This was an interesting story:
http://gata.org/node/7696

Jurors heard how the payroll system operated. When workers at Kahre's six businesses and more than 30 companies that were payroll clients went to pick up their pay, each received a tube containing coins.

Kahre had claimed he tried to legally avoid taxes by creating a cash payroll system that disbursed gold and silver coins, on the theory that recipients could go by the coins' face value for tax purposes.

Certified public account Wayne Paul, brother of Texas congressman Ron Paul, testified that Congress created a dual monetary system when it authorized the gold and silver coins that currently circulate.

Bullshit semantics.

I dare you to try it.

Also isnt it possible that two different public keys could return the same hash value, i know its unlikely but if people are using this service 100 years from now on a global scale there could be a LOT of transactions by then.

A wall of text does not motivate me to respond.

As a base let me explain what i think i understand of bit-coins so far. Each member of the network has a record of all transactions which have ever taken place in the community. Each record of a transaction is called a block. Each block records the amount transferred, the address of the sender and the address of the recipient. The address of the recipient is a hash value of their public key. The record as a whole is called the block chain which is nothing more than every known block organized chronologically. Member nodes broadcast the length of their block chain to all of the nodes they are connected to periodically, the receiving node then compares the length of their existing block chain to that of the sender, if the receiver finds that his block chain is shorter than the senders, he will send a request to the sender for the entire block-chain. When a node initiates a transaction it adds that transaction to its block chain stating that node now has x fewer coins and the receiving node now has x more coins, the nodes connected to the transacting node would then see that the transacting node has a longer block chain and send a request for the update, eventually the receiver of the transaction would receive an updated copy of the block chain proving that he now owns x coins. Now for what i dont understand which greatly outweighs what i do. The network uses pki, but what exactly is being encrypted. What is to stop someone else from sending a message to the network stating that he is you and he transacts x funds to y account, im sure this is where the encryption comes into the equation but how. Also i understand what the theory behind the usefulness of proof of work systems, such as forcing a server to solve a problem before being willing to receive a message from it in order to prove that their is a cost involved for the sender limiting the potential profitability of spam, but i cant for the life of me figure out how it factors into the whole bitcoin equation. If im asked to solve a complex problem then rewarded for solving it, whos asking the question, what method is used to generate the problem. Also isnt it possible that two different public keys could return the same hash value, i know its unlikely but if people are using this service 100 years from now on a global scale there could be a LOT of transactions by then.

This message may seem confusing to some of you but it comes from my personal definition of understanding. I dont consider myself to understand something just because i can explain it or solve a problem relating to it. All through out my life i was so frustrated with public education because no one seemed to understand what it meant to understand, and no teachers ever required their students to be able to understand the material, only that they be able to answer questions correctly. To me understanding involves being able to draw a complex picture in my head accounting for all given variables and potentialities, explaining the relationships between how all parts of a system interact with all other parts, and right now im on a quest to understand bitcoin.
 

I have been fascinated by economics, political theory, and monetary theory for some time, and it is through my self education in these fields i stumbled across bit-coin. Upon learning about bit-coin i became infatuated with the claims made by the bit-coin community. I well understand, as im sure many of you do, the nature of the invisible cage placed upon us by powerful banking interests through fractional reserve lending, debt based currency, and the monopolization of capital and the means of exchange. If bit-coins are truly what many claim them to be an independent, incorruptible, indestructible means of exchange than the potential for positive impact upon our planet by this community is of an unimaginable scale. There exists the potential for this community to be responsible for saving the lives of not just thousands or millions of lives, but billions maybe even trillions if we became an interstellar society in the future. So it would be an understatement to say that im interested in your work.

Clearly the next step for me is understanding, i want to fully understand how this software operates. I have a problem though, everything i read is either to broad to technical. For example i have this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTOhti7wxXk which goes over my head or this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjnM2shYIrM which explains nothing. So in essence what im asking for is a detailed explanation in English not techno-babel that required a doctorate to understand. I am like most members of my generation some what computer "literate" so your not talking to grandma over here but of course my understanding will be dwarfed by many on this forum.

