I am selling my whole business with all accounts I have in possession. Check out this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=757718.0

Also, you get my account (Karmicads) and you will be able to continue my business.

All in all you will get 1 x Sr. Member and 5 x Full Members + my account (Karmicads).

My price: 1.1 BTC

[Selling:]

I am selling bitcointalk accounts!

Selling:

Legendary account!

I don't have this account on stock but I will act as a agent! The user also didn't want to expose account stats.

Price: 1.5 BTC. Legendary accounts are very very rare!

Also selling some member accounts - Price: 0.05 BTC each.

Escrow is a must!

---------------------------

I have sold over 11 accounts the past few weeks -  my accounts are high quality!

[Normally uncertainty sits very comfortably with me. I can cope with not knowing quite well. But Itś strange how the sinister nature and magnitude of a scenario, drives up the urgency to feel certain. Some may opt for denial, others for alarmist retaliation. But regardles of itś manifestations, many people seem to crave certainty. I tend to feel a more intense desire to find out. Call it UBER-CURIOSITY, if you like. Even then, I can´t know what I don´t know and I know it. I wonder if curiosity is the only emotion that proffers an alternative to certainty.]

Normally uncertainty sits very comfortably with me. I can cope with not knowing quite well.
But Itś strange how the sinister nature and magnitude of a scenario, drives up the urgency to feel certain.
Some may opt for denial, others for alarmist retaliation. But regardles of itś manifestations, many people seem to crave certainty.
I tend to feel a more intense desire to find out. Call it UBER-CURIOSITY, if you like. Even then, I can´t know what I don´t know and I know it.
I wonder if curiosity is the only emotion that proffers an alternative to certainty.

I´ve just been trying to find out as much as I can about this strange New World Order idea, in the wake of the National Defense Authorization Act debacle. As a consequence I happened to watch the Alan Jones documentary ¨End Game¨. I can honestly say, that film this only left me with even more ambivalence than I´d previously had.

Also, I notice a common pattern in conspiratorial rhetoric. It often seems to depend hevily upon, circumstantial evidence such as establishing some motive. It also does what fundamentalist religious propaganda often does, by starting with a conclusion and arguing with full force for a preordained conclusion. Starting with pre-ordained claims they wish to assert, then finding evidence that suits the conclusion, whilst employing confirmation bias, by neglecting any mention of contrary points, reasoning or evidence etc. Isnt this another manifestation of that desire to be sure? To believe that we know.

I mention this as I find it somewhat annoying, when attempting to approach an issue in earnest, with an open mind, only to find the issue clouded by, or drowned out by a horde of baying drones trying tenaciously to push their conclusion by whatever divisive and dishonest means possible. Any shred of truth it may contain, is thereby undermined by the least critical and most pernicious rhetoric.

             Let me give three examples: 

The first was the moon landing hoax. I had leg up on this one, with a long standing interest in astronomy and cosmology. The least convincing of the numerous claims made. was the lack of stars in the background of the lunar skyline. The explanation is quite simple. There is no atmosphere (which here on Earth makes the sky appear blue) on the moon. You can stand on the daylight side of the moon, look up at the sky and it will still be black. Nevertheless the ambient light is still too bright for stars to outshine. You don see stars on the daylight side of the moon for the same reason you don't see them on the daylight side of the earth. Mystery solved. Now just a quick memo to all the Moon hoax websites and the misunderstanding will be corrected right? Not likely.  I noted that when it was well refuted that the hoax theorists would either not counter the point, or retort with something like: Well if you´re so smart, why is... [change of topic - insert new contention] ...blah blah blah... The websites didn't seem to care to revise their miss-information either.

To me, this has the effect of ringing alarm bells. If the mainstream populists of this idea, had a shred of intellectual integrity, their little misunderstanding would be corrected. If they wouldn't even do that much, then I´m not about to listen astutely, to a myriad of their other claims, expecting them to be one iota more honest.

The 9/11 ¨truthers¨ were not so easily dismissed in my mind. Even still, there was a particularly poorly thought out and well refuted argument put forward (never mind the details). I remember thinking just the same thing. These people won´t admit when they are wrong and their worst (and fully refuted) arguments are as tenaciously clung to as the underside of a flat earth. I would like to know if there is a vestige of truth in any scientific social, economic or political theory, but there are many interests to pursue and issues to be concerned about. I´m not going to sit there, discussing wildlife safety strategies, with the boy who cried wolf.

This is one of the main reasons I have barely ever gone near the issue of the New World Order. Apart from being a little too... er... political for my taste, it positively wreaks of conspiracy theorist BS.

Discovering bitcoin and the more sane side of the dialog, my perspective was widened somewhat. I was already a do-it-yourself libertarian at heart, with a healthy contempt for authority and a disdain for corporate monopolies and the wretched governments they manipulate. But bitcoin cracked the door open a bit on financial economics for me; then I watched the animated documentary, ¨Money As Debt¨ and that just blew the whole damn door off it´s hinges. Even in my mid forties, I seem to be forever re-assessing my credulity. 

