Quote: "Where do i buy that book ?"

It's not a book, it's a patch reversion reverting a patch made by the machines that resulted in a narrative now on the market and even franchised that is slightly different from that which we are now enacting...

-MarkM-

Quote: "A court system can exist independently from a government, in fact that is preferred."

Apparently not by the Padishah Emperor.

-MarkM- (Though all other governments including Paul Muad'Dib doubtless agree with with you? Heh. Maybe Paul might? Arguable...)

Edit: "is preferred", ha ha, nice, reminds me of supreme commander...

Quote: "Anyone could explain me why would we need a new government now that we have a new, parasitefree, currency?"

I no longer have the quotes collections I used to use for .sigs, so I cannot recall the exact wording, but the Emperor Paul Muad'dib had a nice one about control the currency and the courts and the rabble can have the rest.

(Might also have been same place where he also enquired but who is to say who are the rabble and who the, uh, non-rabble I guess. Rulers, maybe?)

So basically, even the Emperor could see that currency and courts go together...

-MarkM- (Actually maybe Paul quoted Shaddam about currency and courts then added his enquiry?)

EDIT: google to the rescue:

--
"Control the coinage and the courts—let the rabble have the rest." Thus the Padishah Emperor advises you. And he tells you: "If you want profits, you must rule." There is truth in these words, but I ask myself: "Who are the rabble and who are the ruled?"
-Muad'Dib's Secret Message to the Landsraad from "Arrakis Awakening" by the Princess Irulan

Well yeah, typical people probably don't typically buy their fresh groceries, maybe not even their frozen groceries, maybe in general their groceries of any kind, online. (I can buy lots of kinds of shippable food via Amway, but not cheaper than pre-shipped stuff already sitting in a nearby Walmart or Sobeys or Superstore or Sainsbury's or Marks&Sparks...)

It also would not surprise me, though I have not actually checked, to find that buying one's books at a discount from Barnes and Noble by going to Barnes and Noble via the Amway site, might not beat Amazon's prices. Barnes and Noble never struck me as being a "low price is our selling proposition" kind of place. But as I said I have not actually compared their prices to Amazon's. Typical people maybe don't read anyway so typically don't buy books anywhere, online or off.

If you want to buy stuff offline using bitcoin having more online businesses accept it isn't really a whole lot of help probably. Most offline businesses probably don't accept any online payment systems, they accept offline payment systems that most online payment systems have pretty much been forced to have to also accept, such as credit cards and fiat currencies...

So don't bother telling we netizens that more of the grocery shops you shop at need to accept bitcoin to make bitcoin more acceptable, instead go tell more of the grocery shops you shop at that they need to accept bitcoin to make themselves acceptable!

-MarkM- (What, you don't take bitcoin? Darn, can't buy these cartloads of groceries here then sorry. Be a good clerk and re-shelve it, thanks...)

Typical people typically need to actually acquire currency before using it to save for the future or to buy things online, in fact one might even suggest that as long as the unemployment rate is not too sky-high their typical day to day use of money is as an argument in favour of getting out of bed and going to work instead of taking the day off. So possibly its primary day to use for typical people, 40 hours a week, five days a week and so on, is as someone else's carrot or stick by means of which someone else controls their time and maybe thereby their life.

Possibly USD might prove far superior to bitcoin for that day to day use.

For typical businesses though, well, gee, is it true that typically businesses are small? Thus that typical businesses are typically actually small business owners, their employees if any being preferably not actually part of the business at all because it might well be better not to get into the whole problem of trying to control other people's time and possibly thereby their lives?

A "typical business that buys things on the net"'s day to day use might well turn out to include selling things on the net. (How many businesses typically buy on the net to sell off the net? Is it more typical they'd also sell on the net?)

Do typical people who don't own their own businesses but do work for businesses work for small businesses or large businesses?

Could it be that there is a distinction here whereby trying to take control of other people's time and possibly thereby their lives, and possibly acceptance of the carrots and sticks best suited to that purpose, is good for big business (and possibly also big government) whereas trying not to take control of other people's time and possibly thereby their lives, and possibly acceptance of carrots without sticks as best suited to that purpose, is good for small business (and possibly also small government)?

For the big business typical person and the big government typical person maybe what is better about BTC than USD is they don't have to read headlines about BTC involvement in war violence bribery and economic disasters whereas one often encounters such news involving USD.

