The two laws of civilization...

1)  Do all that you have agreed to do...

2)  ...and to not encroach upon the person or property of others.


This shall be the whole of the law.

The question is, how does this translate to an Internet forum community?

I've seen other forums that had a section for self (or moderator forced) segregation without outright sensorship or banishment.  Some forums call this NSFW, but some call it "The Thunderdome".  Some members could be confined to posting in those sections for a period of time for flaming, baiting or NSFW posting.  Like being put into a 'penalty box'.

The "common law" of the Internet is widely known these days.  I.E., don't (persistantly) flamebait.  No personal insults.  No words that you wouldn't speak in front of your own children or parents.  No photos that you wouldn't let your children or parents find on your computer.  Nothing that would get the site owner sitting in front of a prosecutor, or even close to that.

I'm not sure if a policy should be written or not, that's up to the site owner.  If a policy is written, I will enforce it to the best of my ability; but even then I think that the mods should have much discretion.

Anarcho-capitalism isn't a contradiction in terms, because capitalism isn't (in it's original meaning) a political ideology.  What most people think of as capitalism in our modern age is actually corporatism/merchantilism in new clothes.  It's not new either.  I said that anarcho-socialism was a contradiction in terms, not because I consider any variation of anarchism viable, but because anarchism and socialism are two political ideologies that are diametricly opposed to one another.  Anarchism is the absence of government external to the individual, while socialism is a social & political structure explicitly designed to impose a form (i.e. governance) upon society at large.  No matter how one feels about either ideology, no rational person can consider the fundamentals of the both of them, and conclude that they can coexist.

Certainly some of them, probably even the majority.  But they are the pawns in the game.  The useful idiots.  Those who have an ideological goal are predominately some variation of marxist/socialist/collectivist. 

I still think that there will be non-generating clients.  I've been working on a project that would put a client on a Pirate Box (http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox) that would function in all respects just like any other piratebox, but have an Internet connection for the blockchain.  The point of it all would be to update smartphones over wifi.  The point being to test the possibility of smartphone clients like BitcoinJ in a production environment for the ability to do POS type transactions with the aid of a vendor provided wifi connection, without providing for a complete Internet connection.  I've got a router for the purpose, but have yet to put a pirate box system upon it, much less figure out how to redirect wlan side bitcoin connections to the local client.  In this case, generating is futile, but full handling of transactions are critical.  IF Bitcoin takes off, and then makes the jump to brick&morter vendors, such clients would be everywhere; and very well might outnumber generating clients.

Also sent.

You mean besides the fact that Anarcho-Socialism is a contradiction in terms?

Basicly every other client that the owner doesn't have enough incentive to bother with making this kind of low-level code change in order to potentially nab a few extra bitcoins.  Any regular client, whether they are generating or not.  Any future 'lightweight' client that can't generate.  And any future client modified as a clearinghouse service for commerce, which would have a vested interest in undermining such self-serving behavior.

From the Fed's own site...

"As stipulated in the Banking Act of 1935, the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Board are chosen by the President from among the sitting Governors (emphasis mine) and must be confirmed by the Senate. They serve terms of four years and may be reappointed as Chairman or Vice Chairman until their terms as Governors expire. The Chairman serves as public spokesperson and representative of the Board and manager of the Board's staff and presides at Board meetings. Affirming the apolitical nature of the Board, recent Presidents representing both major political parties have selected the same person as Board Chairman."

http://www.federalreserve.gov/generalinfo/faq/faqbog.htm

Granted, it's all kind of circular.  The sitting president can appoint board members from within the Federal Reserve structure itself, but the law of averages says that no sitting president can ever appoint a majority of board members until late in a second term.  So no president can ever 'pack' the board, which has it's value, but it also means that the board is functionally unaccountable to the president or the senate.  Also, who decides who works for the fed?  The banks that are members of the federal reserve system do, not the president.  It's next to impossible to find any documentation about the "from within our own ranks" rule explicitly stated, but there has never been an appointment to the board from outside of the federal reserve system itself since initial board appointed in 1914.

Here is the list...

http://www.federalreserve.gov/bios/boardmembership.htm

If you can find an exception after 1928, feel free to shoot me down.

Perhaps, but I would think that if this were to start happening, something could be done about it.  I can think of a couple of different ways that repeatedly doing this kind of attack could bring the attention of the rest of the network to the attacker's IP address.  It's not that an individual node cannot be discovered with the help of the majority of the rest of the network.

Actually, that's a false flag.  The president does appoint the board members, but can only choose them from a very short list provided by the sitting board itself.  He cannot, for example, choose his favorite econ professor.  As for the Senate, they can only vote yes or no; and if they vote no, then the President must go back to that same list.

Yes, I could refute his scenarios.  They are based upon assumptions he has made about how the protocol actually works, and in turn how a victim's client must work.  He doesn't take into account the possibility of 'watchdog' processes alerting vendors (or their clients) to suspicious activities on the network.  (which can exist, but as of yet do not)  All his attacks basicly combine the 50% attack with an assumption of victim ignorance, and some of them aren't remotely feasible even assuming that he could afford the 50% power from Amazon.  The 'slow motion' attack was downright laughable.

