Japanese children are more harshly punished for questioning authority than probably any other group of people on the planet.

Apparently he had a bad hard drive crash and a backup problem that resulted in his old wallet being irretrievably corrupted.

I did too until they suddenly decided to cancel my most recent purchase because it "appears to be high risk".

The possibility of an alternate cryptocurrency is very healthy for Bitcoin. It makes sure nobody gets complacent.

If another cryptocurrency actually sees significant adoption I think that should be treated as a failure. Bitcoin should work well enough that nobody needs to switch to an alternative.

Alternately, a person might get hired as a janitor for 5 BTC per year, work his way up over a 30 year long career and retire as a manager still making 5 BTC per year.

Remittances are how you bootstrap bitcoin in a place like Iran. Iranians can have their relatives who live abroad send them bitcoins and those bitcoins can be traded internally to the people who want to use them to pay for imports.

How many business can you name that maximize their profitability by restricting the number of customers they serve?

If it really worked like that, then why stop at 1 MB? Limit block sizes to a single transaction and all the miners would be rich beyond measure! That would certainly make things more decentralized because miners all over the world would invest in hardware to collect the massive fee that one lucky person per block will be willing to pay.

Why stop there? I'm going to start a car dealership and decide to only sell 10 cars per year. Because I've made the number of cars I sell a limited resource I'll be able to charge more for them, right?

Then I'll open a restaurant called "House of String-Pushing" that only serves regular food but only lets in 3 customers at a time.

Can you walk me through the reasoning that you used to conclude that bitcoin will remain more secure if it's limited to a fixed number of transactions per block?

Are you suggesting more miners will compete for the fees generated by 7 transactions per second than will compete for the fees generated by 4000 transactions per second?

If the way to maximize fee revenue is to limit the transaction rate, why does Visa, Mastercard, and every business that's trying to maximize their revenue process so many of them?

If limiting the allowed number of transactions doesn't maximize revenue for any other transaction processing network, why would it work for Bitcoin?

If artificially limiting the number of transactions reduces potential revenue, how does that not result in fewer miners, and therefore more centralization?

In what scenario does your proposed solution not result in the exact opposite of what you claim to be your desired outcome?

Democracy as a political system is just a way of making totalitarianism superficially appear less evil.

If it's evil for a single individual to point a gun at someone and order him around, it's also evil when two people do it, when three people do it, and so on. There's no tipping point where you add one extra person to the group and all of a sudden "a mob" magically transforms into "society".

If you still have trouble seeing why majority rule is not a valid ethical justification remember that gang rape is applied democracy.

The reason you're signing a transaction offline is because you assume it's possible for an attacker to compromise your online computer. In that case you have to assume the attacker can alter the QR code that's being delivered to the offline computer, which means there's a non-zero possibility the attacker can compromise your offline computer as well.

Image processing libraries, like any other kind of software that processes arbitrary input, can fail in ways that allow arbitrary code execution. A few years ago it was possible to take over Windows computers if you could convince the user to load a web site containing a malicious JPEG image.

There are ways to reduce this risk by auditing code audits, fuzz testing, and other techniques but those don't completely eliminate the risk.

Unless the programs that read the QR codes provably free from any flaws that could allow a specially-crafted image to trigger an exploit you can't call the risk 0%.

I don't know if this still active or not, but you might want to check here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=93606.20

One of the most hateful actions of all is to threaten a child into believing a lie. How long would religions survive if they couldn't bully children into compliance?

Every scam surrounds the central lie with camouflaged truths, otherwise they aren't believable.

I pay for both of those with Bitcoin.

Utilities are included in my rent and I convinced my landlord to make a Coinbase account with a payment page.

What I would like to know is what BitPay is going to do when they come under the same kind of litigious pressure that PayPal did.

These other layers may indeed assume that role someday, but it should happen because they prove to be superior on their own merits, not because the capabilities of blockchain transfers are deliberately crippled.

Wasn't Namecoin supposed to provide a part of the solution?

MPEx may be a big fish, but  bitcoin as a whole is a very small pond presently.

I don't remember who proposed it but the best proposal I've heard is to make the maximum block size scale based on the difficulty.

The transition to ASIC mining should represent the last step increase in hashing power, so after that's done would be a good time to establish a baseline for whatever formula gets used.