Ok we dropped our commission. So the site is complete free now except for paypal fees.

Of course, outlandish claims and gullibility are always market forces.

It should be possible to analyze the market transactions to see if there was a surge there as well. Just a thought.

No, they're not going to delete 90% of their articles. They'll only do it as a means to pressure the community to contribute. Like I said in my previous post, if the goal was to delete non-notable articles, then they would start with the completely non-notable articles, of which there are a multitude.

They're assholes, but unfortunately, like all assholes, they don't give shit that they're assholes.

Why not switch off minting altogether then, with that logic?

The question is: where is non-monetary component of Bitcoin? There is none. That's why Bitcoin is vulnerable to all kinds of "loss-of-confidence" attacks. I think that this is precisely what Nenolod is doing right now.

The big problem for me is that the minting rate doesn't adjust with the size of the Bitcoin economy (ie. the swarm size). I have a feeling that if this isn't changed, the project may run out of steam.

While it may annoy old users a bit that they can't create as many coins, new users are waiting weeks to mint any coins. It is unlikely that Bitcoins will become established if new users aren't given a decent shot at their own minting (especially when the user base should be growing rapidly). Users who discovered Bitcoins early will still have amassed more coins than new entrants, even without the difficulty changing.

The software is very impressive, but the minting rules really need to be looked at again. Self minting is such a good idea for distributing new coins, but IMO it needs some basic economic theory applying to it, rather than a relatively arbitrary setting.

Revolutionary movements are always started by the loonies.

Interesting replies.

I don't have such a client -- just to clear that up.

What I'm getting at is this:  If BTC were highly valued, and a very clever-but-selfish developer had an exceedingly fast client (say, someone gets CUDU running on all cylinders, or hand-crafts SSSE3 for i7), would they be better off retaining the program for their exclusive use (during inflation), or offering it for 'sale' by effectively charging a fee for every find.

I suspected it would be more profitable to distribute it with a small fee, but the reception sounds a bit... less favorable.

This is because payment system depends on it's software codebase. And it maybe cheaper to attack the codebase or the rule-base,
than fighting against the running algorithms. What do you think?

Disrupting the community is easier, than disrupting the argorithm complexity.

Linus' Law, according to Eric S. Raymond, states that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." More formally: "Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone."

The theory essentially says that money has an expected purchasing power tomorrow because of its actual prior purchasing power. Regressing this idea to infinity means that money could not have been "invented" out of nothing, because it would have no known prior purchasing power. The inventor would have to also set the exchange rates between money and all other goods. To the extent that these rates differed from market expectations, they would not be followed, being perceived as harmful to the individual traders. Thus, money would not be used.

Rather, money must originally be some desirable good that is subject to barter. The market, over time, recognizes some goods are more widely accepted in barter than others, due to certain properties, like being easily exchanged, durable (in composition and relative value), portable, etc. Eventually, these goods become marketable for any other product. Thus, they become money.

This is important because often those who advocate government intervention in the name of economics believe that money does not conform to economic laws that hold for other goods. This theorem partially shows that money has always conformed to the same laws as other goods and did not require government intervention to function economically.

 i also believe that aspect of bitcoin serves as a detractor towards using it, simply because many businesses do not want to be associated with crazy libertarian government conspiracy views.  but frankly, the politics do not matter, what matters is the underlying system, and that is mostly sound.

there is a person on the IRC channel, you may know him  his name is Diablo-D3.  many people i know who have looked at bitcoin for their projects run away because they get a vibe that the project is in general filled up with people who are like Diablo-D3

Do we know who this is?  Academic?  Botnet?  NSA?  Chinese hackers?

What are they doing, other than generating most of the BTC?

There's some douche who's got 1000 cores crunching through hashes, so all of us are kind of left out to dry for now. =P

The main problem with the Euro is central planning - how can you centrally plan for many different needs simultaneously? I'd argue it is impossible and you will end up with winners and losers.

This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.