So basically USD puts in their face all kinds of bad news they maybe would rather not have to hear about. Whereas bitcoin might actually help the kinds of activities they don't want to see to not be seen by them.

-MarkM-

It seems to me from what I have learned so far about bitcoin that all of this should probably be done for Alice by thispackageisnotforlaunderingmoney software installed on her own machine, as I get the impression nothing in the blockchain records indicates whether more than one machine wrote any part of the block chain.

So why set someone else up to take the rap for laundering your money? Have cron run as many Non-Player Character accounts as you think will create sufficient illusion that there are more people playing this game than just you, the satoshi A.I. and we forum-elizabots.

It would help to have the full 8 decimals to play with of course, because then you could simulate a 99,999,999 address market by moving around less than one bitcoin.

-MarkM- (Lets make miners buy bigger disks by generating oodles of transactions for fun and not for laundering money officer no sir not me...)

I have read many times that bitcoin needs more goods and services offered in return for bitcoins, but...

I think it might also be, well, let's say "nice for those who do make such offers" if there were also more actual taking up of such offers.

My landlord put is as "show me that someone actually bought something from you using bitcoin".

Mind you he also wanted to see me actually sell a bitcoin, dumurred at me doing it via IRC, and even seemed to somehow construe my response that I'd have to sell ten rather than one due to mtgox's minimum transaction size as somehow also indicating some kind of scam.

(I suspect though that this was partly an entanglement between his offer to give me a loony on the spot he held it out offering it to see me actually sell a bitcoin. I am thinking he kind of took me as indicating he should give me ten loonies. We'd both been at better off going to bed part of our wakecycles.)

But his basic argument is that like any other ponzi of course the people who got in early and profit{|ed} the most from it want it to *look* like people are really using it for real but fact is, go try offering things in return for bitcoin and does it turn out yes there is in fact plenty of people eager to spend their bitcoins? If it is a ponzi of course there won't be, because no-one is in it to buy stuff with it, they are there to play the ponzi game...

-MarkM- (Yeah I sell stuff, even give discounts if you buy using bitcoins. So join the game, there are real merchants to make it look legit...)

Quote: "Operator takes a sizeable cut and saves it in his legal defense fund." [ sic. s/fense/fence/ ]

And the defence is what?

"I am deliberately running a bitcoin laundry, but not at all for the purpose of laundering money! My gosh are you mad, bitcoin is in no way shape or form money! ..."

Hmmm...

-MarkM-

So the target audience is to have the same stale old videos that you do eh?

To fit all this into the existing already stored block chain I re-propose my long sought "decode anything into anything" application.

Want porn? No problem, it can be decoded as porn. Would you like a and A to stand for that and *that*, or does decoding them as this and *this* look better to you?

Please specify pixel by pixel the video you wish to decode from this blockchain and we will try to find an algorithm that does indeed churn out that set of pixels when used to "decrypt" that same old blockchain...

And for the censors, hey, this app can make anything as obscene or even kiddieporn as your eyes wish to perceive it as! Please specify a pixel to change and how to change it that will to your eyes seem more prurient...

-MarkM-

Take a look at FellowTraveller's OpenTransaction.

You seem to have proposed a use-case for his "basket currency" feature maybe.

-MarkM-

I agree. Just because some forex sites only offer some currency pairs ought not prevent people from looking into how one might look at all known currencies stocks commodities goods services magic swords or whatever with an eye to whether maybe the shoelace the soldier needs to avoid tripping on way to keep the bull from killing the farmer who makes the cheese the lacemaker likes might be obtainable by some sequence of trades...

-MarkM- (Oh wait was it something other than a shoelace for want of which the rest of the old chestnut...?)

To make that more survivable it might be handy to have a way of generating a keypair from a memorable password or phrase. So you could have at least one and maybe a few private keys in your head easily, needing only access to the app that can turn that into a private key fmatching one of your addresses you keep a stash in. I am not familiar enough with how much latitude one has in inventing keys to know if that is at all feasible though.

If not I guess one could come up with schemes for inventing mnemonics for private keys then generate lots of keys with corresponding mnemonics until you find one you find memorable.
 
-MarkM-

This kind of crap makes landlubber / snailbuck currency ridiculously useless for netizens.

