Iceland.

Of all the sovereign nations, Iceland has a highly educated populace, high network access, low electricity costs and high heat needs, a currently weak national currency, and is not (yet) part of the Eurozone (and may never be now).  They also have a small population and therefore an elected government that is very subject to public pressure.

If any nation can directly benefit from openly accepting Bitcoin as an international trade medium, it's Iceland.

Any closed source client would be prodded and reverse-engineered by the open source community.  Even if this somehow doesn't expose the backdoor controls, any use of code that can be shown to have been taken from the open source community would expose the closed source client to using the copyright laws against them.   This would not be the first time that China had been caught doing such things.

In short, I'm not worried about it.

Well, no matter how allinvain may feel about it, it's not part of my job here to pass judgement on the accuracy of forum members' statements.  I guess we are going to just have to trust that most forum members will muddle through somehow.

Why?  It is the readers' job to vett the accuracy of the posts.

Did you run md5 against the package to verify that you have the correct one?

Well, that's not true with the US as a whole, but more than half of Utah, by area, is "legally" the property of the Federal government.  This sounds rediculous, but it is so.

This is generally true with just about every city.  Those things are illegal in Vegas as well.

Wait, do free apps have to pay this fee also?

Airlines would be using the least dangerous tech regardless of what consumer protection laws might say.  It tends to be bad press when airlines kill their customers.

It's a less than ideal example, but I wasn't the one who brought up CFC's in refrigerators.

My house is 2400 square feet, three bedroom, two story 'four square' built in 1919 within one of the largest urban historic districts in the US; with a detached garage and 800 square foot apartment over it, that I bought three years ago for $110,000.  I don't need the apartment income, so I 'rent' it to my younger brother for $410 a month; which just covers the cost of water, sewer, heat, electric, 10Mbps Internet, basic cable and telephone service.

Why does everyone always assume that real estate costs where they live are comparable to places that they don't live?

What about those governments that choose to help Bitcoin because of the potential threat that it poses to the US $ hegemony?  China doesn't want to see their $3 Trillion in reserves suddenly drop in value, but if they did they could destroy the US$ value in days by simply dumping all of their treasuries upon the market.

Iceland, however, would be vastly favored by directly supporting Bitcoin, openly or otherwise.  Bitcoin would be far better for their own small economy than the Euro.

Depends upon which side of government that you are talking about, the public side that is honestly serving the public, or the shadow side that desires to continue to control the monetary system.

Well, I did oversimplify the situation, but the basic premise is true.  Air cycle refrigerators do not exist because prior regulations into the industry makes research into alternatives unattractive for manufactures.  How much does the risk of getting sideways with some nitwit government oversight board cost?  That seems worthwhile with aircraft, mostly because the risk of a freon leak in a pressurized cabin at 3000 feet could kill your customers.  I doubt that it's worth the risk with consumer devices that usually depend upon profit margins measured in a few dollars each.

If it's that smart, then why would it even be noticed by the user?  It should be able to throttle the GPU so that it's running just below full fan heat and stop whenever the screensaver dies.

Whoa!  Hold on there!  You're going to have to support that statement, I will not accept it as a given that gas companies overcharge you.  And by what logic do you claim that there is no competition?  And which companies are we talking about, exactly?  The oil companies that pump it out of the ground, transport it from angry & sandy locales, convert it to petrol, transport it to your local station, or sell it to you at the station?

Price and difficulty are 'coupled', but I would be inclined to think that price drives difficulty, not the other way around.  Miners can't simply raise prices to cover costs any more than Wal-Mart can, which is to say, only as far as the market will bear.

But you do value your dollars in their trade value.  Said another way, you value your dollars in what you can trade it for.  You could be valuing it in the dollars/beer-can metric or the dollars/hooker-blowjob metric or the dollars/pot-ounce metric; but we always value anything as compared to other things, not itself.

It's funny that you should mention this because...

(wait for it)


...they still do!  And it's largely because of government regulations that they do!  Did you know that common air is a refrigerant?  It is....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_cycle_machine

So why isn't air cycle refrigeration used for household refrigerators?  Two reasons...

1) Air cycle machines were inefficient as compared to the ozone destroying refrigerents banned in the US in 1992, but modern advancements have improved their efficency so that they are competitive with the green(er) (still CFC based, just less destructive) refrigerents used in consumer devices today.

And the big reason...

2) Air cycle refrigeration is, by definition, and open cycle.  And the same law referred to above also banned the intentional release of any refrigerant into the atmostphere related to the production, use, repair or destruction of a consumer device.


So it is against the law to manufacture a refrigerator that uses any open refrigeration cycle, including one of the few modern refrigeration cycles that does not use CFC's!  There's your govenment at work!

The airlines get to use open cycle refrigeration because they are not consumer devices!

It's what we deal with everyday, so it's kind of natural.  But you are right, it would be more accurate to value bitcoins in gold.

If we are talking about a working card with an asic (or any other method, for that matter) that gets those kind of specs, I'd be willing to depost $50 up front if I was fairly convinced that the offer was for real and the cards were ready for production.