Same with me.

But I think it's a fantastic idea, because it totally removes one objection that some people have to Bitcoin.

Under anarcho-capitalism a natural balance is reached because monopolies, being large organisations, are slower to react to changes than smaller more-nimble organisations. The time always comes when the monopoly is caught out by fast-changing events to which it can't react quickly enough to maintain its monopoly position.

That stability is good for the dominance and profitability of the government-favored players in those sectors, but for society as a whole it would be better to have dynamism and the opportunity for change than to have "stability".

This is my rig:



My other one uses carrots.

The arrest of Satoshi would end the rally promptly, I think. Let's just hope he doesn't have sex in Sweden.

Humans will be the peripherals that gather energy for Bitcoin.

There are always people who are closing bank accounts in protest against something or other. And in the United Kingdom, many people can't even open a bank account because they don't have the right identity documents.

I've told my friends about it too. Half of them think it's a scam, and the other half think it's an irresponsibly reckless investment.

Agreed. I have got it wrong every time that I have sold, and I have ended up buying back into Bitcoin at a higher price.

The people of Oman can celebrate already, because MtGox touched $2.65 today. The Bahrainis missed out by a fraction of a cent.

I told my wife about Bitcoin while we were on holiday, and she agreed that I could spend some money on it. I bought a 5870 GPU card, and bought some coins.

I made sure she understood that, although the possible upside was big, it was quite possible that Bitcoin would come to nothing. That way, if it tanks, she won't be too upset.

My teenage daughter was also in the conversation, and she asked all the right questions about the technicalities of the Bitcoin system. I was impressed!

So? Torvalds gets speaking fees all the time.

Dude, you're totally missing the point. Gavin isn't being invited to represent the Bitcoin community. He is being invited in his technical capacity as lead developer of an interesting open source project (and probably because he is a smart and articulate guy).

Think of it as "investing" or "managing your economy" rather than gambling.

I think the difficulty level will be well above 3 times today's level by 27 April 2012.

I think Bitcoin will be more of a niche, like Esperanto. A hundred years ago, many people thought that Esperanto might one day be used by most of the world's people. However, it ended up being of the order of a million fluent speakers.

Suppose there are a million people using Bitcoin. That's an average of 21 coins each. They won't be using Bitcoin for all their purchases. Let's say they turn over 10% of their coins each week, and buy $100 worth of stuff using those 2.1 coins. That values each bitcoin at $47.62.

One thing is for sure though: five years from now, each bitcoin will either be worth much more than now, or will be worth nothing.

Well yes, but it brings with it a practical problem. How do you verify the non-anonymous sites? If you don't verify them, you just end up with the drug/porn sites being operated by "Donald Duck".

You could verify by looking for sites that have Extended Validation SSL certificates (the ones that turn the browser's title bar green), but that's going to be a very slim category in the Bitcoin community.

In most countries, if an expense is "necessarily incurred" to earn the income, it is deductible.

You don't get total coverage by separately reviewing every part of the code, because the different parts of the code may interact in ways that were not anticipated.

Don't keep Bitcoin (i.e. wallet.dat) in the same login account that you do your browsing from.

How about only banning things that are illegal in every country of the world? Is there anything that is illegal everywhere?

For sure. Just because you know about something doesn't mean you are forced to blab about it.

If a company can't depend on its employees' discretion, courtesy, and common sense, without lawyers breathing down everyone's neck, the company has worse problems than unauthorised speech.