Well, he can't be an atheist either, nor can he be bald.

Transaction costs are a challenge, one a free market would happily take up. Since governments are so bad at dealing with externalities, it's almost impossible to imagine a free market doing worse.

In fact, governments are probably more vulnerable to externalities and transaction costs than any other organization or operation. Voters have no incentive to educate themselves about the issues, almost no incentive to balance the costs of their actions to other people, and candidates have little to no incentive to plan past the end of their terms.

My point is that there's no special "condition of the world" that needs to be specially protected. The same general protections that preserve the condition of a portion of the world will protect the condition of the entire world if applied to it.

If you specifically configure it for double or nothing, you are much better off just placing a single bet. The Martingale strategy only works if you are trying to win an amount much smaller than the total amount you have to bet.

That's the nature of credit. Credit cards are credit. With credit, there's always a risk that the debtor won't pay the debt. It's not really a double spend because if you chargeback, you haven't spent in the first place. A purchase with a credit card is functionally more like a promise to pay than an actual payment.

If you chargeback a merchant wrongly, the merchant will sue you. They may decide to eat the cost if they thing you're not worth going after. It is important to understand that a chargeback doesn't in any way change how much money you owe and to whom. If the purchase wasn't legitimate, you never owed anyone for it, before or after the chargeback. If the purchase was legitimate, you owed for the transaction both before and after the chargeback. The credit card company is just an intermediary for your payment to the merchant. When a credit card company accepts a chargeback, they're simply removing themselves as an intermediary in the transaction between the cardholder and the merchant.

That's right. The 2.5% or so that merchants pay is only part of the cost of credit cards. The fraud they have to eat is part of that risk too. One of the big advantages of systems like Bitcoin over credit cards is that you don't have to expose the credentials needed to authorize additional spending just to do some spending now. Eventually, that could mean that crypto-currencies become significantly cheaper than credit cards, even more than just avoiding the transaction costs would suggest. (Even if features like chargebacks are added to them!)

That would be great, but there's no evidence anyone from GLBSE is willing to reason with anyone.

No. I'm not advising anyone to lie or steal. I'm saying that if GLBSE is holding your asset ownership and you are holding GLBSE's bitcoins, there is no reason you should give up the only leverage you have while GLBSE is actively screwing you over.

Let me give you an analogy. If you discovered today that Pirate actually sent you a few extra coins in interest, would you pay him back?

If you don't trust James, why would you advise the people he is screwing over to give him money?!

Right, because GLBSE is not negotiating in good faith. The last thing you do with someone who is not negotiating in good faith is give them everything they want and hope they do the right thing.
 
I disagree. It's an awful start. It means there is no negotiating leverage whatsoever.

Not only that, but he doesn't even seem to have any clue *how* to release the share info. And he has totally failed to do so in the past. And he isn't communicating. So unless something forces him to do the right thing, there's a very good chance he won't.

This must be some uncommon sense of the word "correct" with which I was not previously familiar. That or your barking mad.

Actually, if you configure it correctly, you are muck more likely to win than to lose. The problem is, if you do lose, you lose much, much more than you tried to win.

It's like a reverse lottery where 99.9% of the people get $1. But one out of 1,000 people get tortured to death. Of course, your "expected profit" is negative. However, you are more likely to win than to lose.

How does that work exactly? Nefario says he paid Jack Smith twice. Jack Smith says, yes Nefario paid him some extra bitcoins, but Nefario is also holding his asset ownership interest hostage and that's worth more than the Bitcoins he's holding. He'll also say he holds Nefario responsible for breaching GLBSE's agreement to protect his ownership interest and that his damages exceed the overpayment. He'll say he's tried in good faith to negotiate with Nefario/GLBSE and failed, just as everyone else has.

So sure, Nefario could do this, but what's the point? Honestly, I'd advise people not to return any overpayments because it may be all they ever get for GLBSE betraying them. It would be different, of course, if Nefario/GLBSE were in good standing, but they're trying to get money back from their victims -- victims to whom they still owe.

I think the technical issues with this proposal are minor hiccups that could easily be worked around, I don't see any point. The Finney attack is the biggest threat to accepting 0-confirmation transactions and this does nothing to reduce that threat. So reducing the threat of a conflicting transaction by miners seems kind of pointless. It's like adding another chain across the window when the door is held shut with masking tape. If we had a fix for the Finney attack, then this might be worth doing as it would address the biggest problem with accepting 0-confirmation transactions, thus making it significantly safer to do so.

The S107 is an amazing micro-helicopter that I highly recommend. I bought one for $25 more than a year ago and flew it regularly (hundreds of flights) until it died a month ago. The tiny power switch on the helicopter broke. I let many other people fly it and wound up giving them as gifts to people who were reluctant to put it down. It took a ton of abuse, crash after crash, without breaking.

It's very easy to fly and remarkably stable. Very easy to learn on. And it can charge off a USB port, so you don't run out expensive batteries charging the helicopter.

I can't recommend it highly enough. Seriously, buy a few and give them away to friends.

I agree, but it's a scam whose only victim is Pirate.

Correct. The difference would be that Pirate's scam has innocent victims while the PPT operator's scam has only one victim -- Pirate.

Say someone specifically decided to run a "synthetic PPT". They said something like "I think Pirate is a scammer. Rather than making him a ton of money, why don't you make me money. Give me your money and I'll pay you exactly what Pirate would have paid you. You make the same amount either way, but instead of enriching Pirate, you enrich me. I'll take the risk Pirate is legitimate and pay you out in either case."

Surely that wouldn't be a "completely separate scam" if people agreed to it? And there's no rational reason a person who invested in a PPT wouldn't be equally happy in a "synthetic PPT". You have to trust the PPT operator to pay you in either case.

So either this is just "I'm pissed I lost money and someone else might not have been as foolish as I was" or "I'm pissed someone ripped off Pirate". There's no legitimate gripe -- just a technical violation of a contract whose only victim is Pirate. And, again, there's no evidence whatsoever that this even happened. So it's an alleged technical violation of a contract based on nothing but a hunch.

No. That's it not at all what I'm saying. Why not read what I actually wrote rather than picking a small bit of it and putting the word "just" in front of it?

Why? Pirate's actions caused people actual harm. You are talking about an action that caused no harm whatsoever to anyone but Pirate. I can't see why you would equate them.

It makes no difference to a PPT purchaser whether their money actually goes to Pirate or not so long as the PPT operator pays the purchaser exactly the same amount as what Pirate would have paid. The only "victim" of this "scam" is Pirate!

Again, this argument goes nowhere. Suppose this is true. Your damages are $0. So what difference does it make? Yes, if they could somehow have guessed correctly when Pirate would default, they could make a ton of money that way and nobody would have been harmed by it. So what?

Good luck. No government has ever been able to successfully enforce such a high sales tax.

I don't see where this argument goes though. If you pay someone to do something knowing that they have no way to prove whether they did it or not, how can you later complain that they can't prove they did it? And why would it matter anyway since the consequences are the same -- the money is lost -- either way?

The "condition of the world" is just the sum of the conditions of all the parts that compose the world.

Right, but it replaces it with something that stakeholders prefer. So mind your own business.

You really think traffic congestion is the biggest problem?

Actually, the value of their own land is the #1 concern of developers.

Yeah. The history of the United States is, unquestionably, a mixed bag. I think it's a very good example of how concentrating force, even for good purposes, has inherent risk. Every sane political system is a purported solution to this very problem.

How about the United States, formed as a liberation from tyranny abroad, which later killed every Indian it could and fought to annex Mexico.