The Ponzi scheme one is a good one.  I'm going to be editing my first post and including the questions I intend to launch threads for myself, though I'm happy to have help.  Also, how should the canonical newbie threads be clearly marked?

Just so you all know:  for every 100 views this post receives without reply, I kill a kitten.

I've just completed an Introduction to BitCoin that we can sticky for newcomers, but I'd like to add an index at the end to some canonical threads around recurring questions, like:

"How do I get started using BitCoin?"
"Is BitCoin a Ponzi or pyramid scheme?" completed
"Where do I get the free money?"
"What if someone bought up all the existing bitcoins?"
"Won't loss of wallets and the finite amount of bitcoins create excessive deflation, destroying BitCoin?"
"What happens if someone starts another blockchain or cryptocurrency?"
"Could miners collude to give themselves money or fundamentally change the nature of BitCoin?"
etc.

In the long run the solution we want is a professional Q&A site, so go there first and vote for on/off topic questions to help define the site.

After you've done that, come back here and help suggest which other questions recur here often enough that they should get their own thread, linked from the index.

The idea I have for these threads is that I (or someone else) will begin the thread with a clear and concise answer to the question.  Newbies will then be free to ask for help, clarification, etc.  These threads will be clearly labelled and designated Newbie-Safe Zones so that those who are annoyed by new/ignorant users can simply avoid them.  If a newcomer asks an answered-a-million-times question on another part of the forums, they can simply be referred to the canonical thread.  Any further posting on already-answered questions outside the thread will be considered off-topic, as will unhelpful comments by "oldies" inside the marked threads.  Would I be able to get some moderator support for this?

As these forums continue to grow at an overwhelming rate, hopefully this will help the user experience for both newcomers and oldies.  Suggestions/comments/feedback?

Yes but in the BitCoin model (which is the first to solve the double-spend problem without relying on a trusted entity) there is a massive first-mover advantage because everyone using the same blockchain gives everyone increased security compared to multiple blockchains.  Without specific differentiating features it would be foolish to use anything but the most secure cryptocurrency--as a result electronic currencies will experience social selection amongst their features, but not arbitrary proliferation.

So in answer to the original quote there is indeed the best possible guarantee--a mathematical one.

Every single discussion like this should be forked and go in off-topic.  These forums are getting cluttered enough as it is, and the problem will only get worse as BitCoin continues to grow.

Definitely something worth thinking about, because I agree that anonymous cryptocurrency will not be undone.  For money laundering I think the key will be to use the plain old-fashioned approach of "if some guy buys a yacht but claims to be unemployed...." as well as honeypots.  The trust overlay problem for anonymous finances has yet to be solved, and I think this is also a key vulnerability of criminal enterprises because no matter how organised they are it's still hard for a criminal to trust a criminal.  But re-positioning our laws and mentalities as early as possible is important.  I think we have to start focussing on the last remaining constraint that exists for human beings--that we are not yet locationless.  I suspect that someone's being in a known physical location will emerge as one of the highest forms of trust.  As long as we can make it so that violence still has to be committed physically there will be a constraint on assassinations, and we may have to accept that that is the only one that can be any longer leveraged.

@BitterTea I've read the article.  That "incidental feature" was important enough to name the concept after, so I hardly see the difference.

International transactions are the primary application which got me excited about BitCoin months ago--in order for BitCoin to actually take off in that space it will need some kind of trust system, a more stable valuation (achievable by the sale of more advanced products like futures), physical/virtual/financial products denominated in bitcoins that people in the relevant countries want to buy, and/or some sort of framework/organisation for bitcoin exchangers.  The window for this is not universal and magical.  If it takes too long to materialise, the ongoing introduction of bitcoins from mining will lower the value before it does.  There are also (less likely) circumstances in which it doesn't materialise at all.

Consider the case of Napster--it launched the peer to peer revolution but failed itself.  Bitcoin is much more well-designed than Napster, but I personally think it could be at least relegated to the sidelines if an existing government announced 1:1 backed fiatcoin prior to it becoming well-established, for example.  Predicting the future is always something that ought to be done with a little bit of humility.

The question of whether trading of bitcoins alone is an economic surge is empirically simple:  wait.  If BitCoin has truly taken hold as a reliable store of value, then the valuation of bitcoins will not drop with continued mining.  Personally I think you only have to look at what happened after parity the first time to see that BitCoins aren't quite there yet, but I may be wrong.  We shall wait and see!  Either way, I'll be happy since my goal is the success of bitcoin.  Maybe my cautiousness will prove valuable to the market as I re-buy the coins I'm selling at current prices, or maybe BitCoin will continue to surge forward with my bank account thinner than it would have been and I'll be happy nonetheless to see it fly.  Slowing the rise slightly has a very good cost/benefit analysis for my set of goals .

