hmmm... and you're surprised by that?

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=https://smsz.net/btcStats/bitcoin.kml

really?

it is, y'know...

hit the "MEMBERS" link, go back and read grod's posts, proudhon.  all of them.  seriously.

we'll have a pretty good idea by the end of the year, and we'll probably know close to sure by the end of 2012.

in the meantime; it's pretty handy stuff, Bitcoin.  i'm becoming quite enamored of using it to buy stuff.

maybe not exactly, error:


[emphasis mine]

http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/7895143775/dwolla-milestone-one-million-a-day

what if dwolla didn't compete?  what if they... oh, i dunno... facilitated?  merged?  bet on Bitcoin in a big way?  i mean, they know where their money's coming from, right?

it's a very interesting quote.

there just ain't no telling, boys and girls.

asset?  investment?  currency?

we're just going to have to wait until the lawyers hash it out.  it's a tough one - could take years.

in the meantime; make hay while the sun shines.

...and get the ability to verifiably spend specific coins into the client.

no, i'm not sure.  but that appears to be the consensus here, among those who claim (such claims taken with the appropriate number of salt grains) to have had tax-preparer advice and filed that way.

i can't really say i believe any of the info that's out there right now - including that info from the IRS, who have not exactly been stellar, even when it comes to interpreting their own rules.

i think that, realistically, we'll just have to wait for some poor slob to get taken to court.  just hope it isn't you or i.

so you're sticking 2000 watts of heater in the ten-inch plenum of a cheaply-built office building in which you clearly (from the pics) do not occupy the top floor?

and the people in the office above you - which is an office, as floor plans are predictable - won't notice this and get freaked about it... why?

never mind the heat required to spontaneously combust any number of things in the plenum that you'll be heating to 85 C - like the various adhesives, and the wood itself after the fire-retardant chemicals it's infused with evaporate.

holy mother of god.

congratulations on winning the first ever time-shifted Darwin Award...

wow.  just wow.

yes.  if you keep them they're not taxable, but if you sell them for the currency of your country, they are.  turbotax didn't make this even slightly clear with their little infographic.

the real question is how is income from selling them taxed?  long- or short-term capital gain?  which is why i think the client needs to be able to send specific coins - so those bitcoin which were mined more recently, and have a higher cost of production [for miners], can be exchanged.

if Bitcoin are taxed as hobby income (in the US - a pleasant and peculiar tax designation...), what can be offset?

in any case, it's remarkable to see an entity like turbotax deal with Bitcoin - it'll do us good.  i doubt the information they're putting out about it will remain unchanged, however.

everything is pegged to something else.  all that really matters is how you, personally, manipulate exchange rates in your own head.

me, i look at everything in terms of how many loaves of bread it'll get me.  a nifty trick my dad taught me - it's gotten me around the world a couple of times without a hitch.

i'm a network designer, not a programmer - but it doesn't appear that complicated.

you have already tried out giving users the ability to uprate and downrate comments - so that exists in the forum software, yes?  the only thing that needs to be changed there is limiting those who can downrate a comment to users who have attained 'trusted user' status, by gaining sufficient uprates from other users.  anybody can uprate a comment, but only trusted users can downrate one.

and the moderators already have the ability to hide/delete comments.  the change needed there is to make hiding/deleting automatic, after some pre-determined number of downrates by trusted users.

those two things are all that's needed for the community to essentially police itself - and they will.

the rest is gilding the lily:  limiting the number of downrates a TU can issue in a day, or requiring a steady posting/uprate history to maintain TU status if it seems appropriate.

and then the mods can pretty much limit their attention and responses to illegal (as you point out) content, etc., by concentrating on looking at the origin posts of threads, and stolen or obscene posted material which doesn't get downrated.

i guess all i can say is - it works.

EDIT...

* sigh * but maybe not here.  i've been trying to do some more objective reading.

perhaps the project is better served by removing everything but tech, merchant lists, and how-to's, from forum.bitcoin,org.  it is, as has been noted on the SourceForge archive, pretty much a political cesspool.

it'd be nice to save it, if possible...

< shrug >  ...but i'm glad it's not my call.

mmmph.

you are one snarky son of a gun...

levi 501s.

sneakers.

booze.

not online.  a meza grill in every city...

good article.

fairly well-balanced, and obviously decently researched.  i liked the clear differentiation between the client and the exchanges, when discussing hacks and risk.  the choice of Antweiler as the obligatory skeptic seemed a bit off though - a WWII currency and population statistics geek?

eh.

definitely worth the read.  thanks for posting this.

they've rolled their own moderation system.

try the FAQ section:

http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/DailyKos_FAQ

read 5.4 through 5.5.7

in practice it works unbelievably well.  i've been on DK for many years (along with many other sites), and i've never encountered a system as effective, as just, and as well-integrated to the needs of what is one of the heaviest-trolled sites on the 'net.

i'd venture to say that, with some tweaks (all forums are different), the Bitcoin forums could be 95% troll-free in two or three weeks - and you could cut the number of mods, and the time they spend modding, in half.

sorry Gavin - this is a terrible idea.

yes:  "the whole point of bitcoin is to be decentralized."  agreed.

but the point of effective dissemination of information is centralization.  that's why there are books.  libraries.  and the informational requirements to grow the project are a completely different animal than the project itself.  surely you must agree with that?

when people want Bitcoin-related software, vendor information, best-practice information, etc., they need somewhere to go.  it needs to be stable and reliable.  and it needs to have both a high level of trust and a clear, strong link to the core of the project.

bitcoin.org is, and has been, all of those things.  and should rightfully remain so.

i understand that the forums are somewhat... embarrassing, at times.  but it's pretty easy to fix - and would require much less hands-on moderation than you are currently committing to. 

and it certainly would not require shattering the informational cohesion of the project, as this google link does.

i've mentioned the brilliance of the self-moderating system at DailyKos before; and for a burgeoning community like this one, it would perform very well.  if you'd like to discuss it at length, i'd be happy to - PM me.  it would really not be terribly difficult to smooth the forums out - and have the users themselves do it for you.

give this some thought please.

you get an automatic iddqd invisibly apended to your user name in the user database.

no.

if you want to get Kurzweil to offer an opinion, ask him about the potential of the network - forget about Bitcoin:  he'll find them on the way.

it's the network that's more up his alley.  and it would - rightfully - fascinate him.

vladimir claims (probably correctly) that Bitcoin is a singularity.  he speaks of financial/economic singularities when he does.

but there are other kinds of singularity...