I've long believed that if we are to have government officials, they should be tailed 24/7 by public sensor robots. Or ridiculously hot young Asian boys. Either one.

I won't!

I don't like that aspect either. I want freedom by next Tuesday, damnit! This is an urgent problem!
[/quote]


It's a veeerry long shot, but US fiat could dictate all non-governmental telecom landings in the US and its territories shut down, and enforce it. A hundred soldiers at each of the two or three dozen major US traffic-switching nodes and the US internet implodes. A tactical nuke on MAE-West? YES WE CAN!

On top of that, the US military has the resources and intelligence necessary to sever the undersea fiber that carries almost all transcontinental internet traffic, plus the assets in place to accomplish immense comms disruption in all of the 100+ countries in which it maintains military bases.

Mind you, this is a doomsday scenario, and not likely. Destroying the internet would be suicide for the US government, as doing so would destroy Wall Street along with the remnant shreds of its reputation.

Anyway, if it ever comes to it, you and I will build a new internet. End-to-end crypto will be mandatory everywhere. All links, all nodes, all sessions. And DNS will be distributed.

Gotcha. It's just a difference of emphasis, really.

I believe very strongly that a successful effort to supplant state money is going to be a ground-up effort. The big players in today's pink economy are going to be the last to adapt, kicking and screaming, to the new economic reality. For years before that happens, though, individuals, sole traders and small enterprises are going to be taking more and more of their income away as, simultaneously, a) the new monetary system's benefits impact more and more people, b) the inevitable institutional dumbness of big organizations makes them stumble and lag, and, c) continually eroding confidence in the state, its institutions and the entities that rely upon them drives more and more people into the new economy.

If you're reading this, you're part of the vanguard building the new economy and the new world. Mainstream acceptance will come by weight of numbers and via network effects. Who ever heard of Wikileaks or Twitter four years ago? And today we've got Admiral Chairman-of-the-Joint-Fucking-Chiefs Mullen tweeting his dismay over Wikileaks -- no doubt via the intermediation of an office full of PR analysts and bureaucrats, at extremely low relative impact.

BTW, Shadow, when they shut down the internet, I know how to build a new one. Want to help?

Screw big business. Google, Microsoft and Wal-Mart can all eat flaming death as far as I'm concerned, creatures of state privilege as they are.

My task, and where systems like Bitcoin can be helpful, is in making both government and big business irrelevant and obsolete.

Burn, Hollywod, burn.

@RHorning:

"The problem so far as abolition of copyright altogether is to come up with a system where an artist/author (including programmers, photographers, 3d modelers, and other forms of art perhaps not even created yet) is able to sustain themselves in a market economy."

Respect, but... bollocks!

I'm going to deliberately wade into Godwin's law territory here, sheerly for the hell of it.

"Well, sure the death camps are wrong, but what are we to do with all these gypsies and Jews?"

Or:

"Geez, I know the death camps are wrong, but if they stop ordering Zyklon-B I'm gonna be out of a job!"

A consistent libertarian position is one which recognizes state-backed copyright law as an evil. Presently, if you invoke copyright, you enjoy unjust privilege (necessarily backed up by state agents' guns) which cannot exist in a truly free society. If you want to participate in building that truly free society, you forsake and abjure state-backed privilege.

I'll paste it again. It's a moral argument, which won't stand up to your consequentialist thinking, but still: http://www.nostate.com/2323/intellectual-property-does-not-exist/

Even so, from a consequentialist/utilitarian standpoint.... if IP laws were abolished, sure, a few thousand huge corporations and a few million cushily-permanently-employed Westerners would experience setbacks to their lifestyles. Meanwhile, billions of impoverished people elsewhere on the planet would gain access to currently-patented medicines to improve and save their lives. I'm not going to make that argument, mind you, because I'm not a consequentialist at all, but there it is.

Peace,
Mike

PS: Since I'm feeling particularly jerky, here's my website's access agreement:

WEBSITE ACCESS AGREEMENT

Entry to nostate.com (hereinafter the “Website”) is restricted by contract. By pressing “Submit” below you freely, fully, explicitly and expressly agree:

