My comments were directed toward presenting a potential explanation to the 'mystery' of how 'public services' provided by corporate entities come to be.

Many of us never really saw the storage aspect of the block chain as much as a problem, and I'm pretty sure we've been through that before.  Access to the data both locally for functional purposes and for WAN transmission catch-up operations are somewhat more salient concerns, but they are surmountable.  The defining issue here is real-time and near real-time economic activity on the network, and how core Bitcoin is going to evolve to support this.  If it does so natively, I argue that it is almost certain to fall victim to abusive surveillance practices and be under constant threat of technical and legal attacks if it challenges other solutions.

That said, it is a perfectly valid point of view that most potential users don't really care about the privacy issues and the service providers are right to make a dime from their efforts anyway, and also that the solution does not necessarily need to present a challenge to other solutions if implemented 'correctly'.  It's not my point of view, but I can accept it as valid.

I have to agree with this.  As a group, we should be ultra-thankful that Bitcoin-Central performed well on formulating a workable reconciliation process and making so many people whole (in BTC terms.)  There was always going to be 'dust' and occasional 'clumps' of value left to sweep up.  Whether by accident or design, the rightful recipients of this value is Bitcoin-Central, and it would be a huge can of worms to modify their reconciliation rules which were quite fair and reasonably well communicated.  IMHO.

What remains to be seen is how much transparency Bitcoin-Central employs in dealing with the 'dust' and the other aspects of this crime.  They have the ability to provide useful information and actions which would benefit the Bitcoin ecosystem at large through the next year or so.  I personally believe that efforts to do so will be a big factor in their failure or success as a for-profit organization.

I would not doubt that gross emotional responses could be detected in humans.  Like 'love of Big Brother' for example.  I'm actually a little surprised that the technology does not exist now or if it does, that it's not used to ferret out the likes of Snowden before he was given root access to the machine.

Beyond that, I would not rule out the possibility that thoughts which are formulated through semi-vocal means within the mind might be tapped with some amount of precision.  At some point anyway.

That hypothesis should remain open in most cases, and especially in anything related to Bitcoin.  Even the Bitcoin solution itself.

The best marker I can think of the lend confidence to a system is whether the principles have been put under significant personal attack.  Phil Zimmerman (Silent Circle) and Kim Dotcom are two people who have received a fair amount of grief over their histories of involvement with the Internet.  It's always possible that the purported attacks and punishments were elaborate hoax's and/or that the individuals have been flipped, but it is still a highly useful data-point.

Technically speaking, I think it was the king of England's tax men who were the target of irritated citizens ire.

But ascribing ownership where it does not fit is a common rhetorical trick which is fairly effective.  Like why is Snowden 'giving away our secrets' for instance.  I commonly hear that from people who I know with complete certainty are not the connected insiders who held the secret that there existed a truly extraordinary amount of domestic surveillance.

Well of course they do.  The last person I would trust would be someone who claims they are going to take a bullet for me.  They are either hopelessly neive or bald-faced liars.

It's an aggravating corundrum that one gets the best info on who is trustworthy only after they've been shut down.  Parenthetically, I gained a lot more confidence in Mt. Gox after they were given a fair amount of grief by the US authorities.


Accepting Bitcoin is one of the things that gives mega.co.nz some credibility in my mind.

After Snowden's leaks shedding light on how closely the 'five eyes' are cooperating I do not like that they are based in New Zealand...but it's preferable to the US at least.  I do hope that they employ infrastructure commissioned in disparate jurisdictions, and that they and engineered the nerve center to be able to migrate seamlessly if the need arises.


The only solution I will truly trust is one where it is technically impossible for the provider to do one thing or another, and who provides a lot of transparency and system level design whereby I can validate certain things.  Here again, Mega.co.nz seems to have a pretty solid framework for making that theoretically possible.

Lavabit (or perhaps Zimmerman) mentioned the difficulty of securing mail (presumably meta-data) under the current (and dated) protocols such as POP and IMAP.  I assume that they are talking about routing.  It may be possible to devise a system based on one-time use addresses which are similar in some ways to Bitcoin addresses, and combined with a series of proxies operated on a P2P basis, it could become pretty challenging to perform meaningful analytics even with a huge advantage in terms of network taps which the NSA and it's minions have.

One way or another, I think it is finally safe to assume that it makes no logical sense to trust 'the powers that be' to have any restraint at all in terms of their means and methods of imposing control on the masses.  Nor is it wise believe anything they might say since it is abundantly clear that they will flat-out lie about any operations or plans.  Thus if the masses desire or need a solution, it is only logical to work on one which is theoretically sound against any and all attacks.  This stands for both a currency solution and a communications solution.

