and keep some of the bitcoins

you don't get it....

this is not the first thing like this to happen recently

at this past bitcoin will be all over the internet in less then a year.  

This is a bad idea. Coinbase is asking for your password when it want to access your bank account. Do not use!

I think your copyright argument is far too tenuous and detached from both the spirit and intent of copyright law and the actual protections it grants.

But even accepting for the sake of argument your previous points; how do you attach a copyright to the private key that is stored in the form of a brainwallet?

You are trying to establish a property right in the private key, right?

+1

This is not true. Open source, free software does not fall under the US munitions export controls. Otherwise, tools like openssl, tor, openssh, linux distributions, etc would not be available outside the US. See https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/01/07/2010-32803/publicly-available-mass-market-encryption-software-and-other-specified-publicly-available-encryption for the public restatement of that fact. This fact has been true since 1996. See John Gilmore's fights and wins in the US courts here, http://www.toad.com/gnu/export/export.html.

For any open source project with a foundation, only a small subset of developers contributing to the software wind up getting paid.  Usually there are only a tiny few full time positions for lead developers like Linus Torvalds (who is paid by the Linux Foundation), or Gavin in this case.

The remaining contributors tend to fall into one of two categories

• Developers paid by a vendor in the ecosystem, who has a direct economic interest.  Example: My day job is working on the Linux kernel, and Red Hat (not the Linux Foundation) pays for me to work on that open source project.
• Unpaid volunteers

And there are plenty of reasons why one remains a volunteer dev.  As an unpaid volunteer developer, I am free to disappear whenever I want, ignoring all bitcoin related emails for 6 months when the day job gets uber busy, or while I backpack on the Appalachian Trail.  

In open source projects, the long tail tells you that you will always have 100x more casual contributors, than steady contributors you can depend on for a timely response to a critical security bug.

Bitcoin is a very small ecosystem right now, as open source projects go.  (Warning: my own predictions...  I've no BF insider info at all here)  As it grows, Bitcoin Foundation will probably hire another dev or two, another sysadmin, pay for some infrastructure.

Once the bitcoin ecosystem is large enough, you will start to see devs appear who are working for third parties.  For example, (again, prediction, no insider info) MtGox hires their own developer, who contributes work based on MtGox's interests.  Similarly, chipmakers Intel and AMD hire their own Linux kernel developers to represent their interests, and submit Intel/AMD-specific code to the open source Linux kernel.

But that is a ways off.

An open source project is a rich blend of paid devs and unpaid volunteers, everybody working together on one common piece of software, to make it better for everyone.  As the saying goes, you work on an open source project to "scratch your own itch."  That is the engineering equivalent of pursuing one's own economic self-interest, the essence of the free market.

Taking the other side of the argument, the non-zero probability of guessing the private key doesn't completely destroy property rights in the U.S. where you have patents, copyrights, and trade secrets for intellectual property.  You can accidentally guess the contents of each of these protections with a comparable probability to guessing a private key: non-zero but impractical to ever accomplish.

For patents, it doesn't matter that you guessed it after it was filed, you still need to license it in order to use it.  Not doing so is a tort.  This applies even if you guess something close (i.e. covered in the claims).

For copyrights, there is a burden to prove who was first to create it to establish ownership, right to copy/assign/transfer, etc.

For trade secrets, the legal protection is very weak.  In essence, you can steal it by guessing because it was not afforded to the other two protections.

This is why I believe in establishing that private keys are copyrightable speech.  Then they can be afforded a first line of protection from "theft" under existing U.S. law.

The value of a copyrighted work has all manner of precedence to draw from in U.S. law as well.

Now, this is with my possibly flawed understanding of what happens with the clearing price when a change of more than 10% occurs.  If the clearing price for October 6th should actually have been the $12.60, and not the $10 from the last BUZ2 trade, then my whole analysis is wrong, and you are exactly right at selling BUZ2 at $14 and buying BTC at $12.83 incurs no risk.

hihi, sorry I don't have the will to read entire thread so sorry if this has been mentioned already. Can we expect one of the responsibilties of the Bitcoin Foundation would be to defend individuals and companies who will be unfairly discriminated against purely on the fact they used bitcoin for (legal) trading. In the future, there is going to be incidences of misunderstandings like if you or I have been buying bitcoin with registered exchange and the powers that be investigate us for suspicious activity, you get me meaning. So, will the Foundation defend our rights and argue our case for us?

Love Szabo, he's a very smart guy, and has an interesting blog worth subscribing to, beyond his important role in Bitcoin's history.

And regarding the origins of money, here's a nice juxtaposition of the first state-issued coin in history, as mentioned in the article, next to the coin that will (hopefully) end the era of state-controlled money:

Jon I think anyone who has been following you over the past couple of years (as I do on Twitter & Forbes) is likely to agree that you are a principled individual, not only very knowledgeable about socioeconomic topics, but also well-aligned ideologically with the original spirit of Bitcoin.

You make valid points in your other post, and I agree that the Foundation could do a lot of good as a sanity check, sounding board, buffering mechanism, and supervisory entity versus the development team.  And undoubtedly, in the long term, an enlightened oligarchy is less risky than a hereditary Gavinistic monarchy.  My main fear in going from a known state where the developers control the priorities (currently) to an unknown state where possibly the Foundation dominates, is related to the first bullet point: essentially, I don't think that the announced board composition fairly represents my own perception wrt. Bitcoin's ideological and cultural makeup.  I think it needs one extra seat assigned to someone who loves Bitcoin purely for ideology, has lived outside the USA, and has a track record of defending freedom and privacy under political pressure.  Hence the two names I proposed.

Thus, the third bullet, trying to get the development schedule crowdfunded, was simply an attempt at a safety valve in case the Foundation gets dissolved or goes astray, a possibility that seems nonzero given my misgivings regarding the board composition.  I can follow your thesis that a Foundation structure should be more stable and less risky than unsupervised developer control, but that thesis has, as an assumption, a Foundation board which is trustworthy.  At this point, the devil I know (the current dev team) has a very good multiyear track record of self-governance and respect for Bitcoin's privacy features; whereas wrt. the Foundation, yourself and Gavin (a minority) are the only people that I would trust to shepherd Bitcoin not just as a public transactional medium, but also, just as importantly, as a private store of value and private means of payment.

So basically my position is that I'd accept (or at least be willing to try out) the governance premises in your post, and support the Foundation more unequivocally, if the board composition was adjusted to guarantee a stronger ideological commitment to monetary freedom and privacy.