Interesting. I think the probability of a catastrophe within the next 12 months is above 10%. But the potential upside is so very high that it's worth it.

No!

Every transaction needs a buyer and a seller.

With price inflation, the buyer wants to get rid of the inflating money before it loses value, but the seller doesn't want to receive value-losing money either.

With price deflation, the buyer is happy to have money that increases in value, but the seller wants the money too.

Prosperity doesn't come from the money supply. It comes from people making stuff and doing stuff that is useful to other people. Perhaps in a theoretical "perfect" world, prices would vary only as productivity changes, but I can't think how you could bootstrap a new currency into such a world.

But I am always free to sell my bitcoins. If others are not selling their coins, I can get more for the coins that I sell.

You and others who share your preferences are free to start up freicoin and use it instead of Bitcoin. Competing currencies are not a bad thing.

The Bitcoin system is the conduit for transactions, just as the highway is the conduit for vehicles. If you don't use the Bitcoin system (because you are saving your coins), you don't damage the system itself, just as you don't damage the highway by not driving on it.

"The economy" is not a tangible entity, it's just a statistical aggregation. However, "your economy" is real to you. If other people are not spending their bitcoins, your bitcoins are worth more and your economy is booming.

Yes there is a better analogy. Saving your bitcoins is like keeping your car in the garage. Losing your bitcoins is like scrapping your car.

If your car is not on the highway, it doesn't harm anyone else. It just makes the highways more useful to others

Sorry, I must have not pressed control-C hard enough. Try this address:
13...rG

You can send it here:
1AtGauB6WQsiiNHCFTgm36Kcma7mYq8D9E

I was going to say "no need to return the bit-cent", but I suppose it might be worth a million dollars one day

A "solved problem" and a "good idea" are not the same thing!

Also, how are you getting the receiving address into MtGox? The safest way is to use "Copy to clipboard" in the Bitcoin client, then immediately control-V or command-V into MtGox.

If you are copying the address from any other software (e.g. a word processing document) there's a chance that formatting characters are getting copied.

I just sent you 0.01 BTC, so you can see that your address is good.

Try withdrawing just 1 bitcoin to see what happens, to rule out the possibility that you are tripping some limit.

Post your receiving address here and we'll tell you if we think it's an invalid address. It might be a stupid error like a truncated address.

For example, if you copy-and-paste from Gmail it inserts a non-breaking space character. Use Gmail's "Show Original" option to circumvent this problem.

Secure electronic voting is a totally solved problem. Here is an open source system that was used on an online forum that I frequented. The committee members were elected using this system:
http://www.physorg.com/news155473407.html

Thank you, FreeMoney.

Sorry Mahkul, I can't help at this time, but...

Can someone please remind me how to transfer MtGox dollars? I've done it before, but I can't find it in the MtGox user interface now.

Spelling: "Assest" should presumably be "Assets".

The people who want bitcoin to be inflationary should pause to think about this: if we knew that inflation would force Kiba to keep raising the price he pays for articles, we would never write anything because we could always get paid more later

The .org for this is actually available if anyone wants to register it, although the .com is taken.

Amongst other things, I used Bitcoins to buy a 100 Trillion Dollar banknote from Zimbabwe.

People: it is likely to take two or three months to generate a batch of carrots at the current difficulty level, so there's no point buying a contract for less time than that.

And be warned that by winter the difficulty level will have increased greatly, and you are unlikely to get any carrots at all unless you bury your bitcoin mining rig directly under them for extra warmth.

Yes it does. The scammer was always borrowing money to feed his gambling habit, and would never have been lending money.