That's right. I guess no one here actually realizes that auditing is a very small percentage of what the IRS does. I think it's like 5-7% of the returns are audited. If you fill out these ridiculously long forms hoping that a human is going to read it then you're killing a tree for no reason.

They added a bunch more employees to transition the Obamacare program and when that's running smooth they can start digging into auditing Bitcoin returns with those extra employees. If they don't find anything irregular within the first few years then no one will ever read those Bitcoin returns again. They will just accept the bottom line you entered and file it away. You will be the only one inconvenienced by the extra work.

This will depend on how popular BTC becomes. If a significant number of Americans each submit a few hundred or even thousand capital gains transactions each for relatively small amounts it will have an impact. Contrary to popular assumptions tax agencies do not have unlimited funds and their mandate is to raise money for the state not spend it. If the paperwork burden gets bad enough where there is no significant return in taxes collected, they will change the rules to something more sensible where there is a threshold below which transactions are not reportable as is the case with foreign currency.

By the way I live in Canada and the CRA is doing a similar thing. They will learn just give them some time. It is interesting to see some tax agencies in Europe backtrack on VAT and BTC. The UK comes to mind here. In the meantime I am for tracking every satoshi and do not forget to claim those BTC network fees.  

Oh yeah, I got distracted by the horrible butchering of physical, and chemical, laws here, so I didn't even post what I wanted to.  Gold is not going to be devalued by being created, because we are not going to produce gold in significant quantities at any point in the foreseeable future.

However, gold will likely be devalued by a huge influx of supply anyway.  This supply will come from asteroids.  Google, James Cameron, and many other billionaires\100+ millionaires, have been investing in companies that are developing the technology, and making plans, to capture, and mine, asteroids.

For example, 241 Germania is an asteroid that contains enough resources (in the form of various metals, minerals, water, etc.) that it could be worth $50-100 TRILLION if fully mined.  But, that is a very large asteroid, and very far away, so probably not one anyone will mess with anytime soon.  Instead, they would likely go for small asteroids that are very near us.  Many of those have $50-100 Billion worth of platinum and gold.

and the odds are it will be radioactive.

I thought that they were able to produce gold for 10+ years already, just that the price to produce is significantly more expensive than mining it.

I think people underestimate how powerful low-cost DSPs have become.  For example, C. Gouvea was able to verify secp256k1 ECDSA signatures in 700 ms using an ultra-lower power 16-bit microcontroller running at a only 8 MHz (and available as in a tiny 3 x 3 mm package size).  Even very cheap ARM-core processors ($2 - $4) will typically run at ~150 MHz (and with 32-bit registers).  So let's say signature verification for each received TX takes no more than 20 ms, at which point you can relay the transaction to your other peers.  This seems perfectly acceptable to me.  

The only other issue I can think of is RAM, but I don't see why you can't store the unspent outputs in the SD card itself (new SD cards permit reads in excess of 30 MB/s so I think the time it takes to cross check the outputs in a TX with the blockchain unspent outputs stored in flash will be short compared to the signature verification times [20 ms]).  It seems you just need sufficient RAM to pool the unconfirmed transactions (and some overhead to accept new blocks, etc), so upon first glance the 6x8mm 64 MB IC for $1.50 seems sufficient for this purpose.  

I think such a bitcoin node would be useful if it could be made only a few cm in dimensions, cost less than $10-$15 excluding the SD card, and be trivial to set-up.  

  

Thanks.  I do know about the raspberry pis, but I'm thinking even smaller: a tiny little custom board with only the bare minimum hardware required to run bitcoind.  Perhaps the ARM processor could still run linux, or perhaps in the future we could write a version of bitcoind that implemented its own simple OS (as is commonly done for DSP projects).  



I suppose you need enough RAM to pool the unconfirmed transactions, right?  A 64 MB chip could hold around 100,000 TXs.   Here's a 64 MB SDRAM chip that is only 6mm x 8mm in size and costs about $1.50: http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/AS4C4M16S-6BIN/1450-1077-ND/4531924

People have got it running on raspberry pis. The amount of memory (RAM) you require is the main problem.

Seems like you should get in on this: https://xapo.com/in/campaign/debit/

So you agree with me.  If electrical "mining" heaters can't be made cheap, reliable and easy enough, then there would be no economic advantage to using one in place of a simple electric heater so then they won't be used. 



If the mining-heaters can be made cheap, reliable and simple such that using them saves money, then of course people would install them.  Do you think the average person knows how a heat pump works?

It all comes down to what is most cost effective.

I have no interest in hand-waving debates about "what will be most cost effective in various scenarios at some distant point in the future" as we'll both likely be wrong.  

Miners use no more electricity than an electric heater.  100% of the electrical energy "used" by the miner is converted to thermal energy (heat).  Of course in most places there are more cost effective methods of heating a house such as natural gas furnace, propane, or heat pump.

i think that this type of thing is one of the reasons why the us shouldnt be able to tax bitocin theres always oging to be able to launder money and for the time being they dont have an real way of doing so

It only compensates people from US / Canada.
The majority of the MtGox customers were foreigners (including me).
These foreign customers are not included in this Class Action

I looked at the site, and it's not clear how they avoid being ripped off with charge-backs.
Any idea how they actually control/avoid fraud?