Fixed that for you.

It would be cool if they were made out of solid gold and shrunk/grew in relationship to Bitcoin's exchange rate to gold.

They all basically seem to be the same. Someone comes up with some completely unsubstantiated reason why MTGOX is going to take their money and run for the hills and then is countered by someone else's completely unsubstantiated claim that MTGOX has no money whatsoever and then he's countered by someone else's completely unsubstantiated claim that everything will work OK, then someone comes in and threatens a class action lawsuit because MTGOX isn't spending all their time on these forums quelling all this speculation. I was happy to derail this thread. This whole forum has been a fascinating window into the extreme frailty of people's reasoning power. BRB I'm going to go sacrifice one of my testicles so that MTGOX will come back on in 11 hrs and 7 minutes because, you know, the whole world might come crashing down if he doesn't come back on then. Oh, and Bitcoins are going to become the global currency replacing the US dollar, no, wait, they're a massive bubble that will implode and have 0 value.

15:00 GMT Monday.

Square(Square) is the new Square

My Square is Squarer than Your Square

(and a shirt idea, maybe 2 versions, one with a checkbox on each)
[ ] Tuttle
[ ] Buttle

I couldn't claim. Or rather, I'm not sure if I claimed or not. The website timed out processing my request.

Wow. More 32 year olds than anyone else.

Exactly. Also, how would defending the existence/legality of a currency they've received a large number of donations in effect their nonprofit status? I honestly don't know but I could see how accepting this could be perceived as a big conflict of interest and weaken their ability to help Bitcoin in its inevitable hour of legal need. Any sort of donating the Bitcoins to something EFF believes in/backs/is ideologically related to could be perceived as the same thing as them accepting the Bitcoins I'd assume so they really need to either return them, which seems difficult, or let them trickle back into the network in such a way that doesn't benefit them or anything that's perceived to be related to them.

So I think the EFF's totally right in doing this. However they probably should've thought of this before they decided to accept Bitcoin donations in the first place.

Or sit in the sidelines and watch option?

My CSA and one a natural food store down the street from me, and if it's 1 am and I'm hungry and lazy, Safeway. I assume it'd be way illegal to purchase a bunch of visa/mastercard gift cards and resell them for bitcoins so that it doesn't restrict choice.

Thanks for that! I'll definitely download it.

LoL

Seriously. What shape should a distributed exchange take? How can it be funded? I was thinking why not get a bunch of people together to pledge some bitcoin [full disclosure I only have 2 and am waiting to get more when the exchanges open up again] to invest in an exchange and charge a percentage of the exchanged money that gets split evenly between all the investors?

As for the shape of a distributed exchange, I'm not so sure about that. Ideas?

Absolutely, this is one of the more fascinating inventions I've ever seen.  Also maybe we can find in it something we believe in and put that in our arsenal of things we are actively attempting to will into existence to make the world better/more beautiful/more fair/more fitting with some preconceived notion of the way the world works/whatever...

It's funny, Bitcoin seems to be (or is definitely about to be) one side of what I assume will be an epic battle but in itself it's a huge battleground with so many sides laying claim to it for so many different reasons.

An axiom is what you base your logic on. How far down does logic go? Is it turtles all the way down? Each step being preceded by a perfectly logical step before it, preceded by a perfectly logical step before it etc.

First, we're arguing about what went on inside another person's mind who we have never met before, which is necessarily an argument based on faith.

Second, the turtles all the way down argument: his logic had to have been based on something right? And that something couldn't really be based on logic or else that wouldn't be what the logic was based on but a step in the logical system he created.

Third, why is faith a weakness? He had an idea, however it came to him, he had that idea and then (I assume) he decided it was the right idea and an extremely powerful idea and he didn't doubt himself, or at least he didn't doubt himself to a point that kept him from seeing his idea through to its manifestation in the real world. That takes a huge amount of faith. That is not a crutch but a massively important virtue. Faith and Will are intertwined and without them all the logic in the world won't get you out of bed.

One of the biggest problems right now in our world I think is that people have an unquestioning and unanalyzed religious sense of Logic and Rationality and Science that makes us attribute all sorts of completely unreasonable things to them and to think that important dimensions like morality can be emergent traits of systems as long as these systems follow logical paths.

I guess one of my points is that both the lovers and the haters of Bitcoin are appealing to logic to support their positions. And both sides have proponents who reason impeccably... and those who reason horribly so it's best to look deeper and broader to examine what it is we're doing.

No, faith is what defines the axioms and logic is how they derive a workable system from their axioms. My guess is Satoshi created the seed of his idea with faith (epiphany?) and used what seems to be an amazing gift of logic to flesh it out into a system that (my faith tells me) will basically blow up the authority structures defined by the previous faith based monetary system. How are faith and logic antitheses to one another? My view is that they are different dimensions of a powerful system (which Satoshi has created).

I hate to be an asshole but you claim to level the playing field by saying none of the logic is based on anything quantitative but then say that people who are not agreeing with you are denying the obvious so, I guess my next question is what is "the obvious" you speak of and how does this escape/transcend the mutually agreed upon conclusion that none of the logic you (and I) are using is anything but faith based?

What "logic" does it fly in the face of? I think that there are a million different sets of axioms flying around here and people are using them to derive logics of all sorts which are all necessarily based on faith (including yours and mine)