I had an idea this morning, but I don't have the skills to implement it. What I would like is a detailed history of the prohibition of cartoons, made to parallel the rise of drug prohibition in the United States, and eventually culminating in the War on Cartoons. It should be written in a serious tone, such as this Wikipedia article. I think the comedic nature of this endeavor should naturally come out given the subject matter. I don't mind if you take some text directly from relevant wiki articles and change them to fit, but it should not be a complete copy-paste-find-replace job.

Something I'm especially interested in is how the consumption of cartoons becomes violent when it is prohibited.

I'm willing to pay 25 BTC for this, but I'm also open to negotiation.

edit... One thing I would love to see is some of the rhetoric used against cannabis use in the early days, especially that of Harry Anslinger, modified to take a strong stand against the consumption of cartoons.

Most sellers ship via postal service I believe. At least in the US I believe they need a warrant to open mail. Don't use your real name if you can avoid it, and if you know of a place other than your home that you can securely/anonymously receive a package, use that address. Don't include a phone number.

Does the ease of (the federal reserve/government) creating new dollars limit the dollar's acceptability as a mainstream currency?

Argument from authority. You know George W Bush graduated from Yale and Harvard, right?

I like what Mike has done better, which is to list achievements. It's not what where you went to school, it's what you did with that knowledge afterward.

I hear statists are immune to confirmation bias and are completely incapable of forming fallacious arguments!

If the economy is growing, but the number of bitcoins remains constant (or decreasing slightly due to loss, etc), then prices will fall. Wages must fall too, but all else being equal, you will be able to buy the same number of things with your fewer coins. What Sipa and others propose is merely a way for prices and wages to stay constant, without resorting to actually inflating the money supply.

The problem is that eventually, people who know the answers to The Questions That Are Repeatedly Asked might get tired of answering them, and not. That leaves an opening for those who don't know the answers or think they do to provide official seeming misinformation, intentionally or no.

If that's your definition of fiat, then all money is fiat. Gold only has value because people believe in it, federal reserve notes only have value because people believe in the federal reserve.

A more meaningful (and I believe more widely accepted) definition is "money that only has value because of government regulation or law".

The next difficulty is estimated based on the current hash rate. Since the hash rate is off, so is the next difficulty.

Perhaps a mandatory FAQ, with a quiz at the end.

Anything worth throwing computing power at is probably not easily verifiable. The biggest benefit to the hashing method is that it is very hard to compute, but very easy to verify.

The computing power is being used to perform a simple cryptographic calculation (hash) trillions of times per second (across the whole network). Each resulting hash is compared to a very small number (target) which is related to the difficulty. If the hash is less than the target, you have found a valid block. The chance that each hash will yield a valid block is the same for all individuals, all that differs is the number of times per second you can check a new hash.

That's all that miners are doing, hashing and checking. It seems like it's a waste of energy, but I know of no other way to secure the network against double spend attacks in a distributed manner. Any "meaningful" computing would fail to be...

1) Difficult to counterfeit
2) Easy to verify

Let's imagine that the proof-of-work calculation, instead of being a "useless" hashing of data, was to do with folding proteins for cancer research. That sounds great in theory, but there are a few of problems with this.

1) Protein folding is just as intensive to verify as it is to compute in the first place.
2) Eventually a cure will be found for cancer and we are now back to doing "useless" work.
3) As our knowledge of the domain increases, it seems likely that some way would be found to break the system, where break means it is vulnerable to an attack that takes longer than brute force.

There's already Bidding Pond, and I believe another auction site I can't recall.

The difference is that he probably already has a Paypal account.

If the amount does not matter, you can get 0.02 free coins from the faucet.

That is just ridiculous. Since the end of WWI, the United States has walked all over the rest of the world. This is the fundamental cause of our "terrorist" problem.


Military spending necessitates the use of the military (war), and war necessitates additional military spending. Positive feedback loop.

Even if they cared enough to gain 50% of the processing power before it is able to become more mainstream, that doesn't mean Bitcoin would be broken. They may make life difficult for us, at least for a while, but I feel that either Bitcoin would adapt or some other crypto-currency would take it's place.

I too will pledge 20 BTC for the satisfaction of the conditions laid out by cacheson in the original post.

Additionally, and perhaps even more importantly, it will only get more unlikely over time (as difficulty increases).