I'm not understanding this reply. If Bitcoin did become a universal, global payment system, would we all have the blockchain in our foreheads or hands?

I'm not even sure it would be feasible to have a hardware wallet embedded in that way.

And being forced to use Bitcoin would only satisfy one requirement for the MOTB. It still is impossible for it to satisfy the other criteria: being forced to have a mark in the forehead or hand to buy or sell. Like I said, since an embedded hardware wallet couldn't function with Bitcoin, then Bitcoin couldn't be the MOTB.

For an implantable device to function for commerce, the seller would have to scan and deduct from the buyer... and Bitcoin functions in the opposite direction (buyer sends to seller).

Or maybe I'm not fully understanding your response... It appears that there was a hint of sarcasm in your reply, but I'm not going to jump to conclusions.

Here's my two satoshis... Forgive me if this was already posted, but I had a similar conversation with a friend of mine about Bitcoin and this was my response.

Bitcoin, as far as I understand it, can never work like the MOTB, because the payment system described by the MOTB is actually the opposite of Bitcoin. Think about it this way: the MOTB requires the store or whatever to scan you and deduct the money from your account, whereas Bitcoin requires the person to *send* the money to the store.

Since the two systems essentially are polar opposites, my response to my friend was that Bitcoin is actually the last great chance humanity has to adopt a system that could run counter to a MOTB scheme.

What *could* become the MOTB is something like Canada's MintChip. Does this make sense? What are your guys' thoughts?

Just because there are 31 reads about Bitcoin doesn't mean that they aren't actively censoring it.

They have 31 posts over a 6-month period, and search interest for it on Google has skyrocketed. That hardly makes sense when you think about the demographics of that site, and their 1.4 million daily vistor count.

There should be tons of pro-Bitcoin posts on there, but there aren't. Think about it... Doesn't that seem a little strange given what we've seen this past month? There isn't even a post about Bitcoin in the past 30 days on that site.

Here is my Reddit post about it and there's a comment where someone else explains that they tried to post about Bitcoin and got banned as well:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c14dw/the_bitcoin_nonconspiracy_conspiracy/

That was my conclusion as well from my brief experience on that site. Any topic that is pro-Bitcoin gets censored, or gets shilled into oblivion and the OP never gets a chance to make a good rebuttal because they probably got banned from continuing to post like I was.

It makes me wonder... if GLP is indeed a psyop, then the government has a greater force against it than I previously thought.

I was amazed by the number of people on that site that claimed an EMP could wipe out Bitcoin... do they even know how the Internet works?

So, I recently had a fun time experimenting with posting about Bitcoin on a conspiracy forum, with some interesting results. Any feedback is appreciated.

http://bitcoin0conspiracy.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/the-bitcoin-conspiracy/

Yes, but I'm talking about a corporation with enough power to create a "mining pool" of its own. The corporation can offset the costs with a slight hit to their bottom line in the short-term. In the long-term, they gain complete control of the network.

Benevolency (as an overall aspect of the network) is what bitcoin, in my opinion, had in favor of it.

The fact that there would never exist a majority control, at any point, was the allure. If, at some time in the future, an acceptance of a benevolent master node would be equivalent to giving acceptance to a perceived benevolent dictator, then I would seriously start to question the legitimacy of what bitcoin puts itself out there to represent: a decentralized currency.

The future of bitcoin, therefore, is in the belief that human nature is not ultimately corrupt, or that the ones that end up wielding the most power (even from the result of their benevolence) won't end up succumbing to the bad side of human nature (greed, lust for power, etc.).

Or, is there a something I'm missing? Oh, and please forgive me if I come across as a die-hard skeptic, but I'm only entering into a Socratic dialog in the hopes that you guys can convince me of the long-term security of the network.

Doesn't perceived benevolency always come before tyranny?

Then what's to prevent a 51% attack by offering nodes with no fees?

Whew... That's good to know.

However, what happens to transactions that don't have a high-enough fee attached to them? What incentive would the miners have to include them?

Let's say that a large miner with a high hash rate started to only accept transactions into a block if there was a fee above a certain limit. Wouldn't that result in tons of transactions not being handled because miners would refuse to process them?

Please forgive me if is has been answered elsewhere, but I've been searching the Internets for an answer and haven't found one.

So, there's this limit of 21M BTC, as the reward slowly shrinks for finding new blocks.

When this happens to a point where miners no longer get a reward to mine new blocks, then the hashing power of the network will fall, correct?

If that happens, then the security of the system is compromised, right? So, if the network is modified to reward nodes with transaction fees instead, then where is the incentive to mine new blocks? Are new blocks needed to make transactions, or can nodes relay transactions without new blocks?

If new blocks aren't needed to make transactions, then wouldn't it all just result in a bunch of "lazy nodes" looking for transaction fees, and not generating new blocks? Does that result in a compromise in security?

If this is all true, then why is everyone still buying BTC? I'm confused here... please help. I'm a newbie, as you can tell.