Alice is looking for a job.  Bob wants to hire her.

B: I would like to hire you but due to minimal wages laws, I can't afford to pay you.
A: Yes I understand, I'm a liberal myself and I think minimal wages make employment more difficult.  Couldn't we find an agreement?
B: What are you thinking about?
A: Well, you officially pay me on minimal wages, in dollars.  And at each pay roll, I send you some percentage using bitcoins.  We keep this between you and me.  Off the book.
B: I see, using bitcoins should allow to avoid any regulators problem. Sounds fine to me.  It's a shame we have to behave like criminals just to work together, though.

For what it's worth, here is my opinion about mining.

Mining is a race, a competition.   And in any race, not everybody can win.  So to me, mining is pointless and it's much simpler to just buy bitcoins...

...UNLESS:

- you're a computer-nerd.  You enjoy dealing with a lot of complicated hardware, and you are good at setting them up ;

and/or:

- you have access to very cheap hardware and electricity ;

and/or:

- you are extremely smart and thus you are capable of implementing your own mining software or dedicated device (FPGA, ASIC, whatever) ;

and/or:

- you are concerned about the overall bitcoin security and thus you want to bring as much computing power to the network as you can, even if it will not give you many bitcoins in reward


I personally don't mine as I don't fit in any of the above exceptions.   To me, mining would be as silly as signing up for a marathon against professional runners (I can't run more than a mile or something )

I don't play any video games, but I had the following idea while I was reading an article about some MMORPG.  I hope you'll find it interesting.

Ever since I learned about the proof-of-work concept (quite a bit before I learn about bitcoin), I've always thought this idea is pretty cool.  Don't know why, but it's a fact:  there is something I immediately liked about this idea of using a hash function to challenge the computing power of a machine.

Now, when I think about some MMORPG, it appears to me that the concept of force is pretty lame there.  Basically you have a soldier whose strength is nothing but some parameter.   It's easy to modify (even if the game admins won't let you do it easily, but anyway).  There is a limit to it, and it's somehow 'costless'.   Someone with priviledge access to the program could get as much strength as he wants.  This is not cool and it does not fit with the idea of "strength".

So, what about using proof-of-work to emulate the physical concept of force?

Say, two soldiers wield their swords against each other.  The program would require each soldier's computer to solve some hash challenges in order to determine which sword gets to be thrown to the ground.

More generally, there is probably some way to emulate the basic mechanical concept of force and power.

To apply some force, the user asks the program for some hash-challenges to solve.  All this would be public, so that opponents can check that the guy is not cheating.  Better:  opponents provide challenges, so they don't have to trust the game admin.

So, during a fight, each player sends hash-challenges to the opponent, and the amount and speed rate they can sole determins the force they can apply to their sword.

I think a game would be much more fun to play if you can hear you GPU struggling during an intense fight.  At the end, the stronger player will be the one with biggest computing power.  But there are other ways than pure strength to win a fight:  ruse, speed and stuffs like that.
 
PS.  That's it.  As a proof-of-concept, I'll see if I can find some time to create the electronic equivalent of an Arm wrestling game website.

Sorry I don't know any chinese, but I've noticed China has appeared in the Google trends listing about bitcoin.

So I guess China is becoming aware of the future worldwide currency.  This is good news.

I haven't read the diamond age yet, but I know the story and I heard about the "phyle" concept.

Of course there are several other worldwide dissiminated cultural groups, but none of them has a clearly strong, government-proof currency.

A typical economically oriented argument against bitcoin is the "bitcoin will eventually create a deflationary spiral" one.

According to this argument, bitcoin will fail because it lacks a way to inject new money into the system in order to suit economic growth.

I think most of bitcoin adepts answer this argument by defending the concept of deflation, explaining that it is really not so bad after all.  It's especially common amongst former goldbugs as myself.

However, there is a much simpler argument, that doesn't even have to defend the idea of a deflation-friendly economy.

In a keynesian nightmare, people would start to hoard bitcoins in such an extent that bitcoins become rare in circulation and thus prices start to fall.  Then people are even more inclined to hoard bitcoins, and that is the very deflationary spiral.   In such a situation, the lack of money in circulation will create a demand for money.  The failure of bitcoins to serve the economy will become more and more apparent and people will just start to want an other currency.   To put it simply, they will just create an other block chain.   Bitcoin is a tool to create money.  It can be started as soon as a social/economic consensus requires it.

