I would say no, but some would disagree.  That said, the "law" as we know it is not written to restrain the just, but the unjust.  The just understand the "law" intuitively, and don't need it written down.  Any law or regulation that restricts the just from their proper actions, is a false law that deserves to be ignored.

Just don't be confused about the morality of what you advocate. 


Yes we do.  The most effective way of doing what you say above is to remove the regulations currently in play altogether.

No need to do anything but wait.  All fiat currencies have followed the same path.  Although the FRN has had a pretty good run, perhaps the longest in the history of fiat currencies, it looks like the game is almost up.


That's actually a fair accusation, but it's almost as true for the Yuan.  The Chinese government has been understating their inflation rate for a number of years now.  Perhaps the past decade.  They aren't as careful at it as the Federal Reserve, and they are going to have a currency crisis pretty soon.  An in China, that is likely to lead to civil unrest, since the working man there ddoesn't even have the pretense of having some say in his own government's policies, and therefore the only path towards reform is bloody.  I would caution anyone considering large investments into China.  We know that China is a powder keg and the fuse is already lit, we just don't know how long the fuse is.

Experience tells me that the kind of person who is willing to live in a state of anarchy is the kind of person that makes for a hard target.


Actually, that's exactly what you seem to be suggesting.

What about adding Busybox?  Or even all of the GNU tools neccessary to make Android a full GNU/Linux compatible?  Considering that most people who are using an android smartphone are almost always connected to the Internet, it's not unreasonable to have symlinks to an entire set of libraries on the cloud.  For that matter, how big would a staticly linked bitcoind binary be?  HAs anyone tried it to find out?

The northern Atlantic is largely a commons under the control of the EU as it is, so this is a case of government failures.  The assumption that a government is neccessary to make companies play by rules starts with the premise that government will make companies play by rules.  We have all grown up in societies with rather large governments, under the impression that government oversight is better than the alternatives, but history tells us something different.  I am not an anarchist, but I agree with the anarchists on this forum when they say that increased regulation/government is not a solution.  Government is force at it's core, there is no way around this.  Government regulations are more likely to harm the small fisherman than protect him or the natural world.  I don't have a solution to the problem of the depletion of natural fish stocks, but I know with high certainty that government isn't a solution either.

Everything is relative.

If you're new, how do you have 250 bitcoins?

Sure there is.  Paypal has a standard transaction overhead of 2.9% plus some small fixed fee, which I believe is about 60 cents.  Currently, Bitcoin has no such fees; and when it does they will be truly market based, likely never approaching 2.9% except in very small or very unusual transactions.

Historicly, this is not so.  The people who choose tend to be those people who already have some advantages over their countrymen, and become the warrior class themselves.  No exceptions.  The "communist" revolution of Cuba is a prime example.  The revolutionaries there were not communists, they were thugs who made a living killing people until they became the govenment itself and had to cut back on the killing.  They called themselves, and surely many believed, that they were communists; but the big picture is that they were just another warrior class.

And by doing so, do the people not become a government?

This is true, but the areas that anarchy existed could only maintain this politcal condition if there was some kind limiting factor to the spread of the monarch's control.  Usually this was so only in areas that were geographically undesireable to live in, or simply could not sustain a large enough population to coalese into a city-state.  Such areas included high mountainous regions, various degrees of desert, or extreme latitudes.  Basicly, a natural anarchy has only existed peacefully, throughout history, beyond the political reach of society.

You are correct, more or less.  However, and I'm know I'm being anal here, what you are describing is a currency unit; not money.  And the use of a money arises first in the absence of coercive forces such as a government.  A socialist anarchy is impossible, because capitalism is the natural extension of individuals exercising their right to trade the fruits of their own labors.  If a socialist society were to form from an otherwise anarchist society, one of two things will happen.  Either the best efforts of the majority (seeking the greater good) will be undermined by a minority (seeking only their own best interests), such as was entertainingly described in the movie Star Trek Insurrection, resulting in the rise of a warrior class (and therefore a peasent class) ultimately leading to the formation of a monarchy.(all warrior classes form rank structures, the guy with the highest rank is the monarch by default)  Or the first generation of social anarchists will wisely foresee this flaw in their own logic, and found some institution intended to organize the collective forces within society to oppose the rise of gangs or any other warrior class that is not beholden to the socialist collective.  In which case, they have just established a government, and are no longer anarchists.

