I'm unconvinced as well, but I'm willing to keep an open mind.  What I am concerned about are those who are not willing.

The 'old West' territories before statehood were functionally stateless and seemed to do fine.  Either discipline isn't a requirement, or self-governance leads to self-discipline, or both.  I'm leaning towards both.


The largest polluters in the United States, by any metric, are government agencies.  And they are largely insulated from civil actions.  How do you deal with that?

That sounds backwards, as the larger customers tend to have bigger discounts.  Why is it this way, is residential electric subsidised?

Such a thing would force bitcoin's developers to focus on the pruning of the blockchain, upsetting the development timeline, but would not spell an end to Bitcoin itself.  A pruned blockchain couldn't be considered a vector for child porn.

I don't think so, but it would make you a felon just about anywhere.

There is no way that I could afford my lifestyle with your energy rates.

I live about five miles from a 80 megawatt hydroelectric plant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McAlpine_Locks_and_Dam

Innomen, you are getting upset.  Calm down.  It is good for the community to have those who consider the weaknesses, but it is not neccessary that everyone agree on what to do about that.  I agree that the threat is greater than can be perceived at this time, but I don't agree that changing the system to permit coin recovery or forcing a security model on the user is the answer.  The real answer is that there must be many answers.  The vanilla client is just that, if you see a security issue with it, change it and release the code.  Some people will adopt your ideas, others will not.  What makes the whole of Bitcoin at greatest risk to destruction from a single massive attack vector is that everyone uses the same base code.  Using different OS's is only a stopgap measure.  Backups of wallet.dat files are only a stopgap measure.  We are aware that there is a risk to all of this, or many risks.  You are being heckled mostly because you are presenting the problems from only one perspective, your own, and seem to know very little about how the system actually works.  Not enough to offer any real solutions, at least not widely acceptable.

That would be an improvement, but the 'scorched earth' type attack wouldn't care to sign a transaction.  However, any methods to hide the wallet.dat data by the client itself would be in the source code, and the attacker would know where to go to destroy that data.

That only applied from your own frame of reference.  Self-preservation is a logical basis for ranking prejudices, and such prejudices help keep us safe.  But I don't hate nazi's for the same reasons.  I am both part Native American and part European Jew, but you would have been hard pressed to tell by looking at me.  Beyond your self-framed references, your personal taboos have no basis in a larger society.

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Dependence-Day-6753

Long op-ed, but very good.  Will instill both pride and horror in any self-respecting American, Briton, Canadian or Australian.

Last I checked, my residential electric rates were under 8 cents per KWH.

One can assume that homosexuality is a taboo subject to anyone that could reasonably be considered a homophobe.  It's not taboo to myself, and likely not yourself; but I would wager that neither of us would seek it out, either.

My point was that everyone has something that is taboo/offensive to themselves, whether it's due to their upbringing, culture or personal issues.  I am not an exception whether I could prevent others from engaging in my taboos or not.  I would be willing to wager that you are not an exception either, if I could disprove a negative without your participation.

Not only did Stuxnet use four zero day exploits, only two of which were unknown; more analysis by actual experts has resulted in exactly the opposite conclusion of the media.  Although this was certainly put together by a group of people with a wide knowledge base concerning their target, a nuclear fuel refinement facility, the actual programming displays some basic errors with regards to the construction of a computer worm intended to hide from detection.  Either they were unaware of some old cloaking tricks better than what they chose to use, or the authors intended the worm to be discovered.  Considering the evidence all together, the worm was probably written by a small middle-eastern government in a hurry with a strong motive to delay Iran; which seems to implicate Israel.  However, Iran's facilty is still not running months after the discovery of Stuxnet, so the one that was found may have been a distraction for an even better cloaked version still hammering away at it's intended target.  It was a very precise weapon, as well, very tightly targeting only the particular facility it intended.

If any GNU/Linux distro has four unpatched zero day exploits at the same time, I'll eat my hat.

Let the market decide.

And my point was that regardless of how any particular advocate of any particular ideology may think about public choice theory, they all basicly believe that what they advocate will result in a better society.  The key difference is that authoritarians of every flavor fundamentally believe that some form of proper government is the key to that better society, while libertarians (the 'big tent' version of that word) of every flavor fundamentally believe that that a proper government is impossible.

Most people resolve conflicts peacefully without the aid of the state.  In the relatively rare cases that the state police & court apparatus is required to resolve a conflict, it's never peaceful.  The fact that both sides may, in public, comply to the decisions of a judge are more often due to the implict threat of force that a judge's decision is supported by.

How is it any better or worse than any other form of prejudice?  Don't take the high road here, everyone has their cultural taboos.  I didn't say anything about this part of this thread, because I know that I have my own.  In this case, I agree with both sides to some degree.  I have no problem with Bruce's lifestyle, provided that I'm not exposed to it.  However, as Namigold has already pointed out, in his first interview Bruce kinda shared a bit too much.  He was also somewhat led there as well.

Excellent.  That's nothing.

No, I don't.  In this conversation, you're the advocate; so you need to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate use of force.  That was part of my point about the 'just versus the unjust' post.  What most people think of when we use the term "law" are things that are prohibited because they are bad, but those statutes make up only a very small percentage of those produced by government.  In nearly every case of statutes that exist to punish infractions of common sense and basic civility; those actions (or something very much like them) have been prohibited in civil societies since the dawn of civilizations.  The statutes that refer to them in modern texts of law only clarify ambiguity and define consequences.  Beyond that, everything that comes from government is unjustifiable use of force.  I contend that is a given under the premise that governments are the organized use of force.


That would, indeed, be a wonderful trick.  The fly in the ointment is that is exactly what everyone else believes that whatever they advocate would accomplish.  Be they socialist or anarchists, authoritarians or libertarians, republicans or monarchists.


Why isn't it?  When the US was founded, Congress was in session for only three weeks a year, and were not paid.  If we went back to that age, when serving was an obligation instead of a career, I would wager than things might improve significantly.

No.  I expect that the anarchist poster that you were responding to in that post, and whom you implied that you would rob under such a state of anarchy, to be packing heat.  For that matter, I would expect him to be packing heat now.  Granny would be the soft target in this context.


Would a return something like the British Common Law of generations past qualify?  Wherein the law is 'discovered' by judges over long periods of time?  Or are you thinking more of a 'phyle' system as described in The Diamond Age?