How could I have been so naive? Wait...That´s not really being fair... I´d really been much more like willfully ignorant. I hadn´t wanted to know about the NWO, because It was clearly going to be a festering pot of BS and politics. Only recently have many of us come to learn about this ¨National Defense Authorization Act¨. It seems that Mr Jones has a couple of feathers to stick in his hat about how dire the situation actually is. I was surprised at the brashness of some of these crazy old fools, even to the point of openly mentioning their NWO. I hadn´t even noticed obvious clues.  In my defense though, I had long felt that itś necessary for the world to become politically unified in some way, even though my concept was more organic and cooperative. Like, the grass roots organizations would eventually unite and make government redundant. The problem we are facing, is more of a monopolist (dictatorship), top down hierarchical NWO with tyrannical ruling class and a slave like subservient peasantry. (Not to mention the extermination program, if there´s any truth to it.)

I found the first part of Jones´s documentary ¨The End Game¨ compelling, but I noted an arbitrary sort of ´pick´n´mix¨ of other ideological contentions woven though it. Going from the fairly obvious shady, sinister plotting, of a secretive cartel of bankers, royalty and political puppets, to some planned extermination of 80% of the world population, seemed like far too much to swallow. Mind you, I would have considered the ¨National Defense Authorization Act ¨ highly unlikely too, if it didn´t actually happen. I was somehow surprised or taken aback, when the global statistics, for death by unnatural causes (stretching back through history) were mentioned. A healthy majority it would seem, are exterminated by their own state rulers. When looked at a particular way (assuming the stats arn´t fabricated), it doesn't seem likely, so much as, almost inevitable. A chicken will trust the chicken farmer, right up to the day he comes with an axe rather than a bucket of grain. Is our supervision of government, really so poultry. 

Towards the end, I found my credulity and ire being tested once more, by the outlandish characterization of biological evolution and it´s association (by equivocation) to eugenics. Now I´m back in more familiar territory - all too familiar. The ideas presented in the documentary, now suddenly seemed so much more preconceived, fabricated and cobbled together for the sake of a rhetorical construct. Many of us, according to this account, will be doomed to destruction at the hands of the elite and wealthy, or forced into labor camps. The anti-Darwin/Malthus/Huxley rhetoric, gave up the hopelessly impoverished intellectual rigor of the whole film. It was a vile, lamentable attempt at crass ad-hominem, as if dragging their names through the mud was a way to disprove their science. What credit Jones had gained for predicting USA would become a militarized zone, was shot in the foot by the loony, fundamentalist crackpot rantings that followed.

Another incongruous aspect, was the charges laid at the feet of various conservation organizations (Notably the WWF) that had allegedly been setup from the start to do the bidding of the evil empire, by creating massive global ghettos and exclusion zones, while helping to drive the propaganda mill for the global environmental science establishment. Seeeee how it all fits in? Apparently Mr Jones is a bit of a climate science denier also. The problem I have with this, is in the same the way a plot can be built top down, so can a conspiracy theory. Apparently it is too. When so many controversial ideas are packed together this way you might begin to smell fabrication. Isnt it remarkable that so many of these otherwise unrelated conspiracies that happen to be Mr Jones pick´n´mix all hapen to fall together in the same co-cohesive plot. I wouldn't have been surprised to discover the Illuminati had used NASSA as a front to somehow make the earth look spheroid. So itś not just a particular conspiracy, but an interwoven raft of mutually supporting crackpot ideas.

A construct such as this, is hard to believe, because it tests our incredulity on so many fronts and because it´s proponents fail to address inconsistencies with other know facts. The more crackpots tend incorporate multiple conspiracy theories, the more they demonstrate they hold a very broad brush of credulity. We´re supposed to be impressed by the way all these conspiracies fit together in such a mutually supporting way. But the plot itself (even if it were true) is deliberately constructed top down (either by the perpetrators or the conspiracy theorists themselves), so either way itś a fabrication, in the sense of a contrived plot. If the scenario can be created by one, it can be created by the other.

The big problem that comes with aligning oneself with crackpot ideas, is that when you DO have something important to say, you get treated like the boy who cried wolf. This scenario is a dangerous idea (right or wrong). I still very much suspect something is horribly amiss with the US Government, as itś hard to imagine any good justification, for any freedom loving, non-aggressive governments, to reserve such power against their own people. It´s just a pity we have to sift the useful information out from all the looney stuff, to work out what is really going on.

Cheers. Karmicads

[ORIGINAL]

I have recently taken the time to review a particular thread, Read this before having an opinion on economics" which was begun (by bitcoin2cash) in support of a particular book "Economics In One Lesson." by Henry Hazlitt. I have decided to begin a new thread for several reasons. Firstly the name of the thread and the issue it was swiftly co-opted by,(that of IP) made a tangential subject of Hazlitt's book, while the name of the thread became a misnomer. Second the above thread didn't for my BTC, tend towards any equitable resolution, but rather, it trailed off without fully addressing some fundamentals, which were only lightly brushed upon. Finally that thread has been dead for sometime, so I thought I would try to give the Intellectual Property debate some air, with a more fitting title and start again.