You can't really assume that all nodes will ever see both transactions.  Since nodes won't propagate invalid transactions, and your two starting nodes send their transactions to all peers by default, none of their peers will ever transmit those other transactions to the two vendor's clients.  That is, unless those two clients happen to be connected to one another directly, in which case the double spend would fail from the start.  One way to mitigate this, is for ecommerce clients to randomly choose one peer to not send the transaction to, and listen to that peer for the transaction that they sent to echo back.  If their transaction comes back, it's incrediblely unlikely that said ecommerce site will get shafted, even if a double spend attack was attempted, because if they see it, then they probably have the wider dispersed transaction anyway.  If they see any other transaction come across that peer trying to spend those same coins, the sale is simply denied.


I believe that it would show up as 0/unconfirmed in the client, and that those coins would never be added to the total balance displayed by the client.

Only if your ecommecre client is configured to assume a valid transaction is good, which is certainly not the default way of doing things thus far, but not unreasonable for smaller value sales.  Say, anything under $50.

Doesn't really matter.  What you would have to do to attempt a Finney attack is have a script that can spend your coins the instant that you find a block, withhold that block for half a second, and then hope that no one else solved that same block within that half second.  Faster hashing just means that you don't have to wait as long to try it.

Like the double spend attack, the Finney attack can be defended against without confirmations; simply by delaying the completion of the sale for a couple seconds and watching for a block and/or transaction that competes with it propagate across the network.  Both attacks would be futile for any site that sold products that physically shipped, since the sale can be cancelled if the transaction is found to be false.

Although it would be difficult to have more than 20 years experience with Linux, it is possible with BSD.

I'll match that pledge.

How much is the price to release the entire library onto http://ftp://livefreeordie.dyndns.org?

EDIT: I have no idea why this forum adds the http:// onto the above.  I'm not doing it.

What is really best in a currency is predictability.  The undesirable characteristics of deflation or inflation have to do with their unpredictable nature, and their magnitude.  Either condition, in moderation, isn't really a problem.  Bitcoin will be very stable in the future, because it's monetary base is entirely predictable out to decades.  While the economy that it represents isn't nearly as stable as the monetary base, once the economy grows to something comparable to Paypal's, the voltility of the spot price will dampen on it's own.  Even modern fiat currencies are unstable compared to one another, and float constantly on foreign currency exchanges.  This is not really a problem.  Bitcoin is actually inflating the monetary base at a rapid rate, running just under 50% APR right now, but will drop over the next two years to about 6.25% APR just after the drop in the block reward around Jan 2013.  The rising value of a bitcoin over the past several months is a reflection of the rapid growth of the economy. (i.e. more people are getting into Bitcoin, and want a starting sum)  We can see the effects of the changing economic size because the economy is still very small, but as the tech matures, which I predict will occur between 2013 and 2015, the economic growth rate will start to experience deminishing rates of ongoing growth.  And even if it doesn't, the effects of the change in economic size will be dampened by it's much greater size.  All things considered, the trade value of a bitcoin, as expressed in another currency or gold, silver, whatever; will settle down to something much more akin to the relative trade values of fiat currencies on the forex.

I would be willing to contribute to a bounty to put them up on the FTP sharing site mentioned elsewhere.

Research done, with the Laffer Curve in mind, strongly suggests that the optimal tax rate varies between 10% and 16%, depending on many variables largely outside the control of government regulations.

So after all this time, the old testament 'tithe' rule, which was originally a form of voluntary fundraising for the government (the religion and the government were inseperable), continues to prove itself as the wisest course of action.

That data is wrong.  If all of the civil power plants in the world were replaced with PWR type uranimum reactors (i.e. everything that powers the grid, and excluding transport fuel) then the world would run out of the presently known reserves of economicly extractable uranium in about 70 years, at a continuous demand relative to current demands.  There are a lot of assumptions there, not the least of which is that we never increase in demand, nor ever find any more veins of extractable uranium.  Furthurmore, uranium isn't the only nuke fuel known, and isn't even the best one.  Thorium is a far better civic reactor fuel, but uranium reactors were demanded by governments in order to produce weapons grade plutonium.  We know now how well that all worked out.  Thorium is vastly more abundant, nearly all of it is burnable (as compared to uranium 235, which is only about 0.7% of the natural volume of uranium).  Thorium is not naturally fissionable, and must be 'transmuted' within a reactor core before fission; and transmution of thorium takes about 28 days from first nutron bombardment.  So a runaway (supercritical) reaction is, although not actually impossible, orders of magnitude slower in cascading.  (Uranium235 is naturally fissionable, and U238 is transmutable into plutonium in seconds)  So instead of a race against time to get the pumps back online like we saw in Japan, the same kind of system breakdown would have to have months of inaction before there was a threat to the containment.  And that is not even considering that reactors designed for thorium can take advantage of it's inherently safer characteristics, such as a pebble bed reactor or the LFTR (Liquid Floride Thorium Reactor, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor) that intentionally uses a molten core.  If those kind of cores make it out of their containment, they seperate from the main mass core, loose critical mass (if they ever had it, an energy amp is a sub-critical reactor that uses a particle excellerator to maintain a critical reaction) and then cool off.  Which results in the liquid core cooling off and solidifing, never to move again in a thousand years.  (If a reactor has a catastrophic systems failure, like we saw in Japan, the most likely result is that the core cools off inside it's own containment by convection over a period of weeks.  If the systems cannot be brought back up in order to maintain enough of a reaction to keep the core liquid, that core is probably a loss, but it still wouldn't get out.)