Humptulips Washington on the other hand...not so sure about those guys.

Typically through monetizing the intelligence information coming off user access and generally enticing traffic for other properties which do so, though in the case of archive.org I think they may be primarily a philanthropic organization.  One way or another, if they are US based it is a fair assumption that any network interaction will be analyzed by various state and private organizations.  Indeed, unless one is exceedingly careful that assumption should be made about any Internet activity anywhere.

Bringing things back to Bitcoin, I see this sort of utility as a threat to the solution.  Any crypto-currency will be a rich source of intelligence information in proportion to it's success.  There is probably a role for a solution which welcomes such analysis for users who don't care and a role for a different implementation which focuses on hardening against such analysis (and the potential for sister monitoring and legal infrastructure to attack the solution), but each implementation will have one opportunity to decide what camp they wish to be in.  Being the first, Bitcoin get's the 'first round draft choice' here, though it looks to me like the principle movers of Bitcoin have already made the decision.  For my part, I'm falling back into the mode of deciding to live with whatever decision is made...as if I have a choice...

Probably any nation with the organizational ability to develop nuclear weapons would have show 'restraint' if they were in our position.  We never had the ability to take over and police other populations and no great need for resources that could only be had through genocidal acts.  WW-II opened up other ways of achieving a larger share of the pie for us so it would have been stupid to opt for nuclear war (though various people argued for this from time to time.)

I feel that the US was a different nation 80 years ago.  The main reason I feel this way is that so many top scientist immigrated here and helped up develop nuclear weapons, and largely because they seemed to have confidence in our nation as a force of good.  In fairness it needs to be pointed out that the likes of Germany and the USSR were not much competition in this regard.  Anyway, it is hard to imagine anyone immigrating here now for that reason though plenty of people still come here for the money.  As we descend into a totalitarian surveillance state it will be interesting to see how that impacts the quality of our immigrant population.

I've been following it and am not at all surprised.  It's what I've been harping on for some time...if the US doesn't like something on the Internet, the pressure which can be brought to bare against it is greater than most people imagine.  Especially young  males.  It is why I feel that Bitcoin should be actively forming a hardened shell.  The strategy of getting the the US government to 'like' Bitcoin as a means of protection is probably a losing strategy in the end.

Bitcoin cannot be killed, but it can be forced into a role where it is used only by highly technical individuals...and very brave ones at that.

Some people are capable and some are not.  We employ armies of mercenaries from all over the world and they have no qualms about murder for sport.  And we have a lot of people with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan who's brains are scrambled (literally and figuratively) to form a pool.

Ultimately no nation has ever had trouble finding manpower to commit atrocities domestically and the US would be no exception.  Even with appropriate indoctrination only a minority of citizen (and foreign-born mercenaries) would be capable so there needs to be a force multiplication factor but modern hardware and systems make that more possible now than probably at any time in the past.

Even though an armed citizenry is not an insurmountable problem for the imposition of martial law and what-not, it is still a nuisance and a complication.  Of the multitude of things I fool around with (cars, tractors, ladders, falling trees, etc) firearms are one of the least dangerous.  Simply put, they are simply not as big a problem as they are pumped up to be, and it is not unreasonable to hypothesize that one of the reasons for the anti-2nd amendment campaign is in anticipation of finding it desirable to control the population through more authoritarian means at some point on the horizon.

In a scenario where there was hot citizen/government combat, most of the citizens would fall victim to some video game player operating a drone from half way across the country.  The poor guy with the peashooter would be just poof.  gone.  No idea or warning about what hit them.

The main strength that the 2nd provides in terms of a policy at this point is the alienation it would cause to attempt to take it away.  It would be very messy.  A lot of people are really attached to their guns.  I am, though not nearly so much as a lot of my friends and neighbors.  I see the high rates of gun ownership in my area as a key element in keeping confrontational crime to a surprisingly low level in a part of the country where we have 2 or 3 law enforcement personnel covering 1500 square miles and much poverty.

We have a relatively strong contingent of tweakers and various 'white trash' who occasionally use firearms in their tussles among themselves, but absent guns (which a lot of them cannot legally own anyway) they would just use some other utensil.  Usually they do anyway.  The vast majority of citizens are 'normals' and taking firearms from them would create very legitimate psychological and quality of life issues since they would feel much more vulnerable to threats, and not without good reason.

