I would say maybe the point is just about the facilitation, the convenience of working through the client-side tool. Instead of making the FEDs work (i.e, send user information on a strictly one per warrant basis, and in a uniform format), the tech companies and ISPs choose to make it comfortable for them, which increases the risk of abuse.

He didn't make a right call, what he was saying can never be defined as a "call", just saying it's going to go down doesn't make it a "call", to make a call he has to give a target a priori, which he didn't, it's all hindsight.

If Snowden is that shrewd with politics(which I doubt), he should know that if China allows him to stay, she will get no credit because he is in Hong Kong, otherwise if he is handed back, it will be face-losing for China because she apparently chooses to cooperate with her assumed ideological archenemy, so yes, he indeed made the right bet, but only by coincidence I guess.

It's Hitler's new miner in his bunker.

It may sound like news to you, but Hong Kong indeed doesn't ultimately answer to Beijing, at least not always.

Many spiritual organizations like Falun Gong, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_gong#Suppression which are pervasively suppressed/banned in the mainland China, have large bases and many believers in Hong Kong and do lots of propagandas there. Lots of anti-CCP books are also published there, and in the June 4th of every year there was a massive assembly of people gather to commemorate those killed in the Tiananmen Masscare, all these would have been impossible had Hong Kong needed to obey Beijing's order when it comes to evictions/deportations.

It's intolerable that NSA, the Holy See of the cryptographic world, somehow considers it appropriate and justified to create a program which operates based on the abominated principle "security through obscurity". Let's be real, no terrorist worth his salt is reckless enough to not take into account the hypothetical existence of massive and thorough surveillance programs by all kinds of governments, and will not do their uttermost to foil such imagined attempts at eavesdropping. The mere existence of such programs should thus never be considered a national secret(the values of the variables used in the data analysis should be), rather than be transparent and explain to the public why the survelliance program can never be used to collect private data of law-abiding Amercian citizens, like any self-respecting cryptologist would have done, they opt to keep everything in secrecy and put Americans' Fourth Amendment rights in peril.

On one hand, the system is specifically designed to make what you have in mind crazily difficult to happen, the supply of "Bitcoin" can only be increased when every current user(literally) agree to do so. Otoh, it's also ridiculously easy, you can go fork it right now and change the limit to whatever number you like.

This is Bitcoin.

Used to be a Firefox evangelist, and rally for them with the same enthusiasm as I have now for Bitcoin, haven't been one for a long time, since the browser and the web landscape has been fundamentally shifted, the war has already been won, and they were the guys that made it happen, Google only jumped on the bandwagon that Mozilla had built, in fact, Mozilla and Linux are the projects that gave me faith in the possibility of changing the world with the sort of open source projects that no big guy gives a damn about at the beginning.

This action would be important for me as I have long hoped to see them moving from Google as their main source of funding.

Of course it's just another 'gift card', or are you telling me that Apple will somehow allow you to get their coins, wait for the price to go up, then come back to buy their products at 1/3 the price?

It's funny how many people buying bitcoins completely neglect digital signature for their network traffic. 

That's the whole point, it has nothing to do with all the easy collision-finding algorithms you can come up with.

Seriously, get a clue, there is no such thing as "breaking" SHA256, other than quick collison finding, which will only affect address hashing(can be updated to something theoretically unbreakable), and most certainly it doesn't affect mining at all.(to quote Gavin, we would have been just fine using MD5).

Not a threat at all, for one thing people would not be able to trade imoney, it has to be pegged to USD, so it will go up and fall with it. And no merchant will accept something Apple can basically just "print".

What will happen when we pressure test CCP's tolerance? Like, by funding human rights activists with it?

Then you will be working on 10 different chains, each with 5% of the network hashpower behind it?

I was unclear in the quoted post,  if you don't store'em blocks and suddenly flood the network with a longer branch, you can't attack the network, your blocks will be in the main chain the first time.

Also, all the alternative clients developers will have to understand the Bitcoin-qt code, some of them will notice it if there is anything wrong.

No, I was talking about the network in its early days, not right now, and if we give up on proof of work, it will shrink to what it was like in its early days.

If you don't use proof-of-work, a possibility is to use one-IP-per-vote, a script kiddle in control of zombie machines could then very easily pull off a double spend attack under such a system.

With the current design, the only entities that are powerful enough to do a 51% attack are determined groups with vested interest in the old system(govs/banks, etc), so it's possible they will keep trying despite the cost. But again, the more important point is-what would have happened had it not being designed this way?  Some script kiddles in control of several thousand zombie machines could have subdued the whole network.

Had Bitcoin not being designed this way, it would have been killed by a different kind of 51% attack in its early days, Bitcoin doesn't only need to face threats of governments, but also that from botnet operators, random script kiddles etc. In fact, that we are dealing with government pressure itself is evidence enough that the system worked. Also, 51% attackers can follow you wherever you go, however many times have hard-fork.

The hashchain itself is what tells you that the ledger is the result of network consensus, if you can't do it anyway else more efficiently,  then it's not pointless busywork, because it serves a useful purpose in the most efficient way, or you would be essentially saying all cryptographic works(at least those inlvoving hash functions) are pointless busyworks.