Exactly. Again people, read up on it: there is quite a history of businesses, communities, and even individuals minting and printing their own money in the U.S. There is no law banning anyone from making their own money, it's the counterfeiting of US money that is criminal.

Anyone here can walk out their door and print out a million "Bob Dollars" or mint 1-oz. silver "Jane Dollars." Its perfectly legal, although whether the federal government comes after you depends more on how successful you are (I.e.: how threatening you are to them) than on the law.

Hmmm. Looking at block 144218, particularly the just-under-3000btc transactions....

Didn't know it was possible to spend unconfirmed coins like that. This does look a little odd.

Anyone who has read the details of the case know it is a complete sham. Liberty Dollars do not resemble US currency, and are not counterfeit (heck, the first time I saw a generic 1-oz. silver piece copying the obverse of the US silver Eagle, but not the reverse, I thought that was illegal. But apparently it's not, they're sold and collected everyday and no one gets "confused.")

And calling them dollars? Seriously folks? A good primer for real info: money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender by Thomas H. Greco, Jr. Really gets into the history of this. Fascinating read.

Bernard von NotHaus should win on appeal, although as screwed up as the US legal system has been lately, there's certainly no guarantee. (Clearly the Fed hates the people having their own, valuable money.)

Well, something sure seems amiss. So either that, or someone's playing around with HAARP, or we're just living in a time of incredible coincidences.

I blame the fallout from Japan.

And yeah, I think it'll get worse. I'm tempted to bet that it will peak around November 2012.

In sum: yeah, it seems like e-wallets, or some variant of public pooling of bitcoins (BitBills could probably work too) is the only way to ensure privacy... for most folks.

The only other option I can see is to mine solo, accumulate enough coins for all your needs, and never use any single 50BTC block for more than one transaction. (Yeah, that means dumping any change for small transactions.)

One could always create as many empty wallets as one likes to pass funds around, mimicking the involvement of other people, so you could claim the last transaction in a wallet wasn't you... but that seems harder to sell (plus there could always be a demand to know who the first "fake" wallet belonged to.)

It's two weeks between difficulty adjustments (seems a bit long to me, but whatever.)

Hmmm.

Distributing CG animation via a p2p network, paying BTC based on work done to the participants?

Sounds like a good idea to me.

Makes sense. For some reason

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I thought the estimates were all based on the last X blocks, rather than the blocks since the last difficulty change.

The estimate for the next drop seems much lower than I would have thought:

1565638.73312961

Anyone know if such a low estimate is normal for a while after a difficulty change, or has the network really lost that much hashing power?

I've been mulling over the thought lately that perhaps bitcoin can't become mainstream. But also, that it might not need to be. Basically, a similar thought to yours, with similar reasoning, but without the Nwo-focus.

(Not that any of that was necessarily bad or incorrect. Sadly, society has been conditioned to reject such speech without consideration of its merit.)

Bottom line though: we'll see how it turns out. I remain convinced that, regardless of popularity or attempts at regulation, there will continue to be some level of demand for bitcoins for the forseeable future, and that this demand is likely to be much greater than current demand.

While I like the idea, Bitbills isn't really the answer for this.

Hmm. On second thought, I don't think the "really dark pool" idea is viable for large values.

The problem is, to exchange value with bitcoin, you have to either transfer the bitcoins, or transfer the address holding the bitcoins. If all you're transferring is the address, then there's no way to be sure the person giving you the address hasn't kept a copy.

Now, with Bitbills at least you can be reasonably sure that the person giving you the card doesn't have a copy of the address, but there's still the risk that someone at Bitbills does. It's just unwise to trust it with high value.

Defining inflation as an increase in the supply of money, I just don't see how inflation won't be smacking US residents hard, and soon (as if it already hasn't been affecting us!)

It would be great to see bitcoins take off in Africa. Being freed from the bankers' debt controls would be quite a triumph for the continent.

And if most Africans have never used a bank, I'm confident they'll do much better than us "first-world" folks in keeping hold of their bitcoins and avoiding scammers.

Who wouldn't? This selloff is an excellent opportunity to acquire more coins.

Gold and silver are it. Anyone watching the world financial train wreck should be stocking up.

Too bad they can't be shoved into a usb port and privately sent somewhere else without a central server of some sort.

People will get used to a limited digital commodity money, eventually seeing it as the superior means of online exchange. It'll just take time.

The three key methods seem to be:

- Short selling. Massive, naked short selling.
- FUD and pro-anything-but-metals propaganda.
- Electronic market manipulation and rigging.

+1

With time, even those most resistant to changing how they think about digital money and online transactions will either adapt or move on.

That sounds familiar. Where could I have heard that....


Ah. Right.

(No, bitcoin isn't as highly valued as gold, but it's sure not worthless.)

But that's not going to happen. At this point, making such changes would be like trying to centralize torrents, and restrict access to the 18+ crowd.

Bitcoin is what it is folks, the protocol is not going to go through any radical changes... it's just too late.

If you think something drastically different is needed instead, your only option is to build that new, better Bitcoin 2.0 and let the "inferior" one wither away due to all its supposed flaws.

And you might not want to delay in getting the competing blockchain to market....

Sometimes it can.

If it's pretty random noise (which encryption strives for), attempting to compress it will likely result in an INCREASE of the size of the data.