On the opposite, if the bitcoins do their job and allow trades to occur correctly, there is no need for a new currency and nobody will be willing to put any effort into a new block chain.

Between those two situations some equilibrium has to be found by the market.  It can be observed by looking at the prices of the main cryptocurrency compared to other challenging cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin doesn't prevent from creating more money than what is written in the software.  It prevents from creating more bitcoins.  Mind the difference.   Basically monetary injection/destruction is possible with cryptocurrencies.  It's just that it obeys social consensus and individual economic freedom, and NOT central bureaucratic forced planification.

   just not noticed Gavin's new avatar.   It is so true that he looked like Spock in the Forbes article!

I'm not sure I've seen such a simple poll already. 

Notice that to me begging or selling goods/services is the same as buying, but I'm pretty sure some people won't agree with that, so I made a distinct option.

It seems to be quite an intense debate about bitcoin on quora.com.

I've noticed a great quote from a guy named J.C. Hewitt:

That being said, I think that Bitcoin may wind up thriving. The ideological impetus behind it is admirable. The technological achievement is impressive. I like that it was motivated by science fiction, like most great technologies. I think that it should be free to compete with other currencies.

To me this DSK affair is a shame for my country.  Especially since french medias knew about his perverted behaviors, but they didn't talk about it, pretexting it was his "private life".

I'm ashamed to be french, honnestly.

I answered 'Totally'

Somehow I wonder if I'll ever manage to free my mind from this whole project.

1. Bitcoin is a technologically sound project.
2. Bitcoin is unstoppable without end-user prosecution.
3. Bitcoin is the most dangerous open-source project ever created.
4. Bitcoin may be the most dangerous technological project since the internet itself.
5. Bitcoin is a political statement by technotarians (technological libertarians).*
6. Bitcoins will change the world unless governments ban them with harsh penalties.

 


My god, is economic freedom so scary?

"Should I transfer some money? No prob, gimme your public key. Ok, done!"  This is not fiction anymore. #bitcoin

I think this short dialog sums up bitcoin pretty well!

Lol,  I was hanging around on some forum about japanese anime, and I had the idea of using "Satoshi Nakamoto" as a pseudo for posting a comment.

I think it could be cool if all bitcoin users were doing the same.  It could get people curious if they keep seeing this name everywhere they go.

Somehow, it could turn "Satoshi Nakamoto" into a new "John Galt".

It's a nice non-intrusive way to promote bitcoin, imho.

Ça manque de sondage ici. 

I know most people won't agree with me on this, but to me bitcoin will have success as a metacurrency.

What is a metacurrency?    Well, as you know, a currency is something that is used as an intermediary to exchange stuffs, right?   Then, a metacurrency is something that is used as an intermediary to exchange... currencies.

Are there other metacurrencies?  Yes, plenty of them.   Gold is the most famous one.  We used to buy consumer goods with gold, but we don't do that anymore.  You can't buy a pizza or a car with gold.  You have to sell your gold against national currencies first.   So gold is a metacurrency nowadays.   Other fiat currencies were meta currencies in their history.  So was the Écu before the euro in Europe, for instance.

That's why I don't care much if my local grocery store doesn't ever accept bitcoins.  I'll just buy the lousy money it requests:  I'll possess this silly money just the time necessary to buy the stuff I need.  A few seconds basicallly.

Oh my god this is the first time ever I have such a linux crash!!!

It seems that my system is absolutely unrecoverable!!!!!

I'm currently sending this message from a freshly installed Ubuntu distro.   So far I've managed to recover some backups such as my GnuPG private key.

I hope I'll have no problem getting my wallet back!

Pray for me guys!

An interesting legal idea here:

I doubt Bitcoin will be made illegal. By itself, the Bitcoin network is just a mechanism for passing around signed messages and calculating hash values. It would be difficult to outlaw that without running into constitutional free speech issues.

I tend to agree with that.

Hi,

I want to post messages on youtube but I don't want to go through the registration process, nor do I want to accept their user conditions.

So I start this reverse auction  for a login/password on youtube.

Auction will end on block 123,000


I may cancel the auction if at the end I'm not happy with the finite price.

Is that true?

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/bitcoins-a-new-way-to-donate-to-the-fsf