Nah, that's just a myth.  Wasn't that on one of those public service videos we had to watch in high school?

Wait, What?

Where is this?

Regaining control is as simple as regaining the majority of network power.  This kind of attack is dependent upon either honest node operators not noticing the shift in computational powers, or simply not reacting.  Neither case is particularly likely, but the idea that honest nodes wouldn't be able to quickly respond once such a takeover of the system was apparent is silly. There are numerous major players just on this forum that would have the ability to quickly add power to the network, if they had some compelling reason to do so at a loss, by purchasing & setting up bitcoin daemons on 'the cloud'.  There are quite a few people with much to lose under such a situation as may be willing to spend some of that in order to protect the remainder, and many more still willing to contribute to that end to protect their own smaller nesteggs.  Ultimately, it then all comes back to how long can an attacker maintain the advantage; and which group can continue to commit escalating resources, the coordinated attacker or the collective of honest bitcoin nodes.  No matter how much computational power any particular government may have, it is practically impossible for any single government to be able to possess >50% of all the computational power of the Internet combined, or even >50% of all the computational power available to all of the world's governments combined.  Bear in mind also, if Bitcoin is bad for the nation on top of the fiat currency scheme (USA) then it is, more likely than not, good for almost all of the others.  A slow moving attack upon the Bitcoin network from one government is likely to prompt the (open or cladestine) support of many other governments eventually.

Whatever you are on, I want some.

I'm sure that's true, but considering that libertarianism isn't part of the thread topic, you still don't know what you are talking about.  Hell, you don't even know what you should be talking about.


I would have to read a different thread, the only ideology in this one followed you here.

I'm not.  I'm not an anarchist, nor a Marxist.  I have proposed nothing, and if others have, it is only in response to your thread highjacking.

The right to keep what you produce is a fundamental human right.  It may be control, but no one else loses any honest freedoms when the owner does what he will with his own property.  There is no such thing as collective property, even in the former USSR the trucks may have been bought by the government, but the drivers held *possession*.  Real capitalism existed in the USSR, it exists everywhere, because it's not an ideology.

When you boil it down, there are only two laws of civilization...

"Do all that you have agreed to do, and do not encroach on another's person or property."  (Mayberry's Laws)

This is the whole of the law.   Notice, also, that these are laws concerning individuals, not all of society.  Ideologies aside, any society that generally honors and supports these two laws, tends to prosper.  Yet, once a society no longer honors these two laws, it tends to decline.  They are not absolutes, and can be violated often before the society begins to show it's rot, but they never will be denied.  Marxism cannot exist, simply because it fails to honor these two laws.  Democracy fails this test also.  Capitalism, even as defined in the context of control of the means of production, does not neccessarily violate these laws.

Not if you don't know what you are trying to critique.  And complaints about various political ideologies is a weak critique of an economic theory.  You have pulled this thread way off topic.  Go start your own tread elsewhere so that the rest of us can properly ignore you.  Also, you keep saying that it is trivial to prove us wrong.  If it's trivial, why don't you actually offer evidence in support of your positions?

I considered buying one of these for my kids when they were new.  Could it run a bitcoin client.

Then you do not understand what capitalism actually is.  The word, ironicly, was coined by Karl Marx.  He made it and 'ism' because he wanted to paint it as an ideology.  It's not an ideology, it's a collective description of the free exchanges of individuals within a working free market.  There is no example of true capitalism anywhere in the world that I can point to, because the closest thing to capitalism that still exists is the illicit drug trade.  State capitalism isn't capitalism, it's merely a soft form of national socialism.

Like so many things, the term 'anarchy' gets lost in the nuances of semantics.

When anarchists speak of an anarchist ideal, they are not speaking of lawlessness.  What they really mean is a society without any persistent institution with a monopoly on the use of force.  Asking how it would work out is asking for wild speculation.  A better question  would be, "has it ever worked before", for which the answer would be "yes and no".  Yes, because we have numerous examples of societies that existed that functioned for generations without any persistent institution forming that filled such a role, but also formed such institution on an improve basis due to threat of invasion or internal conflict.  The 'old west' is a somewhat recent example.  Even though there was, literally, a federal government; the closest thing that most residents of the western territories ever encountered to a government was the county sheriff or the federal marshal.  Judges were elected by the counties, and traveled from town to town to adjudicate crimes and civil disputes, but even judges were hired locally and their enforcement was as local as the sheriff's willingness to abide by the judge's decisions.  Still, it was a far more peaceful and law abiding society than contemporary cities such as Detroit or Oakland.  Disputes were rare, and more often than not negotiated between neighbors.

Another example is the 12 tribes of Israel of the old testament, prior to the establishment of the king.  Another is the Swiss from their foundation without a monarch around 1250 A.D. to at least 1450 A.D. and arguably much longer.

No, because those examples no longer exist.

So the question needs to be updated.  Can a society exist without a persistent institution developing with a de facto monopoly on force in a modern society with modern technologies, social interactions, and population densities that are common today.  I'm inclined towards no due to intuitive reasoning, but no one can really say for certain because no one can really predict how such a society might develop.

I can't speak to the GPU generation thing, but in my experience switching to Linux from Windoze gets you more of everything worth having on the exact same hardware.

I'm sorry, but what does radical nationalism mean in this context?  Because from an American perspective, it doesn't sound like something I would support.

Based on a quick google search, there doesn't seem to be an active makerspace/hakerspace in Iceland.  However, I'm sure that there is something that we could work with.  Even a GNU/Linux users group would a good lead.

It's decided then, we shall focus our advocacy upon Icelanders.  Are there any bitcoiners from Iceland already?  The rule of six degrees of separation says that someone in this forum will have some kind of indirect access to Bjork, the trick is discovering who that might be.  If there is an Icelander in the forum, that would likely be the person with the best personal access, considering the size of the Icelandic population is smaller than a mid sized American city.  All it might require is a phone call, an appointment and a bus ride to make this happen.

Let's not be subversive, however.  Whoever ends up making this pitch also needs to make it clear that the existing bitcoiners stand to gain if Bitcoin takes off in Iceland.  This should not be presented as an entirely altruistic enterprise.

Iceland is an ideal choice.  Not only do they produce a majority of their (non-transport) energy needs from geo-thermal, they have a year round heat demand.  Their own currency isn't particularly well accepted elsewhere, either.  It would be, in many ways, good for the population of Iceland to embrace Bitcoins.

It might happen this way, but I would doubt it.  If the world could reject the US FRN as the international currency without great harm to their own economies, I suspect that they would already do so.  The result of so much cash returning to the US would result in massive inflation, but would also harm most other nations as well.

I contest that the US FRN is actually falling in value.  That would depend on how one looks at it, but every way that one can look at it is relative. 

Do you mean something different than www.mybitcoin.com?

That would be because the US Constitution didn't create a democracy.  Not even a democratic republic.  The US was intended to be  federated republic.  The parlimentary republics of Europe are far more democratic in nature.  Senators were not elected by the people until 1913, and our head of state (president) is neither directly elected by the people, nor indirectly through parlimentary procedure.  It's done through an entirely independent body called the 'electoral college'.  I'm pretty sure that no other nation functions in like manner.  As a side note, Abe Lincoln was fourth in the popular vote, and wasn't even considered a contender before the electoral college met.

I was referring to studies done before co2 was considered a pollutant, so I'm pretty sure that refers to spills, dumping, runoff, fumes etc.  I might have to review those studies.