Yes, that's a good idea. Freedom does not mean that everything should be allowed. Freedom only means that you are allowed to do everything which doesn't hurt others. Therefore it does not make bitcoins a "less free" currency if we would state that we e.g. don't want to see a bitcoin slave market.

Of course, this statement is (hopefully) self-evident because the vast majority of people (also in the bitcoin community) agree that there should be no slavery at all. But, for instance, when politicians start to demonize bitcoin by claiming that some people created bitcoins for the purpose of doing criminal and evil things, one could easily point to such a "code of honor". This code of honor would then signalize that most bitcoin users are not aiming for a opportunity to do "evil" things without getting caught. But that they rather want to have a currency which is more trustworthy than fiat currency, a way of online payment which is more convenient than paypal and credit cards etc, which they just want to use for their everyday buying and selling.

Maybe, such a code of honor could than be used as a guideline for deciding to which bitcoin businesses the wiki (or other bitcoin-related websites) should link and to which not. Formulating such a code of honor has nothing to do with any enforcement of rules (which anyway cannot be done without the use of force in meat space). It would rather be a way to formulate the "mission" of bitcoins, as the majority of bitcoin users sees it. And this would be, in my opinion, a good thing.

Let's just assume e.g. the US government. Of course, this would only affect US in the first place. But they could for example offer foreign (web) shops to register some receiving address to the US list of 'legal' addresses in order to allow US citizen to legally transfer money to them. This would be no big deal for a foreign web shop to do, because they can still keep all their other addresses away from US regulation so they loose nothing from this. But on the other hand they can open their shop for a big market with 300 millions of people by doing so. If this works, the US government could establish their regulation concept without hurting international trade too much, even if other nations would not cooperate.

But I can easily imagine that other governments will like bitcoin regulation and surveillance a lot. So I don't see any reason why there should not be similar regulations in most countries of the world or even international agreements on bitcoin regulations (like for money laundering).

I don't say that this scenario will happen. I'm only saying that it's not unlikely to happen.

If bitcoin really succeeds, I guess it will be regulated in a way that it becomes at least very difficult to use it anonymously. A 'worst case' scenario which comes to my mind:

The government creates a new law which makes it mandatory to register all your bitcoin addresses at a newly founded bitcoin regulation office. They'll put all those addresses into a database which then can be accessed publicly via the internet so that everybody can check if an address is properly registered or not (the names of the address owners will not been published, but some governmental institution like e.g. the tax authorities will of course have acces to them). Then it will be made illegal to transfer money to or receive money from non-registered bitcoin adresses. So if you create a bitcoin address without properly registering it, it's not only illegal, you'll also have trouble to find people to accept bitcoin transfers from this address (because they will check the public address database before e.g. accepting you as a customer in your shop).

To make things easier in everyday life, the government could start to distribute a 'secure bitcoin client' which automatically complies to these rules. For instance, if you create a new address, the client registers it immediately. If you send money, the client automatically checks the public database and only allows the transaction if the receiving address is also a registered one.

Given the existence of such a government database which relates all legal bitcoin addresses to the actual names of the owners, the architecture of the bitcoin network will turn the currency into a perfect tool for surveillance. If authorities want to have a list of the things which I bought on the internet within the last ten years, they don't have to bother with getting data from online payment services etc. They just look up my bitcoin address(es) from my database and check the blockchain ...

Thanks, that's good to know.

Hi,

I would like to make some suggestion for bitoption.org. Look at some trading example:

Let's assume I own two BTC and we have a bitcoin price of 20 USD now. Further, let's say somebody is writing calls which would allow me to buy 1 BTC each at any time between now and two weeks later for a price of 30 USD and sells those calls for 1 USD each.

Now, if I'm bullish on BTC and want to have some leverage on my investment, I would do the following (I neglect fees for now):

I deposit my two BTC at bitoption.org. Then I trade one of them for 20 USD and buy twenty of those calls. Now, let's say I'm lucky and the BTC price moves up to 35 USD. So I want to execute my call options now. Then I have to do the following:

I trade my second BTC into 35 USD. I take 30 USD and execute my first call, which leaves me with 1 BTC + 5 USD. So I have to trade this BTC again for USD, which gives me all in all 40 USD now. So I can execute the next call, which leaves me with 1 BTC + 10 USD. And so on. Eventually, I will end up with 135 USD or ~3.85 BTC, depending on which currency I prefer. But the process to get there (executing one call after the other) is that tedious!

That's why I would really prefer to be able to sell my call options to somebody else instead of executing them by myself. Maybe I would even be able to sell them for more than the intrinsic value of 5 USD, because there is a lot of volatility in the market and somebody could hope for a even higher execution price in the future while he would not risk to loose more than 5 USD per contract, even if the exchange rate crashes back to 20 USD or lower.

So I think introducing a market for buying and selling already running call- or put-contracts would be a very nice addition for bitoption.org. It would make life easier for speculators who just want to have some leveraged investment without being interested in the actual execution of the contract. On the other hand, it would create some arbitrage opportunities for people who buy contracts from speculators just before they end for a little less than the intrinsic value and then take care about the execution. It would also give speculators a possibility to exit a trade if it runs against them: If - in my example - I see BTC prices dropping and start believing that 30 USD would not be reached before the end of my call option, I don't have to wait until they are terminated and I'm left with nothing. I could sell them to some other speculator for a smaller price (like maybe 0.5 USD), who still hopes for the BTC price to move upwards again.

I think this second market would improve trading a lot. And it's also like option trading at the stock markets work: Most people don't care about option execution, they just want to trade them in order to profit diproportionally high if the market moves in their direction. What do you think about this?

Hi,

I've checked the graphic cards in the mining equipment wiki and found some candidates I would buy for my first mining rig. But I'm still wondering why there is no statement about required graphic card memory in the wiki. Is it not important for the performance? Can I go with some small graphic card memory like 1 Gb or is it better the have some bigger one?

Another question: I've read that it tends to be difficult to combine two entirely different graphic cards like 6970 and 5850 in the same mining rig. Would it also be a problem to combine two different models of the same series, like a 6970 with 1 Gb memory with another 6970 with 2 Gb memory?

Martin

There is a paper from Ashish Goel about his idea:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.0515

The system is a freshly installed SUSE 11. So there shouldn't be any antivirus. Is there any known issue with SUSE? My internet connection is not a particularly slow one and I'm using the 0.3.21-beta client. So the reason for this problem must have something to do with the operating system.

Hi,

today I've installed a bitcoin client for a friend. It's running, but it seems to take hours now to download all the blocks of the block chain. The first blocks went reasonable quick, but at the moment it takes maybe one second per block (I'm at block 124000 and something now). It makes sense to me, that the more recent blocks are bigger and therefore take longer to be downloaded. But I'm wondering if it's really normal that it takes more than six hours to download the block chain?

I also restarted the client and added some more connections with -addnode, as suggested in another thread. It's still that slow.

Another question: I've done a test transfer from my to his client today. The money has not arrived yet. So my understanding of the system is, that this is because you can not receive any money unless the block chain is downloaded completely. Is this correct?

Martin