Pretty good up to this point, but it's become obvious to me that you still don't understand the difference between a barter system and a currency system.  Money 'evoloves' is any free society to permit an unknwn third party trade.  So that the chicken farmer does not have to negotiate with the baker to accept a trade in chickens.  The farmer can sell his extra chicken to the doctor, and then by some bread, then the baker can go get his checkup.  No two parties must need be aware of the third in order for the trade to occur.  The thing that is traded between all three parties is the currency.  It's not neccessary that this currency be a commodity, but historicly that is the case.

Yes, an educated mind.



The utility that I get from bitcoins, or from US dollars or Euros, is only in what I can trade them for.  They have no 'intrinsic' utility.  Not for me, and not for anyone else.  Feel free to try and come up with a use for currencies outside of their monetary trade uses.

The Romans used many things as money, besides gold and silver.  More popular than either of the traditional metals were salt and iron nails.  It should be obvious enough that both of those have utility beyond their uses as a medium of exchange.

As an aside, that is where we get the convention of sizing nails in "pennies" even though the actual metric is denoted in a small letter "d".  It was originally measured in 'denarius', the *official" standard silver coin of the Roman empire.  That alone should give one a clue as to how highly valued a simple iron nail was to the common Roman, since a normal nail for home construction is called a "16 penny"; and a man named Jesus from Nazarath was betrayed for 30 denarius, significantly less than the value of the three large nails used to pin that man to a dead tree.

I think that a great many people on this list would benefit from a book called, "Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?" by Ray Bradbury.

This could open up a potiential attack vector, if any thief were to discover that you have a bitcoin client running on your home machine with continuous access.  It could also serve as a sign that you have a client running on your home machine, even if your server was indeed secure.  The main reason that most people have never been actively hacked over their broadband connection, is that most people don't have anything on their home computers worth stealing.  All this will change if bitcoin takes off.  If a talented thief cannot beat the blockchain, he can likely still find a mark in the wide world; and if the home pc is well secured, then the home become a physical target.

IMHO, it's worth the disk space to be able to run a full client on the phone.

I need a portable bitcoin client, one that can reside entirely on a USB thumbdrive.  I would prefer to be able to run under both GNU/Linux or Windoze, but Windoze I need. 

Can the client reach out from within a network, even if the ports are blocked?  Is it possible to configure a client to reach out using a different port number and succeed?  I can use port 443 almost anywhere, but the high ports are blocked in most of the places that I can get Internet service in public.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

No, it is not.  The US dollar is a fiat currency, and nothing more.



Historicly the yellow metal was prized for it's beauty in jewelry.  In our modern world, there are many uses for it in industry for which it is ideal even though it is too expensive.  For example, lead is poisonous to humanity, but it's mass number makes it both a wonderful material for making ship ballasts and radiation shielding.  Gold has been used for both these things in the past, but only in very specific situations. 

A personal question, Red.  Is English your first language? 

If there is no use for something outside of the context of a currency, then it is not a commodity.

That's not true at all.  It seems too many people who post on these lists, do so under the pretense of understanding economic theories.


Gold has an "inherent" value, not because other people value it as a medium of exchange or a store of value, (a currency) but because it has real utility outside of this context.  Gold is used in many products that *require* it, and would be used in many more if not for the monetary premium that the desires of all of the people who desire it for it's currency uses.  Gold is, in fact, less abundant in our modern world in an "above ground" refined state than silver.  Silver, however, is not prized (by enough people) for it's properties as a currency.  So it's value is much closer to it's value for it's industrial uses, for which there are many. 

And are you are seriously going to claim that a can of soup or a can of soda doesn't have an 'inherent' value?

The calculations are not wasted, they are an investment into the cryptographic strength of the system.  If people were willing to donate clock cycles to some other endeavor, they would do so.  For a great many; however, the thought of helping to defend an online currency system, for which each is personally invested, is a far reaching act of service.

Then you should make a simple but separate webpage to put on the 'trade' page.  This forum buries things to deep, and only represents a small percentage of people who would otherwise use bitcoins to buy a book from you.

