Nono, the Bronies really like MLP.  It is a thing.

Where you at in Cali?

Hahaha, I don't think that picture represents at all what I do, but I gotta admit, it's a pretty hilarious picture and I'm saving it to my GIFs/JPEGs folder.

In short: because your proposal, while sensible, would make Bitcoin hard and costly or computationally infeasible.

For gauging the markets, I prefer clarkmoody.com :-D

I seem to have gotten the figure wrong.  It's only 262 million corpses.

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM

Yah, the whole fearmongering sockpuppetry is much less scary when in text form.  Hehe :-)  But, if I may suggest, just stop reading their bullshit entirely.  I mean, there's so many better things to do!

Look and listen, you little shit.  I bought a lot of Bitcoin precisely with the purpose of investing and saving it for a very, very long time.  Your stupid-ass proposal is exactly about robbing me and other people like me, about depriving us of what we worked very fucking hard for, most likely when we will need it the most, about imposing extra uncertainties on top of the long bet we've already signed up for.

How am I supposed to react to that, huh?  Should I write a whitepaper and publish it in a scientific journal?  Should I smile and fart unicorns?

No, turdhead, I'm going to get very pissed.  Justifiedly so.  How should I not get emotionally charged?  Do you seriously think we're playing with marbles here?

Of course I'm taking it personally, you idiot; it's my money you're proposing to endanger.

If I told you that I want to organize people to rob you, to deprive you of your savings, how angry would you be?  I bet you'd be really fucking angry.  If I, to that, added insult to injury by acting "puzzled", failed to respond to good reasons why you shouldn't be robbed, and told you "well I don't know why you get so angry", you'd get even angrier.

Life lesson 1: If you don't want people to get angry at you, don't fuck with other people's money.

I would suggest that governments failed more catastrophically at their stated purpose of protecting their citizenry, by murdering their own populace to the tune of 273 million corpses, just in the 20th century, excluding wars.

But to each its own.

You really were still watching the sockpuppet shows?

I haven't watched one of those since 9/11, and I already didn't before that (that day it was impossible not to watch because the boob tube disease was everywhere).

I think he does mean "engorge".  LOL.

Sure, the whitepaper could conceivably be linked in the contract.

People have tried to reason with you, and people have listened to you, and people have asked you to substantiate what you have to say.  And all you keep doing is repeating the same irrational scaremongering, never engaging people rationally, never substantiating your propositions.

I am tired of your shit.

The bottom line is: if you're so sure that Bitcoin will be a catastrophe "because infinite deflation", don't fucking use it.

And really, you need to let go of your self-importance.  We don't need to change Bitcoin just to assuage your fears.  We do not exist solely to serve you.  Bitcoin wasn't invented for you.  Bitcoin shouldn't change to be what you want it to be.

Bitcoin is the way it is.  Period.  You can either choose to partake in it as it is (in which case, good for you), found your own community (doing all the necessary work), or don't participate at all (in which case nobody will punish you).  There's three perfectly fucking good choices right there for you.  I'll tell you what's not an okay choice: it's not okay to pester, fearmonger, or terrorize us with lies, just so you can get your Ideal Bitcoin imposed on the rest of us.

You need to understand that.

And if you're not going to understand that, you are not a reasonable man.  If that's the case, GTFO already dude, nobody wants to hear your shit anymore.

Exactly.  "Average" people get killed or gulag'd in standard revolutions, and get left behind in peaceful ones.

Example follows.

---------------------------------------

Number of coins.
The number of coins generated by Bitcoin participants will be a maximum of 21 million.  This number will increase slowly over the space of a few decades.  The increase will slow down as Bitcoiners get closer to 21 million generated coins, and then stop.

Decimal places.
Each Bitcoin can be divided into 100 million units.  This means there will be a maximum of 2.1 quadrillion (in U.S. numbering style) units of currency.  In the future, this may be amended to increase the number of units -- but the number of Bitcoins you have will not change by such an increase.