Having read the thread completely, I also read through Economics In One Lesson, for some context over the whole thread (in case it was relevant). I was, I must say, presently surprised at what turned out to be a very inspiring affirmative book, that reminded me, that the more I learn about economics, the more it seems I already knew. Not to be a smart ass, but I've been saying the same sort's of things for decades and Hazlitt only confirms them. In light of the above thread, I was expecting an obtuse diatribe of sophist rhetoric, to justify a preconceived agenda. I think it's quite instructive that Hazlitt's book, lends so much import to technical innovation and invention and following the central theme of the book illustrated by the 'The Broken Window' analogy, we can clearly see an irony emerge in the application of this principal to the special pleadings of the Anti-IP brigade. In this book, Hazlitt makes no overt pronouncements of his views of Intellectual Property, but If read without bias, the treatise makes a case as damning to the special pleadings of Anti-IP crusaders as any special interest. Perhaps the most overt testimony Hazlitt makes for an endorsement of IP though, is the very first thing presented in the book. No not in the first chapter. Not in the preface. Not even in the Contents list, but before all that, his book sets the record straight:

ECONOMICS IN ONE LESSON
Copyright, 1946, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
All rights in this book are reserved. No part of
the book may be reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except
in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews. For information
address Harper 6 ̄ Brothers
r.-c

I should note, this is not issue of contention for Hazlitt, who implicitly endorses IP in the tenets of his Economics, as well as embracing it as a function of his professional life. The irony goes to those who would elevate this publication with the merit it so clearly deserves and yet fail so completely to apply its lesson to their own position.

I can honestly declare I have a fair degree of ambivalence regarding IP as it stands today, not because I feel that it should be abolished, but because it so often serves the less deserving interests at the expense of those who it should be protecting. I personally have failed to find the capital required to launch innovations due to the complexity, paperwork and expense of patent law. I have also, foolishly (without non-disclosure agreements), trusted people and consequently had innovations that were the earnest fruits of my mind, used by people I can reasonably assume would not have otherwise had them and commercialized for good profit. Had I been better placed or supported, I would have been the (I will say 'rightful') beneficiary.

If anybody is going to benefit from the providence of a good idea, then it should at least in some part be the innovator themselves. The problem in a world without any reward structures for intellectual providence, is that it not only destroys the incentives of the creative endeavor but leaves those who would innovate in the gutter, while those who have no part in the creation of a valuable idea, to profit from the spoils. There should be no need to restate the free-rider problem. What concerns me, is not to restrict the liberty of the end-user from having the object and using it, but the misappropriation of the creative process that adds value to the finished product.

Argument's of shrill, petulant indignation. for the liberty of a person to obtain and posses the creative product, once divorced from it's physical medium, give no consideration for where the value of the thing comes from. All value is equated to the material instance of the thing and none to the value of the intangible creative component that makes the thing so much more than just a blob of matter. Disregarding the value proposition, in the creative processes is as limited and biased as anything Hazlitt mentioned in his book.

One thing we should dispense with from the outset, is the petulant recourse to a slippery slope of escalating retaliation, that some Anti-IP libertarian crusaders like to resort to. A LAW is a LAW. That doesn't guarantee it is morally just, not by any means. Almost everybody knows laws they find ethically unsatisfactory. I might prefer, to be allowed to go wandering naked in the streets and claim this liberty to be an unalienable right. I have the right to take this position as a matter of principal. In practice however, I have to acknowledge that I am a member of a (however imperfectly) democratic society and that however intensely earnest my own convictions may be, I am not above the law and that the rule of law applies to all the laws I do like, as well as those I don't.

The simple fact that any law when disobeyed, will lead to a similar escalation in punitive repercussions, does not give recourse to any argument about the ethical validity of the particular law that is being enforced. Whether it is littering loitering or looting, you will be expected to face the consequences. And yeah the law can be a proper ass. Most libertarians have a whole slew of contentious bones to pick, before we proclaim we're satisfied with the ethical values of the law. But as they say in the big house, if you do the crime, be prepared to do the time.

It's sufficient to say that you disagree with a law, but what makes it wrong, should not rely on the fact that it will lead to repercussions if not obeyed. The argument that Intellectual property is right or wrong either way, should stand or fall on it's own merit, not on the consequences of it being enforced. It goes without saying that an unjust law encroaches on our liberties but disobeying law is not one of our liberties. Pretending that it shouldn't be law, because of the consequences implicit in disobeying that law, is simply begging the question.

In a similar vein, I see there is a tendency to appeal to the un-policeable nature of IP law, such that if by some furtively covert means you could sidestep it, that somehow demonstrates that there was no ethical basis for the motive behind enshrining it in the first place. I'm referring here to the convoluted scenarios being entertained about how the contents of a book or a blueprint might fall into the wrong (or right - depending on your view) hands. Whether by X-ray glasses, telescopes or by the transgression of a third party, the laborious details are hammered out to show just how the Anti-IP crusader can 'get away' with an act of espionage, as if to proclaim that the futility of policing the law, somehow demonstrates their ethical precedence, in claiming it to be unjust.

