I thought I made i point that I am NOT BENEFITTING in any way, neither do my fellow citizens. In fact, my own life and my fellow citizens' life is made worse by the day because of these. If I told you that I am from Greece, would it make any more sense?

I mentioned in my post that it might be different in your country. I pointed out what type of services I DO NOT want. I understand it is not obvious to the reader that I am not proposing a complete banishment of these. I wouldn't have any objections if the services were better, or at least closer to my personal standards. Maybe in your country they are, in which case, I would consider you a lucky person.

I don't know what a "Libertarian" is and what classifies me as one (I don't seem to understand the term). I'm just laying plain facts and common sense.

And I do at least believe that all these needed services would be much better off in the hands of local government instead of central govenrment (better, fairer, and by god - cheaper).

In any case Ayeyo, thank you for making me think again about what I wrote before.

A bit late to the discussion, but I would like to add:

I do NOT want or need "essential services" like:

1. A public school that teaches crap to my children, which crap I then have to make them "unlearn", forces me to pay for it through taxes, and makes it ILLEGAL for me to take up the natural parent responsibility of teaching my own children.
2. A healthcare service system that will stack me along with another 1000 people in a dirty hospital when I am in need of it, and makes it ILLEGAL for me to even work for someone unless I pay my fat contribution to it every month (20% of usable salary). If I want decent healthcare I have to pay extra fro a private plan.
3. A pension system that has no way of being solvent in 20 or even 10 years, which means I will get close to nothing eventually, and also makes it ILLEGAL for me to work for anyone unless I pay some more fat contribution to it every month (another 20% of usable salary). Same thing goes for any decent retirement expectation, I have to pay extra for a private plan.
4. A law enforcement system which does not give me the right to fire a shotgun in the air when someone is breaking into my house (imposing a fine TO ME in the best case, and imprisonment FOR ME if one pellet touches the burglar), which I am also forced to pay through taxes, and essentially makes it ILLEGAL for me to have the right to protect myself and my family.

Apart from the illegality, I cannot personally afford to pay extra for these things (a private school, private police, etc) because the money I can produce (almost 70% of it, in direct or indirect taxation and "contribution") is being thrown down the bottomless pit of the providers of these "essential services".

And by saying I don't "need" these services, I just mean that I believe I am in a more knowledgeable position to take care of these things for myself, if only they would let me.

Can someone please stop the government from offering me these "Essentials"? I don't want them.

I don't believe in revolutions anymore, so my only hope is that this whole system will implode to its extinction, as seems to be gradually happening.

And no, I'm not in the US, so I don't know how this applies to that country.

Martin, if you're talking about Windows, RDP will not give access to the card. Your connection will only allow you to see a dummy display device, same happens with sound also. Any software accessing the GPU card will not work (best case) or crash (worst case)

Use Teamviewer instead (it's actually safer as well).

If you're talking about Unix, Saturn's reply above is correct.

Just a tech question guys, how much bandwidth do you actually use for pool operation right now (at ~250 GH/s and ~600 users-miners)?

To make things clear, I want to run a pool for Bitcoiners in my country (which seem to be very few at the moment) to promote BTC use, something that we will need very soon around here. I got some servers sitting idle at the moment, and I wonder what kind of line I should get.

I would appreciate any reply.

Keep up the good work.

Hi Emmanuel,

As BTC is quite new, someone has to take a risk in any transaction. If you don't find a provider willing to take the risk of increasing difficulty and unknown BTC price, then you would have to take the risk. Otherwise, there is no transaction.

And BTW, a miner has already taken a risk, and will naturally seek someone to share a part of it. So look for a deal where the risk is shared equally as much as possible.

Just a thought to show that getting what you want might not be that easy.

Jessy, I do admire your efforts, and I would like to suggest some other approach:

Do you want your customers to use bitcoins? Then give them some.

Instead of a 10% discount for BTC payment, give them a 10%-20% BTC coupon for select items, wherever you know that your risk is not that big. Example, a customer buys a special offer item for 50$ and they get 0.25 BTC as a gift, plus a nice booklet explaining what is Bitcoin and how they can get started easily. Mention in the booklet that soon (2-3 months) you will be offering Bitcoin-only special deals.

