You know what they say;  Nearly half of those who enter a war exit it with and unexpected lose.

I basically dis-agree.

For one, it is still the case that many people (in the West at least) have an innate sense that 'liberty' (at risk of using a loaded term) is a good thing and something to be in favor of.  That sentiment can be squashed with the proper regime of propaganda.  I feel that this propaganda is very much underway and is being fairly successful, but it still takes a fair amount of time.  When the populations are prepared to accept totalitarianism in terms of freedoms of action, it will be unlikely that such things as Bitcoin and general privacy will be able to survive.  But we are not there yet by my estimation, but well on the way.

Secondly, there is an element of mutually assured destruction as I alluded to which relates to totalitarian regulation information exchange.  It will be unpleasant and costly for even those who have access to the reigns of power, and more critically, to their friends/benefactors.  Actually implementing a program of fascist control of the global internet is probably not something which anyone looks forward to.  Even those who could pull it off.  But as time goes by it becomes more tenable rather than less.  Thus, the cost of cracking down on us plebs will increasingly look like the lesser of to evils (the other option being loss of control and extractive operations against us.)

We could possibly win this war, or at least sue for tolerable peace terms at this point.  I feel that our chances diminish from here forward.  I could be wrong.

Dotcom seems to me to be, so far, playing a perfect game.  The strongest evidence that he is not on the 'good' side is that he has executed with uncanny perfection in the time I've been paying attention (only since 'mega' started.)

I do fear that the 'bad' side has the ability to use whatever force escalation is required to win, but only at the expense of radically changing landscape and possibly in a way that would be to negative for them to stomach.  But the situation and balance of arms is not going to get any better for us as time goes by.  Our best chance is probably to release the hounds sooner than later.  Satoshi and Dotcom seem to be doing so, and they have my support and respect at this point.

edit: syntax.

Believe it or not, I don't fully dis-agree with your assessment even though I have pretty much zero confidence in any data provided by (or filtered through)  the governments of the US, Japan, or anyone under the auspices of the UNAEC all of whom are complete victims of regulatory capture.  Geiger counters are pretty limited in deducing most kinds of long-running risks.  I have several kinds of scintilation detectors to independantly verify what I wish to verify for my own purposes here on the West Coast of the US.

I do believe that the situation in Tokyo is much less than fine for the MANY people who ARE going to be victims of excess cases of cancer.  And much of Fukushima and the valuable farmland that it had need to be written off completely for the immediate good of the inhabitants.  For a country like Japan this loss is an unmitigated disaster.  The only saving grace is that they were already a dieing race so their need to feed themselves was decreasing.

Now to be fair, we really should weigh the benefits that the nation of Japan and the people of Japan have realized in their use of nuclear power.  Also, the pros and cons of their nuclear weapons program (which is, I believe, why they were fucking around with plutonium...like everyone else who does so...)  I personally do not write off the utility of MAD, nor the potential for China to decide it's time for some pay-back at some point.  All that said, if nobody with a dysfunctional regulatory system should fuck around with any form of nuclear anything no matter what the benefit.  I'm particularly unhappy about those in East Asia doing so since the fallout heads my way.  I'll bet that China melts one down within a decade.

It's a big Internet...and amusing that someone would home in to a particular thread of a particular board of a particular forum of a particular domain to complain about the OP title.  But I always appreciate being amused.  So, thx

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Separately, I wish to god that you were not so mute on the ASIC stuff as one of the few people who would probably have something to say which is worth focusing on relative to the topic.  OTOH, I'm finally past my interest in the topic for now I think.

Just a data-point on Litecoin (and Bitcoin.)

I looked at it briefly when it was pretty new.  My sense was that it was not a scam like various other efforts, but it went in mostly exactly the opposite way of what I saw as a durable and scalable cryptocurrency.  Again though, I just scanned things.

My friend is still working on downloading the Bitcoin blockchain after several weeks.  He would like to participate as a full member in the solution and try to add his part to strengthen it.

He also started messing with Litecoin where it is possible, I guess, to participate in mining and the blockchain is less unwieldy.  Cudos to him, and cudos to Litecoin if the accessibility is more than just a function of not being as mature (or not yet having caught the Satoshi Dice plague...)