You have a right to your own opinions, but not your own facts.  It is impossible, by definition, for bitcoins to be a commodity.  A commodity requires a utility outside of the context of a medium of exchange or a store of value; beyond being simply a currency.  Not for you, personally, but for someone.  Historicly, gold and silver both have (and still do) have utility as jewlery.  Presently, silver has industrial utilities, and gold would also if it wasn't valued so much more than other alternatives.

Bitcoins can *never* have any utility beyond their use as a medium of exchange or a store of value; and a FRN or a Euro wouldn't even make decent toilet paper.

Bitcoins are no more a commodity than US Federal Reserve Notes are, and nor are they backed by any fixed commodity standard.

"Hard money" is a commodity that is 1) durable 2) divisable and 3) difficult to fake and 4) difficult to produce.

Bitcoins are a currency, but neither are they backed by a commodity standard of any kind, nor do they represent an obligation (debt) of a bank or government like a fait currency.  Money can also be a currency, if they are minted into a standard denomination, but money does not have to be a currency.  But a paper currency is not money; at best, paper currencies are a symbol and substitute for the money.  Even this mush has not been the case anywhere in the world since the Swiss were pressured into dropping the gold standard.

That's what I said.  The video is misleading, and will perpetuate the 'good as gold' myth.  This is not something that we want to support.  It's only an analogy.

I'm sorry, but I didn't care for it.  I makes a decent ad, which I imagine was the goal, but it will perpetuate the myth that bitcoins are comparable to gold.  This is not so, and should not be repeated.  The process may be an online comparable to mining for gold, but gold is hard money.  Bitcoins are not hard money.

Speed is a secondary goal.

I understand the Y2038 problem from a layman's perspective.  My point was that, I doubted that a Y2038 problem exists within the structure of bitcoin.  Since the timestamp is relative only to a particular position within the blockchain, there is no reason that a client should require an accurate timestamp within the block.  And then, what would that be?  GMT?  I'm pretty sure that my client is doing fine with local time.  If that could be getting any successful blocks rejected, let me know, please.

I'm not a programmer, but I have doubts that any of those 32 bit variables are subject to rolling over antime near 2038.  My understanding, however limited it may be, is that the timestamp of the blockchain is relative only to it's position within the chain, and not subject to any such limitations.  I'm sure that the two week difficulty calculations require an accurate count of seconds, but at worst, that would just throw off the calculations for the two weeks around the rollover in 2038.  And since there is a limit to just how much the difficulty may change in any two week period, even that isn't particularly crucial.

Transaction fees are currently very rare, and cannot be collected by anyone except the computer that solves the block anyway.  The only way to get bitcoins from the system is to 'generate', but the best stragedy, IMHO, is to offer goods or services in exchange for bitcoins already in circulation.

The power used is not wasteful.  It is simply what the owner is willing to commit to the project.  Even so, it may be used even as "waste heat".  I am an electritian by trade, and years ago I had the following idea form, while installing a 'heat trace' network on insulated sprinkler lines inside an open air parking garage.

The 'heat trace' is a fairly expensive cable that has a continuous resistive core to produce low intensity electric heat along the length of the pipe that it's taped onto.  Insulation is then wrapped around this assembly.  The best, and most efficient, systems have a temp reactive core; so that the closer to the freezing point that the cable itself becomes at any given length, the lower the resistance across the core becomes, resulting in an increase in heat output along the colder and less well insulated sections. 

At the time, I was playing with an early form of distributed computing called "Condor", which allowed single processes to be exported to other computers upon a network and their disk I/O shipped back across the network to a master server without the process being able to tell the difference.  I thought then that a small "computer on a chip" wired upon a flat network cable would be able to effectively perform the same functions of keeping the pipes above freezing with local temp sensitivity while also crunching numbers in exactly the same way that bitcoin requires.  Such an idea would require a network that permited quite a bit of power in order to not need an unacceptable number of power points along the pipe, but imagine the usefulness of such a system for companies that have such needs in very high (or very low) latitudes.

What if such a system were retrofitted onto the Alaskan Oil Pipeline, for example, one mile at a time?