I don't have a problem with the government owning natural monopolies, such as these (better than private sector). In fact I think that this should be the sole source of income for the government (maybe...). What I really hate is personal income tax and the way it gets wasted on inefficient govt. health and education, which would be better served by the private sector. I don't like redistribution of wealth. I see bitcoin as a way to bypass the tax/welfare system. Something that society badly needs.

From what I understand, bitcoin is legal, but you have to declare it as taxable income. This is fine because, as bitcoin grows, you'll see allot more underground/cash-style economies due to the untraceable nature of bitcoin transactions. Eventually, perhaps only big corporates will be paying taxes, because they are too big to go under the radar. As people realise their newfound economic freedom, they'll begin to see that they don't need the government to manage the economy or the currency or any industry and the role of government will naturally be reduced to military, police, courts; where it belongs.

I'm really excited by this. :-)

I've been working on a site over the last few days. The idea is to grow the bitcoin economy outside the internet and into the real world. So I want to provide a service where people can post notices about goods and services that they are selling, in exchange for bitcoins, in their local area. Or conversely, people looking to buy goods and services for bitcoins in their local area.

So basically it will index notices by location, so people can do business directly. There are limitations as to what you can sell over the internet.

People will register and then compose a notice about their business and specify their country, state, city for indexing. The rest is up to them, I just provide the index.

I'm not sure what to call it and I'm not sure what business model to adopt (eg. charge 1BTC per notice).

Any thoughts, ideas, feedback would be appreciated.
Thanks,
asdf.

What if I'm operating entirely within the bitcoin economy? I earn ONLY bitcoins and buy things for bitcoins ONLY. I never touch any $.

In this case, I pay no taxes and the government knows nothing of my activities except that I'm "unemployed". Maybe I could take a part time job (putting me in a low tax bracket) just to keep the suspicion off.

What are the legal implications for this and what are the chances of getting caught?

I'll throw up $50.

I suppose we will pay you this money with bitcoins??? What is the best way to turn a credit card into bitcoins?

What happens with the "profits", how can we monitor the progress, how this all gonna work, etc?

I hope your right, but I disagree about insurgency; on a level playing field bitcoin WILL displace every fiat currency controlled by a central bank. Think about it, people will stop using banks, stop paying taxes, markets will be difficult to regulate when their transactions can't be monitored. They will lose their stranglehold on the economy. Key to the power structure is the control of the money, which is precisely what bitcoin usurps.

I see the biggest threat to this project as the very system it seeks to displace. That is, the banking establishment.

Isn't it inevitable that the Federal Reserve Bank will at some point buy every coin ever generated and completely wipe out the economy?

Well... we could just start afresh with bitcoin2, or whatever, but will this ever get off the ground when central banks have everything to lose from allowing it?

I'm not an economist. Is this a legitimate concern? What are your thoughts?

Pools offer the advantage that nodes can co-ordinate their hashing so that they aren't generating the same hashes as each other. It's not about "total hash/s", it's about "total unique hash/s". If everyone in the pool is assigned a subset of all hashes to work on (sizes based on each nodes average hash/s), then we'll guarantee that no hashes will be repeated. The node that generates the coin can just keep the full amount. The group will be better off together than alone. The bigger the pool, the better. In fact if these pools get much bigger than the companies (in terms of hash/s), then THEY will be severely marginalized and be forced to join the main pool or get nothing.

If the pool gets too big, then coins may be generated almost instantly at some point. This could be bad for the stability of the currency. Can anyone do the math on how many parallel coperating cpus it would take to find a coin in say, one minute?

I think this is a very important issue for the success of Bitcoin.