its quite exciting because all week everyone was talking about Reddit, Reddit, Reddit.  And then Wordpress comes out of nowhere and drops the biggest ringing endorsement you could ask for.

Kunekune are suitable for a novice owner as they are placid, friendly and love human company. They are intelligent and easy to train.

This is extremely important. WordPress is synomous with freedom of speech. This allows us to reframe the Bitcoin debate from being used to buy drugs to ensuring our freedom of speech. We saw how fast the Internet rallied against SOPA, PIPA, etc. Bitcoin will get a lot more public support for freedom of speech. Coupled with the everyone with a soapbox using Bitcoin to pay for their soapbox ... I cannot really think of a more important propellant for public Bitcoin support.

PayPal recently fired 325 employees and 120 independent contractors. If they tried to freeze WordPress they would encounter a fury from the Internet like SOPA did. I imagine a lot of bloggers would boycott Paypal out of spite.

I've just edited the post; here's a donation address: 1E82DM9mxvvfMfVAwpDANbkwXc2uWvQD1. I hope the original authors of this thread show up at some point as well. I've just tested on a 5770 - about 600MH/s.

One of the key pillars to returning money to the people, as Ron Paul mentions in a new edition of The Case for Gold which will be released this week for free to Laissez Faire members, is to undo government’s monopoly on money creation. None of us can imagine what that would be like because the government has held such a monopoly in modern times.

But money is no different than anything else. It benefits from the spirit of enterprise. Competition is good. Competition leads to product innovation. It ensures product quality. In contrast, as with any monopoly provider, the government’s money product has denigrated over time. Since 1971 the U.S. dollar has no backing. The coinage has gone from gold to silver to an alloy of copper and zinc.

As evidence that the market is seeking a sounder currency, the digital world has developed a currency that is getting attention and use, Bitcoin. Bitcoins have no central issuer but are administered through a decentralized peer-to-peer network that began in 2009. There are somewhere around 10 million bitcoin in existence and more will be released until a total of 21 million have been created by the year 2140.

Bitcoins is the currency of the online black market. For instance, The Silk Road (Amazon of the illegal drug trade) only accepts payments in Bitcoin. The European Central Bank observes in a new report that “It operates at a global level and can be used as a currency for all kinds of transactions (for both virtual and real goods and services), thereby competing with official currencies like the euro or US dollar.”

It is not the best or final answer to the monetary problem but it does serve as evidence that market desires something better than what governments are giving us.

There answer to "why not" is two pronged.

1) The mills of justice turn slow, but grind exceedingly fine. Just read the first paragraph of my BIP 2112 proposal. As a technical advisor/export to a plaintiff all my Bitcoin-related correspondence is potentialy subject to the discovery by the defendant counsel. I don't want to get involved in some sort interferrence accusactions, conflicts of interests, etc. I use my "social capital" to post here as a premier cryptocurrency forum to assure that everything technical I wrote is a matter of public domain and cannot become some sort of submarine patent. It really is secondary whether somebody implements my ideas or not. They just have to be matter of public domain.

2) IMHO another real-time, reflective, in-vivo alt-chain is not the way to go and waste of the effort. IMHO the cryptocurrency field will be stagnant until some enterprising biz-school grad or doctoral student does some sort of in-vitro discrete-time simulation experiments using GPSS or some such. When the headline will be something like "100-years of Bitcoin evolution simulated overnight" it will mean that the crypto-currencies have arrived as a field of research.

I mean I don't mind and even support you and others discussing alternatives. It is important to keep the ideas in the open, public domain. But it somewhat resembles the philosophical "what if?" discussions I've heard in the theological departments. But when the "what if?" are much-faster-than-real time animations then the actual scientific discovery will happen and the whole field will move forward. Either as a field of research or as an venture investment opportunity.

Nice, fast-moving WebGPSS or similar animations sell better than the walls of text or pages of certifiably-secure cryptographic algorithms. My contributions are really mundane, on the par of "how to make a good oil-pan washer so your engine won't seize even on the bumpiest road".

Many people complain about government control of currency, but only a few do something about it. I’m not talking about movements to “audit the Fed” and such. I’m talking about real innovation that makes an end run around the government’s iron grip on the monetary system.

Ironically, while some economists are pooh-poohing Bitcoin, the ECB devotes some of their lengthy report to the idea that the Austrian school of economics provides the theoretical roots for the virtual currency. The business cycle theory of Mises, Hayek and Bohm-Bawerk is explained in the report and Hayek’s Denationalisation of Money is mentioned. ....
The report writers indicate that Bitcoin supporters see the virtual currency as a starting point for ending central bank money monopolies.

The creation of Napster meant the music industry was obsolete.

The creation of Bitcoin means the banking industry is obsolete.

All that is needed is participation, the rest will take care of itself - inexorably and silently until the walls crumble down upon those holding meetings to handle the "new" threat.

Nope.  KnightMB did questionable things that didn't involve Bitcoin at all.  Anything which offers an opportunity to part fools and their money is going to attract its fair share of opportunists.  Anything which is perceived as offering anonymity is also going to attract its fair share of opportunists.  Bitcoin is just another tool they're going to use.

What I was addressing was the assumption that because people are in a position where they could do something to benefit Bitcoin as a whole or "make a contribution" to Bitcoin they have some obligation to do so.  I think any such assumption greatly over-estimates the number of people who have some kind of ideological loyalty to Bitcoin.  People aren't spending tens of thousands of dollars on mining rigs "to maintain the blockchain".  The didn't invest with pirate because it was "good for Bitcoin".  They don't speculate on Bitcoin prices for ideological reasons.  A lot of people don't give a shit about Bitcoin per se - it's purely a means to an end for them.

Bitcoin doesn't make people do bad things but in the short-term it has some characteristics which are appealing to those who want to do certain types of shitty things.  There's certainly no deterrent to using this community to perpetrate scams when the community response is pretty much always "let's stop talking about it, put it behind us and move forward".  Any community - Bitcoin related or not - where there's a critical mass of people looking to get rich quick who also have a distaste for regulation and other government intervention is a scammer haven and this community is no exception.

If Bitcoin isn't robust enough to withstand negative publicity and negative events then it is ultimately doomed to remain a niche technology used only by Satoshi fanboys.

Jesus wept.  People say exactly the same thing about anything negative which happens in the Bitcoin world.  "It's not good for Bitcoin", "let's put it behind us and move forward".  It's one of the reasons why there are no meaningful consequences for scammers.

Like it or not, Bitcoin is going to be used for things which attract the attention of the authorities, whether it's Silk Road, extortion attempts or trading child porn.  "lalalala I can't hear you" is not the best way to respond to things which bring negative attention to Bitcoin.

You're also forgetting that many people in the community thought that the ransom attempt was a good thing in that it got Bitcoin mentioned in the mainstream media in a big way.  For once, it wasn't only those who read the technology pages who were reading about Bitcoin - anyone following the US election campaign could have learned about Bitcoin for the first time because of the coverage the extortion attempt received.

Money is not a “social institution”, as the report claims. The ECB is a social institution. Money is the property of individuals; it does not depend on any institution for it to come into being or have its value (Bitcoin being the latest example of this, if indeed it is money; the FSA in the UK says it is not) and the best form of money is gold. Gold in your hands is separate from any issuer, has a value in and of itself, “inherent value” and is not a part of ‘Society’ or a ‘social institution’ or any other fictional socialist nonsense.

Money has not been affected by technological innovations; it remains exactly the same in nature, just as man’s nature has not changed because he can make a phone call. This is a fundamental, though not surprising, error of the authors of this work.