    * that you shall not, by act or omission, take away any impressions, copies, extracts, derivatives, subsets or samples of this Website or any part thereof;
    * that you shall not, by act or omission, copy, store or retransmit any data from this Website or any part thereof,  including but not limited to sequences of or individual characters or individual bits;
    * that you shall not, by act or omission, fail upon the Website owner’s request to surrender all energy patterns, tactile sensations, auditory stimuli, mass-energy distribution changes or other media of phenomenal transmission incident to your use of the Website to the Website owner, to become the exclusive property thereof;
    * that you shall not, by act or omission, link to, cite, quote or reference the Website or any part thereof;
    * that you shall not, by act or omission, speak or otherwise divulge to third parties your knowledge of the Website’s existence, your knowledge of its contents, the contents themselves or the existence of this WEBSITE ACCESS AGREEMENT (hereinafter the “Agreement”) or the Agreement itself, or any part thereof, despite being legally and morally bound by it;
    * that you shall not, by act or omission, form memories of the Website or any part thereof or of this Agreement or any part thereof;
    * that you shall not, by act or omission, recall, remember, recount, retain, reconstitute, recreate, receive, recover or retransmit the Website or any part thereof or this Agreement or any part thereof;
    * that you shall not, by act or omission, fail to exercise due care and prudence in excluding third parties from taking part in your use of the Website in any fashion, including but not limited to by blocking all energy patterns, tactile sensations, auditory stimuli, mass-energy distribution changes or other media of phenomenal transmission incident to your use of the Website such that they cannot pass to third parties;
    * that this Agreement is the totality of all contractual relationships between you and the Website owner and that this Agreement supersedes, replaces and annuls all prior contractual relationships between the aforementioned parties;
    * that any breach of this Agreement on your part shall subject you to a penalty of three hundred (300) ounces of 99.99% fine gold or two thousand (2,000) hours of forced labor, with that the choice of penalty shall be yours, payable to the Website owner within ten days in the case of gold or within one year in the case of labor;
    * that you shall not, by act or omission, attempt to or actually transfer, surrender, hypothecate, pledge, encumber, subordinate, abandon or pass by gift, inheritance or other means any of your rights or duties under this Agreement without prior written consent of the Website owner;
    * that should any portion of this Agreement be found to be unenforceable, such finding shall not affect the enforceability of any other provision of this Agreement;
    * that the term of this Agreement shall begin upon you pressing “Submit” below and shall be perpetual;
    * that this Agreement may from time to time be amended or supplemented by the Website owner in written form and with due notice to you;
    * that in the event of any dispute or contest involving this Agreement, such dispute or contest shall be submitted to the jurisdiction and binding arbitration of Bob’s Arbitration and Pizza Company, Libertania, Ancapistan, without appeal; and
    * that you have entered into this Agreement freely and without duress after careful consideration and understanding of all its contents.

@AdrianAtari: Yes, we should be discussing how Bitcoin handles the URI scheme. But that's a separate discussion

@Gavin: I don't see the sense of a Bitcoin MIME type. A URI scheme describes a resource. A MIME type binds a document type to a handler. Implementing a "click to send Bitcoins" capability using a MIME type would require that the website on which the payment link was embedded send a new document to the client browser. Seems needlessly complicated to me.

See also the discussion at http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1840.msg24927#msg24927 for how to register URI scheme handlers, at least on Windows systems.

Oooooo!!!

I've drawn about BTC 350 in 3 weeks of releasing Bitcoin payment gateways and PHP utilities. Can I get a cookie?

No, way easier and more portable (do we really want to promulgate a Chrome extension, a Firefox addon, an MSIE plugin, a Safari whatsis, and on and on?) It can be done in the installer.

This is from the NSIS installer script that installs the open-source Pidgin instant messenger program on Windows:


Bitcoin uses NSIS as well for its Windows installer. The work would be to include the installation of URI-scheme handlers into the user environment for each of the different GUI installers, plus implement the "catch" part of the handler inside the Bitcoin code itself.

Agree with kiba, and totally reject RHorning's car analogy. The car is property. If someone takes it and totals it, you're deprived of the use of it. Not so with intellectual "property".

(My main thoughts on the topic: http://www.nostate.com/2323/intellectual-property-does-not-exist/)

What it boils down to in my mind is that in the case of software licenses like the GPL or even something very loose like CC-BY, when you publish you're reserving the "right" to go and shoot somebody who violates the license. Or have the government go shoot them for you.

If I catch you stealing my car, it might be okay to shoot you. If I find you republishing my work against my wishes, it's never okay to shoot you.

This doesn't mean, however, that shooting people (i.e. using state legal means in any fashion) is the only way to sanction infringement. The person who goes and puts his own name on someone else's creation isn't a "criminal" in the judge/jail/police/fines/execution sense, but he sure is a dickhead. And there are all sorts of human ways to deal with dickheads: ostracism, gossip, blacklist, and so on.

I spent a little time on this and failed to come up with a solution.

The intended model was to provide a block HTML+javascript code that people wanting to host the button could paste into their sites:


The problem with this model is that the included script is loaded from a remote server but needs to make a JSON-RPC-HTTP(S) connection to (generally) localhost in order to post the "send" instruction. This runs into the accursed same origin policy: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Same_origin_policy. Fail.

