Not wanting to be pedantic, but let's stop naming these currency issuers "escrows", shall we? They're not escrows. They're much closer to the concept of currency boards than that of an escrow.

Just realized today was the last day to "get in", and decided I should read the document.

I'm having a hard time understanding your currency board thing (that you name "escrow").

If I'm to make a "goldcoin", the asset I should base my currency board on should be gold. If it's USDCoin, it should be USD, and so on. It should not be MasterCoin.
You cannot peg the price of something to two different assets...

Did I just read you document too fast and missed something?

EDIT: I think I got it. The reserves of your currency board are in MasterCoin, but the price you're tracking is that of a third asset. You buy/sell reserves in order to push the price your user coin to your target. Interesting.

Sounds risky... I'm not really sure it's doable. I've never heard of any currency board operating this way. That green clock up there kinda tells me I don't have the time to fully understand the economics behind it... guess I'll just have to buy after the deadline if I realize it's doable.

Nothing has intrinsic value.

Value is subjective, it's an opinion people have on stuff. Therefore it cannot be an intrinsic attribute of the valued thing. Saying something has intrinsic value equals saying value is/can be objective, what's dangerously false. (Marxism is entirely supported by this theoretical mistake, for instance)

Congrats!

Do you consider using the payment protocol under development?
That would cover the compatibility issue mentioned by Ego, as we can expect that protocol to become a standard.

Forcing people to pay VAT when selling bitcoins is practically equivalent to forbidding official exchanges and pushing every exchange either to another jurisdiction, or to the black market.

I really hope they don't actually try to enforce what they told you, and that they eventually come to their senses and change their stance.

Panamá and Hong Kong have their currencies pegged to the USD for decades now, don't they?

AFAIK, all cases of failed pegged currencies were in situations where the money issuers also attempted to use money creation to manipulate interest rates (or any other price). As long as it only creates and destroy currency with the goal of keeping a parity price with a foreign currency, I fail to see what's the great danger.

But then his first assumption doesn't stand. I only need one router, and it's already provided by the ISP...

Yeah but it is already provided by the ISP... isn't it in your case?

But M1 also includes lost/stolen/"locked away" cash, if I'm not mistaken. There's simply no way to actually know how much cash (or bitcoins) is out of circulation.

I still think that what we call bitcoin "market cap" is its M0 (monetary base), not M1 nor M2. Whenever (if ever) we start to have bitcoin-quoted financial instruments that are traded around as money, then we'll have to add these to the "market cap" to get a higher aggregation.

I haven't found any sorted list of fiat currencies per M0 though.

Please. If it's not explicitly forbidden, it is legal. The entire globe should be green.

If you want to make some distinctions, you could distinguish those countries whose governments have already started attacking Bitcoin business through regulations (like US) of those who haven't done anything yet.

Encrypted disks (LUKS, Truecrypt...) are also good, but you're still vulnerable to hardware key-loggers.
I think the best is not to let the device accessible as Mike suggests. Either carry it always with you or lock it somewhere.

Yes, that's reasonable. You can also lock it somewhere etc. I just wonder if concerned people will know about it and take necessary precautions.

Not wanting to be negative or anything - Trezor is definitely a great improvement on security since our greatest worry right now are malwares - but we should note that its currently configuration makes it vulnerable to the "evil (and tech-savvy) maid attack".
Somebody tech-savvy enough with physical access to your place (a maid, a boyfriend/girlfriend, a roommate etc) could deliberately infect your computer while you're not around to get the PIN. Even a hardware key-logger would suffice. Once with the PIN, s/he only needs to steal the device.

I don't think that's a major risk, in the sense that it won't happen frequently, but it's worth noting anyway. Some people can't afford to fully trust those they share their living space with. Think college students for ex., particularly computer science college students who happen to share their room with people who were just put there by the residency administration. They barely know each other...

I don't think that's a good idea. The default client should be specialized in handling the Bitcoin protocol. It should not be "disturbed" with other features, even the coolest ones.
OTOH, a separate piece of software that interacts with the default client via its API, but has a different code base, would perhaps be interesting... (I tend to think this feature works better with lightweight clients, but anyway)

You know, the unix KISS principle.

I just quickly saw Gavin's blog post and this forum entry.

I'm posting here because I wonder if there's any chance of considering adding the fee information in the PaymentRequest, sort of like I proposed here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=119086.0

The receiver specifies a formula in the payment request for the fee to be payed. The client software calculates the fee, but doesn't bother showing all this to the user: it just says "do you confirm paying (total) to (receiver)?.

I know that adding a chained transaction also allows the merchant to add a fee, but I still prefer the solution of specifying via a PaymentRequest, since it decreases the amount of bandwidth that will be required to run a full node.

Just an idea.

Not of the same bank. Even if all banks fail, the size of each bank's loss will not be the same. Also, bank creditors choose how exposed they'll be (a bondholder is more exposed than a depositor, a depositor that leaves lots of liquid money in the bank is more exposed than one that invests his money somewhere else like real state, precious metals, bitcoin etc). It's perfectly reasonable and fair that those who were voluntarily more exposed end up paying a larger cut than those who took precautions to stay away from the failed bank.


I respectfully disagree. It's not irrelevant. Bail-outs create a moral hazard. The certainty that you can explore this rigged game and always win, at the expense of others.
A bail-in as I described would at least punish those responsible by making them lose everything. If that's the norm, even though the whole banking system continues fucked up as hell, bankers would be more prudent on their risk-taking.

But of course, I agree that central banks are absurd, that they foster cartels, and that the monopoly of money is perhaps the worse economical problem the developed world faces today. Bail-ins per se won't fix that. But they might change the behavior of bankers.

 

There is such an individual in Germany's parliament? Wow...
How libertarian is he on other fronts? EU could use its own "Ron Paul"....

I thought Switzerland didn't have capital gain taxes at all...

I didn't get your point, oleganza.

You noted some injustices that are practiced world wide. But how does that change what I said?

Forcing taxvictims to pay for a bank rescue will always be less fair than what I wrote. Banking being a fucked up industry or not.