Probably the only way to get firearms out of the hands of the citizenry of the US at this point would be to implement a forced urbanization campaign as was attempted in Vietnam.  At that point a computer program could do the drone strikes with simple logic, and it would be safer doe to 'friend or foe' decisions which humans often fuck up.  I mean 'authorized' personnel would be in the non-urban zones from time to time working on resource exploitation, infrastructure maintenance, etc.

Unsurprising.  The 'marketing' is not what I would consider to be particularly up-front.  Many of the claims about privacy, peer2peer, scalability, centralization, etc were at best temporarily true.  Many of the legitimate advocates of the solution honestly believed the 'hype',  and very few of those who understood the technical aspects of the solution sufficiently to see the looming issues did much toward disabusing the crowd about some of some of the misconceptions.  We all have at least a financial stake in growing the userbase after all, and it would probably be disingenuous to neglect that as a factor in how the solution has been presented.

[y]es.

Mainly 'readers'.

The graphic was hilarious to me.

Unfortunately is is almost NOT a joke that the fact that Hispanic janitorial staff show no signs of terrorist activity is sort of proof of guilt.  If they were innocent then they would not be so careful to hide their evil activity with great success from our highly trained analysts with the most technically sophisticated systems that (my) money can buy.

About 5 minutes after the bright idea of a net struck someone, the idea of (what we commercial gill-netter fishermen would call) 'corking off' the entire river would occur.  Fishing would be fantastic for about four years...at least for the guy with the lowest position in the river...then mysteriously dry up completely.

Many years later it would be discovered that salmon return to the river in which they hatched to spawn on a four year cycle and 'society' would devise something called the 'Department of Fish and Game' who would modulate fishing effort such that the commercial and substance harvest would sustain for the lasting benefit of the entire population.

There really is no organized network of terrorism with religious group at the apex for the simple reason that 'terrorism' in the form of civilian murder is not very appealing to Muslims, Christians, or any other group of normal people.  There may be some lone wolf types and small splinter groups, but they are very rare.  This is most unfortunate for the leadership of the United States who are well served by 'terror' within our own civilian populations, and I believe that this is the basis for trying to cultivate more of them through fairly gratuitous assaults against Muslim populations world-wide.

There are plenty of 'Islamist', but they are strongly focused on their own domestic struggles and could not give two shits about the West.  I can understand this.  I pity any populations which comes under control of religious fundamentalism, and I would certainly hate to see Jerry Falwell issuing fatwas in my neighborhood, but it's simply not worth very much to me personally to fight against Sharia law in the Swat valley in Pakistan.  That is for the Pakistani people to deal with.  It is double-plus-not-worth-it to me to shred the constitution and have my country committing blatant war crimes for this goal or to control the energy transport routes are any other such project.

I say 'duh', but then I'm a 'conspiracy theorist.'   This is a natural evolution of mass covert surveillance and it is inconceivable that the system will not continue to degrade and be subverted even as it continues to expand.

Every Joe Sixpack that signs up for a cell phone is worth on average something like $3000 in revenue to corporate service providers.  Every Joe Sixpack who is thrown in prison is worth probably hundreds of thousands to corporate service providers.  Of course we see the development of a corp/gov feeder system to tap and expand this revenue stream.

A consider myself a 'socialist' but that is mainly because I rely on myself to define the term rather than accepting the spin that others use to color and contrast it.  A run-down of my philosophical chain of thought follows.

1)  Human history has been dominated by a hunter-gatherer mode of existence and that is the social grouping mode that we've evolved toward being successful in.  As populations have grown this mode is largely obsolete.  In this mode of existence individual variation in humans would account for, for instance, a somewhat larger production of game.  But these societies tend to be very equitable so the best one achieves for being superior is a little extra respect.

2)  In modern societies a modest elevation of one skill or another can translate into a lasting accumulation which impoverishes the rest of the group in some proportion.

3)  In even more modern societies like the US today, there a modest wealth accumulation can be leveraged in a sling-shot effect to create enormous accumulations and impoverish an even larger percentage of the population.

4)  Significant disparities in wealth inevitably lead to social strife and revolutions which are bloody and unpleasant.  In the proceeding interval (which can last for generations) totalitarian systems develop in order to protect the wealth accumulations and that makes life less than ideal for most people.

5)  The synthesis of 1-4 lead me to the conclusion that 'distribution of wealth' is necessary for stable and tolerable existence in society.

6)  Distributing this wealth in the form of education, health care, insurance for those who have the misfortune of being invalid or aged, etc, is to me the most logical course of action and will product the largest amount of human content.  If it can produce a society which the participants can be proud of then it is likely to have the credibility to be enduring.