Even if "The US" bans such things as Bitcoin in its usual arrogance by declaring it part of "The War on Terrorism and Drugs" or something, i think that in the vast majority of the world - or as the Americans call it "the rest of the world" - Bitcoin will continue to do well... ![Wink](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/wink.gif) If the US bans bitcoin, much of the rest of the world would gravitate towards it because it irritates the US government. Including many US citizens.
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I vote for "BITMILL" too
Easy to remember, difficult to get confused in common speech or in text. I like it. +1
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I think once all of this is over banksters, politicians and soldiers should be lined up and shot at dawn
For practical reasons, it's best to refrain from lumping soldiers in with the others. After all, odds are high that if there is going to be any shots fired at dawn (or any other time) they are going to be doing the shooting.
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Big deal, so 20 people get stinky wealthy for being 'early adopters', so what. There will be much more people who will regret for the rest of their days and get ridiculed by grandchildren about buying a pizza for a 10kBTC or selling all their bitcoins for .70$
On this basis you can refuse ever buying shares of Google because Larry and Serge got zillions of them for "free".
In any case most of those initial 'easy' money are going to be sold for peanuts i.e. less than 1000$/BTC.
I'd bet that the guy who bought the pizza for 10kBTC is one of the 20 (or 20000?) who will be stinking rich. No one is going to be ridiculing him, let alone his lucky grandkids. Buying that pizza might have motivated him to ratchet up his collecting. And it might have helped kick start the use of Bitcoin as money. Ironicly, I'd bet that he doesn't even have 10kBTC anymore.
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If there were a way to secure the network while also contributing to useful computational projects, we would likely do that. But there isn't any way to do this. The compuations can either be useful for some altruistic project or be useful for blockchain security; but not both.
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I'm going to piggyback on benyben's question here.
I understand that by doing this, we secure the network, however, here's my question: WHY are we being "paid"? Is it because we are securing this network? In a way, yes. But mostly because any monetary system has to have the initial distribution somehow, and distributing the currency based on the contributions towards blockchain security is about the most equitable as can be devised for an anonymous, digital currency. Eventually that initial distribution cycle will taper to zero, and then miners will be "paid" to process transactions, but the method of processing transactions also contributes to the ongoing security of the blockchain in like manner.
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@"zomg early adopters get too much":
Boo-hoo, person X does not deserve his Bitcoins. Bitcoin initial distribution is by far the best approach I've seen so far. Yes, the makers made the rules so that they can get a neat share in the first month. SO WHAT? I was late too. But do I mind? This is much better than inflation. I rather give absurd amounts of money to someone who was an early supporter of a useful technology than to states who just burn it. Especially if I have to give it once, and the states want to keep the money burning all my life.
Added to that, once those early adopters finally decide to take those profits, then those bitcoins are loose in the system, and no amount of gaming or lobbying is going to give those early adopters their advantages back. It's a one time advantage, whereas fiat currencies are constantly being screwed with to the benefit of some insider or another. Hell, even the gold and silver markets are manipulated to some degree.
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The obvious difficulty of getting current users to agree to such a tax collection mechanism to be added to their clients aside. Which government would this tax be collected for? Any government entity that you could choose will 1) not have the jurisdiction to tax all bitcoin users and 2) will have citizens of other nations that would desire to actively undermine the collecting government's ability to collect any taxes.
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Bitcoins is surely very dangerous. particularly to all the middlemen and other bankster parasites who need to start to think hard if there is anything they actual can do that adds value. Investing into business which trains former bankers to do something useful like electrician or plumber professions might be a good idea.
Hell no. Those professions require years of committment to master, and flooding those labor markets are going to crash the skilled labor value. Come on!. Banksters are people too, once they cannot leach on every freaking single international money transfer, they are more than welcome to earn their living doing something worthwhile. Only if they can learn to do it the same way that everyone else before them has, without a subsidy.
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Bitcoins is surely very dangerous. particularly to all the middlemen and other bankster parasites who need to start to think hard if there is anything they actual can do that adds value. Investing into business which trains former bankers to do something useful like electrician or plumber professions might be a good idea.
Hell no. Those professions require years of committment to master, and flooding those labor markets are going to crash the skilled labor value.
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so, your solution.. is to let the average american citizens suffer, unable to aford basic health care let alone these new technologies? don't you think AMERICA should benefit from these technologies first? not joe schmoe in socialized healthcare land.
I think you don't really understand what you advocate. What defines "basic health care"? Health care is an abstract concept, a collective service provided in small portions and in different ways by many different people. None of whom are obligated to do anything in particular for anyone in particular. If "basic health care" were to be defined as whatever form of health care that was available to the richest person 50 years ago, I'd be for that form of socialized medicine, because whatever knowledge hasn't been updated in 50 years of medical science is dirt cheap. I do agree that there is a social problem with public health, but I don't agree that there is an ideal solution. This is my problem with it, Americans, all of us, should benefit from advances in science.. not just the rich few.. and everyone else in the world with a sane health care system.
The rich always benefit from scientific advances before the rest, medicine notwithstanding. That is the way of the world. Do you think that you would have your smartphone today unless overpaid Wall Street wonks were willing to pay way too much for crappy wireless cell service in the 1980's?
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If you limit bandwidth there, this would lead to long downloads + frustrated clients who anyways have to wait ~2-3 blocks until they are allowed into the network in the first place!
