True.


Also true.

Sweat equity.

Don't forget the Wachovia bankers who were more than happy to support the cartels' civil war in Mexico that nobody likes to talk about.

What you need to do is spend 2+ weeks outside the G7 and pay close attention to how average people go about their lives and businesses outside of the tourist areas.

Wander around Lima, Peru, for example and you'll find plenty of unlicensed currency exchangers who operate in defiance of the law because enforcing those laws would require more resources than the regulators have at their disposal.

It's a bit different in the digital realm since there are plenty of talented programmers in the US and Europe who are willing to sell every tinpot dictator in the world monitoring technology in exchange for blood money, but that just means the programmers inventing circumvention measures have to work a bit harder.

Are you implying that truth has anything whatsoever to do with the US criminal justice system?

Why would it? It is a criminal system, after all.

When governments control the money supply, the result is pure evil.

http://news.yahoo.com/airlines-halt-ticket-sales-venezuela-210753054--finance.html

All the shills, sockpuppets, and collaborators who want to prevent Bitcoin from becoming a tool for freeing humanity from that blight can go fuck themselves.

It's quite latency sensitive now, but the low hanging fruit in terms of improving that hasn't even been touched yet.

Start with a new block message that only includes transactions hashes instead of full transactions and you reduce the amount of burst bandwidth needed by a factor of (size of a hash)/(average transaction size).

With a bit more work miners can broadcast most of the block in parallel with hashing so that the amount data they need to rapidly propagate once they find a valid hash is tiny and constant relative to the transaction rate.

Pick three random non-experts and try introducing them to the concept of encrypted email.

Walk them through the entire process of moving away from the workflow they use now and into a new one that includes Thunderbird and Enigmail.

Make sure to cover the concepts of key signing; what it means, how to assign trust, and how to actually do it.

Remember that modern users don't read email on a single device - they've got desktops, laptops, tablets and phones and are accustomed to things just working no matter what device they're on. Ever tried to synchronize keyrings and trust settings across multiple devices before?

Do that, and then come back here and say the UX for encrypted email is just fine.

It's not just about the mechanics of actually encrypting and decrypting messages, any more than driving a car is just about how easy it is to fill the gas tank. it about the entire process.

It doesn't matter if you're selling something for currency or not - convincing other people to use even free software follows the same principles as selling them anything else.

Saying "we're not about that" is just a lazy excuse for bad software.

No no no - that's where it always goes wrong.

Users are the customers of personal encryption software. If nobody uses PE software it's because the designers of said software failed to understand meet the needs of their (potential) customers.

There is no such thing as defective customers, only defective products.

Is that why newbie restrictions were lifted and this thread is immune to normal categorization rules?

By the way, there's a way to fix PKI, but you can't put cryptographers in charge of building it. They've got a three decade track history of user interface failure (sorry, but it's true).

Hand the problem over to the game designers instead, the people who have a track record of building software that people actually enjoy using: http://bitcoinism.blogspot.com/2013/09/building-pgp-web-of-trust-that-people.html

Nothing, really.

It's just some development time and a protocol version bump away.

There actually are real, valid concerns regarding the effects of hash function vulnerabilities on Bitcoin, but saying "OMG the NSA can break everything!!!!" doesn't achieve anything useful.

I'd be a lot more excited about the claims of the people you're talking about if I say any indication at all that said people actually understood the problem space.

Turning metatdata in a blockchain into something that has relevant effects in the real world means delving into fields outside of just coding.

What you can do is use the blockchain to store tamperproof metadata about non-blockchain assets.

Actually doing something useful with that metadata is an out of scope problem as far as the blockchain is concerned.

btcd maintains a full blockchain index by default. I think Bits of Proof does as well. Not sure about Obelisk.

Bitcoind may in fact be the odd implementation out by not doing that by default.

And that has what exactly to do with Bitcoin?

The real point of the test is to remove plausible deniability for concern trolls so they can be summarily banned.

It takes away one technique from the forum disruption toolkit.

Since you possess this insight, you should also be able to explain what exactly it means to break a hash function, and what doing so allows an attacker to achieve? Right?