I suggest you stick to the 80/20 rule and simply publish your Bitcoin address on Facebook.

Chances are that if someone knows how the get hold of more than 0.05 Bitcoins, they know how to copy and paste a Bitcoin address.

Also in the guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/dec/19/broadband-sex-safeguard-children-vaizey

And yet again all internet users collectively have to pay the price for the incompetence of certain parents.


In other words, 85% of computer literate parents are too lazy to spend 30 minutes researching and downloading a family filter (can it be that hard?).  If they really cared that much about their children seeing porn you would think that they would at least spend so much effort protecting them.  
  
So if it's going to be a draconian solution, how about cutting off the internet connection of those responsibility-dodging parents for gross negligence, so that the rest of us internet users can just get on with our business?

Bleh, I would be disappointed if that were to become the main use of Bitcoin. It would just be an investment like hundreds of others. There is nothing that "Bitcoin as an investment" does that other investments don't do.

I hope that Bitcoin's killer app will be something more innovative than that, exploiting a feature that is unique to Bitcoin.  p2p bandwidth allocation and p2p DNS allocation are two examples where Bitcoin would not only be ideal, but it would be very hard or impossible to use a centralised currency.

Asia seems really underrepresented.

I would have expected more in Japan especially, given the number of internet users.

It's only free wiithin the Eurozone, not Europe.

If you can find a profitable way of generating, go for it!

What I'm concerned about more is that a lot of newbies turn up here expecting that they should generate X amount of coins, and then become disappointed/disillusioned when their attemps yield meagre results. Or they feel that it's "unfair" that they mine so little compared to expert and early generators, because they feel entitled to X amount of coins, like our friend hromisko. And then they give up on Bitcoin for the wrong reasons.

Where did you get this 10x figure from by the way? The cost of generating is likely to vary hugely depending on individual circumstances, because it is likely to involve sunk costs that are not related to generating. Also, there are the non-monetary costs: Time invested in learning about short lived mining software, fan noise, etc.

In principle, I would consider it a fallacy to try and mimic gold. Gold has many flaws but in the non-digital era it was the best we could find as a currency for lack of alternatives. Bitcoin can be something fundamentally different to gold, and it should be if that makes it a superior currency.
 
If we start using Bitcoin for generalised timestamping and whatnot, this might increase their value, but it will also indroduce additional costs and vulnerabilities into the network.

KISS.

Sigh.

Please don't become fixated on mining. Mining is not the point of Bitcoin. Trading is.

Sometimes I feel as if the bicycle has just been invented and everybody has become obsessed with servicing their shiny new bicycle (which is required to keep the bicycle working, granted), but people have now become so obsessed with servicing that hardly anyone actually bothers to ride it.

Good luck with that.

With a centralised currency  it is already difficult enough to exclude people who try to use it outside the intended community or region.

I am curious. How do you plan to enforce these restrictions in a p2p currency? Moreover, in a p2p cryptocurrency where a user can identify himself with nothing more than a set of cryptographic keys? 

How do you plan to prevent a GPU miner (or any other kind of "speculator") from joining your network?

And who is "we"? Are you part some kind of local currency initiative? In which case, the Bitcoin software is probably not the tool you are looking for. I would suggest looking into the Ripple monetary system.   

You already have to buy rights in order to be allowed to shit.  Or at least you have to buy some of you own land if you want to shit for free. 

So why not the same for breathing?

The amount of CO2 produced by breathing is so small though that it would proabably only cost a few cents a year.  Hardly any one would even notice if you refused to pay this, let alone care.

There is some validity in the idea of trading emission rights.

The way it's done at the moment is corrupt though.

Somebody at some point has to start with emission rights and that somebody at the moment is a goverment.

Why should any government be given emission rights for free, only to sell them on? The atmosphere is a global good and no single government has regisdiction over the whole planet.

Also, a government can arbitrarily create more emission rights according to subjective criteria that can easily be manipulated by voters, lobbyists, dictators, etc, for reasons other than protecting the planet.

Finally, lifetimes of governments are finite and global warming is a long term problem (100 year span).

I am not buying any emission rights from any government, that's for sure.
 
If the premise is that global warming harms ALL human beings more or less equally, and that every human being is equally responsible for reducing his/her CO2 emissions, then the sensible approach would be this:

Every person on the planet gets a certain (equal) volume of emission rights by default. The total is determined by consensus, much like the 21M figure in the Bitcion community.

Individuals can then sell their emisions rights to other individuals or corporations in their web of trust. The ripple monetary system would be perfect for this.

