The points against China are....

1)  They are a large population, and therefore not prone to quick changes in monetary policy.

2)  They are a command economy, and would therefore likely view the rise of an un-managable currency (from outside their own culture, and worse from a Japanese national) with contempt.

3)  They are deeply vested in the international fiat systems due to international trade, and would be wary about losing much wealth with the decline of those reserves.

Patience.

Already did.

And you know this, how?  Can you see the trade volume on Silk Road?  In Russia?  In China?  Just because the visable market is small, doesn't mean that the trade volume is entirely speculation.

Ripple doesn't define the unit of value the IOU's are based upon, while a LETS system must collectively define this.

The burden of proof is not on me to show that the system is not broken.  And I have seen enough to believe it proven for myself, what you have seen or not seen is, likewise, not my problem.
Incorrect.  Your proposal is about the blockchain, and node identity spoofing would be the equivilant of hijacking the identities of trusted miners, but Bitcoin doesn't presently depend upon trusted nodes, which is part of the point of it all.
Again, incorrect.  The scorched earth attack involves a node developing trust as the network builds, and only turning malicious after the WoT has grown to such a size that the value of such an attack outweighs the value of continued growth.  Said another way, the scorched earth method is most profitable when the network is mature.

This is likely true in most cases, but not provably true.  Satoshi's white paper proves that similar attacks are not possible with Bitcoin so long as the attacker has less hashing power than the honest network.  And this is the status quo here.  If you don't like it, prove it.  You are long from that goal.  As I understand it, you don't contest that proof; you just believe that the transaction rules don't promise that said hashing power can be maintained.  And I disagree.[/list]

Time really isn't an issue.  It's not like Bitcoin is ready for mass adoption anyway.

Not if they openly approached him.  If they weren't going to play nice, they wouldn't have bothered with a ruse.  Like I said, openly inviting him to speak and offering him a speaker's fee tells me that they intend to play nice.  It's a very bullish signal.

Not well, but how about a quote and a link?

"This cost comes as a choice between rising unemployment and rising debt.　 The mechanism is fairly straightforward.　 Countries that seek to supercharge domestic growth by acquiring a larger share of global demand can do so by gaming the global system and actively stockpiling foreign currency, mainly in the form of, but not limited to, central bank reserves.　　 This allows them forcibly to accumulate domestic savings while relying on foreign demand to compensate for their own limited domestic demand."

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/04/bogus-threats-to-us-reserve-currency.html

Basicly it's about the current account deficit.  Foreign producers can export to the US and accumulate US $, but unlike under a gold standard, this requires that the US become a debtor nation.  This works fine as long as the economy keeps humming along, but contributes to the public pain under a recession, like now.  Prior to the US $ becoming an international reserve currency under Brenton-Woods, the vast majority of the debt of the federal government was held by wealthy private citizens rather than central banks of foreign nations or sovereign wealth funds of dictatorships.  Of course, national debt is bad, because the 'debtor is slave to the lender'; but at least if the government is owned by the wealthy class of it's own citizenship, these same citizens have a vested interest in a stable social order and the legitimacy of the government.  Foreign investors do not, always, mind the losses if they can sow difficulties in the 'great Satan'.  Not all of them mind you, as China doesn't want to do it because it would harm China to a great degree, which was the strategic beauty of Clinton making China a 'most favored trade nation' back in the early 1990's.  In this way, he led to the Chinese middle class becoming dependent upon the economic health of the United States; and he foresaw a future that China could become the only single nation on Earth capable of challenging the US military in a conventional ground war if only by shear numbers.  Of course, he didn't foresee the adventurism of his successor nor the harm this has caused to the readiness of the US military; but if we were not presently in three major open conflicts at the same time, we would still be the most "effective" military on Earth.

And, of course, the present stability of the Chinese ruling class is highly dependent upon the quality of life of that same middle class.

