And that is why most people can't understand libertarianism.

Basicly, yes.


A client could detect when it is on the minority side of a network split, although none presently do, by tracking the average time interval between blocks.  If the interval is more than twice the average for several blocks, or more than 6 times the average once, that client is almost certainly disconnected from the majority network.

Still, the clients cannot just decide to lower the difficulty.

No, and if they tried then their blocks would be wiped out each time that they reconnected to the majority network, and those transactions would have to be included in another future block anyway.  The chain split that it would cause wouldn't be a problem for anyone outside of the ship.

Bitcoin can be a reliable store of value, as can gold, silver, US Savings Bonds, or many other things.  There are investment vehicles that exist specificly as a store of value, such as US Savings Bonds, but even that isn't a certainty, and I can think of no such intentional structures that do not have counter party risk.  Commodities do not have counterparty risk if one takes delivery, but there are storage risks.

That's probably because modern OS's can be trusted to handle any ram overusage by some form of virtual memory paging, but Android doesn't do this.  So some form of substitute needs to be created.  Perhaps bitcoinj can be modified to treat the blockchain as a series of records, of say 500 blocks apiece, and only keep the latest one in ram; and the rest as flat files on storage.  Odds are high that it would be rare that bitcoinj would have to check back farther than a couple months for anything, so beyond 20 such files, the client could then hash the entire blockgroupfile so that it could recheck it if it needed to redownload it from a support server.  Such a server could support thousands of such client, as downloads would be uncommon.

In fact, this might be a good feature for the main client.  No need for a regular client to prune at all, and even keeping the headers would become optional if it had the small database of archived blockchain hashes.

That has been called 'pruning' by others.  It was intended by design for a future 'lightweight' client that could still stand alone, without the need to trust a remote server.

Not really true in this case.  The risk of double spending is if there is a person on the sub trying to send coins from a wallet to another person on the sub, while another person in the greater Internet has a copy of that same wallet trying to spend those same bitcoins.  This excludes the possibility that the sub was trying to generate while under water, which would be futile and therefore should be suspect anyway.  There would still be a near zero risk that coins could be double spent on the sub itself.  A disconnected client is at risk of a double spend, but a disconnected client can certainly itself spend.

No, not really.  But any independent client will need to have access to a full blockchain at some point in order to even know that it has any bitcoins to spend.

What about a remote blockchain?  A symlink over the Internet, or a blockchain 'server' that can scan the blockchain for these Android clients whenever the Internet is available.

Indeed.  Currencies, in general, make for poor forms of savings.  That's not why they exist.  Bitcoin exists as an Internet cash equivalent, and if performs that function very well.  If you are looking for a store of value, there are much better choices.

It will some time before a node could exist on the Moon, and the SoL delay would mean that any generators on the Moon would be at a distinct disadvantage.

Low Earth orbit is doable now, but neither option actually protects the blockchain from a solar flare.  The current model  is easily as safe as can be expected.

Not in my lifetime.

Pay Kentucky taxes instead of Illinois taxes?

I would like to be able to see my client running on Fluxbox WM.  I'm guessing that it tries to minimize to a tray, but does not show up in the Fluxbox tray.  Some command line switch to prevent auto-minimizing would be helpful.

Great idea!  Then I'll write a script that installs a new client, transfers the free 1000 BTC to my other client, deletes the new client and repeats forever!  Give everyone free money, and we will all be rich!

Canadians are forced to use metric when dealing with their governments, much like Europeans.  Where I live, the freeway signs have both miles and kilometers, and so does my car's speedometer.  Everyone else's speedometer has a kilometer scale in the US as well, because the government forced that upon the auto industry decades ago.  Yet miles remains the dominate scale; because then and now, Americans prefer to think in miles.

Neerus sucks, too.


Look around you.  Unless you are an engineer or some kind of scientist, the majority of people who are around you at this very moment have been educated in both systems, and continue to choose American Standard for daily functions.  They can do so because they are free to do so.  Their local, state and federal governments have to deal in whatever metric that the pubic insists on using.



I hope you realize this is not an argument in favor of the free choice of the Metric Standard, since in most (if not every) cases, the public must deal in Metric because either their governments refuse to deal in any other system, Metric is the only system of measurements taught to children, or more likely both.  I can understand how Metric was better in Europe than the differing standards that were similar to Imperial, but different than the nation-state next door.  But that is not the case in the US, as we have been using the same standard across a land and culture vastly more intertwined than anything Europe could replicate before the European Union, but the Metric Standard was a great leap forward for interoperability and clear communications.  Not because it was a base 10 standard, but simply because it was a cross-border standard.  As far as consistency, American Standard is broken.  But it's never really been about consistency, but utility.  And for Americans, being the only significant population taught two different standards of measurements, the utility remains decidedly on the side of the American Standard.  Brokenness aside, American Standard is mostly a base 2 (or base 4) standard based on fractions, which is easier for lay people (and particularly those who are math illiterate) to understand intuitively.  For example; Gallon (1/1), Half-Gallon (1/2). Quart (1/4), Pint (1/8), Cup (1/16), Gill (half-cup, 1/32).  Beyond either end of the range of that example, things get broken, but this range alone covers most of the useful range (utility) for everyday measurements of liquid volume.  We do the same thing to all other units less explicitly, but we do it.  Half-mile, Quarter-mile, half-inch, quarter-inch, half-pound, ounce (1/16th), dram (1/256th lb), etc.  The greatest advantage Metric had that led to it's adoption in Europe, and most of the former colonies of Europe, was it's cross border interoperability.  Metric did not have an advantage over American Standard in this regard, so it has never gain common usage outside of professional fields.  The fact that Metric doesn't dominate in a large society free to choose it is evidence that it was not superior enough for a free public to choose it over what they already used.

Good, God.  I would hope not.  Talk about 'newspeak'; free market = monopoly and force = freedom.  If I were king of Wikileaks, I'd still choose him to be the frontman, for no other reason than to stir controversy to keep the ire of governments turned in his direction and away from what my left hand is doing next.  Much like the president of the universe in 'The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy'.

Atlas Shrugged is best understood as a political philosophy disguised as a work of fiction.  All the main characters are representative of different classes of people, which is why they all seem so sterile, so completely vile, or utterly perfect.  Pretty much all of Ayn Rand's work followed this pattern.  It's still a pretty impressive opus, considering English wasn't her first language.

You're thinking, but there is no economic reason for any financial institution (bank or otherwise) to choose bitcoin as a reserve currency and then start another blockchain, for any blockchain requires a great deal of system overhead.  A bank might choose Bitcoin as the backing for a digital or physical currency of their own design and administration, but it would not likely be another blockchain.  If there is a central trusted party (the bank) there are other ways to handle the double-spend problem better than a parallel blockchain.

Metric sucks, and would fail without explicit government advocacy and support.  Case in point, most Americans grew up learning American Standard (very close to Imperial, but not quite) because all the adults used it, and also learned Metric in school, because the government wanted people to use it.  Most everyone, if they have a choice, prefer American Standard in regards to the kinds of useful metrics lay people use; i.e. miles for traveling distances, feet/yards for sight distances, and inches and fractions of inches for fine distances.  The fact that an adult can convert traveling distances (km) into sight distances (meters) in their head is generally a useless feature, because people rarely have any reason to do so.