I am in the United States of America - is it possible to send USD via Bitcoin network in Europe - e.g. in one of the following countries Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia&Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia?

Thank you.

Beautifully said. It sounds to me like you are powerfully related to other people. As a result of being powerfully related to your fellow human beings - whether through therapy, healing of trauma, faith or all of the above- you got to know who you are.  That's something that a BitCoin can't buy.... and one can be only transformed into such a human being... by a certain higher power which most people do not beleive exists.

I wish more people were like you. The good does indeed survive!

Carl Gustav Jung also said "The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely".... I hope he knows that one too.

Wow... I am impressed .... You remind me of Mr. Data from Star Trek, cold, unemotional, calculating and driven.... by the love of the BitCoin!

I wish you the best of luck in your pursuit.

Do not take this as an ad hominem - just think about it before you have the 'automatic' (emotional) response - but what kind of a personality "does not take much stock in the opinions of others"? A trusting or distrusting one?

Pretending that we do not use emotions, in addition to data/logic/facts when making decisions, is, in my view, deadly.

At the core of who we are, we're driven by our emotions as well as reason. What is the incentive for my dad, who is 64, and never interacted with computers his entire life nor does he intend to, to trust BitCoin over the dollars in his pocket? It will definitely not be an in-depth analysis of BitCoin. It will be my word or other people or authority he trusts to make the decision.

Does your personality get an MD degree before you go to a doctor because you do not take much stock in the doctor's opinion?

Either you are playing devil's advocate here, or perhaps you are very young .... Again, not to berate you, but I am a little surprised you do not see the point.

I just want to add one more inquiry to my previous characterization of BitCoin -

the value add of having a decentralized currency does not come without some other, less visible/obvious costs.

Namely, all the good, bad and ugly stuff that human beings are able to do with centralized currency, will still be possible with BitCoin, once the gold/BitCoin fever is over and the currency is used en masse.

Thus, I assert that BitCoin is NOT a solution to the ethical/moral problems that arise in society. After all, the first thing one will do with an anonymous currency that can be sent to anyone in the world is abuse it for immoral purposes. By 'immoral', I am using my personal Judeo-Christian belief system here, which has been around for 4000 years or thereabouts, BC and AD combined. Apparently, some of this has already been done.

The cost of being able to transfer currency at will, to anyone and anywhere in the world, is an apparent shift/increase in responsibility from the group (e.g. "centralized") to the individual.

Now, the question is - if responsibility to make "bad" (e.g. self-destructive or destructive to others) decisions is given via means of BitCoin - will that eventually result in the massive corruption of the whole, e.g. the few or one bad apple will spoil the whole good bunch?

Or, does personal responsibility eventually, once all the "bad bunches" have been eliminated by self-destruction or mutual-destruction, result in increased responsibility for all people combined?

I know there is no easy answer to this type of ethical inquiry - however, I want people to beware that NOTHING comes without a COST - not necessarily a MONETARY one at that, and that eventually, "scary" or "pleasant" as it might be, we ALL get exactly what we are asking for. Whether we like what we get or not, in the end, is open to debate.

I am not denigrating or putting down BitCoin by any stretch of the imagination, merely adding some _human_ perspective to it and the kind of problems it will solve as well as create at the same time as a result of this transfer of responsibility.

I feel compelled to respond to creighto's remark here.

People in general, me included, have a difficult time believing that out of the ashes of the recent economic collapse (the RE market collapse as well as the Madoff-like, greed based ponzi schemes) something as awesome, beautiful and as powerful could arise as the result of the efforts of a single, or perhaps and more likely, a group of technically/economically minded/skilled individuals.

The automatic, default response to anything novel and revolutionary, is at first, denial and ultimately, acceptance while pretending nothing new ever happened.

A perfect example of the emotional/psychological/thought/belief-based roller coaster that we all go through when faced with something so big and so 'surreal' is captured in this just as awesome, beautiful and powerful quote as BitCoin is, by William James:


Now, I've personally known a few people in my time who have achieved something revolutionary, not because they had any idea how to do it when they set out to do it, but because they all had the following things in common at the level of whom they were being:

1) an intention to create something Good (Good here is defined according to my Judeo-Christian belief system)

2) a complete surrender of their personal philosophy/worldview/doctrine in lieu of another's philosophy/worldview/doctrine. They answered their God-given Calling.

3) they executed and finished it

Steve Jobs... is one of these people.  Bill Gates... is another one of these people. In my view, Satoshi, whom as far as I am concerned at this point in time might as well be Keyser Söze, is one of these people as well.

I choose to create a personal relationship with Satoshi by starting with a $100 USD investment into BTCs, much in the same way I have created a personal relationship with Steve Jobs by owning a MBP, or Akio Toyoda, by owning two Toyota vehicles, mine and my wife's.

My trust in BitCoin, vis-a-vis, Satoshi, is 100%. I risk getting screwed over by BitCoin/Satoshi. Upon reading the whitepaper, I am confident that Satoshi's intentions are noble, despite any imperfections BitCoin's heuristics may have.

My suggestion to everyone here is to trust Satoshi until he cannot be trusted any longer.  I know this doesn't sound "revolutionary", but in fact, all of these skeptics and naysayers are actually PRETENDING to know that Satoshi is a scammer, and thus BitCoin is a scam. Fact is - they don't know anymore than I know that he is genuine. They want to peek around the corner of time when the only way to find out is to play the game. If indeed he turns out to be a scammer, the people with the highest levels of greed today risk getting screwed the most anyway. The other ones can shrug off the loss. One thing I am certain of, if Satoshi is proven to be a scammer, he will be no more, much like Bin Laden, or Ratko Mladic.

Barring any serious technical analysis of Satoshi's BitCoin heuristics/algorithm that can prove it logically unstable or easily defraudable by a large entity with much time/cash to spend on a systematic attack toward this purpose, I welcome you to the new world currency - BitCoin.

Dive in, the water's just fine (for now!)  

So I woke up one morning and decided I don't like Gavin's and Jeff's bitcoin clients for any of the platforms.

Can I write my own, and is there anything technically stopping me from doing this if I were to follow the rules of trading/transactions on the Bitcoin network?

Maybe I want to write a Haskell or a Clojure client... or Ruby. Is there anything stopping me from writing one and getting other people to use it if they see value in it?

Where is the protocol specified of how to write a Bitcoin client/daemon?

Thanks!

BitCoin is the future of a single worldwide currency. It seems like God sent it.

Now, do you believe Harold Camping's Rapture prediction? 

I think it's one of:

1) Bruce Schneier - cryptographer
2) Niklas Zennström - Skype
3) Justin Frankel/Tom Pepper (posing as one person) - GNUTella
4) A combination of the above plus a few theoretical/applied economists 

Your take?