So, where are the "actual Bitcoins"?

Make both the risks and incentives known to miners. List them out. List out how the good guys and bad guys can use Zerocoin. But do not expect the media to get this right. The community must explain this to the media properly with a press kit.

Few Qs from watching the presentation:
How important is the original trusted authority in the establishing of the accumulator? How bad would it be if it were corrupted/breached?
Tacking on Zerocoin on top of Bitcoin seem to add a layer which can be hacked: the coin itself appear no longer backed by the block chain but by the encryption chosen (RSA XYZ) while being carried on the chain. It seems to be adding a point of failure to me: am I getting it right?

I searched and could not find a Zerocoin thread on those forums, please let me know if I should be somewhere else with those questions.

This post is a kind of addendum to the previous 'gold narrative' post. Specifically, we look at the question of debt and why it is not so much the size of the outstanding debt, but its productivity that gives rise to worry. Even though it is greatly hampered, the market economy - with perhaps 30% of the population effectively engaged in wealth creation - continues to deliver the goods in the long term. The capitalist mode of production has steadily increased the world's wealth, in spite of taxes, regulations and the abysmal failure of central economic planning by central banks. However, there is a limit to the depredations the economy can deal with. At some point a threshold is crossed, and capital decumulation begins. It may already be underway in Europe in fact. And what are governments doing in the face of these problems? Under pressure from the election calculus and the powerful bureaucratic caste, governments have decided on a 'flight forward': massively inflationary monetary policies, even more regulations and taxes, and all sorts of financial repression measures. This is the main reason to remain pessimistic in spite of the market economy's wealth creation powers and the ingenuity of the wealth generating class of entrepreneurs. In effect, the parasitic State is in the process of consuming its host. Modern-day intellectuals, most of whom are paid by the State far in excess of what their services would fetch in a free market, continue to defend statism even as the ship is sinking. However, people are beginning to wake up. With the advent of the internet, it is no longer possible for the establishment to control the flow of information and ideas.

....

In a nutshell the problem posed by the mountain of debt that has been built up over time is the following: it has misdirected investment and falsified economic calculation, which in turn has distorted the structure of production and led to the consumption of scarce capital (which is usually disguised as illusionary accounting profits) during the boom periods. Subsequently this became painfully obvious as the inevitable economic busts set in.

What's more, the duration and amplitude of the boom-bust sequences has continually grown, as after every failed boom, the amount of new credit and money thrown at the economy to 'rescue' it from the bust has been vastly increased. Ever larger additions to the amount of money and debt outstanding have resulted in ever smaller additions to economic output.

....

Under these given conditions, governments have apparently decided on a 'flight forward' that consists of a mixture of massive monetary inflation, the imposition of ever more stringent regulations and taxes and various (other) forms of financial repression. Bureaucracies continue to grow like weeds, and so does their output. Is it any wonder that we are looking at these developments with growing dismay and pessimism? We are not happy to have to adopt a gloomy outlook, especially as we are well cognizant of the world's potential and the power of human ingenuity (which is evident even in the severely hampered market economy we are saddled with). However, with governments continually chipping away at the market economy's wealth creation ability, the day may well come when capital accumulation ceases or even reverses (if it hasn't begun already: just look at Europe). To come back to the beginning: this is a major reason to invest in gold as a form of insurance (this is beside the fact that gold may also be simply be regarded as an alternative currency to store one's savings in). The fundamental backdrop is what it is; perhaps sound money and sound economic policies will be adopted again once the failure of the current course becomes so glaringly obvious that what is considered politically unpalatable today comes to be seen as the only way forward. However, we are not there yet by a long shot.

I mean bm is almost pgp, million times better than email, but why not also add pgp. It's just an extra second vs in jail for years.

Anyway other than the question of whether soft forks make sense or not: what about making an all zerocoin based alt-coin (no bitcoins, nothing but zerocoins), that is either-or mined with bitcoin.  Then people can trade in and out of zerocoins by buying or selling them for bitcoin with an atomic transaction, probably p2p without some trusted exchange like mtgox.

Either-or mined (as distinct from merge-mined) I mean that each mined coin set is either a set of 25 bitcoins or a set of 25 zerocoins.  If its a zerocoin set its not a valid bitcoin set, and if its a bitcoin its not a valid zerocoin.  I'm not sure the zerocoins or bitcoins have to do much with mining events for the other network other than check they have the expected number of bits as they wont automatically know how to validate the other network.  Some miners may choose to validate both networks, but thats a choice for them.

In that way people can experiment with zerocoin, without bloating the block chain, complicating bitcoin, and without slowing validation on the bitcoin network.  And the two coins should have approximately the same cost (and maybe therefore value, though the price would be subject to demand/supply and any taint discount for bitcoins; zerocoins are taint free, or perfectly blended taint at least).

Adam

This has actually captured my interest now. What we're really talking about is a single party exchange (funded by investors?) that only trade for coupons that equal 1 usd... and only buy and sell bitcoins with it.

So every node on the network is run by an investor. This investor is effectively creating coupons at will (backed by actual physical dollars?)

So the software could manage the exchange between bitcoins and coupons. It could become the method of choice to move value between the bitcoin exchanges if nothing else.

~

It would require a very high level of trust for people being able to issue the coupons - as they'd have to have cash on hand and be able to deliver it to destroy coupons when people wants to cash out.
I'm not sure it's workable - bitcoiners are inherently against a single entity or small group of players controlling the money supply.

Now what if we took it from like—yesterday.

That is a bit of curve fitting, isn't it? Particularly since goldbugs like to tout the 5,000 year cultural history of gold.

Which still does not change the significance of one basic fact: Gold has a proof problem that Bitcoin has solved.

I'll give it a shot using the calculation from the discussion here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=68655.msg1688539#msg1688539 (-100 for some reason I haven't worked out )

the silverbox update (comparison from the beginning of this thread, March 13th, 2012, gold=1690, Bitcoin=5.4):
Bitcoin is 79.11  Gold is 1248.50
Bitcoin: 1365%
Gold:    -26.12%
Diff:  1884% advantage Bitcoin

Correct me if I got it wrong Zerg  

Although the BF response is very good the glaring inconsistency is arguing that Bitcoin is not a store of value, but also should be treated the same way as the Mexican peso for sales. Despite its poor track record the peso is very much a store of value while it remains a viable national currency.

namecoin can be used as a key-value system to do things like this: namecoin-files (i dont link it on purpose so ppl have to search for it as it bloats the blockchain alot...)

I saw the presentation, it was better than I expected, and recommend watching it once videos are posted.  It's not an ivory tower project at all, they have a working implementation internally based on the reference Bitcoin client, and they are going to be making that prototype available this summer.  Assuming the scalability and other issues can eventually be resolved, they want feedback from the community as to whether to try to eventually make the technology be tightly integrated with Bitcoin, or deployed as an altchain, or something else.

The .bit Firefox addon is now opensource @ github.com

Link: https://github.com/Namecoindotcom/dot-bit-addon