Ltcfaucet, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent post were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this forum is now dumber for having read it. May God have mercy on your soul.

Newbies is fine. I'm one of the first 10 to answer your question. Please send me my 0.0001 BTC.

Opening your wallet doesn't receive bitcoins. Receiving bitcoins is entirely passive. Action is only needed to send them.

Use a separate wallet with a separate address. The only time you put your identity at risk is when you spend the bitcoins. Then you have two issues:

1) You have to submit the transaction without revealing an IP address that can be traced to you. You can submit the transactions through i2p or tor or from a store's open wifi. (Which might reveal your approximate geographic location depending on how you do it.)

2) You reveal to the world the bitcoin address you sent the bitcoins to. So obviously, you don't want to send it to an account associated with you. People will be able to see which accounts you send the bitcoins to.

Awesome, a must read.

We knew that to be useful as money something had to be durable, scarce, tradable, and fungible. Bitcoin is showing that those are pretty much all of the requirements. No agreement is needed. No rule is needed. If it's useful, people will use it.

In addition to the other answer (which is the 100% slam dunk way we're guaranteed this can never happen), there's another practical problem. The miner can't steal the block because it doesn't *know* the block. All it gets from the pool is just enough information to find a nonce. The pool generates the block when the miner submits a nonce that meets the difficulty. (It might be possible to figure out the block by guessing though.)

Before crytpo-currencies, the distinction was pretty clear. If the scarcity was natural, like gold's, it's not fiat. If the scarcity was artificial, like unbacked paper money, then it's fiat. Currencies that were redeemable for commodities by their issuers, even if there was a fractional reserve, were not considered fiat.

This made definitions of "fiat money" like "money without intrinsic value" and "money whose value is not fixed to an objective standard" equivalent. However, when you bring crypto-currencies into the mix, things get interesting. Bitcoin's scarcity comes from mathematical rules, but the choice of those rules and the ability to change them comes from an agreement, but that agreement cannot be as easily changed as a government can print more money.

Now, there are two ways you can react to this. There's the irrational way and the rational way. The irrational way is to parse dictionary definitions of "fiat" to see if Bitcoin qualifies. But this is irrational. If a company makes a three wheeled vehicle that acts just like a car, we don't look at dictionaries to decide whether it's a "car" or whether we must call it a "tricycle". We look at how it acts. If it works just like a car, we call it a car. And, if it becomes really popular, then we remove "typically with four wheels" from the definition of "car".

So the right question is whether Bitcoin *behaves* like fiat currencies. If it does, then we should consider it one. If not, then we shouldn't. Either way, if needed, we should adjust the definition of "fiat" if we want the distinction between fiat and non-fiat currencies to remain useful.

I don't think anyone was arguing that there would never be a time when one could have sold one's original shares for a profit. The question is one of how much risk there is and whether it's likely that you could actually find the right time to sell it a profit. A similar argument a month before Pirate defaulted would have shown that investing in Pirate was a good idea.

Note that I'm making the strongest possible case in the opposite direction. The truth is in-between. Satoshi Dice is not like Pirate who never made any actual profits from any actual business activity and where the prospects for ever having an actual, legitimate return were always zero.

Nuclear depth charges in the 10-500KT range are the most effective way to combat submarines. Of course, there's also the issue of protecting yourself from other governments that might get them and use them for blackmail absent a threat of nuclear retaliation.

It's not that simple. Greed is definitely a factor, and it's always underneath the surface. But it took more than just greed to allow Patrick to convince himself that he was helping people by loaning them money at self-evidently, non-sustainably usurious rates.

What about tactical nukes (say 10KT to 200KT) for use against submarines?

He still had a good reputation, but at that point, he knew he had debts much greater than he could ever repay and he had personally lost a good deal of money. It's easy to be honest and build up a good reputation when you're making money.

Patrick was essentially unknowingly running a Pirate pass through. So long as Pirate kept paying, he made money, his lenders made money, and his borrowers made money. But as soon as Pirate defaulted, Patrick knew that his borrowers would default as well.

The test of a person's character is what they do when times get tough. And it appears Patrick sold his investors down the river to bail himself out.

Up until Kraken he seemed, at least to me, to be a willfully ignorant fool, but honest. In fairness, Ponzi schemes somehow manage to do that to people, even smart people. Even skeptical people.

That's not PayPal or ebay's fault, that's the nature of payment by credit card under Federal law (15 USC 1666). The payment processor can always disintermediate themselves. They're not agreeing with the buyer, they're just refusing to handle the payment because the buyer asked them not to. They are the buyer's agent, making the payment to you because, and only because, the buyer directs them to. The buyer still owes you the money. You can still collect from the buyer directly.

Whenever you use credit cards or something built on top of credit cards, you have to accept that the credit card handler can disintermediate themselves from the transaction if they choose to do so. In that case, you have to collect from the buyer directly, suing them if necessary. That's just the way credit cards work. The credit card company handles the payment if the buyer wishes them to, otherwise, they don't. It is inherently a revocable payment, and in that case, it's the seller's problem to get the buyer to pay them directly. Don't like that deal? Don't take credit cards or payment services built on top of them.

I defend him only against unfair accusations. I am well aware that there are a number of fair accusations that can be made against him! For example, Kraken appears to be a pure scam.

With no special skills, I draw the line at knives and swords. Even for shotguns and long guns, I think it's reasonable to require a gun safety course, trigger locks, and so on.

Of course. A rule requiring multiple people's assent to grant access to the weapon is totally reasonable. Regular monitoring of mental health is reasonable too. As a practical matter, nobody is likely to go to the trouble of meeting these qualifications, so probably nobody will bother figuring them out in the first place. But in principle, there's no reason nuclear weapons shouldn't be available to civilians if they can meet those reasonable requirements needed to handle them safely.

Presumably, there is some set of requirements sufficient to ensure they're used properly and responsibly. If people can't meet those requirements, they shouldn't have nuclear weapons. If they can, why shouldn't they have them?

You don't give a four year old a kitchen knife. Your focus on types of weapons is unproductive, IMO.

Either pick a type of weapon and ask what restrictions should be on it, or pick a restriction and ask which weapons should be restricted no more than that. Otherwise, I don't think you'll get useful answers.

For example, "What should a person have to do to own a hangun" is a useful question. "What weapons should be available to a normal adult with no more than a background check and a day of training" is a useful question.

I think you've kind of guaranteed a useless answer by using the term "general public". Any weapon should be available to anyone who meets the reasonable requirements for owning such a weapon, whether it be a hammer or a nuclear bomb. There is no reason to draw a line at some arbitrary point rather than imposing reasonable requirements on ownership of all weapons. I can't imagine how any person might meet reasonable requirements for a nuclear bomb, if that helps.

Check with blockexplorer to see if they sent them.

It's a convenience feature -- the ones you need more often are made easier to find.