This isn't hard to do with Bitcoin.

The block chain is already public.

You could for example use a single Bitcoin address for each bank account.

The customer can then simply use the block explorer to see if her coins are still there.
 
You could also publish ALL Bitcoin addresses owned by your bank, but without saying which one corresponds to which bank account.

You could even prove that your bank has X amount of Bitcoin in the vault by digitally signing  requests from inspectors, journalists, etc. with the private keys of your Bitcoin addresses.

This degree of verfiability and transparency would eliminate the need for a democratic bureaucracy.

Who is Satoshi? Why is Satoshi? When is Satoshi?
Will the real Satoshi please stand up?
Satoshi isn't a person, it's a whole way of life.
There is a little bit of Satoshi in all of us.
Live Satoshi, breathe Satoshi.

Satoshi is now.

 

I will tell my GF that I already got the money back that I invested, so whatever happens, no harm done. I am definitely not selling the rest of my Bitcoins though, whatever she says.  I will wait until the bitter end/ glorious future of Bitcoin.  

1. You can't buy a pizza with gold either.

2. Wallet encrypted and stored in three places including a cloud storage account is safer than any physical wallet can be.  It's not rocket science - it's only a matter of educating people.

3. Stores can hedge if that is a big problem for them.  Or they can just hang on to them until Bitcoin goes mainstream.

4. Nothing stopping the two parties from using an escrow service or web of trust. Except unlike Paypal and CCs,  it's not mandatory.

5. Regular users who switch off the client don't compromise network integrity. The network can easily do its job with miners alone.

6. Or you just sit down for a few days and educate yourself. See (2). It's a worthwile investment considering what's at stake, don't you think?

7. Yes, it's still a beta technology. There are risks and failure scenarios. Don't invest in Bitcoin if you can't affort to lose it.

8. Bitcoin fulfils some real, practical needs that no other technology fulfils at the moment. Even if the euphoria dies down, there will be a core of users who buy Bitcoin for sober reasons.


Yes, all of these are factored into the price, as well as future expectations of all of these.

Monopolies are only a bad thing in a propretarian economy, because there they often exclude people from using capital in a more efficient way than the owner of that capital.

In a non-propretarian economy monopolies can be desireable.  One example is open-source software. Too many forks can be detrimental. It's better if everyone just sticks to ONE standard.

Bitcoin too could become a monopoly, even if nobody really owns or controls the Bitcoin protocol.  IMO that would be superior to several competing block chains.

[oh you forgot to say that drugs extreme sports wreck families and carry a high risk of death and brain injury]



   *eye roll*


By they way, I think that alpaca socks are inherently immoral. I can't give you a rational explanation, but they just feel wrong somehow. Any human being with a sense of decency blah blah blah ... will agree with me.  So, alpaca socks should not be advertised.  

GF: You never get off that damn computer. What are you doing anyhow?
me: Uhm, just ... sorting out my finances.
GF: And why is this taking up so much time? Are you opening your own bank??
me: Actually, that's pretty close to the truth.

Perhaps it's time I tell her about my involvement with Bitcoin. It's been 6 months now and I still haven't told anyone about it. I can't exactly explain why, but I'm really nervous about coming out.

What difference does it make? People who want to believe it's a fake will continue to believe it's a fake, or they will come up with some other conspiracy theory.

That's why birth certificates should be stored in a block chain. If not anything else, at least this would make the date of birth unforgeable. 

Don't know about the US, but where I live capital gains tax only becomes payable once you sell the asset.

After skimming over this long thread, I'd like to make one more point which I haven't seen mentioned yet:

A world without implicit contracts does not necessarily lead to chaos and endless civil war.

In his book Practical Anarchy Stefan Molyneux describes how such a hypothetical society could function and thrive.

The idea is that there are several dispute resolution organisations (DRO) competing (and cooperating) with eath other.  There are no implicit contracts. There are only explicit contracts with DROs.  In practice, almost everybody would end up being a member of some mainstream DRO.   

So let's take some examples that Onarchy has used, and see how DROs would resolve this.

1) Someone who produces kiddie porn. 

This one is easy. Since kiddie porn is almost universally condemned, this person would amass a terrible reputation, and soon he would have trouble finding a reputable DRO prepared to take him as a member.  Without a DRO to protect him, someone might just "accidentally" murder him as soon as he is forced to leave his property to find food, because he has no explicit contract with 99.99% of society protecting him against murder. 


2) Defamation  and Threats

In a world where anybody can commit the "crime" of defamation against anybody without fearing physical retaliation, baseless defamation and relaliatory defamation would soon spiral into a "flame war", and nobody would take this kind of information seriously anymore unless it's backed up by evidence.  Also, people would no longer believe information outside their web of trust.  If someone defames a person inside their web of trust, and the published information turns out to be baseless, or a cruel breach of privacy,  they would lose hard earned trust from a lot of people.  That would act as a strong deterrent.   

In short, society would acquire more healthy skepticism, and paradoxically, there would be less defamation even though it's not explicitly illegal. Implicit libel+slander laws are similar to "consumer protection" regulation leading to passive, gullible consumers, who dishonest companies find easier to rip off. 

3) Being murdered because I'm not wearing a sign "don't murder me".

Again, since murder is almost universally condemned, almost every DRO would have a clause against this, and reputable DROs would have reciprocal agreements allowing to "extradite" murderers to each other.  The putative murderer would be wise to assume that a person on the street has a 99.99% chance of being protected from murder by their DRO, who would hunt down the murderer.   Ok, this model still doesn't protect against "crime of passion" murders but neither does the statist, implicit contract model.

Appeal to majority... oh and you've just scored own goal with this one, because by definition you youself are abnormal as someone who even vaguely falls into the libertarian camp.