I sense that one of the more valuable things to many developers of open source solutions is to get valuable feedback and testing and such.  I don't sense that those who work on Bitcoin, or at least the important core aspects of it, are much different.  (Parenthetically, this sense...right or wrong...is probably the biggest single factor giving me hope for the solution.)

FTR:

 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo  :  I used the 'metro' figure.

 - http://enenews.com/ap-headline-gundersen-tokyo-soil-be-nuclear-waste - http://vimeo.com/38995781

 -  Although a bit of a philosophical issue, a function of governments of states which are not 'failed' is one of managing regulatory bodies.  When the regulatory bodies fail, the buck stops with the government.  The regulatory bodies with oversight of nuclear technology have probably failed as badly in the US as they had in Japan.  It was just a role of the dice about who got hit first.

I suspect that this is a strongish hypothesis.  Most people I know in the US feel an innate sense of subversiveness when I describe Bitcoin to them.  Same with using mega.co.nz cloud storage.  I would expect both to be pretty fringe for a long time in societies that have either a cultural aversion or legitimate (or imagined) fear in being associated with subversive activities (read 'China'.)

Of course the leadership of Japan has just turned a city of 35x10^6 into what can only be described as a radioactive waste dump.  How much that will strain the Japaneses cultural affinity toward the trust in authority will be an interesting question.  I suspect perhaps not much...the leadership's management decisions ended up getting Tokyo firebombed once and the cultural affinities remained fairly strong.

About the only function I've gone to in the last decade was a Bitcoin gathering which occured a stone toss (not even a throw) from where I happened to be.  It was quite underwhelming to be honest.

As for the value, I retain the philosophy that I came to after understanding the solution 1.5 years ago.  The real-world problem solving potential of the solution and the abundance of BTC to back-fill the potential need argue for valuations literally orders of magnitude greater than what we see today.

It is interesting to note that Bitcoin can provide an exchange function irrespective of the values.  Obviously price stability would be pretty useful.  But if people hoard them hoping for higher valuations it could cause a truly impressive spike in values at some point.

It's utterly relevant and, like your other work, appreciated.  Even to someone who holds a lot more gold than BTC

I saw his sidekick ~proudhon a month or so ago.  As usually, he was calling for a price collapse.  That was heartening because when he does so, the price usually goes up.  And sure enough, we are up like 50% since by my rough reckoning.

Mostly it's just that the term 'zero risk' tends to set off alarm bells in my mind.  Generally speaking, TEMPEST and Cold Disk are two risks that I see as non-zero.  Particularly if someone knows you have potentially hundreds of thousands of USD's worth of BTC (or anything else) kicking around.  I'd be inclined to at least encrypt the HDD by way of making security suggestions.

"0% risk".  Hmmmm.

They'll probably be blamed if Bitcoin fails as well.  What can ya do?

For my part, I find the moon landing doubt rather absurd.  OTOH, the hypothesis that some Muslims in some caves half way around the world pulled off is 9/11 much much weaker then that it was organized largely by a handful of people who had significant influence over systems in the US.  Over the decade, the latter hypothesis is simply proven to be much better at explaining the observations of the event.

I see little reason why BFL would want to sit on "customer's" money unless they wanted to use it...or steal it.  It would have been relatively easy to use escrow, or better yet, the native abilities of Bitcoin itself to maintain a queue if they did not have some reason why they wanted to have full control of the funds.

The actions that Avalon took to most credibly and honestly demonstrate what they've produced seem faultless to me, and I suspect to many people who have some amount of understanding of the technical and social issues related to the Bitcoin project.

Thx for the review, BTW.  It was most interesting to me.  I hold hope that the Avalon team will see their way clear to run their business in a way which fosters both competition and mutual benefit among others who may have the resources to, and interest in, further building a robust Bitcoin network.

Garzik mentioned on another thread that he happened to have paid for development on the open source Bitcoin project out of his own BTC stash.  The guy ranks as high as any on my list of people in the community who I find credible, and at least one clearly competent individual came forward to verify that he'd been a beneficiary of this action, so I think it pretty likely that this story is not BS.

On top of that, Jeff did not just produce his story out of the blue.  It came only after receiving a fair amount of abuse from miserable envious individuals in the community (of which there are plenty.)

It's funny (and sad) that so many people simply cannot conceive of believing in a cool thing enough to be at least a little bit selfless in supporting it.  I guess Ms. Rand would not approve or something like that.