You don't think BitChen is the Chen Jianhai referred to by Zhoutong as his "previous business associate" and scammer?

Especially as BitChen posted this forum message on 14 July 2012:

Yes, if only Gavin's avatar didn't look like he was wearing a yellow life-vest, about to bail at any moment

Have you noticed the small table on the right in the background? The one with Bernanke in mufti on the left, and Satoshi seated on the right?

In 20-30 years you'll be able to photograph the DVD on your hi-resolution digital camera, then use an app to decode the DVD pits from the photo.

Don't believe me? This guy can play vinyl LPs by putting them on a scanner, then running an app:
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/
How cool is that?

Anyway, even though DVD players will soon fade from mainstream use, there will still be some around for centuries. You can still play wax cylinders from the 1890s.

If pirate is there, my money is on pirate being the photographer.

The Triton 9100, a small ATM, draws 230 watts. There are approx 2.2 million ATMs worldwide, drawing a total of 506 MW of power. In other words, 56 Bitcoin networks.

Notice how, in the original post, pirate said "Contact me for details if you're interested". So unless anyone contacted him for details, they're not going to meet him, and pirate can claim to have fulfilled his part of this trollpromise.

Nor did pirate say that he was attending DefCon, he just said he was going to Vegas. For all we know, he may be putting all the BS&T funds on red at the roulette table in a desperate attempt to keep his scheme afloat.

In that case, pirate may be lucky and can prolong his scheme long enough to win his bet with vandroiy.

Or, if pirate loses at the roulette table, he may default on the coming interest payment. The terms of his bet with vandroiy allow for a two-week delay after a missed payment. So by 14 August, the gig is up. Just like pirate already hinted.

(I'm not invested with pirate; I'm just here to enjoy the show)

It could be like a Bitcoin jukebox; you could send a few Millies for a song of your choice to be played.

Congratulations! Kids are even more worthwhile than Bitcoin!

Anyone who can really get 15%+ monthly doesn't need to worry about getting anything back from Bitcoinica.

The bitcoins are at 1:43 and 3:53.

Most UK ISPs block all pages on the IWF's blacklist. According to the following page, there are usually around 500 to 800 pages blocked. The list is not made public:

Wikipedia - Internet Watch Foundation

Most of the blocked pages are said to be CP. The blacklist really only makes the news when they block major sites like Wikipedia or the Internet Archive.

Bitcoin is pretty-much the only type of money you can stuff in your mattress, without its value being eroded due to inflation.

Then hopefully you'll work with MagicalTux to add a checkdigit to MtGox account numbers.

Here's a very straightforward non-centralised solution:

The domain name belongs to whoever has submitted the lowest (i.e. most difficult-to-compute) hash for that name. Ownership changes if someone submits a lower (i.e. better) hash, but in that case there is a 90-day delay to give the original owner a chance to submit a better hash and keep ownership of their domain name.

Whoever can gain the most economic value from each domain name, will be the one who can afford to dedicate the most resources towards mining hashes for that name.

Suppose Microsoft Corp wants to hold on to microsoft.com. They might keep a server or two chugging away, regularly submitting lower hashes whenever they find one.

Now suppose Joe Average somehow manages to get a hower hash for microsoft.com than Microsoft themselves have been able to do. Microsoft has 90 days to improve on Joe Average's hash, before they lose the domain. So naturally, Microsoft will dedicate a big server farm to the task, bigger than Joe Average can justify economically.

With this system, no-one can squat a domain name that's more valuable to someone else, because that other person will find it worthwhile to compute enough hashes to gain control of the domain name.

Richard Stallman and Max Keiser in the one place? Awesome indeed!

Spread-spectrum wireless communication is very hard to jam.

So would I.

That illustrates a weakness, not a strength.

Someone will host a similar page that sends the private key back to the server. Then they send out 100 million emails telling people to "click here to make their bitcoins safe with a paper wallet".

The biggest contribution of Bitcoin to society may not be the monetary improvement that it brings; it may be the improvements that it forces to be developed for computer security.

Thank you theymos for clarifying (again). I'll edit my post to get it right this time.