Kenya already has p2p cellphone banking.  And "good" Internet access for Bitcoin is relative, as there are other solutions.  When a decent lightweight client for Android is developed, expecially if Android phones start shipping with a Dash7 mesh radio, a casual user in Kenya might not ever need Internet access.

 

I wonder how the recent revelation that Gavin Anderson is doing a presentation on Bitcoin for the CIA would trip up these mental giants, but I'm not willing to join the fray to try it.

Honestly, I would have expected the membership on an overclocking forum to be a bit more tech savvy.

I can't watch the video, but the idea that there has been zero reporting in the media is false.  I've seen it.  Unless you don't consider Fox Business News channel to be "mainstream".

No, I don't.  I think that there are plenty of people in government capable of seeing the trends, and motivated enough to act towards benefitting from those same trends.  This is true if the trend in question is the stock market, Federal Reserve dominance, or the rise of cryptocurrency.  Nor do I doubt their capacity to obscure their true motives.

There is probably a way to do this.  What if the client were to track the average number of blocks that a fee paying and free transactions were to persist in it's own queue, and increase the blocksize limit by 25% when it adjusts difficulty if the average wait blocks for fee paying transactions were over 6, and the free transaction section limit if free transactions averaged over 30.  And a client wouldn't reject an oversized block if it's own calculations put the averages over half of those numbers. 

I just pulled those numbers out of my rear, so I'm not suggesting they are ideal, just throwing out an idea.  If transaction congestion became a problem, this metric could stretch the blocksize to accommodate without undermining the scarcity value of the blocksize limit, and it would take months to grow significantly.

Likewise, if the average block wait for a fee paying transaction were under 2, or the average wait for free transactions were under 10, those same size metrics could be reduced by the same factor until they returned to the current limits.

I don't agree that this is a given.

The government has many other ways to generate revenue.  The income tax is not small, but has always been more about social engineering than government revenue.

That said, I was saying that I would be surprised if Bitcoin were a government project.

I have suspected for a couple months that this forum was being watched, and that a couple of forum members were agents keeping tabs on us; but I'd be very impressed if Bitcoin were a CIA project or that Satoshi turns out to be a government agent.  I've been careful enough that most average forum users aren't likely to be able to discover my identity, but not careful enough to prevent the feds from doing so.  I would consider that futile.  And considering that I've personally mentioned that I have worked for the federal government in the past, they almost certainly know the real me.  These guys aren't surprised easily.
Yesterday I would have agreed with you, but as I mentioned, the CIA openly reaching out to Gavin in a friendly manner implies that they intend to "play fair", if they intend to play at all.  Hands off is almost certainly not an option now, and probably never was considering what the goals are.

This is only true for certain sectors of government.  Domestic monetary policy is not a concern for the CIA.  That's doesn't mean that the monied interests of other sectors won't interfere with whatever the CIA might have in mind, but the CIA doesn't care what cyberpunks are doing in the dark corners of the Internet in general.

I find this revelation to be supportive of Bitcoin's future.  If they are openly asking a major representative of the Bitcoin community to speak, that means that they not only have looked at it fairly closely and have judged generally that it's not a threat or a crime (meaning they are not going to commit resources to destroy the network) it also means that someone has a use for Bitcoin.

Keep in mind, they have a use for Tor, and if every Tor node were owned by the feds, it woundn't be very useful to them either.

It might also explain some of the mystery money that has been flowing into MtGox and driving the price.  If the CIA has a use for it, they are going to have to have some of it.

If this presentation goes well, and tells them what they really would like to verifiy (they don't ask questions that they don't already have strong opinions on, like lawyers never ask questions in court that they haven't already researched, the CIA has access to some truly high class programmers themselves) then just imagine the level of hashing power that the feds could bring to Bitcoin.

I know that most people think that the fact that the US FRN is the international reserve currency is a major boon for the US economy, but there are some very notable downsides.  In some ways it's in the interests of the US to gently back away from that role.  Bitcoin could help that endeavor.

There are several android clients being worked on presently.  This topic has come up with regard to third world usage of Bitcoin before, please search the archives.