I am sure you can expand on it. I am the proud owner of a nearly bankrupt B2B store in a nearly bankrupt country with nearly bankrupt banks, and time is running out fast. Just found out about Bitcoins a few days ago, and my mind is trying to find ways to do my business with it, as normal business with fiat is out of the question at this time.

Cheers.

Well, we'll be leaving the Euro first (pretty soon), unless the Germans get to win that race.

And BTW, Hercules (your version) and Xena are Australians, not Greeks.

We have had black market economy and barter for thousands of years, under any conqueror. We will survive, no matter how hard it will be. It's only a pity that Bitcoin only exists for a couple of years. If it was a more established currency, as I expect it to be in a few years time, then any transition would be much easier.

Think that any weekend from now on can be default weekend for us. The government on a Friday night will declare a 3-day holiday for banks on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday so that they have time to print new currency and change our Euros to devalued Drachmas. And freeze deposits at the same time.

Bitcoins FTW.

At least one 

Άντε να δούμε που θα βγεί.

I would add:

- Please release source code, if you don't then nobody knows what you might be doing with my wallet and with the network. We are talking about money here, not fun and games. If the official client was not open source, we would not be talking about Bitcoin today. I would advise anyone against downloading it. If as a developer you do want to make some money (which is perfectly understood), accept BTC donations for user  suggestions, wish lists and customizations.

- Apple can ban an app anytime they want. Good luck running it and recovering your bitcoins afterwards. Android is much more open and safe in this matter. You don't need anyone's permission to run an app on your phone.

Who would create and distribute these Bitcoins then? Whatever the answer might be, the creator/distributor would need to be a singular entity. If it wasn't then anyone could claim to create Bitcoins.

So, if it was a singular entity, who of the Bitcoin crowd would want to do business with them, with a centrally controlled currency? Isn't this what we have already going on in each country?

The idea of Bitcoin, as described in Satoshi's paper points specifically to a distributed production and transaction scheme, so that not one entity can control the currency. This is a feature, not a bug. The whole "mining" thing is a very well thought out method to make the production of Bitcoins "difficult", therefore costly, therefore increasing in value as time passes.

Hope it does give you an answer to the question.

I think that you should be directed somewhere else, this is not a "how to buy dope and vigara" support forum. And you should be getting enough promotional emails about the second one.

Ask around in your neighborhood, you'll surely find someone willing to help. If that doesn't work, ask the police  .

Seriously, don't worry, silkroad will most probably recognize the need for an independent support forum and get to it, most probably behind TOR again.

In the meantime, let's keep the discussions here to bitcoins, that's why most of us got here I think. But then again, I may be wrong.

Hi Dazoe:

With all respect to the work you have done so far:

Open sourcing IS a prerequisite to gain trust in a community like this (and most other communities also). I do understand that you would like to receive something back for what you do, so keep the ads there if you wish. In another scenario, if you do indeed show that your produce is good enough and secure enough (by exposing the code), you can certainly ask for donations to provide user-suggested upgrades and customizations.

But no open source is a no-go, at least for me. I've been on the Internet since 1995, and I have NEVER got a virus, because I decided that I'll be careful from the beginning. And since bitcoins are money nowadays, I would never download something which does not expose its source code to the community.

With that said, we all should be free to do as we wish, so good luck with your project.

This should be expected on Ebay, the same happens with gold and silver, when there is a sudden big drop in the price. One way to counter this, would be to include a shipping fee in the original auction (I know it doesn't make sense, but it can work) and state CLEARLY in the auction that this fee will be lowered to adjust for a drop in the price of a bitcoin in a trusted exchange (Mt. Gox for instance).

You cannot discount the price on Ebay easily (to prevent fraud), but you can discount the shipping.

Example: BTC is 19.00$ at the moment, so you put up an auction for 17.00$ per bitcoin and 6.00$ in shipping/handling fees (you can offer to send a printed receipt for this, so as to avoid being characterised as a "fake shipping fee"). This way, and supposing that the buyer is aware of the current exchange price, you can adjust the final price of the auction in agreement with them.

That's what I would do anyway.