Nearly every action in my waking life is regulated in some way backed by the threat of violence. 70% or more of my job is related to supporting regulations enforced, again, by threats of violent action for noncompliance.

Then we could talk literally of the millions upon millions dead upon the mantle of statism.

Statism *is* violence.

Non-statist violence in my life is typified by the occasional minor incident of road rage. That's it.

Oh, I forgot. Somalia. Of course, what was I thinking? 

It's getting time for someone else to step up to the plate. Gox, as the major player and just about a single point of failure is just too big a target.

It would be quite difficult for there to be more.

I'm not saying, I'm just saying

I'm definitely an "if it works" kind-of guy but I also tend to like laying out the pros and cons. I leave the balancing of those pros and cons to individual preference.

Bitcoin certainly is taxable. They just have to declare a tax on it. In fact, if you've made income on it, you should probably, by the laws of your jurisdiction, be declaring it.

What it is not easy to do is enforce taxes. So they will do what they always do. If they can find a point to tax, they will tax it. They will tax the online stores you use, they will tax the shipping, they will find ways wherever. And when you find ways around it, they will throw you in jail.

Bitcoin is great and very subversive but don't get the idea it will somehow prevent the government getting its claws into your legitimate transactions.

I LOL when I hear people refer to the rear compartment of an automobile as a trunk or boot and the lid at the front as a hood or bonnet. Language lulz.

Personally, I don't have much issue with drift of language. It happens. Now there are left-libertarians and right-libertarians. The underlying meaning is in support of increased liberties. Of course, I believe that the left-libertarians are misguided in their aims and understanding of liberty but that's a different argument (The left has a long history of using words in diametric opposition to their actual meaning in any case).

libertarian in the US sense seems to be gaining ground in the UK also. I read several sites from there and libertarian is typically used in this manner. This is hardly surprising. In the US, liberty has long meant freedom from the interference of others, in France and much of Europe, it means freedom to be a bum and not starve.

Well, perhaps you are confusing things by bringing in "anarchism" then. We could concentrate on "libertarianism" but I have to confess that I'm not that familiar with the origins. I suspect the rise in adoption of the term has more to do with the stealing of the label "liberal" by those who are anything-but than seeking back into the far past. I often see the term "classical liberal" used as a synonym.

I guess an important thing to bear in mind is that the past 100 years or so have seen the rise of the state to overbearing stature. That has skewed the field quite a lot.

The tractor maker gives you a tractor because building tractors is its own reward.
The steel maker gives him the steel because working around dangerously hot molten metal is its own reward.
The miner give the ore to the smelter because crawling around in holes in the ground is its own reward.

Anyone who believes this shit should schedule a road trip and go on a mine tour.

In fact, if collectives are so much better, they should be able to outshine all the inefficient top-down owned businesses and put them all out of business. Not happening and you can't claim it's all because of fatcat capitalists controlling the economy.

The thing is, capitalism isn't really an ideology as such, it's just a formalization of the way the world works. You work, you create goods, you exchange goods, you have capitalism.

Anarchism, being the lack of an over-arching control, cannot oppose capitalism any more than it can oppose the laws of gravity or, (perhaps more aptly) fluid dynamics. The only way to suppress capitalism is by imposing control from above. Anti-capitalism is antithetical to anarchism.

The great thing about bitcoin is that it can turn from being a store of value to being a medium of change on a dime (pardon the pun). Want to save for a rainy day? Do so. Need to spend it? Do so. In many ways, it's a new paradigm.

I bet he'd kill for a sandwich.

Who says?

I hear there's a thing called computers which can replace many people for a lot of repetitive tasks. Could be just a fad though.

QFT

It's not a terrible system but it does mean you're charging different amounts to different people and just looks messy. If you do different addresses, it's "cleaner" but you'd really want to automate it. Then the buyer enters their details, and scans the resulting output QR, cuts & pastes (or enters the key manually if they're masochistic). I've been thinking this might actually be something that could be provided as a service by an external company, the resulting funds being funnelled into the end-seller's single public key and the order information either emailed or provided by an API. Disadvantage is that the external service gets a cut, of course.

That sounds like it is unable to access the internet. It's not smart about caching the icons. That's also on my list of planned improvements.

It has occurred to me that some of the lag on Gox might be some kind of DOS attack since it has proven before that that induces panic selling.

Seems like it would definitely be worth having some fiat on other exchanges in the event this happens again. In fact, it would be interesting to see if that is where a lot of the buying occurred.