This is an excellent idea.  Helping non-techies be at least as secure as internet banking is the biggest limit for adoption in my social network.

You just described exactly how and why BitCoin works.

A friend of mine coined an excellent term for the current surge:  it's a heisenbubble.

It's definitely a bubble, in the sense that people are buying based on learning about it and speculating, rather than any apparent economic surge.  However.......if someone does decide to build something truly innovative on top of BitCoin that wasn't possible before, the current value will be left in the dust.  So it's uncertain if it's truly a bubble or not.  Given the high rate of BitCoin influx from mining and the general impatience of speculators, it's mostly a matter of when exactly the breakthrough application of BitCoin arrives.

Until then.......heisenbubble.

BitCoin can do this with a scripted transaction that keeps the receiving key encrypted until the money is re-spent.  Check out the end of the BitCoin Script page.  And that way you don't have to watch continuously to see if a conflicting transaction has been published.

+1

Psilocybin made it to the byline of the Forbes article.  That is a big deal for those of us risking our real world identities to help bitcoin succeed.

Don't anybody go post there unless you have good soft skills.  People with misconceptions aren't really a problem--people with misconceptions who get argued with and thus solidify their misconceptions are.  There's no harm to bitcoin if these people don't adopt for another couple years.

You still reading this thread cw?

You can call it "orderstamping" if you'd like.

The only other thing you seem to be missing is the incredible efficiency of the bitcoin network.  In its current form the network can scale to the load of something like Visa, sends the first transaction across the globe in a split second, allows for "thin clients," and has plenty of room for optimisation and specialised over-protocols.  It's difficult for me to see how your system could be made particularly efficient without a high-performance trusted repository and order-stamper.  Otherwise the privacy becomes strictly equivalent to bitcoin (especially when you take into account bitcoin's ability for scripted transactions).

Bitcoin mining nodes have an incentive to be online all the time and to try and process transactions as fast as possible.  Any failure to do this creates a strong market incentive for someone new to set up shop.  To me the real genius of bitcoin is not just the idea but that the particular implementation, complete with asymptoting distribution curve, is economically ingenious in its incentive to participate.

Any network hoping to out-compete bitcoin will have to offer some truly innovative differences.  The only possibility I see on the horizon is a fiatcoin backed by a trusted government--and that's politically complicated.

I've made a career out of predicting the future--and I would never, ever use this phrase

As at least a temporary measure can the link from BitCoin.org be changed to say "Unofficial Wiki"?

Explaining new concepts to people is a difficult skill to develop.  Knowing your facts is critical, but once you do the "soft skills" are all that matter.  If you don't have the soft skills to do it well, please don't bother.  Opinions on new things don't really harden unless someone argues with you.  Then you become committed to your prejudgement and much harder to sway later.  Nobody needs to won over today.  Most of the time, you should let bitcoins do the talking.

You still need an authority to do the timestamping--it's true that having one trusted authority could replace the blockchain, and thus you could definitely have a state-issued bitcoin version that gained wide adoption and was comparatively cheap to run, provided the trust could be maintained the same way a state has to maintain trust in a physical currency.  The advantage of bitcoin is essentially just that no such trust is necessary given any significant degree of adoption.

But I don't see how transactions could remain private without a trusted repository.  It's true that a receiver would only have to publish their "proof of already spent" token in the event of seeing another spend of the same coins, but to transfer that right to the next owner they have to hand them the whole transaction history--keep in mind that since coins need to be split and combined this quickly means most users have most of the history.  And anyone in the history of a coin can force the publishing of the complete chain just by spending the coins to the general repository.  You also need some incentive for people to store this data, so I'm not sure how this would work economically.

Precisely.  Individual, bite-sized responses to specific questions, indexed mainly for our own easy reference.  When someone asks something that's been asked a trillion times, they just get a link to the canonical thread and (if necessary) their thread frozen for off-topicness.  Having a stickied post that explains this will happen doesn't mean everyone will read it write right away, but it does mean they won't feel too hard done by when it's brought to their attention that a "standard policy" of the forum has pre-addressed their specific situation.  People feel that there is an organised, professional mechanism in place rather than just a bunch of frustrated "oldies" trashing newbs.  That difference is important--and in the canonical threads there can be a "don't post here unless you're either a newb or helping one out" rule.  People frustrated by newbs can just ignore them.  I think this would drastically improve the experience of first-comers.