What I suggest instead is that the Bitcoin program (optionally) install URL handlers for bitcoin:(address) URIs into the browsers installed on the user's computer. That way, clicking on a Bitcoin URI would pop up the "send" dialog, possibly pre-populated with the amount to send as well as the address.

I've been putting out software under the Unlicense (http://unlicense.org/), published last year.

Then you're both lucky!


In its current state, bitcoin is x86-specific. Certainly it can be decoupled from the hardware architecture, but that's not a task taken lightly.

If all you need is a bitcoind network appliance, I'd just look around for the cheapest functioning p3/p4 notebook I could find for less than $50.

He didn't say that...

No, but the webserver must have a static IP address and the bitcoind server must have either a static IP or a DNS name to IP address mapping taken care of by DynDNS, for example. Also, the bitcoind server needs to be configured to permit the webserver's IP to connect to the RPC interface: https://www.bitcoin.org/wiki/doku.php?id=rpcssl

"setgenerate true 0" disables generation, but leaves the "generating" flag at TRUE:

syadasti@nobody:~$ bitcoind setgenerate true 1
syadasti@nobody:~$ bitcoind getgenerate
true
syadasti@nobody:~$ bitcoind setgenerate false
syadasti@nobody:~$ bitcoind getgenerate     
false
syadasti@nobody:~$ bitcoind setgenerate true 0
syadasti@nobody:~$ bitcoind getgenerate       
true

A payment processor for the WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress.

github repository: https://github.com/mikegogulski/bitcoin-virtuemart
Support: http://www.nostate.com/3971/bitcoin-for-wp-e-commerce-shopping-cart-for-wordpress/

The README file:

Bitcoin for WP e-Commerce

A Bitcoin payment method for the WP e-Commerce shopping cart for WordPress.

Version: 0.9.0

Features

    * Generates a new bitcoin address for every order
    * Provides payment address to customer on site at checkout, plus in a subsequent email
    * Configurable timeout after which unpaid transactions will be canceled automatically
    * Configurable number of Bitcoin network confirmations after which an order is considered paid
    * HTTP or HTTPS access to bitcoind

Requirements
Base requirements

    * WP e-Commerce 3.7.7 or greater
    * WordPress 3.0 or greater (may work on 2.8+, untested)

PHP requirements:

    * PHP5
    * cURL support
    * SSL support (if you're using HTTPS to talk to bitcoind)

Limitations

    * It is assumed that Bitcoin is the only currency accepted.
    * All prices are assumed to be in Bitcoins, and no currency conversions are performed.
    * Checks for payment receipt are performed via WordPress cron, at least until bitcoind allows attaching a JSON-RPC callback to an address.
    * No notification is sent to the customer or shop administrator if a transaction expires without payment.
    * Expired transactions are marked with a status code of "5" in the database, which doesn't correspond to a human-readable status code provided by WP e-Commerce.
    * No localization support.

Installation

    * Install WordPress http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress.
    * Log into your WordPress installation as an administrator.
    * Install WP e-Commerce via Plugins->Add New in the WordPress dashboard.
    * Transfer the contents of the distribution archive to the wp-content/plugins/wp-e-commerce directory of your WordPress installation.

Configuration

    * Navigate to Store->Settings->Payment Options.
    * Under "General Settings", check "Bitcoin" and uncheck everything else.
    * Click "Update"
    * At right, Select the Bitcoin payment gateway.
    * Configure your bitcoind server information.
    * If you are using HTTPS to talk to bitcoind and would like to validate the connection using bitcoind's own SSL certificate, enter the absolute path to the certificate file (server.cert) you've uploaded to the server.
    * Configure your payment timeout and number of transaction confirmations required.
    * Adjust the checkout message template as required.
    * Click "Update".
    * Click "General" at the top and set the currency type to "Bitcoin".
    * Set the remaining parameters as you wish and click "Update".

Donate

    * Bitcoin payments: 1DcZfySDvUoNBzf2mwReVy3VL93WtwnALr
    * Gifts via other methods: http://www.nostate.com/support-nostatecom/

Authors

    * Mike Gogulski - http://www.nostate.com/ http://www.gogulski.com/

Credits

Bitcoin for WP e-Commerce incorporates code from:

    * XML-RPC for PHP by Edd Dumbill (for JSON-RPC support)
    * bitcoin-php by Mike Gogulski (Bitcoin support library)

License

Bitcoin for WP e-Commerce is free and unencumbered public domain software. For more information, see http://unlicense.org/ or the accompanying UNLICENSE file.

With big credit to theymos...

Github repository: https://github.com/mikegogulski/bitcoin-php
Doxygen docs: http://code.gogulski.com/bitcoin-php/