In the modern world, nothing.  That is unless someone intends to settle Antartica.

Certainly not, but the ararchists in Europe are not true anarchists.  They are not opposed to idea of a state, just the one that exists.  Most of those that are rioting over education costs are actually socialists, because that is the kind of state that most of them think that they would want to form after the current one fails.

Honestly, the individual who advocates for anarchy as an end is a very rare creature, even in the US. 

Local websites that function as the farmers' market are a great idea.  No need to get up early on Saturday to drive to a parking lot full of vendors in hopes of getting fresh tomatos before they are all gone.  A vendor could simply put up on Thursday 80% of his expected pick for Friday, to be delivered to an agreed central location at noon on Saturday.  If his pick is greater than expected, then people could still offer to buy more once they arrive.

If you could actually know this to be so, then either you are the dealer or the system doesn't work.

There is no way to know.

Any miners are good for the community, because the point of it all is to get the maximum cryptographic security possible for the blockchain for the lowest cost possible.  These two contradictory goals result in the balance that the difficulty reflects, and therefore the difficulty always reflects the greatest amount of security that the network is collectively willing to pay for.  Big miners simply do the heavy lifting because they have found some way to gain efficiency slightly by economy of scale.  If those large miners didn't exist, the difficulty would most certainly be lower, and therefore the blockchain more suseptable to takeover by overwelming computational force.

No, the state subsidies the costs of higher education in Britain, and they were protesting austerity plans that would have reduced the state's percentage of support.  Thereby increasing the cost borne by the students. 

Although I agree it would be wonderful if this were real, I have to point out that we cannot see the back of his collar in the floating photo.  If I were to make a hoax website, I'd start with some obscure genius character that the Western world would not have heard of, and putting him into the former Soviet bloc is a great start.  And then photos like this, taken so that the reader's eyes are pulled away from the only part of the photo that a support cable could be seen and making certain that any such cable is not in the camera's view anyway.  Even if it were in view, such a photo could still be faked today using a few of those clear high-test fishing lines.

This is already taken care of.  The IRC channel is no longer critical for bootstrapping, as the vanilla client has a built-in list of persistent node addresses to try if it cannot reach IRC, and the network permits node discovery.  If you block IRC and try it, you will find that bootstrapping takes much longer, but it does not fail.

It helps in the sense that "many copies keep data safe" in the event of a direct blockchain attack, such as a virus moving across the Internet attacking Windows machines, but not Linux machines, or vis-versa.

A modified client that can be triggered to turn on generations automaticly by some defined signal might be a good modification to have.

I'm okay with this.  I would agree that calling it "generate coins" gives the user the wrong idea.  "Support Network" or "Donate CPU Cycles" would be a better option, and it should be buried deeper into the menu and not on the main GUI screen by default.  But I do think that it should remain on the vanilla client.

Care to offer an alternative?

And you make this conclusion, how?

Ask me what, exactly?  Do you think that all the native american tribes got rolled?

Didn't a remote client for Android already exist?  I thought someone had that one licked back in July.

Ironicly, I'm on your side in this debate.  However, I feel the need to point out that the United States is not a democracy, it's a federated republic.  That may seem like semantics, but it's not.  The framers considered democracy carefully, and intentionally rejected it as a model to be emulated; precisely because of the ills of mob rule.  As far as I know, there is no true democracy at any nation-state level anywhere in the world. In part, because it's no more scalable than communism.  Both can work very well at the size of a small town or large church, but both break down at larger member sizes.  The effective limit on any parlimentary democracy making a decision is roughly 800 voting members, and anything over 500 is in gridlock territory.

A democracy is one citizen, one vote.  The US doesn't even have a direct vote on the President's office, much less the decisions of Congress.

I agree with this statement on principle, but this is exactly why I consider anarchy an unsustainable political condition.  Even if you could convince the majority of the people that they do not need the state, which is already true in reality; the need for the collective use of force will shortly present itself again due to the minority of sociopaths that will take advantage of the absence of a state.  Nor are the odds that an anarcy will beget a peaceful republic particularly favorable, as the vast majority of anarchies result in a more authoritarian state rising up to gain control.

Personally, I don't consider the possible gains worth the risk.  At least not until there is some place to escape towards.  And if there were, those who seek freedom would desire to move to the escape society in order to experience freedom in their own lifetimes; rather than work within their own society for the future chance at freedom.  This is why we have seen so much immigration towards Western societies over the past 30 years.

In the long run, it doesn't matter much how any of us here might imagine the "optimal end-game" might look like.  Reality doesn't care what we might think, but it does care about economics.  If pool mining is the most efficient way of doing things, then it is here to stay and will dominate forevermore.  But it's not the most efficient way of doing things, because pool mining must charge fees to cover group expenses as well as the risk of a fraudulent exploit of the system.  So pool mining will only appeal to those willing to lose those small amounts for non-economic reasons.  Even if pools dominate in the future, their continuing existence depends on satisfying their contributers, and so they really don't have any more control over the system than anyone else.  For as soon as the contributers get a credible report that they are being used to manipulate the network, or for any other underhanded activity, those contributers will simply stop contributing.  Some will mine alone, some will join other pools, and some will simply quit; but the power available to a pool operator will drop to zero shortly after it is misused only once.

I can't foresee myself joining any pool, ever.  Mostly because; if a malicious computer geek wanted to steal the bitcoin wallet.dat files from a lot of people all at once, how would he build up his target group?  Answer: start or steal a pool, and your target demographic will simply tell you who they are.

Then it's probably 50 KB, I know that it's not much.
I believe that the fee structure is a condition of validity, but miners are not compelled to include free transactions at all.  In a future that there are enough paying transactions to max out the total blockspace, free transactions are likely to be ignored my profit minded miners.  Although there will likely be some miners that always include free transactions on ideological grounds, there is no way to know if free transactions will continue to be processed on any reasonable timescale.


Probably, but the 1 meg hard limit was an arbitrary rule included early on as a method to limit harm in the event of a 'transaction flood' spam-type attack.  It was never intended to remain in effect, and to my knowledge, could be removed without effect now that the transaction priority score rules and the minimum transfer fee rule are effective.  As far as I know, we have never even come close to the 1 meg hard limit anyway.   

The number of miners do not affect the block rate in the long term, because the system adjusts to changes in the network's total hashing power every 2016 blocks, or about two weeks.  However, within that two week window, it is expected that increasing transaction fees during peak periods will eventually create an "elastic" processing rate by drawing in miners who are marginal with just the block reward.  The idea being that during the high transaction periods, the accumulation of fees that are seen unprocessed on the network will trigger automatic generation to try to process those fee paying transactions, and the average time between blocks will drop.  The flipside being that on the weekends, and the off periods of the major Bitcoin trading areas, will end up having an average time between blocks longer than 10 minutes to compensate.

In short, "will there be enough miners?" is not an irrelevant question, even outside of the context of security.  However, the answer is always "yes" because the ebb and flow of the transactions and their average fees will create a fast moving market that will adapt to the conditions consistently.

It's not limited by number of transactions, but by individual and collective size in kilobytes.  I can't remember the exact details, but I'm pretty sure that the total free transactions are limited to 25 KB and then fee paying transactions increase the minimum required fee to a maximum hard blocksize limit of one Mb.


Up to the artificial scarcity limits mentioned above, yes.


Increasing fees attached to the transactions.


No.