.e. so that the windows bitcoin client wouldn't put the wallet.dat onto whatever windoze machine that I was using at the time, and then the windoze machine that I was using at work today had a hiccup of some kind while I had the bitcoin client open and my entire thumbdrive was corrupted.  69 BTC, gone.

Don't forget to back up your wallet.dat files, particularly if you use untrustworthy operating systems.

There is no such thing as a democratic state anywhere on Earth.  Democracy doesn't work on any scale larger than a church business meeting.  All these "democracies" are representative republics of some kind.  This is not remotely the same thing.

Talking about a childish response....

"I just can't get no respect!"

They might be testing our response time, to see if we are still paying attention to them.

I'm sure that they will think of something, rather than just close up shop.  Still, that does not mean that governments will be able to continue as they have for the past 60 years.  Most governments wouldn't stand a chance getting a deficit budget to work without the central bank's implicit ability to manipulate the value of the currency.

This is certainly true.  Do you know any farmers who pay sales taxes because they sell extra veggies at a farmers' market?  I know I don't.  The goverment agents don't get sideways with them because 1) it's a small market with little expected gain 2) it's bad p.r. because they know that the public favors these markets and 3) it would help to come down on publicly advertised farmers' markets because they know that there is already a great deal more private activity that they can't find.  Farmers' markets are like advertising for the farmers that do this kind of thing, they aren't the bulk of the dark market activity.

If Bitcoin ever goes truly mainstream, the governments of the "Western" nations are most definitely going to feel the pinch, and most of them already have enough trouble paying for the social services as it is.  Considering that governments worldwide really do consider "national defense" (however they define it) to be their primary reason for existence, do you think that social safety nets are going to be supported while the pentagon has to hold a bake sale?

Looks like they removed bitcoin as an option from their "other ways to give" page.

Makes it harder to debunk.

A side effect of using a currency that is functionally anonymous.

Technology is certainly not neutral.  The widespread adoption of Bitcoin doesn't imply any particular ideology with the code, but it does imply a sea change in the idealogies of those who will continue to use it.  Like any other disruptive technology, you cannot be unaffected by it's implications.  That's why we call it disruptive technology.  I've met many a person with enviromentalist and socialist leanings, but I've yet to meet one that refused to own or use a toilet.  Composting maybe, but they definately owned a toilet.

To paraphrase the Bible...

'Not all dissentors will become libertarians, but they will all be changed.'

Why is it our responsibility?  They should know how to research and read, or at least know how to ask a civilized question before chiming in about they alone can see the great Bitcoin flaw (tm).  If Bitcoin requires that everyone understand how it works in order to be adopted, it's already a failure.  But the facts are that the vast majority of people don't know or care how fiat currencies work, either.  When Bitcoin hits the mainstream, most people won't really care how Bitcoin works.  They will simply trust their geeky friend that it does work, and start using it little by little. 

Not really, this is a known-known.  The difficulty follows the price; when the price rallies, miners join the fray; and when the price falls, borderline miners drop out first.  It's a self-balancing system.  Feel free to stand around and not participate, however.  That's what I did, and I'm not bitter about missing the rally from 1.4 cents to 6.5 cents before I bought in!

This is correct, a node won't forward a transaction that it considers invalid, and by seeing another transaction that spends those same inputs, the second transaction is invalid.  It probably wouldn't need 15 seconds even if the network were huge.  Transactions propagate very fast.

I don't know for certain, this is true.  But I do know economics.  I know incentives.  And I know praxeology.  The ultimate test of any science is the ability to make repeatable predictions about the future, otherwise the theory is flawed.  Economics has many theories, but in my opinion, Austrian Economic Theory is more accurate at ongoing predictions than any other theory.  And the reason for this is that Austrian Economic Theory is based upon the concept of the rational economic actor, and the study of how changes in the economic environment effects those rational economic actors and their behavior.  I look at the system as it is, and I see a small oversight in the picture.  I see an "externality" to use the lexicon of the modern world.  It probably will never be a problem.  I've admitted this.  And as such I have made a proposal that would only affect the system if it were ever to become a problem.  That's why I suggested an 'alternative minimum' miners' choice type fee, and not a hard rule.  If it's in place, and never really needed, it would cause no harm.  If in the future without any significant block reward, if it turns out that this really is a concern; those miners would have the choice of enforcing this known rule in order to establish a price floor.  I intentionally thought it out in order to limit the possibility of unintended consequences, another reason to have it as a miners' choice rule and not a hard|validity type rule.  If it were to have some unintended consequence show up, the miners' could simply stop honoring the rule, announcing their intent to do so.  Users won't object to the removal of a counter-productive fee, but they are likely to resist the imposition of new fees.

I don't disagree.  I'm trying to create a standard for this that miners can turn to, and in this way also allow capital accumulators to plan out their best course of action before this point arises.  If my proposal, or something similar, is generally accepted by the miners as workable now, then current users will already begin to alter their behavior in a manner that limits their own costs in the future.

This will happen anyway, so that lightweight clients can communicate with other lightweight clients offline.

I'm suggesting an alternative minimum fee rule, for which any fee offered less than that the miners simply regard that transaction as among the 'free' class.  Either they pay the minimum fee expected for that transaction, based on this rule or any other minimum fee rule that is larger, or the transaction receives no priority bump compared to a free transaction and is not valid for the fee paying sections of the block.  By 'that low' I'm simply saying that I'm trying to establish a standard price floor that (profit minded) miners are likely to honor in general, so that users in general know to pay it.


Because I'm trying to address the (admittedly very small) costs to the network for very old transactions.  The blocksize limits might pay for it fine, but that still wouldn't have a direct relationship to the costs of old transactions, but for the new transactions competing for space.  It wouldn't have any effect of encouraging the desired behavior from capital savers, namely the active reduction of resource usage.


It's not much of an issue.  I've already admitted this.  The costs to the network required by any one old transaction are tiny, indeed.  But they do exist, and are cumulative in nature.  This cost isn't directly addressed in the current fee structure directly.  I'm proposing, and asking for better proposals, that directly address this long term cost.  The fees need not be large, and certainly shouldn't be large, to have the intended effect on user behavior overall.  I suggested an alternative minimum fee that would have expected only .00000026 BTC per year per input.  That's damn tiny, and it will be decades before this is either a value of any significance or even before the other minimums in effect are smaller than this.

It's difficult to know the ratio, but the point is valid.  The standard behavior of the client is to total up as many inputs as necessary to pay the intended his due, and then the change returns to the sender.  Since the default behavior of the client is not to consolidate vast holdings into fewer transactions (the very behavior I'm trying to address) it's reasonable to assume that any transaction with more than one input is sending the larger of the two outputs.  So an average can be derived from the transaction records.

This is doable even in the current state of affairs.  A blockchain that doesn't mine, and has many connections to miners.  But that same blockchain server has to be compensated somehow, and this functionally means that those who use the blockchain server are going to have to pay that service directly.  In fact, I've been thinking about doing this exact business model, and charging a small monthly access fee for users.  The primary users, in my view, would be thin clients that use a redacted blockchain as a matter of course.