What needs to be considered before all else, is the underlying justifications for our society having invested our reward system in recognizing intellectual accomplishment and the value proposition, engendered by those who are able to manifest it. What is considered to be 'property' by this standard, is the product of the social collective, who value the intellectual fruits of talented minds, that are (and rightly should be) entitled to fair rewards for their innovative creativity, toils and tenacity, from inspiration through, research, design, prototypes and on to licencing and production. It's hard enough for the inventor as it is to catch a break and the proposition that coming up with a good idea is easy, is what you might expect to hear from any damn fool who literally has NO IDEA!

You tell me that you have come up with any ORIGINAL idea that is as remotely useful as a paper-clip for instance, and that you have been through the trial and tribulations, from the first moment of inspiration to seeing you idea realized and rolling off the production line, then you tell me that good ideas are plentiful. You tell me how pleased you will be to stand there, having made neither cent nor satoschi, for the benefit you have bestowed upon the world, while some greedy tyrant, who sold out on you or just used your idea if you gave it up freely, is now on the way to being worth millions. I doubt that anybody so flippant as to claim 'ideas are plentiful', would ever have the slightest chance of ever being in this situation. Inventing is like rescuing victory from the jaws of defeat and almost nobody wants you to win, no matter how damn honest you are. Let me see the anti-IP crusader who has genuine valuable ideas, that are worthy of pilfering for profit set about realizing them or giving them up freely.

Otherwise, I would like to be enlightened exactly how, without the basic protection of IP, an honest but poor, diligent, hard working inventor, can have any hope of creating ideas so valuable that are worth stealing but be granted the benefit of taking them to the market. The original idea is obviously a subject of some value if anybody else might like to make use of it. That by the way, is NOT increasing the plenitude of ideas (hint: It's still the same idea if you simply copy it.). You cant proclaim that ideas are plentiful because they may be copied. Copying an idea and originating it are worlds apart In principal. If you are talented enough to have your own ideas worth paying for then you shouldn't have any need to endorse the profiting from ideas that are originated by others. Go have your own ideas if you profess them to be so plentiful. And nobody is precluding anybody from possessing and using the manifestations of an idea that is protected by IP. The example given in 'Against Intellectual Property', which point's out that: "If I invent a technique for harvesting cotton,
your harvesting cotton in this way would not take away the technique from me." is a prime example of disingenuous sophistry.

Theres a huge difference between being allowed to buy a cotton harvester, manufactured under licence and incorporating a royalty for it's inventor and not being permitted to use an instance of the intellectual property. You will not be asked to pay the price of having the monopoly to USE something, but simply to manufacture and market it. Of course the idea of invention are non-exclusive, that's the beauty; the inventor recognizes a need and solves a problem that is not just manifest in the single instance s/he first sees it and solves it, but by generalizing that solution s/he see the potential to solve the same problem on a much wider scale. It seems to me that the Opponents of IP cant make this distinction between USE and manufacture. In order to prevail in their views, they hold to rigid semantics of arbitrary definitions, wherein 'work' can only be valued if it is physical labor and 'possessions' or 'belongings' must be tangible assets not some some intellectual concept that you cant directly touch, taste, see, hear or smell. The concepts of their value system are held to be tangibles and that is that.

Since discovering bitcoin I have learned so much about economics and I have plenty more to learn yet. One thing I had always known, but has been reiterated over and again, in everyday life it is so easy to habitual forget, is that ALL value is subjective. I had long known and acknowledged the momentarily enlightening principal, that something is only worth what somebody is prepared to pay for it. But to carry that with me and recognize that things do not have any intrinsic value is another matter. We all subjectively value things on our own terms. Yet it's hard not to think as if the ounce of gold or glass of beer is valuable in it's own right. We know there are many others who will agree with us and conspire to place value in the object. We are the ones who objectify things with value, whether individually or collectively. Nevertheless, all value embedded in anything of human value, originates from the subjective idea that is borne of this primal subjective desire. Value itself is an idea. There is nothing less legitimate about the value of an idea, just because it has no immediate manifestation in the physical world. As soon as it does, we may throw away the, idea and only value the item that has benefited from incorporating it, or we may see that  the intellectual providence or talent imbued in it by creative thought, is intrinsic to it and what gives it value. It is subjective value by any measure.

What has happened in history, is that we have started out with physical things, which can have value, only by virtue of their utility function or aesthetic appeal, then progressively the value of the creative intellect or art, has been liberated from the utility of the tangible medium.  A famous sculptor or painter could be rewarded well for the providence of their talent, but they could only expect a one-off payment for each piece of art they produce. Nevertheless the renown and popularity they might well deserve for their creative product, is likely be manifest in the inordinately high price paid if the art pieces were in good demand and were perceived subjectively to have aesthetic (or perhaps abstract conceptual) value. It's far from likely that highly prized art such as this is likely to have any price correlation to the canvas, the paint or the timber in the frame. The materials that make the piece, in other words, you might  ironically say, are actually immaterial. The reward for the merit of the artists talent is practically the whole essence of the value and the confinement of this art to it's physical medium contributed to it's rarity. The renascence painter may get no royalty today, nor would his descendants, but then the paintings sold could command higher value, because they were each one of a kind.