If someone breaches the "contract" and emits more CO2 than they have the rights for, this would mean social pressure from friends who have bought rights from them for BTC.

That kind of scheme I would consider spending my BTC on.

Ok, here is my controversial opinion on this:

Casual Bitcoin users should not be encouraged to do any mining at all.

They are wasting their time.

Leave the mining to the experts.

Mining is an essential aspect of Bitcoin. That does not mean it's the most useful or even  interesting aspect  for the majority of users.  

Newcomers always seem to get fixated on the (relatively minor) mining aspect, and this distracts from what Bitcoin is really about, an exchange tool. I feel that if all this effort, time, and passion that so many newcomers devote to mining, was devoted to improving the exchangeability of Bitcoin instead, this project would be a lot more successful by now.



If I want to acquire 1g of gold, there are several ways I could go about this.

1) I could head to the mountains with a gold pan and wade in the river all day every day, and after half a year of panning I would find a nugget (if I am lucky).

2) I could join a collective of 100 panners and head to the mountains for just a weekend. Then whoever is lucky enough to find a nugget agrees to divide it equally amoung the other 99 panners.

3) I could do what I am good at, be it programming or hairdressing, for a few hours, earn some money and then invest in a professional mining company that sends its heavy machinery capable of extracting thousands of nuggets per day.

4) I could buy the gold from someone who already owns some.


Anyone who did 1) IRL would be considered nuts, unless it's purely a hobby that they genuinely enjoy. But that is a good analogy of what you are doing when you attempt to mine Bitcoins with a CPU.

Option 2) would be considered slighly less nuts IRL, yet still highly inefficient and silly to say the least. But that is essentially what a pooled mining effort is.

Option 3) is smarter but still too cumbersome for a casual gold user because it requires detailed industry knowledge and investing experience, and because you have to wait until you get your gold.

Option 4) is by far the most sensible choice for the majority of people.

Want some Bitcoins? Trade them! That's what Bitcoins are for.

What I would like to see more in music sites is a bounty + exclusive release system.

For example, everytime the artist releases a new song, the 30-second sample is posted on the website. The artist can define a bounty and a timeframe. Fans can then pay as many Bitcoins as they choose into the bounty account (perhaps above a minimum, also set by the artist).

As soon as the bounty is reached, the mp3 file is made available only to those fans who have contributed, perhaps a month before it is released for sale to the general public. If the bounty is not reached in the specified timeframe the Bitcoins are returned to the fans.

edit: coming to think of it, this is more a ransom than a bounty, but I think ransoms work better for music than bounties because music is such a subjective emotional good that it's hard to for the listener define in advance what she wants.

ಠ_ಠ

Assange has enough "whuffie" to get by without money. Even after all his bank accounts and credit cards have been blocked, he could travel to almost any country in the world and couchsurf, hitch rides, or use air miles from people who are sympathetic to his cause.

Shit, that Wikipedia admin is seriously starting to suffer from paranoia. Now he is even accusing us of hacking into dormant Wikipedia accounts to promote the subject. *rolls eyes*

Maybe we should just leave Wikipedia alone. Soner or later Bitcoin will appear there by itself anyhow.

I don't understand why Americans get so neurotic over the supposed fall of their empire. It's not the end of the world, you know.

Look at the UK for example. It's an empire that has been falling for over 100 years now and is still falling (at least in terms of relative importance on the world stage).

Daily life consequences? Not noticeable. Yes, a lot of people moan about the good old times when "Britain was still great", but they ultimately get on with their lives.  London is a great place to live, state or no state.

There are a lot of examples of "infinitely increasing" databases where nothing ever gets erased.

One is the US constitution, where new amendments are appended to the body of the text without removing what already exists.  Yet, the US constitution hasn't "run out of paper" in over 200 years.

Another is Wikipedia, where every edit is recorded for all eternity.

"Infitinitely increasing" is clearly not an issue. It's the rate of increase that matters.

The only banks that have the ability to create money "out of thin air" are the central banks.

This money is then lent to the high street banks, which lend it to individuals.

When you borrow 100,000 to buy a house, that is hard money. Your high street bank doesn't have the mandate to "create" it, it must borrow the money just like you.

In Bitcoin the distrubuted network acts as the central bank.

Satoshi is no different to anyone else. He does not have priviledged minting rights.

Satoshi could run a bank if he wanted to, but that would be nothing but a "high street bank".

If a few thousand bored teenagers is enough to destroy the internet, then the internet has a serious design flaw. In which case, the sooner it gets replaced by internet v2, the better.