I honestly don't have all the numbers and there is so much propaganda floating around I hardly know what's real these days HOWEVER:

IF much of the top wealth in the USA really is from printed dollars then the tax paid by the receivers of such mean nothing:
Its like if I rob you and then donate a few nickles to charity.

Considering the deficit printing and the bailouts and that the richest often hold their wealth in assets, not fiat, I would not be surprised if in truth the poor and the middle class in the US carry the largest burden.

Sure the top 5% of the population may not be well-connected bankers or corporate heads, but they may well be working for such.
(EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
1 tril deficit/15 tril gdp = 1/15 used dollars are printed)


I think money printing is more disruptive than most realize. It doesn't just lower fiat value, it makes it impossible to see whether a venture is creating value for society or just tapping into the flow of fake money - given time such confusion corrupts your entire economy vastly.

I think NAP is a beautiful personal principle, but I also agree with the others here saying that it breaks down the second someone elects to use force or even in borderline cases.

Is a company polluting and causing cancer in your village aggression? Or their freedom? Do you even have hardcore scientific evidence you can show in a court or in public?
The money to take a day off to protest, hire lawyers or what ever?

Compared to old times everyone today is "rich" due to cheap coal, oil, gas and technological progress.

Just watch when the oil lets up and the financial crisis worsens, things will get nasty again.

In positivist technocracy the idea at least is that you just look at what works and not the ideology bs.

I see bitcoin as a technological fix to a social/political problem for instance.

Except the wealthy in America pay much lower taxes and much of their wealth is from printed dollars handed out by government to them - printed dollars that devalue the dollars of the middle class mostly.

In my country that linked example however is pretty spot on.

I would take it in a second.

Basically it would save me transacting my savings into BTC myself and let me decide how much to give the tax man


Naturally my pay would be denominated in currency other than BTC that's fine.

In fact if in the future I am in the position to bargain I will likely push myself to settle in BTC whether for rent, paycheck or investment overseas.

BTC only truly shines once you cut the fiat out of the loop.

I nominate Cenk Uyger? of the Young Turks.

He is progressive, but doesn't like the main banks printing free money for themselves.

+ they have like tens of thousands of daily viewers.

You are incorrect there:

The first can be done an INFINITE number of times.

The second could theoretically be a problem, but it would only work ONCE, after which they would be out of coins.


Anyway it is known that neither Satoshi nor the other super early adopters have THAT many BTC. A couple of millions in $ which I wouldn't mind having myself, but then that's about it.

Even dumping it all they would only be able to suppress the BTC price a few years at best. Just mtgox alone trade their worth in volume over the span of a few months.

Lastly they have nothing to gain from doing so and what they DO have to gain they have earned by giving the world BTC.

Short of going into peoples home, checking their client version and killing them if its wrong you can't control BTC.

Even in a dictatorship the regime would likely loose too much public support and waste too many resources attempting this.

51% attack:
Only lets you obstruct payments, NOT change the protocol as has been mentioned.
Even obstruction only works until everyone blocks all the IPs you have access to.

Tracking:
TOR and mixing services lets people communicate highly anonymously using BTC. See Silkroad for example.

Pushing it underground:
Just forces people to convert to cash in public while converting back to BTC at first underground exchange.

This would basically accelerate inflation into hyper inflation even while the country appeared to be using the state fiat.

At that point the government would HAVE to accept BTC for taxes or collapse.


BTC is THE ultimate weapon in non-lethal struggle against oppressive forces. Its going to be a wildfire at some point.

Whats a strike next making every cop and soldiers paycheck worthless?

The BTC protocol can just be updated to allow more decimals.

I have yet to hear anyone disagree to this easy solution.


Decimals, new cryptographic standard and swarm clients - basically every problem that might ail BTC in some 100 years has been theoretically solved. Rest easy.
(I was concerned myself about these, so I collected all the answers)

Bitcoin is backed more by physical laws than math. Basically it all rests on computing power being scarce.

It the laws of our world were different or changed doing a 51% attack might be easy.

Even if a God or Gods created the universe he/they may no longer control it, who knows?

"Backed by current physics" might be more correct.

Yes BTC in a BTC economy, don't worry so much about what the fiat does. As long as BTC is climbing in value the risk is in holding dollars as I see it.

As for the thread topic it looks like it has settled down around 6-6.6 for a while. Wouldn't be surprised if it dipped down into the 5's with the euphoria gone though.
5 is the new 4, then in 6 months its 6.

Unit of account and money really should be considered two different things.

Bitcoin does not necessarily need to be the first if it is a great tool for trade.


I guess we could back it at 2$/BTC for some slight psychological effect, but it would be better selling your house for BTC, renting it out or what have you.

Your solution would work.

In fact its probably a much simpler swarm client proposal than mine, there is just a few issues:

You also split the miners hashing power which makes each shard less safe.
Anyone could make a new shard.
Confusion
Low adoption rate.
(You mentioned some of this yourself)


My proposal has the same idea as yours, but nodes trade tx data instead of exchanging coins and block-branches are split instead of the entire chain. That way there is no fork etc..

Seems like a another flaw in this design to me.

At VISA volumes I think each block would be one gigabyte. Even if half or less it would break the light nodes proposed here.

This solution is patch work, a swarm client combined with the ledger system is the only way. It doesn't have to be my design, but we will benefit a lot from swarm principles at some point.

1. It will take at least 3 years.
2. Scalability issues will have to be solved one way or the other.
3. Public key encryption of commuications between nodes needs to be added. Nodes will know each other only by public key. (prevents node fooling by connection manipulation).
4. The user should have the ability to specify the number of decimals so that satoshis are not the smallest unit.
5. The cryptographic algorithm used might need updating to prevent quantum computer related problems.
EDIT 6. The max blocksize not ignored should be settable by the miners/users, an equilibrium standard should form and evolve from then on.

4/5 are no rush

Yeah I think that was a BTC supporting comment too. OP just misread (understandable with that sentence).

Lol what the hell kind of country is that!

I'm pretty sure print scanners today can tell if you are showing a print or nothing.


Anyway I'm not saying its impossible just that double-spends aren't that potent, maybe except for ATMs. (Which apparently are dynamited anyway)

I would also be surprised if someones upstream connection was stolen

At least with SSL known, it would only happen once before an SSL update was made.

No my structure theoretically could operate entirely with swarm clients.

However in the case of mining pools you might have one node orchestrating which hash will be worked on.

The guy of this thread has super nodes, I don't. Maybe you got confused that way.

I don't like super nodes, I think it's bad centralized design.

Could you give me a link to your proposal?

ATMs have cameras and since cash is involved I am pretty sure you could in fact call the cops with some success.

The ATM might also say require your fingerprint, just in case!

Would YOU risk robbing an ATM with max 10 min. of a head start from the cops?

If your attack is detected make that head start smaller.


Even should you succeed you likely would get a maximum of 10k$, trivial compared to bitcoinicas loss and considering the expertise the thieves would have to posses. + your fingerprints are now on police file.