Moving on to the book publishing industry of more modern times, the ability to print copies of a book, enables the talent of an author to be shared by many more people, but obviously the individual rarity of the creative product is not as potent. Publishers aspire to selling in volume because theirs is a mass produced product. The author is rewarded the same way but to a lesser degree. If their work is highly prized they make more even if they make much less per unit value. It's easy to see that the publishers have a job to do and have to compete in the market for business. They ad an important component to the value that is the whole value of the book. Likewise the printers contribute paper ink and printing services that are factored into the whole price. The bookstores buy at wholesale and add their markup to cover expenses and profits, so that we can go shopping and buy a book. Now the Anti-IP crusader claims that the only one not deserving of payment is the one who wrote the book in the first instance. The one who provided all the creative talent to begin with, is begrudged the right to lay claim to the creative output of their own mind.

Sure you can point out that you have the physical means to download and print a book and that doing so is nobody's business because you are only using your own equipment. That A) what you do with your own equipment is your own business and B) any effort to impose a restriction on you is an imposition on your liberties. The question is this. Let's say you want the physical book because you want to give it to somebody (who still likes physical books) as a gift. If you HAD bought the book from a bookshop then, and so you had happily paid for the physical product of paper and inkalong with the editors services and the service that the bookshop provides, and everybody involved with the production of the book; are you then, still going to begrudge the only vital and necessary contributor to this finished product; the author? In that protracted gravy train, of middlemen and coat tail jockeys, would you choose the only person with any real talent and the one who provides the primary reason to produce a book in the fist instance, and say that the dollar they earn from a $20 book is unjustified? If their creative contribution were not worth paying for, you might as well go buy a pretty blank pad of nicely stationed paper, bound in a fitting cover and give that to Aunt Betsy, saying "I would have bought you the latest Daniel Steele title, but I couldn't bring myself to pay royalties for the authors talent".

Laws are fully intended to impose on your liberties.  Are we so self possessed as to claim that because we own our own car, gas pedal and foot that our liberty is being imposed upon if we can't go screaming through quiet suburban streets at 100 MPH? The risk of hitting a child chasing a ball onto the road might be nothing but an intangible, remote probability, at least till it happens. If the argument holds that it's your car and your foot and nobody has the right to tell you what to do with it, then undermining somebodies livelihood with your unlimited liberty to use your computer and printer may quite sensibly seem have little consequence. The point is not to invoke a contrived reductio ad absurdum equating copyright violation to killing children, but that we agree as a society, to limit the consequences of some potential outcomes, by surrendering some liberties. It's simply not true that just because you own something, it's your unassailable right to do with it, whatever you wish.

I'll be the first to admit that the copyright laws are way off beam, especially to the extent that they confer the rights to royalties well beyond the lifetime of the author/artist. But to contend that they should be abolished completely is also way beyond the pail. In exercising your 'liberties' to the extent of using your own equipment for self serve entertainment, I am somewhat ambivalent there. Most of what we help ourselves to that way, comes under the heading of stuff we never would have never paid for, if we had no choice. So there's an argument to be made that the artist is not loosing a paying customer. But what of the many paying customers who do willingly buy the real thing? If you remove the mechanism by which the writer/artist/performer is assured of their reward, there should be something in place to ensure they are offered what they deserve. If anybody should be cut out of the gravy train, the least deserving of such reform is the talent.

In music and other multimedia it's becoming more practical to get rid of the middleman and I have much less problem with that. I'd like to think people could be generous and voluntarily offer the artist a token of appreciation for their work, but in entertainment and aesthetic arts, it is much easier for the performer/artist to bid for their own reward. They are in the business of being known, popular and liked. It certainly seems unfair though, that two or three generations of a pop star's descendants/beneficiaries, get to be born with a silver spoon in their mouths and want for nothing, just because their granddaddy/mommy was somewhat talented. You might give a little coin voluntarily to who ever you like while their music/performance gives you entertainment, and that would rightfully dry up in the timely manner as the fans dictate.

You are however, hardly likely to buy a loaf of bread at the store, and say to the assistant: "Here, this is a 10 cent tip, because I want you to see too it, that the guy who invented the little plastic tag that keep my bread bag closed is rewarded for his inventive contribution." Ten cents is all he might cost you in your whole life, for his part in the cost of taking this innovation to market, but without IP laws he might receive nothing and possibly never did. The huge number of similar innovations we regularly take for granted, are embedded into our multitudes of products and services in such a way as we would never hope to individually reward the creative talent that has manifested in them. Moreover, we expect our products to compete on price so we want the best premium of value we can get, regardless of the fact that creative rewards are inbuilt. If anybody is taking a free ride there, it's not the poor inventor guy, who more often than not get's screwed over by the money people and marketing parasites. To axe IP wholesale, would do most damage to the deserving talent and intellectual benefactors of our current time.

