That's pretty much the WTFPL without the swearing and with a disclaimer. I prefer the obscenities and love the preamble
http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/


Not being able to trust anyone sounds rather costly to society as a whole. You'd have to put up artificial barriers to communication and wouldn't be able to outsource anything to anyone.


Sounds nice in theory, but not very practical at all. Can you give some ideas of how this would actually work in practice? I know my arguments could be taken as an appeal to consequences, but in the real world we need to strike a balance between idealism and practicality.

The vanilla GPL wasn't made for a world of software-as-a-service, which is why the AGPL was written to fix this modern loophole. In the era of the vanilla GPL, software was actually distributed to end users. If copyright was abolished we'd still see locked down versions of free software desktop apps, and sites hosting AGPL software without the source code.

What makes fraud a true law? If I choose to make a product that is identical to someone else's but make no claims that it is an original, only people who sold it under false pretences would be committing fraud. Without trademarks or design protection I would be free to make identical copies from inferior materials and sell them, people could then claim that they don't know whether they're original or not.

Not hidden away forever, just protected by the courts from industrial espionage. Consider that someone pays your staff to leak designs that you have invested heavily in, you can't prove who did it, there is no contract in place between me and you, and there's no protection or ownership of information. When your product is being brought to market by my company before you've even announced it, what can you do?

Yeah controversial statement I agree, but Stallman's GNU project did build a lot of the free software we use. I tend to write open source software which can be locked up as proprietary myself, my favourite licenses being MIT or WTFPL. However, I do think we'd see a hell of a lot of copyleft code being locked up as proprietary if there were no copyrights on software, and copyleft does help protect user-freedoms.

Having said that, even as a developer I don't have any strong feelings either way myself. If copyright was abolished I'd still be paid for doing an honest day of work, though the people who employ me might have less to spend.

As per the subject, do the hard-core libertarians here support intellectual property? Are copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, personality rights and other notions of information as property justified, given that they are essentially state-sponsored monopolies, regulations that infringe on people's freedoms of expression, trade and action, often by use of force.

However, without copyright we wouldn't have free software or huge investments in proprietary software, without patents all inventions would be secret, without trademarks there would be no high quality brands due to market saturation by counterfeiting, and so on and so on.

So which information should be protected by regulation and/or treated as property, and why?

Your price is a bit too high, mtgox is currently showing $16/BTC

Hey that's much nicer, great improvement!

Unless you know how the system works, you should assume that the answer is yes. Windows caches files on the disk before burning it to CD. When copying from USB -> USB you'd expect nothing to be written to the hard drive, but it goes through RAM and anything in there could potentially end up in your paging file and therefore written to disk.

The ideal solution would be USB -> USB using a Linux live CD, with either no hard drive plugged in, or by running "swapoff" to make sure no virtual memory is in use at the time of the copy.

I understand that this may go down like a lead balloon, but please read it anyway because I think it's important.

I'm a programmer rather than a designer, but I can tell a good looking app from one that was made by programmers alone. The official Bitcoin client is one of the latter. For the system to take off we need a good looking client.

How do we make a good looking client?

Well, first of all we need to decide what's wrong with the official client. The main thing I can see with it is that it's full of technical jargon that means nothing to a first time user before they've read the manual, and we all know that users never read the manual. It lacks tooltips to explain the jargon, visual cues and metaphors to show what the things mean. It also just looks ugly, there are no graphics other than the send and address book icons (which are actually reasonably nice and easy to understand IMO)

What does "134,184 blocks" mean to a user? A time-based approach would be more informative. Tell them how out-of-date they are, not some arbitrary number that they don't understand!

What does "2 connections" mean to a user? Showing this as a red to green bar, with a tooltip giving suggestions of how to get better connectivity would be much more user-friendly.

IMO the list of transactions shouldn't even be visible on the first page, it's distracting and noisy. What does "50 confirmations" mean to a user anyway? Offer them some advice here, set a threshold for "confirmed" and have the UI show a confirmed balance and an unconfirmed balance. Advise them how much effort someone would need to put in to steal their BTC based on the number of confirmations.

There are probably other things too, but I personally think the client needs some love from a real UI designer, followed by proper user-testing by people's grandparents.

It would be better if they charged a small fee and sent the BTC back to a return address if it wasn't claimed

Someone with loads of coins continually cashes out and keeps the BTC worth pennies until long after everyone has lost interest in the project.

Here's a tool I made for this, many years ago (it's for evading corporate mail filters, so it XORs the file)

http://bitplane.net/projects/misc/mail-filter-evasion/

And +1 for anodyne for the same transaction

You best be trollan'. Almost everyone who knows their way around a keyboard uses IRC, there are 70,000 free software users and developers online right now just on Freenode, bitcoin's developers hang out in #bitcoin-dev.

Do you trust us all? Knowing your sell and buy prices and times, I could manipulate you instead!

This is an interesting viewpoint, though I wouldn't say it would be evil or even vaguely wrong to do this. If the hermit is indebted to society for his upbringing then he is essentially a slave to that society, that there should only be one type of society and that there should be no experimentation with new ways of life, no matter how unjust the society you were raised in is.

Exactly. If you had a huge number of bitcoins then introducing innocent-looking bad code into the official client to destroy a larger number of bitcoins would be a cheaper option than trying to take over the block chain.

Haha, newbs. Made in one of clickteam's game creation kits, might even be traceable back to their serial number if they actually bought it.

I suggest submitting this to all the AV companies ASAP. I am submitting it to Microsoft now.

edit: also reported to Google's safe browsing

Who is your Money now?

Completely feasible. A good strategy would be to pay for a multi-pronged attack taking advantage of 0-day vulnerabilities in all the popular clients that are connected to the network, then send all the money somewhere like here:

http://blockexplorer.com/address/1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE

These coins would not be retrievable using the current system