Not explained at all, merely stated.  Adding subsidized ASICs to the mix will increase difficulty, at least until the point that everyone stops using the system entirely, at which point the only person left mining is the subsidizer, and he can set the difficulty to whatever low value he wants, but, and this part is critical, but no one cares because no one else is using it.

As for opencores, go for it.  I'm totally in favor of more designs and cheaper chips.  Considering that we are (probably, heh) going to go from zero publicly available ASIC designs to at least three in the next 12 months, I wouldn't say that open hardware is critical here, but it is always desired and appreciated.

Meh.  50,000 (very homogenous) people on an island is hardly a test.  Proof of concept, maybe.  Also, see here.

And most of his detractors don't take his assumptions on faith.  Justice and defense aren't necessarily "sectors of the economy".

Just one example, in the USA the justice system is creaky and inefficient by design because a group of people were horrified by the efficient systems they had seen elsewhere in the world.  It is a price that they (and we) were willing to pay.  It may be possible for a market to produce the same or better outcome for less cost, but it is not at all obvious.

Yawn.  If you want to destroy bitcoin, it would be cheaper to round up all of the miners and shoot them.  If you want to reduce the difficulty, but still keep a functioning system, what are your options?

My apologies, I had taken the total destruction option to be an assumed, but uninteresting, path.

Now I'm confused.  You posted a link to a state that existed from 930 to 1262 as evidence of the viability of a system invented by a guy born in 1819.  Did Gustave invent anarcho-capitalism, or the time machine?

At any rate, Iceland as a whole has never had more population than a small city, so it is hard to draw conclusions that would scale up to the size of the Roman, Venetian or American republics.

What mechanism would they use to lower the network speed?  It is very easy to add mining incentives, but impossible to reduce them.  There are no anti-fees that you can put in a transaction to lower the reward for mining.

The OP proposes a scheme that he thinks will break the system, but he hasn't ever done a proper accounting of the costs, risk and rewards for all of the parties at each step along the way.  His conclusion is based on shitty bookkeeping, and a desire to find a way, any way, for his prejudgment about proof-of-work to be right.

f(x) is SHA256(SHA256(x)) and x is the block header.

Meh.  Untested conjecture.

I'm not opposed to the idea of anarcho-capitalism, and if it worked, I'd probably even prefer it.

But I do know that a Republic works, for as long as the people value it, generally at least a few hundred years, and it has a track record of not failing in the direction of apocalypse.

I don't think you understood what he is proposing.  He is saying that if the current network speed is acceptable to most people, but a few people would like it higher for their own reasons (whatever those reasons are), they have a mechanism to pay for that extra speed without changing the system.

This was not a techno-republic.  (Side note, you said democracy, which is wrong, the founder rejected that system intentionally.)

The founders were keenly aware that they were making a temporary thing.  They were all serious students of history, and they knew damn well how and why Republics died.  From Athens and Sparta through Rome to Vienna, they knew that every Republic eventually commits suicide.  The collapse of the Venetian Republic was an ongoing event while they were drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and it was well known to the founders.

They still thought it was the best option, and plenty of us still agree today.  Some of us even stick around watching the suicide in progress, saying "Not today!".

2¹²⁸ is an absurdly large number.  I did the math a couple of months ago, and at that time I think I had figured out that the bitcoin project has managed to do about 2⁶⁸ hashes in 4 years.  That is actually pretty consistent with this lowest hash.

SSL cert signing requests have no consistent structure beyond some very loose guidelines that vary a bit from CA to CA.  If you were trying to design a data format that was intentionally vulnerable to hash collision attacks, I doubt you could do a better job.

Heh.  I had the exact same problem with 0.7.0 and it hasn't happened to me since I moved up to 0.7.1.

Ahh, I think you might need to do some reading on what the RPC API is, and how to use it.  I suggest starting with the link I posted earlier.

Highlighted for emphasis.  If you don't do this step, you'll end up with with a bit of a mess.

The answers are in this thread already.  What are you having problems with?

Are you wondering how to use the RPC service from .net?

To use the p2p protocol to spew blocks, you'll have to implement a fair chunk of the protocol; enough to convince your node that it is talking to another node.

If you just want to see the blocks, parsing the block files is super easy.  The only catch is that you'll need to build your own index as you go.  The satoshi client keeps an index, but it is in the BDB system, and interfacing with that is probably much more work than doing it yourself.

As far as I can tell, mailing booze is bad, but causing booze to be sent to you from overseas isn't a big deal.

As in, you are liable for the import duty, which is under $1.00/litre, and (worse) if they notice that it is booze, they'll halt it wherever it is and give you the option of abandonment or having another (non-USPS) carrier pick it up and finish delivery.  $$$

Since you don't want to talk about anything that might be of broad interest, like cryptography or statistics, I guess I'll just point you to the btcguild thread so that you can talk to eleuthria about his stats.

Meh.  Turn the world 90 degrees and paper dollars become bearer certificates (IOUs) for checkbook (real) money.  It is really hard to come up with an argument for one being more "real" than the other than wouldn't apply equally well from the other side.

And in reality, banks make loans first, and then seek reserves second.  The real limit to the money supply is the product of the creditworthiness of borrowers times their desire for loans.  The reserve requirements are impotent in terms of the money supply, that is they don't actually prevent any loans from happening, but they do sometimes reveal weaknesses in specific banks.

And yes, you do have to be a member of the club to "invent" money for loans, but it is a damn big club.  Technically, that distinguishes from "anyone".  I haven't checked, but I suspect that becoming an orange grower or pork belly farmer (or a producer of COMEX-able gold bars) is a harder club to join than banker.  (Cletus isn't parked outside the Chicago Mercantile Exchange building with a truck full of pigs waiting for his short to go to delivery, he operates through a co-op and a broker and inspectors and regulators and... )