I can't find any details about Bitcoin on the Shopkeep.com website.  Anyone have a link to where this came from?

It's even worse than that.  Sex offender laws are so broad, that there are people that are on the lifetime registry lists for having sex with their legal spouses, for "mooning" and for having 'Sweet 16-Happy Birthday' sex with their 15 year old girlfriend only 10 days younger.  I almost got my nephew labeled as a sex offender, because at age 11 he pulled my daughter's pants down in an argument.  Not as any kind of sexual thing, but to tick her off.  She was four at the time.  My wife and I called some childcare 'hotline' for advice on how to deal with the issue, because it wasn't the first time that he had used this tactic to run her off.  The operator told us that if he was 12, he would have been obligated under law to report our nephew as a potential sex offender, which would have certainly caused a visit from Social Services.

And, of course, it doesn't matter what kind of crime that you have been accused of, if you are on a sex offender list you are automaticly assumed to be a child predator by the general public.

Not even a block, but only one bitcoin address keypair.  The block as a whole does not use a unified cryptographic scheme.

This is a really good idea, and would be a great way to measure velocity.

That's not entirely true, as a quantum computer requires a qubit for each encryption bit, but it's true enough.  Still, if quantum computers ever become a realistic threat to Bitcoin, then online commerce and electronic banking will already have been laid bare.

If online wallet sites similar to Mybitcoin were to collude to attack the system this way, what happens to them once the depositors get wind of it?

What would an online Bitcoin bank run look like?  And why wouldn't the threat of same limit collusion to start with?

For the time being, yes.

For that rate, you could be my next door neighbor and I would mow it myself.

Who would that be, and under what charge?

You assume there would be better antibiotics, but in my opinion you are more likely to just end up with a lot of academic researchers chasing grants, not producing useful research.  The most likely outcomes of government managed scientific research is either focused towards developing more effective ways to kill brown people or an accidental viagra, which then gets buried in paperwork only to be rediscovered by some paper-miner in two decades and bought up by a private company anyway.

Only that the merkle tree is not in the header so that the tree can be 'pruned' of long spent transactions, until there is nothing left but the 80 byte header.  If the merkle tree itself were included in the header, then the header would not only be potentially significantly larger, but of a variable length.  We do not want a variable length because we do not want to introduce a condition that it becomes advantageous for a mining client to ignore a transaction; because it would make it's hashing more difficult compared to another client that simply ignored all transactions racing for the block reward.

The problem that I see with this is that this system just moves the wallet.dat security problem from a machine that the end user can control to one that he cannot.

I can't say for sure, as it's been years since I've read either book, but I might be getting Objectivism confused with Agorism in this manner.  Nonetheless, the is certainly no way that Ayn Rand ever got back from SS as much as she was compelled to contribute.  Getting back as much or more (adjusted for inflation) involves either an exceptionally long life, permanent disability by mid-life, or some other statisticly unlikely scenario.

Try asking them, but I was under the impression that they are agorists, and as such could not abide by vendors using their site that are known to steal the property of others in order to sell it on their website.  Being against victimless laws that prohibt the free trade of particular plant products, sexual relations or other contraband is not the same as being against true crime.

NZ is good.  Urban is probably good.  You might want to consider setting up a mesh node filtered for only Bitcoin traffic, and annouce in the area that you are doing so.  If users join the mesh, bitcoin traffic to the outside world can be shared (if you're careful about it) and most of the traffic that your personal node would see would be coming across the mesh.  The trick is to force your local client to only permit one or two connections from the ISP and the rest from the mesh, and as long as others agree to do the same and don't freeload (not a given), your own personal chargeable traffic from Bitcoin should be managable. You should throttle the ISP Bitcoin traffic anyway, down to modem speeds; or set it up to only connect to ISP side nodes at particular times of the day.  In the future if you have a portable client on a smartphone, set it up so that it only connects to the mesh clients via wifi and never over the cell network.

Better yet, try to convince your ISP to set up a node of it's own that you could connect to without charges.  If traffic beyond your ISP is what is getting you charges, they might be willing to do this because such a local node can function well as a caching gateway, permitting the ISP to block outbound Bitcoin connections without actually interfering with the Bitcoin network.  As the Bitcoin network grows, I have no doubt that ISP's are going to want to control bandwidth consumption.

Of course, I have no idea how receptive they might be to the idea, but it's worth an email.

Do you mind telling us the nation in question?  I might have a solution for you to pursue, depending on where in the world you are.  And are you an urban dweller?

What kind of fork?  If you mean a network split, a seperate 'watchdog' process can detect when the intervel between blocks suddenly doubles, and issue a warning.  Each successive block that is over 80% longer than the prior average increases the certainty that a network split has occurred, and that you are likely on the wrong side of it.  If you are on the majority side, it doesn't really matter.

If you mean a blockchain split, then such a event can be detected by the clients because some of the clients will receive two valid blocks, and has to keep both until the next block is created, which then breaks the tie by being built off of one or the other.  The loser is discarded.

Not unless he freely sold his kidney to you.

That is regrettable.

I think that, since MtGox is a website in Japan these days, the most that the US FBI can do in the short term is steal the domain name.  DNS lookup says that the IP address is 69.64.54.59, but direct use of that address does not lead to MtGox.