Case law, however, does exist that basicly means that if US$ were offered in settlement of debts, but were rejected because of a contract that required some other form of settlement, any court will hold that debt as void.

So, in practice, any business that allows a customer to acrue a debt first (as an example, a sit-down resturant, where you eat first and pay on the way out) must accept US$ as payment of that debt, even if they had a huge sign on the way in that said, "No gold or silver, no service".

I've used this to my advantage in the past, as I don't use credit cards.  I had reserved a particular tool from Home Depot's tool shop, and went in to rent the item.  Advance reservation is free, unless you cancel, so they didn't ask for anything more than my name and address on the phone when I called.  I went to pick it up, and they asked for a credit card for the security deposit.  The clerk insisted that he couldn't rent me the tool without a credit card, and I said that I was certain that his computer system did have a cash deposit option in theer somewhere, because that was the law.  He ended up calling his manager, and after going through the whole ting again, the manager called some kind of corporate office, who proceeded to tell him how to access that part of the POS system.

I left with the tool, and did not need a card despite their insistance that only a credit card was acceptable.

Not unless your starting nonce is identical.  If you are using a pool miner, the pool should be managing the nonces of the miners so that they are not duplicating work, although I'm not certain that this is done.

If you are mining locally, are you using two independent instances of the mining client?  If yes, then it's very unlikely that they are duplicating work.

I can assure you that there are academicly trained economists that are watching Bitcoin.  I can also assure you that none of them that you would want to review Bitcoin is going to be willing to stake their professional reputation yet.

If all you need is the script reviewed, either post it here in the economics section of this forum; jump to one of the many economic forums elsewhere.  I think that you'll find that there is no real consensus that can be achieved on any of the questionable parts.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Atlas Shrugged yet, even though that's not quite what he is asking for.

Alongside Night  (The defining agorist novel)

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Cryptocromicon & the Baroque Cycle Trilogy, in that order.

Basicly anything by David Brin, but in particular Glory Season and Infinity's Shore of the Uplift Series

Fountains of Paradise

All of these are fiction that illustrate one or more libertarian concepts in some fashion.  In the first three, such concepts are central to the plot; in the rest they are incidental.

It's also important to keep the ability to mine via cpu's in the vanilla client, should there ever come a day when the system is attacked, and the userbase is called upon to mine at a loss in order to defend against an ongoing blockchain attack.

I'm aware of the science, and I'm telling you that we have not hit that peak.  Hubbert's Peak has limited applications to resources that have a significant recycle use anyway, because it relates only to the economics of resource extraction.

And if it even apraaches the spot price in silver many of the major uses of copper (electrically related mostly) can be easily repalced by other materials.

Because Windoze sucks?

I can't help you here, as I don't use Windoze if I have a choice.

Fiction, non-fiction or both?

And this is a good argument for establishing a legal defense fund for the day that the government decides to make a test case out of one of these, otherwise indefensible, exchangers.  With many small exchanges, it is indeed impossible to stop it from occurring.  However, as we can see with the pot industry, they can sustain a persecution campaign for a long time; and we could lose years if the precendent is unfavorable.

This used to be true, but try it now and you aren't even likely to harm a modern hard drive, and might not even disrupt a running (GNU/Linux) server enough to get a kernel panic.  Modern magnetic drives have pretty effective shielding.

What makes you think that the government has the capacity to monitor your mail in such a way?

Yes.  If you have a good backup of your wallet.dat file, just reinstall the newest client and put a copy of your backup into the proper directory before starting it up.  It should find both your new and old funds as it bootstraps the blockchain.

True, but Bitcoin is subject to overwelming computations anyway.  Which is why the system is designed to encourage participation in the hashing that keeps the blockchain strong.

We are not past the peak in copper.  The prices for copper are more volatile than simply the cost of production, and very little of it is consumed in industry.  Most of it still exists in a refined form within electrical conduits everywhere.  The big cost driver for copper over the last decade is the increases in the construction demands of China and India.

That's a not so recent joke.  I've seen versions since about 1998.

This sounds like the old joke, "I always give 100% of my efforts at work!  10% on Mondays, 25% on Tuesdays, 50% on Wendsdays...."

Tell me this, if any single entity had access to the kind of hashing power to make this work, why bother with such a complex attack vector?  Why not just simply dominate the network?

For the attack to work once, it already requires that the attacker have control of at least one of the blocks wherein the difficulty is adjusted (perhaps both) that buffet a 2016 block set.  To do this attack twice in a row requires that the attacker be able to reliablely control at least two of these critical blocks in succession.  If the attacker has that kind of processing power at hand, then the 50% takeover issue is probably within reach.

The majority rules cannot be changed in such a fashion.  The only way that the protocol rules can be changed is if the majority of the potential generating userbase (which is larger than that actuall generating base) we to agree to change the rules, and vote by downloading a new client that repected those rules.  It couldn't just happen during a relatively short time frame, because once that attack ended, which it must eventually, the entire network would revert to the existing protocol stack, and any temporary changes made by the attacker by brute force would simply be undone, and all of the attacker's new blocks rejected.  Resulting in the atacker gaining nothing for his efforts.

Honestly, it probably woulnd't harm the Bitcoin network at this point, but in the future it might make getting honest tranasctions into the blockchain difficult, which could impact further adoption.

Yes, it's sarcasm.

Is English not your first language?

Not really, it was just a spike and follow-up drop in the hashrate a couple of weeks ago.  Someone just referred to it as our "mystery miner" and it just stuck.  We don't have any evidence that it was a single entity, or several with bad timing.  My best guess about the whole thing is that someone tried renting out the cloud to mine for a bit, before having the facepalm moment when they finally realize that it's going to be hard for them to pay rent five times higher than the value of the bitcoins and make it up on volume.  Another credible possibility was that someone with a botnet was benchmarking their network.  The truth is that it is actually impossible for us to ever know any details, so we are all just guessing.

http://bitcoinwatch.com/

It's near the bottom on the left column.