Can you list one that doesn't do any of those things?

It seems to be a bit of a false dichotomy.

You appear to be comparing the reality of what life is like with a state: genocide, expropriation, slavery, no protection from the bad guys (the worst ones get government jobs) with an imaginary utopian state that doesn't actually exist (free with a decent military and judicial system).

Remembering back to last year when high load on the forum was making the system almost unusable it might be worth looking into something that performs well under pressure. AKCS fits this criteria.

There is an extension for Firefox that does exactly what you are asking.

This is true at the moment but I don't expect it to last very much longer.

The behavior of the political class in the last few years very much resembles the frantic looting of the public purse that happened in the former Soviet Union just prior to its collapse.

Western governments are far beyond the point of no return when it comes to fiscal sustainability. The current generation of federal workers in the US, for example, will never receive the pension benefits they were promised, which guarantees there won't be another generation following them as part of the current system.

Regulatory difficulties are a temporary problem at best because before Bitcoin becomes large enough to attract serious enforcement attention the implosion of the public sector may be too far along for them to do anything about it.

If the owner were clever he'd incorporate in the US state and form a different corporation in another country. Then instead of the domestic corporation hiring the employees it would outsource the work to the foreign corporation, which would hire the US employees as contractors and pay them using Bitcoin. It would then be up to the contractors to take care of their tax liabilities themselves.

I'm not sure that philosophical misgivings are as important as you think. According to MemoryDealers, Chinese exporters are starting to express interest in using Bitcoins to accept payment for their products. If the producers of products people want to import start demanding Bitcoins then those customers will start using Bitcoins to pay for those products.

It seems like there should be a formula that could calculate the average cost of successfully implement a double spending attack for a given number of confirmations based on how much computing power it would require.

Then it would be possible to determine the optimum number of confirmations for a given transaction size.

I'm no cryptographer but I seem to remember that algorithms exist to split an encryption key such that N of M fragments must be used to form a valid signature.

Could such a system be used to create a separate verification system on a physically different computer (without requiring special hardware) so that even if the computer storing the hot wallet is compromised it can't generate transactions by itself?

My take from the presentation is that the function of coin laundering needs to be incorporated into the client itself.

His example blogger with a single published donation address should be giving out new addresses for each donor if he cares about income/spending anonymity.

His client software should be monitoring his spending habits and intelligently managing his pool of addresses to ensure that any time he spends Bitcoins at least one address has enough to initiate a single sender transaction.

In addition the heuristics should have a lot of tunable parameters so that the software can automatically adjust its behavior to make wallet reshuffling look statistically similar to the other transactions in the block chain.

All this can be done by the client without the user needing to worry about the details.  The user would only need to make a few high-level decisions like how much he was willing to pay in fees if it was the case wallet reshuffling incurred them and what to do in the case of a large unexpected purchase in which no single address had enough Bitcoins to handle it alone (wait for a certain amount of time for reshuffling or else accept a permanent reduction in anonymity). Users who where especially interested in anonymity could take the time to tell the client ahead of time about planned purchases to give it time to make those funds available via an appropriate single address.

Do people really still do that?

The average person is a customer rather than a business owner. PayPal heavily favors buyers over sellers so naturally the average person isn't going to see the any of the problems. It's not very hard to find horror stories from the seller's point of view, however.

On the other hand please don't misinterpreting my previous posts as discounting the desirability of usability improvements for the average user. It is important but the necessary mindset for improving Bitcoin from the point of view of the merchants is slightly different.

It's really a case of two parallel and only partially overlapping efforts - one targeted at the users and another targeted at the business owners.

I would certainly recommend advertising your service as a more reliable and hassle-free way for a merchant to turn sales into local currency in the bank. The fact that the underlying mechanism for doing so is decentralized crypto-currency is something that is not relevant to most businesses.

In fact, if it were my motto I'd make it:

Bit-Pay : Merchant Solutions for Small Businesses

Your customers are the businesses, not the Bitcoin movement. Bitcoin is not the reason your business exists, it's your competitive advantage. Really your customers don't even need to know how you are able to deliver payment processing that is faster, cheaper and more reliable than PayPal unless they're curious. All they need to know is that you can and do.