Meanwhile there is still no valid philosophical justification, for why the virtuous idea or concept, should not be granted the imprimatur of a possession. It's a mater of fact that as a society we agree to do so, and that is because we have grown up in a world in which ideas have been gradually liberated from their physical constraints. The value of anything is subjective and society on the whole, is better off if we seek to reward that which we perceive to have value. In particular where practical invention is concerned the idea, if it is indeed a good idea, deserves some guarantee that just because it is comprised of intangible information, that the originator will not be sold short and their idea allowed to be stolen from them by opportunists, who will take advantage of the profitable value it may manifest without even acknowledging the originator.

It's all very well to cynically propose that you might have thought of the same idea independently but the purpose of patenting is to establish a priority. In a sense it's like solving the current block in the block-chain and 'staking a claim' to the treasure. I can remember the crude schoolyard protocol of 'finders keepers, losers weepers'. But that was often challenged by the plaint 'Hey! I saw it first'. Patenting establishes who has first rights to an original concept, even if the process is bewilderingly complex and expensive. We store information as a repository of value between the block-chain and our bitcoin.dat wallet files and so bitcoin demonstrates that information can be used purely as a store of value. We are way beyond saying that nobody can own information or a particular pattern. You can give me your wallet.dat file if you disagree. Information can be of mutual value and so it must be granted equitable protocols of origin, ownership and distribution. Who's to say what protocols are fair? I think we all are. I can think of nothing worse than the nihilistic anarchy, of throwing our arms up and saying "If you think of a good idea, it belongs to nobody". Even 'finders keepers' is more civilized and conducive of equanimity than that.

Sorry for the long rant. 

Hello fellow bitcoiners,

This gets a little long at the other end, so get youself a cupa and make youself comfey. I've been contemplating a couple of ideas for sometime now, that have eventualy gelled into one unified whole and I think it might now be worth the time to share it with you.

On one hand I had wondered if the bitcoin network and protocol could be re-modeled and co-opted to create a useful smaller network for a company to trade shares and originaly I was thinking that it would use the standard protocol and be modified so it had a smaller limit to the number of total units of trade that would be created. Where as the bitcoin network has a target of 21 million total coins, the company 'bitstock' (seems like an apropriate term to coi.. er... stock) would only need, say, 1 million, or even 10 thousand. 

Anyhow, I concieved this with some concerns about how coins on one network would be prevented from being exported on another. As I understand it, this is no a concern anyhow. The basic idea, was to allow a business to permit the tracking of it's equity by implementing this micro-currency to represent it's shares and those could in turn be bought and sold with regular bitcoin.

Due to more recent experiences with the liqidity issues of bitcoin, with respect to trading them in with of regular currency and then after the MtGox incident, I began contemplating another seperate idea, which involves implementing the functions of a trading exchange in the same manner as bitcoin using peer to peer technology. Like MtGox, only over P2P. Then I wondered, if such a trading exchange application, couldn't also be incorporated into the bitcoin interface. After some more pondering, I realized, that both these ideas were begging to be amalgamated. The bitstock I realised should become a seperate protocol in it's own right and the network and blockchain modified to handle some slightly different data. I should make one thing clear from the outset, that is: The bitcoin network and protocol would stay exactly as is and this idea is only a complementary support, which itself, demands bitcoin trading in order to work.

Whereas a bitcoin only has one long identifier of it's uniqeness, the bitstock would have less need for such a large range of unique identifcation, but some of the identity string, could be reserved for a secondary, client assigned identity. The client bitstock application as I envisage, would be able to trade in a large number of individual stocks, comodities, and currencies. Anybody who has something to trade, such as produce, services and even their own company shares, could list them on this virtual stock exchange. The individual trading units, would deliberately have their own block chain (only because I think they would have to) and the units of bitstock, would be asigned an identity according to what type of commodity/currency/stock it is being used to payfor.

You can imagine a whole table of comodities, currencies and stocks, that each person or company may have holdings in, allong with of course, bitcoin itself, which would stand as the base unit of value, against which all the others are calculated. The bitstock could be very effective in establishing business to business trading pathways, where bitcoin can be traded between companies for the multitude of bitstock commodities and services on offer. Companies who provide payment gateways for their regular local currencies, can also list the currency they support. Apart from improving liqidity of bitcoin by diversifying it's pathways to liquidity, while building strong bridges of B2B trading, it could also open a much easier and more fertile path to listing a startup for seed capital. Once you have a company listed and its business plan is published (publishing could perhaps even be provided as an intergrated network service), investors, stock brokers or VC's, may speculate and trade to their hearts content.

When the company returns dividends, the shareholders need to be paid fairly, so the bitstock network might implement a means by which the company automatically divides the proffit and sends bitcoin in exact proportion to the amount of shares each shareholder has. Proffits of course, will be made in bitcoin. If they are made in other currencies, then they must be converted into bitcoin to satisfy the rules of the bitstock network. The reason for this is that bitstock would only be generated by the node of the company or person trading this particular stock or commodity they list. There will be no mining for bitstock in this network. Instead you have to have a ballance of bitcoin proportional to the value of the companys soluable equity. That will be measured in bitcoin only. The bitcoins you have may be spent, in just the same manner as any company uses running capital, but unless you make a profit somehow, you cant buy back more bitcoin than you spend. You dont make a measured turnover letalone profit; not until it is converted to bitcoin in the trading wallet.