True anarchy as a political structure is unsustainable, and will always lead to something else entirely.  Most self-described anarchists are aware of this, and therefore are not really anarchists; but instead are whatever kind of idealist that they expect would come from the anarchy.  Anarchy is simply a temporary condition; the time period between the final collapse of the current condition and the initiation of the intended political structure.  Karl Marx was, himself, aware of this and regarded a forced state in anarchy as a necessary step towards his communist ideal.  Historicly, they are all wrong.  Anarchy has always led to the formation of warrior classes taking control of territories, whether you call them gangs, warlords or freedom fighters.

The engineers of these technologies don't do things the way they do because 'playing nice in a small pen' is their primary concern, although it likely is of some concern.  If they just chose to do what is in their own interests only, without considering their impact on others, then eventually others would make undermining their success a priority.  However, if the engineers consider the impact on others, and try to minimize that impact, they stand a higher probability of success without interference themselves.

This is exactly why WiFi, Bluetooth and Zigbee can all share the same band in the same area and generally succeed at their primary missions.

What says that we want them to play nice?  all of these are examples of forms of commons, but we also have real examples of real successes when innovators don't play nice.  For example, Wifi, Bluetooth, PSK31, Spread spectrum and many other wireless technologies function so well in a crowded EM environment as a direct result of not playing nice, and development that proceeded under the premise that otherswould not play nice.  Wifi & bluetooth in particular use the same unlicensed band, and must function with interference in order to function at all.  And yet, you can buy smartphones today that allow you to use your wifi connection to use Skype while talking on your bluetooth headset inside of a coffeehouse that several other people are trying to do similar things.

that wouldn't work either, because you are then dependent upon some financial institution's ability to defend the peg.

If someone really wanted to attempt this, one way to do it would be to keep Bitcoin's halving pattern, but double the term with every halving of the reward.  If the starting term were still 4 years and the reward 50 Timecoins every 10 minutes or so, then 21 Million coins would be distributed in the first 12 years, and 31.5 million after 28 years, and so on.

I doubt that, really.  There are a number of early forum members who seem to have had substantial resources before jumping into this, who likely had a better ability to generate than a single, presumedly middle class, programmer.  ArtForz likely had greater wealth overall, both outside and inside of Bitcoin.  I can't imagine that it's terribly likely that Satoshi has personally dedicated more than a few cpu's to generation.  Assuming that ArtForz's claims with regard to his own generating capacity are remotely accurate, which has more or less been verified by at least one other forum member; it is very unlikely that Satoshi is even in the top five.

One of the great things about Bitcoin, is that there is no way two reliablely produce a top 100 richest list.

EDIT:  the top 100 richest list you have on your site could all be owned by the same person, or could all be owned by persons who are very far from the top 100.

I think that they will eventually.  Many enlightened people didn't believe that the public would long suffer fiat currencies once fractional reserve banking was legalized, and many more believed that worldwide abandonment of the gold standard would lead to major monetary crisis (true) and that the economicly educated among the world powers would clamor for a return to sound money. (false)

If bitcoin takes off, it will not be because of it's limited monetary base, since it's going to be inflationary for a very long time.  If it takes off, and I am betting a great deal that it will within three years, it will be because it's a more efficient and more convient monetary system than otherwise currently exists.  At which point, the refusniks will either begrudingly drop their objections in order to participate in the new economy, forever waiting for the day of the "great Bitcoin collapse"; or simply drop out of Bitcoin economy and render themselves irrelevant.

If someone were to implement Timecoin, how would the initial distribution of the currency work?  Bitcoin has solved this problem elegantly, but if Timecoin has a fixed inflationary structure, say 2% per year, how would this be enforced by the network?  Would you start, say with everyone there at the genesis block sharing a fixed starting amount, and then each block then distributes whatever amount would equal a 2% APR?  (Say starting with 10.5 million coins, first block would be 3.9954378, second would be 3.99543531, etc).  Talk about getting screwed if you are the guy who joined the network 6 minutes after teh genesis block.  Enough people on this list bitch about the advantages of "early adopters" with Bitcoin.  If you choose to distribute teh first 10.5 million coins in the same way as Bitcoin, and then switch to a 2% APR forever, it would be decades before the problems with inflation would be noticed.

Intuitively true, but if there is any group that is inclined to avoid proper phycological profiling, it's politicians.