Another thing to consider is that if a business has a presence in the US and in Mexico and is involved in moving money from one to the other it's going to become entangled in the laws that make those other services so expensive.

I would never start a business in the US that had anything to do with remittances. Let people who want to send Bitcoins obtain those Bitcoins themselves and just be merely a currency exchange in the target country.

I agree but you don't need "cash for bitcoins" people in the developed countries - you need to set those up in the developing countries.

I have a small amount of personal experience in this matter. I am a US citizen that was married to a Perivuan for several years and we sent remittances back to her family frequently. You're absolutely correct that it's very expensive and inconvenient.

Now that you can make deposits to the exchanges via cash to the branches of major banks it's very easy for someone in the US to get their hands on Bitcoins to send back home. The far larger problem is enabling people in the developing countries to convert those Bitcoins to local currency.

That means partnering with locals and setting up brick and mortar currency exchanges in a lot of different developing world locations. I've got some ideas for how one of those would work and I've considered working with some of my former inlaws but it's certainly not an simple undertaking.

I understand that attitude and in the long term that's where we want people to go but first you need to consider a different type of merchant.

The economy is bad right now. Margins are thin and many businesses are struggling. There are a lot of business out there that are barely hanging on and for whom a chargeback or a freeze on their PayPal account while they investigate a complaint could be devastating or even fatal.

If you start talking to those people about alternative currencies they will tune you out because they have neither the time nor the resources to investigate.

On the other hand if you talk to them about a more reliable way to get USD into their bank accounts suddenly they will be all ears.

Get those people onboard and give them a reason to prefer Bitcoin over debit/credit card or Paypal and they will have the necessary incentive to get more of their customers shopping with Bitcoin. When their own suppliers start pestering them to use Bitcoin then you'll see more of them holding on to them for B2B transactions.

Does your calculation assume that the store is accepting Bitcoins "natively" without using one of the third-party services that immediately convert sales into USD? Because offering a 2.9% discount for Bitcoin is only a break even proposition for a merchant if the total fees involved with a Bitcoin sale, everything from when the customer clicks "pay" until USD (or applicable local currency) hit his bank account is 2.9% less than the total fees involved with the other methods of payments.

I don't see that as a bad idea. I'm not sure how many merchants would bother though.

I just want to emphasize that it's in the best interest of people who want Bitcoin to succeed as a currency (rather than those who just want to make themselves rich via speculation) to focus on the needs of merchants and customers because in the end the value of Bitcoin as a means of exchange trumps everything else.

Merchants want to make it as easy as risk-free to sell their products as possible. They generally don't care about toppling the international banking cartel.

When people talk to me about Bitcoins I explain to them why it can be beneficial for selling things over the internet and encourage them to convert any Bitcoins they receive immediately to local currency. I don't want people who are dipping their tow in the water getting burned by exchange rate fluctuations.

I think that's what Bitcoin needs to be right now: a high-velocity online means of exchange that is superior to PayPal. If that keeps the exchange rate low in the short to intermediate term then so be it. If Bitcoin makes life easier for buyers and sellers of real products and services then its use will grow over time and eventually there will be enough of a real economy backing it up that it will make sense to start holding on to them.

Only then does it make sense to start talking about Bitcoin as a store of value.

In the use case I mentioned a single network administrator controls the computers that run the node and the front end. I guess the risk then would be one of the computers on the same network becoming compromised and using zeroconf to advertise a malicious node?

Just my opinion - target small business owners who sell over the internet and are tired of PayPal's bullshit (that would be nearly all of them).

Emphasize the lack of chargebacks and lack of any central authority who can freeze your account for an indefinite time and arbitrary reason.

Services like bit-pay are ideal for merchants who just want an easy way to get paid without the hassles involved with PayPal and also don't want exchange rate exposure. Getting USD deposited into your bank account every business day with no chargeback risk and for a fee that's competitive with PayPal or a MasterCard/Visa merchant account is a really good deal for them.

Get the merchants on board and they will encourage their customers to follow.