The value of your companies shares may rise or fall independantly of it's total bitcoin but not the amount of them that you release. You can only sell at agreed market value and you could only buy back what you have in bitcoin to spend. As far as the client software is concerned, you are just another trader. The companies bitcoin is no better than anybody elses. Just as the bitcoin network prevents double spending, the bitstock network prevents insider trading. Any transaction on the books must be have bitcoin on one side of the ledger. I can well invisage this being incorporated into, or fleecing the opensource code of a good double entry book keeping application, like GNUcash. The point of double entry is everything id accounted in a zero sum system. Every payment from one place is made to some other place and every budget category, is an account, with in and out ledgers. If everything paid for by the company must be taken in bitcoin to be written off as expense, then you ultimately need bitcoin to cover everthing. That's what justifies selling your bitstock shares for bitcoin though.

When you release some shares, it reduces the overall value of them, but since they are released by selling them for bitcoin, you have more trading currency to work with. The bitstock network will not allow bitstock to be bought or sold with anything other than bitcoin but only provides a seperate protocol and network, for liquidating one currency or comodity against another, via the exchange of bitcoin. The number of bitstock units in play at any moment is a zero sum game when played against all the bitcoin equity in the trading companies wallet ballance and material equity. The network can see to it that all of a companies trades from their trading wallet are listed publicly in a running budget ballance sheet, so that shareholders can scrutinise every transaction made, with assets, liabilities, trading ballance, existing shares and their current value, all on display.

The managers may buy assets for the company with local currency cash and not record it, but that will only give their shareholders a free gift. Instead, to account for a purchace, they must use bitcoin or spend bitcoin out of the trading wallet, to buy other currency. Now it's on record they have accounted for their spending and can make purchaces that they need. The management cant however sell anything out of the company ballance sheet, that isn't already accounted for in terms of bitcoin. That of course goes for bitstock too. You could try to run a cash sideline, tradeing out company resources for a local currency, but that will just weaken the proffit you can record and the value of your stock. It's nothing that any company cant already do, for that matter. In this system at least, you are held accountable to much tighter scrutiny and shareholders are granted the means to track all variables of the companies net worth, by deliberately making them reducible to one common unit of P2P currency (our beloved bitcoin), while shares are floated in a way that is also universaly acountable. Only bitcoin in. Only bitcoin out. all assets, liabilities, profits and shares accounted for.

Hopefully companies will eventualy be able to trade for almost all of their requirement B2B+P2P and very little will be needed to be reduced to fiat currency. Their stock can be listed, allong with their produce or services and anybody trading in bitstock can have a smorgasboard of portfolio choices. The existing currency exchangers will not need to maintain central user databases nor have login accounts with all that personal information. Instead they can concentrate on providing a gateway to buy and sell bitcoin for regular currency and list their currency options as on the exchange network. The bitcoin economy could then be rid of a serious bottleneck, causing security and liquidity issues.

The bitstock client, will obviously need to incorporate a regular bitcoin payment client frontend at the very least, but it should also incorporate a gateway to transact localy with a regular bank account. Local currency liquidity is a serious shortfall at the moment and the option of third party centeral websites to play intermediates, is a huge drawback for liquidity and security, while it undermines the benifits of P2P currency. Regular currency exchangers should offer the equivilent to POS, requiring only your direct deposit details, encoded over the network, never stored on their system and never human readable, but simply triggering the authorisation of their client to buy BTC at the listed price and given quantity, while ensuring they are paid. Selling bitcoin is the reverse process, authorising a direct deposit payment and negotiating both the bank payment details and the bitcoin transaction.

With currency, as with any comodity or stock, bitstock acts at an automatic escrow as well. It only releases the bitcoin in reciept of the stock being sold. The trading client nodes will agree by the buyer taking an offer on the market, and confirming the bitcoin is availble in their wallet, then signaling the buy to the sellers client node. That locks in both payment and supply so no more human intervention is permitted. Only with a multi-commodity P2P network or two seperate networks, is it possible to monitor both comodities in a transaction and make sure one agreed unit of trade gets exchanged for another. That in my view has the makings of a universal online stock exchange and bank to network, network to bank trading gateway, to go with the wonderfull, universal bitcoin currency we already have.

OK that was an overwhelming intro. I'll leave it at that and wait to hear what confusion I've mannaged to cause.  Needless to say, your input and queries are greatfully welcomed.

HIT ME!

Perhaps somebody has already thought of this. Perhaps it's unfeasible. But I'thought I'd ask anyhow.

Since GPU's can mine far more efficiently than a CPU, is it possible to create code for a virtual GPU (I'm thinking of hardware that won't support a graphics card)? Would the overhead defeat the purpose? Could you squeeze much more hashing power out of a CPU and make the memory dynamicly allocatable to the GPU on demand (ie in native CPU idle time). Just a thought. 