Most captive portals allow the owner to permit certain ports at will, so whitelisting port 8333 would allow the user to connect to whatever bitcoin client he desired prior to payment, and then tentatively allow access with the receipt of a valid transaction. If the transaction turns out bad (double spent, or whatever) during the next 20 minutes, cut the user off. Bitcoin might be nice for real money transfer, but for small + quick payments (on the airport I want to check mails 5 minutes before the plane leaves, not wait half an hour until my payment is verified!) you would need either a centralized prepay-solution or something else.
Confirmations are not required for small value payments. Take a look at the 'vending machine' threads. Online e-wallets are one solution, but a double-spend is a tough thing to do, and not something a person is likely to attempt for small value gains. Until someone can package the exploit and make it trivial to perform such a thing, giving them a skeleton key to all micro payment systems. Maybe, but then this either becomes a digital 'arms race' as the vendor's programmers come up with new ways of flagging frauds, or simply new ways to identify fraudsters. If the vendors cannot keep ahead of the fraudsters one way or the other, vendors will simply default to requiring confirmations, and online wallets will truely become required for 'instant' transfers.
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If you limit bandwidth there, this would lead to long downloads + frustrated clients who anyways have to wait ~2-3 blocks until they are allowed into the network in the first place!
Most captive portals allow the owner to permit certain ports at will, so whitelisting port 8333 would allow the user to connect to whatever bitcoin client he desired prior to payment, and then tentatively allow access with the receipt of a valid transaction. If the transaction turns out bad (double spent, or whatever) during the next 20 minutes, cut the user off. Bitcoin might be nice for real money transfer, but for small + quick payments (on the airport I want to check mails 5 minutes before the plane leaves, not wait half an hour until my payment is verified!) you would need either a centralized prepay-solution or something else.
Confirmations are not required for small value payments. Take a look at the 'vending machine' threads. Online e-wallets are one solution, but a double-spend is a tough thing to do, and not something a person is likely to attempt for small value gains.
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Doesnt this attack require total control of the network?
No, it only requires that you recreate the circuts repeatedly to identify as many of the nodes on the network as is necessary to narrow down the possible locations of the target. Most hidden services use a few highly trusted nodes in order to defend against this attack, as victory is defined as establishing a circut with an owned node in direct contact with the target. Still it can be done by first identifying those trusted nodes, and then literally breaking into those nodes to directly locate the target. It's not an easy attack, but the CIA certainly has the resources to do it. I doubt that the FBI would do it, for no other reason that such an attack wouldn't likely lead to untainted evidence for a trial. But the CIA's goals don't usually involve a prosecution.
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No matter what any of the talking heads try to preach about socialized medicine.. it works. Just because our closest neighbors havnt gotten it right doesn't mean we can't, so don't bother mentioning Canada's terrible system or the UK's.
My problem isn't with the idea of socialized medicine per se. My problem is with advancements in medicine. Sure, there are some nationalized social care that does a respectable job overall, but every last one of them depends upon the innovation in medical science in order to improve. And every last company that does the research depends upon the US's semi-open market in order to pay for that research. Government cannot replicate market based innovation, no matter what they think they can do.
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I would be interested in a tor/i2p proxy service. that is you forward traffic from tor or i2p addresses (onion addresses and eepsites) via ssh or something similar to another machine, so that I can operate my service from within tor or i2p without having to run the systems.
This is something i would pay for, just saying since you seem clued in on interfacing wth the tor network.
If you don't run the hidden service/eepsite on the same server as the "real" site, it becomes trivial to locate the hidden service. For a service whose location is already known, since it's on the public Internet, this isn't really that big of a problem, but it could be an issue for such a proxy operator, who might not want his server's location known. That said, it's pretty easy to set up a hidden service or eepsite. I can walk you through this for a few BTC. ![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif) How can they be located? It's similar to triangulation. The hunter sets up an number of intermediary nodes that they can modify to track packets, then repeatedly make circuts to the target. Since they know the starting content of packets, they can identify their own packets as they cross their nodes, even encrypted, by timing and packet size. Then they note which node the packets are going too next. The idea is to identify the path from different directions, narrowing down the geographical location of the target by progressively locating the nodes in the circuts.
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Woodwick candles, at a competitive price shipped.
Badger bug balm.
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The couple in question doesn't seem to be a threat to society, just to their own offspring. Should we kill them anyway, just to be on the safe side? Who else should we go after while we're at it?
You are right, not a threat to society but maybe only to their neighborhood. If I was their neighbor I would kill them anyway to be on the safe side since they are clearly very mentally unstable and because I'd feel good about rescuing the kid. what if another neighbor considers you a threat because they don't see it the same way as yourself.
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In many fiat currencies, a particular denomination of note displays a particular important figure, with the lower the value (and therefore the most commonly used note) is the most important person. Of course, these people are usually already dead, and as far as we know all of the important persons surrounding Bitcoin are not. But since Satoshi is IMHO the most important person, and Gavin is very close these days; .000001 bitcoin should be a Satoshi and .001 should be a Gavin. There should not be a name for a bitcoin denomination beyond the sixth decimal place.
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The current system isn't that great at punishing criminal sociopaths. It's much better at putting them in power.
You said it like it's a bad thing. Sociopaths are way better at making rational decisions I suppose that depends on how one defines "criminal". The halls of prisons are filled with unsuccessful and ignorant sociopaths, alongside the non-violent drug offenders. While the halls of Congress and the Pentagon are filled with successful and intelligent sociopaths.
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