Great to hear! All those all ideas are something I can support.
I think we cripple ourselves by presuming that the enemy has every advantage and therefore anything we don't fully understand must be a part of the NSA's sinister plan to enslave humanity. 

 Yes, they have a comprehensive surveillance grid. What I'm pointing out is that it is turning out to be a two way street. There have been MANY instances where it has come back to bite them in the ass and will continue to do so.
Benghazi, Syria, Boston... All examples where the system was forced to backpedal in the face of public outcry and criticism.

Of course we are not out of the woods! But there are rays of hope, and it is not a foregone conclusion that the system is gonna win.

If you want to wallow in defeatism, fine. Maybe you should unplug all your electronics and go hide under your bed.

Me, I'm going to use every tool at my disposal to try to win whatever freedom I can.

Even if those tools are not perfect.

I think you place way too much faith in our adversary.

 The powers that be are dangerous and evil, but they are human, they screw up and they can be thwarted.
Case in point... the internet. They underestimated people. They thought we would just use it to look at porn and cat pictures while they could categorize us and identify subversives.

The problem was, people have a hell of a lot more to say than they ever imagined. We are using their own control grid to mess up their shit, and they are getting scared.

They are now looking for ways to reign it in, but they won't be able to. Not without mass revolt.

So none of the people currently working on Bitcoin, and modifying it to create alt coins are bright enough to understand what the code does?
It seems to me, that if there are vulnerabilities or potential backdoors, the incentive would be huge for hackers and coders to find these vulnerabilities and exploit them. Why use keyloggers and viruses to rip a few coins off from users too lazy to secure their machines when there are known addresses with huge balances?


Pump and dump. Banks pump, dump and generally fuck up every damn thing they can exert influence over. The mortgage bubble, the current stock market, hell, pretty much the entire economy. So, yeah, they will mess with crypto too.

@theTruth

Tell me.

Just how does a decentralized currency that cannot be controlled by a central authority serve the interests of of a centralized world government?

Bitcoin does pretty much the opposite of what any self respecting one-world totalitatrian government would want.

Thanks for the list.
And to think that I was even considering "participating" at one point...
Hopefully, people will stay away.

Yes, that is exactly what I'm worried about.
If they could design a system of interlocking scripted contracts, they could create an "approved" system of wallets that they control.

Then they could use existing laws, or have new ones enacted that force exchanges (or anybody else) to trade only within the group of "trusted" accounts.

Like I said, I'm not too much of a programmer or software engineer. But I have dabbled with relational databases that perform scripts and calculations (Filemaker). It is almost scary what you can construct with a few scripts and calculations. You can really make data jump through hoops.

Don't get me wrong, I like the potential here. It's just that something like this could really be misused  and I don't know how it could be brought back in check.

Edit:
As I re-read this, I feel that I may come off as too strident about this.
I think that I should stress that I am in no way an expert, and honestly don't know if what I described is possible. It just seems to me that it might be.
I look forward to hearing from others who know more about it.

Here's a link to the whitepaper
http://ethereum.org/ethereum.html

And to their website
http://ethereum.org/

The blog portion of the site also has some interesting articles about the "turing complete" aspect of their built in script language.

Thanks, I hope you share some of what you find out.

I did a quick forum search about Etherium after I wrote this post and I can see that I'm not the only one with misgivings, but I'll post this anyway.

 I'm new to cryptocurrency, and am certainly no programmer.

The thing I like the most about cryptocurrency is the potential for bypassing the current financial system. In my opinion, the current system is completely inadequate to serve the needs of a digital economy, and is corrupt beyond any hope for reform.

Among the new cryptocurrencies popping up, Ethereum is one that seems to be very promising. In addition to Bitcoin's block chain, it has a scripting language that allows wallets and transactions to be controlled by contracts.

This is a feature that could be very helpful if used in the right way. For example, you could theoretically set up a wallet for a kid's allowance that limits withdrawals, or specifies which addresses they may spend money at.

According to the currency's developers, the sky is pretty much the limit as far as what you can accomplish with interlocking contracts... so long as you are able to pay for the computational power needed to run the contracts.

 From the Ethereum white paper:
 “Universality - a fundamental part of Ethereum's design philosophy is that Ethereum does not have "features". Instead, Ethereum provides an internal Turing-complete scripting language, which a programmer can use to construct any smart contract or transaction type that can be mathematically defined. Want to invent your own financial derivative? With Ethereum, you can. Want to make your own currency? Set it up as an Ethereum contract. Want to set up a full-scale Daemon or Skynet? You may need to have a few thousand interlocking contracts, and be sure to feed them generously, to do that, but nothing is stopping you with Ethereum at your fingertips. “

So I don't see what would prevent the banks and regulators from using Ethereum's  scripting system to build a walled garden network of  “approved” wallets, controlled by contracts that give themselves regulatory control. These wallets would only be able to transact with other approved addresses and could also be seized or frozen by regulators.
They could then use their political clout to force the exchanges to do business only within their approved network.

It seems to me that Ethereum could easily be captured this way. At least most of the users herded back into the slaughter pen.

I don't think that most of the public would even object to it. In my bitter experience, short term self interest and convenience take a back seat to principles and freedom with the vast majority of people.

I  hope that I'm wrong about this, and would love to find out why.