Wow. I wonder if I can get enough people to chip in and buy Ohio. Of course, they're probably not selling, so we'd have to vote in people who would allow it first. Then we might even be able to skip the buying it part and get those people to do what we wanted in the first place. Too bad it never works that way.

Well, part of the issue is that the damn bank charges us a fee every time I get paid by direct deposit. I could circumvent that with bitcoins.

We accept Bitcoins at http://www.chariottrading.com/bitcoin.html

Cars are retarded anyway. Suburbanism = urban sprawl = a disease. New urbanism ftw. + pay tons in costs and pollute the environment burning precious fossil fuels to move 1 person for a 30 minute walk.

Are we building cities for cars or for people? Support pedestrianism.

I doubt that micropayments will be possible and sustainable long-term through the Bitcoin network, so long as every node must learn about every transaction.  There's just not enough bandwidth on a typical internet connection to receive 100 bytes each time anybody anywhere in the world buys a snack or a sword in a game or seeds for their farm.  Micropayments are feasible now while there is unused capacity for free transactions, but as soon as Bitcoin's user base grows to fill that, the transaction fees needed to balance supply and demand of network resources will make micropayments from stand-alone clients infeasible, if for nothing else, the transaction fee will be too high.

Services like Mybitcoin.com are about the only way micropayments are going to be possible long term.  Such services would aggregate them and complete micropayments "off the block chain", and standalone Bitcoin protocol would be left as the backbone for large transfers of money - and the digital equivalent of the "gold in the vault".

I am part-owner of a company, and paid a monthly salary by said company. I'd like to try paying my salary in bitcoins, but I have a number of concerns. I'm researching these, but feel free to chime in if you know something. Hopefully we can eventually build a guide for employers considering paying salaries and wages in bitcoins.

Questions/Concerns:

1. How will this work for taxes? I want everything above the board. Should my company buy bitcoins each time my salary is to be paid, and then I just pay the same taxes that I would on the cash (and the company pays its share the same way)?

2. Should my salary be pegged to the dollar or a fixed amount of bitcoins? (How does this affect #1?)

3. Will I be able to get by with bitcoins? Will I have to sell them too much, or can I buy most of what I need with bitcoins? How could I work around this?

4. Will my company's banking institution flip out if I buy bitcoins with the company CC or debit card?

5. What's a good way to keep a separate bitcoin balance for my company and for myself? Run a separate bitcoin client/wallet somewhere?

6. What else should I be worried about/planning for if I do this?

In a more anarchist society this issue would have been resolved within weeks. One possible scenario: Since the parents care passionately about this issue, they all would have chipped in and purchased the street and run it as a cooperative where they can set their own rules.   Ok, there are  now a handful of commuters who can no longer take the  shortest path to their workplace at a high speed, but do they really care enough about losing 10 seconds commute time to purchase back the street (among themselves) at an even higher price than the concerned parents are prepared to pay?

lost coins will eventually be recovered when quantum computers become large enough... as the rest of the network will have already moved all the active coins to stronger addresses well before that time.  

But that may be at least 40 years in the future.

It's hard to say how long deflation would take to kick in.  It depends on many variables not easily quantified.  Hell, even though we know, for example, roughly how much larger the USD money supply is today compared to several years ago, its effect on inflation hasn't really been seen.  The economy will have to pick up a lot more in order to create a sufficiently-high-enough increase in demand in order for us to see inflation.

*facepalm* Why do I bother? Did you even read what I said? It's not that simple. How do I know where I copied it is safe? You are demanding that everyone who uses the currency be tech savvy. I don't care how reasonable you think that demand is because you happen to be tech savvy, it isn't.

The second a common good problem crops up and people are afforded the opportunity to be callous, snide, and unhelpful to new people, they make a career out of it.

You'll change your tune the first time you have your wallet burnt by a DOD professionally crafted virus.

You answer is as dim as saying "don't crash your car" in response to issues of vehicle safety. No one plans on getting in a car wreck and sometimes it's not your fault, worse, sometimes, it's no one's fault.