No double spends.
There is a (tiny) risk that bitcoins given to you won't be given to someone else at the same time, causing you to lose the bitcoins given to you.  Bitcoin prevents this by having multiple participants verify ("confirm") all transactions, and showing confirmations to you.  The more confirmations, the less likely it is that this will ever happen; with six confirmations, there is a XX.XXXXXX% guarantee that the transaction is irreversible.  The more bitcoins you are receiving from someone, the more prudent you must be in waiting for six confirmations.

Do not lose your coins.
Sending coins to invalid or abandoned addresses will cause these coins to be lost forever, reducing the amount of Bitcoins in circulation by that amount.  Since this usually causes a very slight appreciation of everyone else's Bitcoins, think of this phenomenon as a donation to the general well-being of every Bitcoiner out there.

Keep your Bitcoins secure.
If someone manages to swipe your Bitcoin wallet (and, if it has been password-protected, your password), Bitcoin provides no mechanism for you to block them from spending your Bitcoins.  So keep these valuables as safe as possible (or safer) as you would keep cash or any other valuables.

Eventually, your Bitcoin wallet will require an upgrade.
Computers become faster all the time.  The complicated security puzzles that Bitcoin uses to secure your coins become easier and easier to solve as time passes by.  Given this physical reality, after a few decades, the Bitcoin network will have to change to a newer, more complicated security algorithm, securing the existing Bitcoins with the new algorithm in the process.  You will, in all likelihood, have ample time to secure your Bitcoins by transferring them to a new wallet.  However, should you not do that during the transition, Bitcoin will not be able to keep your coins protected from theft.  So you will have to perform this operation at least once.

Going back to the original idea before retarded people derailed it with a proposal to steal "abandoned" coins.

--------------------------------------------------

I think it would be a great idea to add this "contract" to the Help menu of the client, and to a text file in the source code.  The contract should explain in plain terms how the network works, what's the limit on the generation of coins, what happens to lost coins (they remain lost), what the fees are and in which circumstances they are required, et cetera.  The goal of clarity for such a document should be that anyone understands the implications of Bitcoin's technical decisions before committing to using Bitcoin.  That is, to generate mutually informed and voluntary consent.  ALMOST like a contract (but not quite, in any legally binding sense, of course).

If possible, this document should be formatted using Markdown or (failing that) HTML.

Demurrage is exactly what is being proposed by baking the theft of "old Bitcoins" here.  The distinction is not one of category, but one of parameters -- the demurrage being proposed would be after a few decades, rather than only a few months or whatnot.

If the code contract in the Satoshi client changed to include demurrage, I stand by my promise to keep the original source code running so demurrage will not happen.  That will ensure Satoshi Bitcoin users will not lose value or coins at the hands of people peddling organized theft as a "virtuous solution"  to a non-problem.

Have you noticed, guys, how the assertion "Lost coins will cause an unhealthy economy" just keeps being repeated like a mantra, but absolutely no rational justification has been proposed to substantiate it by the idiots repeating that mantra?

Surely you have.

Have you detected how no answer is provided to the question "So how do you detect the difference between lost coins and parked coins?"  The statist doesn't answer -- he merely says "just steal what isn't yours, but don't worry, we'll make this theft 'fair'."

Their next "argument" will be as follows: the people who want to bake organized theft into Bitcoin (to steal people's coins, obviously) will accuse of "greed" people holding Bitcoins who don't want the protocol to change.

Here's how I know that implementing "theft of long-term storage coins" is a bad idea: someone already implemented this very concept -- called demurrage, purported to be "fair" -- in an altcoin called Freicoin; that shit tanked and went nowhere.  That was 100% predictable -- lots of people want other people's money to be stolen, but nobody wants their own money to be stolen.

It's really simple to know whether something is a bad idea or not: just observe people's choices (when they are not being forced to do a particular thing), and you'll know what's "better".  People choose Bitcoin over dollars because people judge Bitcoin to be better than dollars.  People choose Bitcoin over Freicoin because people judge Freicoin to be worse.

I'm a certified genius, and I see no problem with gold going up in price forever.  I've seen absolutely zero evidence to believe that "a commodity going up forever" is bad, which makes this belief a faith-based irrationality.

Fact is, as long as businesses can predict the rate of change in value of any commodity and plan accordingly, there's nothing wrong with a commodity going up or down.