I'm probably not alone in this, but I had lots of struggles in the past week, with trying to first take some bitcoin and cash it in for my local Australian currency, then wanting to buy some of those cheap bitcoins today, I struggled to find a way to buy in with Australian dollars. It's quite frustrating when you have good money in your bank and there are people on MtGox and TradeHill screaming to sell, yet I cant get a look in. In the first instance (getting AUD for bitcoin), I tried selling on MtGox and opened a liberty reserve account, then I opened an offer on Exchange Zone to sell my liberty basic USD for USPP, until I realized all the difficulties that go with depositing PayPal and that nobody would want to go near a reversible transaction. So I backed out of that pathway and put my money back on the Mt. By the time I bought back in with bitcoins still soaring, they had gained $4 USD so I lost some ground there. 

I then discovered BitPiggy, but they only handle the lesser of $500 or however much is in their pot and now they are also down for servicing for a few days. Somebody pointed me towards e-ForexGold but the seem to require a 24 hour waiting period, at the time It was because I had a new desire to buy bitcoin while the price was low. Now the prices are going back up, it seems I missed bus again.

This is really quite frustrating. I have bitcoin in my wallet, money in my bank and accounts with PayPal, Liberty Reserve, Exchange Zone, e-ForexGold, MtGox and TradeHill, Yet I still can't easily just pay AUD anywhere, to buy BTC or vice versa. Anybody with the same problems or a reliable solution?

Hi all, Well I have gotten myself into a bit of a mess, and a bit of a catch 22 situation.

I started playing with bitcoin about a year ago (back in v. 0.2. days). I've been caught up in other worlds since, but until the GPU miners started to take hold, I managed to mine 450 BTC on my CPU over a bit over a month on my CPU alone. I think I had a problem with my OS after a power outage and never got bitcoin set up again for one reason or another, until a few months ago. Unfortunately by then there was no joy to be had, mining with a measly CPU. I spent some of my coins though, on a months worth of VPN connection (which I never really made good use of) Anyhow I checked back again a couple of weeks ago only to find the price of bitcoins going through the roof. Seems that my months worth of CPU mining is growing toward $4,000 USD WOW! 

Anyhow I no sooner learned of this and had intended to do a full (and careful) upgrade to the latest client, before my mother board gave up the digital ghost. That's were the real problem begins. As Linux users may be aware, it can be very forgiving on some hardware problems even changing drives to a completely different machine can work, but not for me. Not this time. Grub wouldn't take to the new (slightly downgraded board) To complicate this, I had two drives with the root partition on one, and the /home directory on another. I just couldn't boot into my old distro. I chose to make some space on a new partition and set about installing something else.

I had a super security packed Fedora distro, which I tried out and a futzy cloud based consumer oriented Ubuntu distro called Joli. I have both of these installed. The beauty of the Joli distro is that it finds all your other grub installs and includes them automatically on it's boot menu. The down side is that it makes it like hell to get proper administrative privileges and access to you own machine for say copying files as root (if it's actually possible at all). But at least I can try different parameters at the grub prompt. The fedora one is better to administer but I found that after installing the latest bitcoin client, it is giving me a segmentation fault error when I try to load it with the the wallet.dat file which (I believe) is the one from my old distro. I did try clearing out the whole lot except the wallet.dat, starting with restore etc...etc.. I've spent over a week pouring over the docs and problems here on the forum, but I'm getting nowhere fast. I cant start the old client on a new system and the new wont take my old wallet.

I have that many copies of various wallets and have tried that many things now, I am loosing track of where I am and what I've done. So I will offer 20 BTC bounty to the linux guru who can help me fix this mess and get access to the wallet which (I believe) is the one that has my BTC booty stored in it, as I need to do a transaction to cement a business deal and those coins will come in very handy. Thanks in advance for any advice/help too.

Steve.

[HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!!]

I have just got my bitcoin software going today,  and I am about to start investigating a bitcoin project. I figure you want your wallet wherever you go on the web (once bitcoin rules the world that is ) and so it would be nice to have a  Firefox browser wallet plugin. This might have an editbox on the  toolbar, a spin button for amount to spend, then a pay button alongside. Existing balance could show up in the status bar. That would be the minimum design, but more sophisticated features could be implemented with a sidebar version, perhaps even pulling data from bitcoin market, your contacts, and favorite suppliers/shops/services (where you spend), as well as history and regular payment/budget features. Not sure how hard this will be as I'm not much of a programmer really. If anybody else thinks it's an easy job to knock up and wants to make it happen, I'd be happy to get out of the way. (because I wouldn't be much help to somebody doing it properly.)

Also, has anybody yet developed a shopping cart or any other payment gateway for the web? Even a donate button would be good. If you can paste some simple code into your website, from basic templates this plugin has, which include your bitcoin address/ID and a few custom settings in wizard (like the paypal widgets), then think how fast and easily people can have a monetized site. Transactions will be instant browser to browser, just like cash in person. Don't have bitcoin yet? No problemo. Click here and install the plugin right now. Paypal will be Playpal. 

      HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!! HAIL BITCOIN!!!