It most certainly is a currency.  It facilitates trade.  That's what currencies do.  That's why I gave the etymology of the word.  It comes from the word meaning 'to flow' -- it permits trade to flow.

And unlike a commodity, it has no use other than to facilitate trade.  Hell, I could argue that a US Dollar Bill is more of a commodity than a bitcoin is -- because if nothing else, I could light it on fire and generate heat from the paper.  Or I could use them to wallpaper my room.  Bitcoins have absolutely no other use than to facilitate trade.  

You probably don't want to call them currency because you want to skirt the laws regarding currencies.  

Diamonds are sought after as an ends unto themselves.  People spend money to have diamonds, not to then turn around and trade those diamonds for other things.  Diamonds can be used for jewelry, cutting things, etc.  That's why diamonds are a commodity, while Bitcoins are a currency.  If bitcoins were useful for anything OTHER THAN TRADE, you'd have a much better time trying to call them a commodity with a straight face.

And again -- it doesn't matter what the community calls them.  Even if you could convince every person in the Bitcoin community to call them a commodity, it won't make a bit of difference.  It's what the judge/jury/law defines as currencies that ultimately matters. 

I make the distinction because of the definition/etymology of 'currency'.  Currencies, as the name implies, permit trade to FLOW (like a current).

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=currency

Nope.  I thought I made myself clear on that point.  They're a medium of exchange.  They're desired because they facilitate trade.  They're not desired because someone wants to place them on their lawn, atop their TV, eat them, etc.  Some weirdo might have a goal to accumulate them without EVER using them to facilitate a trade for SOMETHING ELSE -- but I have yet to run into such a person.  And I doubt that you have either.

Quite interesting.  I can think of multiple ways that someone got control over ChanServ bot.  Same password used elsewhere.  Pretending to be the legitimate owner to the IRC mods, and begging for ops.  Or password file downloaded and decrypted.

Converted / Sold / Exchanged.  The point is still the same.  They're not an end unto themselves, they simply facilitate trade.

He was convicted on counterfeiting charges -- his coins were confusingly similar to legal tender coins.  I don't agree with the Jury's decision in his case, but he was playing a game by rearanging the "In God We Trust" into "Trust in God".  

Nobody said that bitcoins were legal tender money.  They are obviously not.  They're an electronic currency which can be converted into legal tender currencies.

Go to disneyland and you have a good chance of acquiring Disney Dollars.  Those are a type of currency that is not legal tender.  And go to an arcade where you get 8 game tokens for $1.  Those tokens are also a currency.

It would be a commodity except for the fact that people use it to buy things.  If buying things with bitcoins were impossible, then I would agree that it was merely a commodity.  But it is trading like a currency on currency exchanges, and people are using it to buy things.  

What YOU call it is irrelevant anyhow.  It's what lawyers/judges/juries call it that ultimately matters.

Money is generally considered to be a currency which is backed by something -- such as gold, silver, etc.  I would never call a bitcoin 'money'.  But it is a currency, because it facilitates trade, and is not and 'end unto itself'.  People who want bitcoins want them for their ability to facilitate trade.  Not because they are nice to mount on the wall, on top the television, or anything like that.

If I go to you with a pig and ask to trade it for your chicken, we're engaged in barter.  It's barter because the items being traded are desired by each party as an end unto themselves.  They intend to eat the pig/chicken, or such.  Currencies, on the other hand, are an unconsumed facilitator of trading -- which is exactly what bitcoins do.

If they do have control over so many hacked computers, it is still quite doubtful that they could cause those hacked computers to generate bitcoins without the legitimate owners of those computers knowing. 

I am not so sure that is true.  They could modify the coding of the difficulty increases such that it grandfathered in all previous transactions at the old difficulty limit, and then have a new formula for all transactions which occur after a specified block number.

Using my previous example...  If the old limit was 2 raised to the power of a 32-bit integer, they could change that to 2 raised to the power of a 64-bit integer (which is a mind-boggling large number).  They could set the code so that it would grandfather all transactions under block number XXX,XXX at the old formula.

Let's say that the code permitted the difficulty to raise by a factor of 2 raised to the power of some 32-bit integer.  I suspect that the Sun would die off before that happened.

Do you have any idea of the maximum limit to the difficulty increases?  If there was no limit on the difficulty levels, computing power improvements would be irrelevant.  It just gets extremely difficulty to solve blocks.  There is no problem here, unless the upper limit of the difficulty increases can be realistically attained.

Even if all the worlds super computers were focused on solving bitcoin blocks, it wouldn't kill bitcoin.  It would simply make it so difficult for us regular GPU miners to solve blocks that we'd probably all quit.  

And everyone's IP address on this thread has been delivered to website asking for the username/password.   Hope your firewalls are up to speed...

So according to Moore's law, computing power should double in two years.  

And how much has bitcoin's difficulty level increased in those same two years?

Yes, both computing power and the difficulty levels increase exponentially.  But just because they're both exponential doesn't mean that one will reach or otherwise catch up with the other. 

OP, you really don't have an argument here, unless there is a realistically realizable upper limit to the built-in difficulty increases.  

Found the show archived at:


http://kiwi6.com/file/9j8g288xs7

http://www.mediafire.com/?a5y5zkituuotfha

http://torrage.ws/torrent/186212A02D679BCA24FEAD1D822F28DC2ADB4831.torrent

http://thehashden.org/torrent/AB87A3F9748D576F63768564519D0DCB0DC338A3.torrent

I love how the Mt in MtG becomes "Mount"...

Probably shouldn't have that "." in the name, though.  Unless, of course, you have www.mt.gox.com set up to redirect to www.mtgox.com

That's odd.  I was under the impression that many exploits use this very method, as well as stack overflows.

Anyhow, I am not going to debate this further.  Today's modern OSes might be as impossible to crack as the Nazi Enigma code...  Hmmm...

So you're telling me that I can't intentionally write beyond my own memory pointers in C++ on a VPM?  Nonsense.

The physical machine is shared.  It is only a PROGRAM on the OS that makes it appear to be separate machines to the various users.  The root user sees the whole REAL directory structure.  So the barrier between accounts is only as solid as the program controlling the access.  Show me an OS that is without bugs...

I ran a webhosting company for a number of years, using Ensim at the time.  Another problem that is inherent to shared machines is the tendency of the OS to remain outdated well beyond what you'd settle for if you were the only person on the machine.  In other words, providers don't generally do a great job of keeping the OS as up to date as they should.  The techs in those centers have an install disk that simply doesn't get updated as fast as updates are available.

I don't need access to the device.  I need access to the memory.  Or are you going to tell me that they have separate memory sticks too?  

No OS is 100% secure.  And once you start sharing the machine with other people, your level of control and security lowers.  That's just a fact.

Have you had access to the root account on a VPM?  The view is quite a bit different.

I don't think you are correct.  They only appear to be separate services.  And the hard drives are typically jailed in such a way as to APPEAR to be multiple instances of the os.  Appearance is NOT reality.