I would, for no other reason than to limit the 'detrimental reliance' that I have upon the power company, but there are cheaper ways to accomplish this.  A reactor can be built as small as 5000 watts, and made to last for decades.  This is exactly how the continuous mission to Antartica heats and powers it's base camp buildings.  An entire city block can be powered from a reactor site the size of a quarter acre home lot.

I think that the 4S would be a huge boon, but I don't think it's going to happen before the thorium LFTR (Lifter) reactor is built, and during all of the recent news in Japan, the media completely overlooked the news that China has announced that they are going forward with a domestic thorium energy amp reactor design.

The US has fallen way behind, and will continue to do so as long as governments and NIMBY types continue to inhibit progress.

If you had a high school civic teacher, s/he should be fired.

The United States is a Federated Republic, each state chooses it's own structure, but most are either a federated republic directly copied from the federal level, or commonwealth republics.

The US is a far cry from a trade federation.

Well, I do it solo.  So your probably right that no one in their right mind would do it.

Of course, I do it (in part) to heat my study.  And no, I have never solved a block.

The only alternative beyond a theoretical stage is 'testnet', which is almost exactly like the main blockchain except it exists to get hammered.  I believe that you can join the testnet with the regular client by way of a command line switch, but if it isn't -testnet I wouldn't hazard a guess.

What about keeping the hard limit, but adding an occasional exemption, say every retarget block can be as large as necessary to clear the backlog. (or ten times as large, or 100 times, whatever)  That way, the longest delay that a cheap/free transaction is a couple weeks, and the clients without much bandwidth only has to deal with an oversized block occasionally and on a predictable schedule.

This way. the near term scarcity that would drive transaction fees in the future would still be present, and donations won't languish to unrealistic terms.

I'm willing to volunteer to be the bad cop.

You have an impressive ebook library.

Silly statement, since Filezilla logged onto it in under a second just now, and I didn't so much as reboot Filezilla.

I can't disprove a negative.

I'll just say, give it a try.  See how it works out.

The European 'anarchists' are not in favor of a stateless society.  They are, largely, socialists.  Intentional chaos is an intermediate stage outlined by Karl Marx, and in detail in Rules for Radicals.  Karl Marx noted that the majority of any nation has a vested interest in the status quo, even if that same majority can recognize it's flaws.  Thus, the status quo must be disrupted before any substantial change, in this case a socialist revolution, may be successful.  Certainly they don't all believe that they are socialists, but all of those who are rioting are contributing to that end, whether they know it or not.

For the largest botnet ever discovered...Just sayin'.

If you think your botnet is up to the challenge, give it a try.

Not if the user was running a pool miner, or the 'shy' client.  The clients don't need to bootstrap with IRC, it just makes initial connections to the network quicker upon startup.  If someone was running a client 24/7, IRC would become irrelevant after a couple hours.

For a limited time, sure.  However, even if you could isolate every known node from one another, you would still have to be (or connected to) the largest of the isolated networks.  A botnet can't realisticly stop these nodes from generating while isolated.  Artforz, alone, once represented 5%+ of the network and his setup is on a private network, not a pool.  So even if a botnet was large enough to fracture the network, the botnet owner's clients would have to be able to out run Artforz, any other miner of equal or greater capacity, and the total of the clients that it couldn't blockade.  For the blockade must end eventually; and when the network reconsolidates, the blockchain with the greatest proof-of-work still wins.  That could be the botnet owner, but it might not.  Participating honestly in the mining is still the best overall business plan.  This is actually part of the point of the way the mining system was designed.

Sure, but by the time it's not, the size of the Bitcoin network will be much larger than any botnet.  And this kind of plan assumes that the major players in the network right now just sit back and do nothing while a DDOS attack persists upon the network.  This is unlikely, and all that it would take to completely deny the botnet owner his ill-gotten gains would be for Artforz to set up a couple of modems on his network and connect directly to a couple other major players to directly trade blocks.  Furthermore, there is no certainty that such an emergency physical peer connection network isn't already up and running.  How would we know if Artforz and the other major miners have privately discussed this or not?  With the capital costs that these miners have already commited to their systems, a few modems and a script to call one another directly over POTS (even if it were long distance) would be a small additional cost.

If they haven't already discussed this, they will be shortly after seeing this thread.

If that is all that is done, the two sets of clients will each be trying to claim the current blockchain for their own after the reward drops to 25 BTC.  This will force an ongoing blockchain split, causing other network problems.  If anyone wants to do this, they need to build a separate network like 'testnet' is now.  Otherwise, I would be more than willing to participate in a direct attack of nodes that used the 'other' client.

Bruce!  Where have you been?  I was beginning to wonder if you had burned out on Bitcoin.

Any progress that you can report with regard to the POS system that you were working on in November?

Humans are a herd animal.  The concept of a true democracy is impossible, because even if everyone truly could have an equal vote, there is always a significant minority of the voting public that seeks an alpha male.

No, that's not a threat.  This just goes to show that it would be profitable for a botnet owner to mine using the botnet, which wouldn't harm the network at all, and would actually help it grow stronger.  What he was describing was blockading a majority of the honest network (probably by identifying the largest pools and other large miners that share an IP address) and denying those nodes access to the network in some fashion.  My point was that this probably isn't possible, because although a botnet could DDOS a large number of those major players, all of the smaller miners that the botnet isn't aware of (or simply doesn't have the size to attack) benefit as well, so the attack isn't viable.  As you have pointed out, it would be vastly more profitable for the botnet owner to simply bend his stolen clockcycles to actually mining in a 'honest' fashion.  For all we know, this is already happening.

Appears unreachable to filezilla

The network-at-large is pretty large.  I would doubt a DDOS attack would be effective.

This is a bad idea, at least from the perspective that you might not want to host files beyond your personal review on a machine in your home.  Because dynamic dns is easily backtraced to your actual address, if you are the right person (or agent of the state).  A hidden service over Tor would be wiser.