If we stick to bitcoin we can hopefully keep transaction costs nice and low, it seems the costs come in whenever one tries to actually make use of stupid previous-millennia earthling currencies. It seems the only reason that stuff seemed at all useful in previous millennia was because people were lugging it around in ships and wagons and carts and sacks and chests and bags and pockets plus maybe happened to have enough weaponry handy to keep those containers from being ransacked en-route...

-MarkM-

Hmm, it could actually be an interesting experiment to run with that chap's fork of bitcoin as a distinct separate currency.

It might have an advantage over a started from scratch fork (forked code but started from scratch blockchain) simply because everyone who had any bitcoins when that chap did his fork of the blockchain now not only still has their original bitcoins but also has that many of his newfangled badcoins or batcoins or whatever one might like to call them.

My "Martian BotCoins" I have implemented for the Freeciv Galactic Milieu game don't offer everyone who had bitcoins way back when an equal number of Martian BotCoins. So people who did have bitcoins back then might find his badcoins or batcoins or whatever more interesting than my Martian BotCoins simply because *they already have some* ...

If he doesn't want people to *already have some* of his newfangled coins, maybe he would be better of starting from scratch like Martian BotCoins have, but maybe to save some lead time in (re)creating his billionaire status he might like to code his massive windfall into the genesis block of his new currency.

Which would *you* (the generic 'the reader') prefer, a new currency you already have some of or a new currency you don't have any of?

-MarkM- (I think Satoshi probably  owns the genesis 50 Martian BotCoins)

I too found the barwen.sh offer interesting. I only came upon this thread last night and am still thinking about what exactly I could use such an account for but the price point is certainly very interesting.

Would it be okay to run an IRC bot?

Maybe even one that does nothing other than keep a #channel in existence and op the "real" bots of the channel whenever they come back online. (A placeholder bot not one that people chat to etc.)

-MarkM-

Sweat? What is sweat in this context, exactly?

Does it differ from elbow grease? If so, how?

-MarkM- (Who does, indeed, have time to spend but is curious why to spend it on what exactly, and how...)

The link provided earlier, http://finanzcrash.com/english/aberrations.html makes an interesting argument about the opportunity benefit of liquidity holding up the entire interest rate system and thereby forcing capitalism to forever maintain scarcity instead of actually satisfying demand.

As I read it seemed to me that it is an argument in favour of having the medium of exchange inflate but not thereby also causing the medium of capital to inflate. Thus the impression it gave me is that it might actually be better to let the inflationary fiat currencies continue to serve as the medium of exchange, the faster the inflation the more urgency to actually spend it instead of hoard it for the opportunity benefits of liquidity.

Basically the link argues in favour of having a mechanism that will balance that opportunity benefit so means of exchange will actually get used to buy stuff instead of held over society in a maybe I will buy something maybe I won't uncertainty creating uncertainty that itself probably encourages others to also want to poise in liquidity waiting to see what one ought to buy and so on ultimately leading to gosh knows what final catastrophe impossible to predict because of the higher and higher uncertainties leading to all kinds of possible chain reaction modes of failure.

So maybe it is good that most buying and selling happens using heavily inflating fiat currencies, and we should aim to keep our savings in bitcoin and spend the fiat stuff...

...Which I suppose is simply bad money driving out good like G's law said...

-MarkM-

Years ago PayPal's terms of service pretty much ruled out currency exchanging.

Private individuals would tick off some other option than "this is me selling currency" or "this is a currency exchange", instead claiming it is a personal debt owed or the sale of a service. Because to say it was a currency exchange or sale of currency would in those days have been against PayPal's terms.

I am not aware of that part of their terms having changed since then. Has it?

-MarkM-

./dev/urandom might be faster and more efficient than sh /dev/urandom.

(Or should that be exec /dev/urandom? I have been awake too long.)

I am not entirely convinced his dying of radiation poisoning would be the best possible outcome, since obviously that would, rather, be for a glitch in his system to cause him to generate for me instead of for him(*). So actually sorry he would earn no bitcoins other than however many I decide to tip him for grabbing me all the bitcoins.

(*) Plus the hashes when decoded correctly would be some awesome insight or immortality formula or something...

-MarkM-

I just heard from an old friend I had not seen in a long time. It seems he might be a potential tenant for my primitive rustic hideway, so I have suggested he consider using bitcoin for any financial aspects of such a spring break... Seems promising... A tenant who will pay bitcoin? Cool idea.

Of course he will probably earn it back and maybe more if he helps keep the place from falling down...

-MarkM-