I love it when people use the word "decency" to try win an argument.  WTH is "decency" supposed to mean anyhow other than an hand wavy expression for "this is right/wrong because it feels right/wrong to me".




Anyhow, your position seems to be that if person A puts a lot of work into something and person B benefits from the fruits of that work in some way,  B has somehow become indebted to A because B has entered an implicit contract, from the mere act of benefiting.

The problem with this principle is that it is impossible for a central authority to objectively quantify this kind of positive externality for individuals, much less enforce compensation.  

Example: Mike spends 10 years working on a brilliant poem and when it's finally finished he shows it to his best friend John. Without Mike's permission, John graffities the poem onto a bridge where Mary reads it from the train on her daily commute.  She is so inspired by the poem that she decides to give up her job and start her own business, making her, and by extension, her husband Fred a millionaire.  According to your principle, Fred is now indebted to Mike. But how much does he owe? $100 ? $100,000 $10M?.  There is simply no    
objective way of determining this, even if this whole chain of events was public, and even a Big Brother state would not be capable of illuminating all the complexities of social webs.


Life isn't fair according to your definition of fairness. If it was, a heart surgeon who works 24 hour shifts and saves countless lives would make more money than a rich heiress who lives off rent and never lifts a finger.   That kind of "fairness" can only function in totalitarian state.  The heiress is lucky to be sitting on capital she didn't need to work for the same way the inventor of aspirin is unlucky he had to work for capital he cannot sit on.  

As someone else put it well, the purpose of property rights is not utilitarian, the purpose of property rights is to settle disputes over who controls a finite resource.

Onarchy, your distinction between social and economic freedom is subjective.

You say that your "free state" will have zero regulation but various decrees on gay relationships, drugs, or whatever enforced by the host country.

But those decrees are regulations.  

Objectively, regulations against an individual's sex life, or social life, or spiritual life, or whatever life are not different than regulations against an individual's money making life.

All restrictions on how an individual can achieve maximum subjective utility without violating the non-aggression principle, are equally immoral. Some people may derive utility from making lots of money, others from becoming a monk and meditating all day (and yes even poor people pursue that goal sometimes - look at India for example).  

Your "free state" will only give people maximum freedom in the money making aspect of their life while still infringing on other freedoms, as dictated by the host country's arbitrary morality.  You say that it doesn’t matter so much because (according to your subjective opinion) freedom in the money making area is somehow superior to freedom in other areas, and poor people mainly care about economic freedom anyhow.

I say, fundamentally there is only one kind of freedom, and let the individual decide which "flavours" of that freedom are important to her/him.  Who is being the arrogant rich Westerner here, making that decision for them?

Perhaps gay porn is a bad example, but it's simply not true that people from poor parts of the world are not concerned about the so called social freedoms.  A better example is religion, and lack of freedom of thereof is bound to lead to the brutal oppression of some immigrant minorities in a theocratic host country.  Either that or people from other cultures simply won't immigrate and the free state will never become your multicultural utopia.

Also, I'm curious about this: Imagine the host county mandates some really silly, religiously motivated decree, I dunno, like "driving a car on a Saturday is punishable by prison".  When I move to the free state and challenge the decree in the supreme court, and the supreme court can find no evidence whatsoever, empirical or first principle, that the decree is beneficial, who’s side will the court take? And if it does take my side, how will it deal with the host country's hostility?

I am a corporate whore, but I plan to change that once I have gained enough experience. Curious to know where other Bitcoiners stand.

Frankly, I think that the "salient legal issues" are academic, because they are not relevant to the reality of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Bitcoin will go the way of filesharing networks, and operate in a universe almost completely outside the jurisdiction of any particular country.

Not that the Bicoin ecosystem will be a lawless place.  It will have its own laws that will emerge organically. Whatever US banking lawyers dream up in the meantime, will affect only a small tangential part of the Bitcoin economy.

The reward will drop from 50 to 25 @ block 210,000

The first difficulty change after the drop will take place @ block 211,680

That's 1680 blocks, or approx. 11 days afterwards.

Curious to know what the community expects to happen. I predict that it will drop more than 80%, because the competitive nature of the mining market will mean that the majority of miners are just barely profitable, and a drop in net income by 50% will make most of them unprofitable.

That makes sense. I suspect that might be the problem. The parts of the laptop where the HD and chipset are located also get super hot when I download the blockchain (so hot I have to take the laptop off my lap). Dell studio laptops seem to be known for overheating problems though...

I'll try updating the BIOS firmare. Thaks for the advice.

I'm running Bitcoin on a Dell laptop with an Intel i7 CPU. OS is Ubuntu 64 bit.

I deleted the contents of .bitcoin and copied a new wallet.dat. After downloading about 50,000 blocks the computer shuts down and I get a bios message saying "warning: CPU temperature has exceeded 90 degrees".

The funny thing is that this only happens when downloading the blockchain. I can generate coins for days, even at 100% using all 8 CPU cores, and the computer doesn't overheat.

Seems like a peculiar behaviour. I have used a lot of computationally intensive software before, but I've never managed to fry the CPU like this. What might be going on?

What's the best way to avoid this? renice? It's quite an anxiety-inducing message and it could put some people off using Bitcoin. Shouldn't the client go a bit easier on the CPU by default?

I agree, but to be a successful entrepreneur you need capital, industry experience, and connections.

Most prospective entrepreneurs gain these by being an employee for a few years, in the industry where they want to set up their business.

I personally don't have much of either at the moment, and believe that bootstrapping is too risky.  Employment is the only realistic option in the short term, unfortunately.

Similar to Canada, unemployment insurance is provided by a quasi-non-governmental insurance company except it's compulsory and heavily regulated.