S3052, did you remove your postings on the stock market apocalypse?  Where are they?  You did an analysis on the S&P 500 and predicted it would go down...a lot.  Are you too embarrassed to leave them up?  I bet if they came true you would be boasting about it instead of hiding them.  Please correct me if I am wrong.

Catherine Flick seems like a nice lady.  I think people are just fine tuning bitcoin and why it should exist and debating it with Catherine's arguments.  In addition, libertarians are also very passionate about individual freedoms.

I left this on the bitcoinmedia site:

Surveys like the one Catherine created can influence the psychology of people’s minds. What if I substituted “Bitcoin” with another phrase?

1.) Do you think it is good or bad for Catherine Flick to donate to hate or terrorist groups?
2.) Do you think it is good or bad for Catherine Flick to donate to legal political or other organizations?
3.) Things that Catherine Flick can do for good?
4.) Things that Catherine Flick can do for bad?

Asking questions like this can unfortunately associate Bitcoin with “bad” subjects, just like how Catherine Flick can be associated with these negative subjects.

I think I read somewhere on this forum that bitcoin is an intrinsic property of the Internet.  As an analogy, Bitcoin is an elemental property of the Internet that was born similarly when elements where born out of the Big Bang.  It had to come into existence.  Sounds like sci-fi, but for real.

I read your blog post and it seems what you have argued makes sense.  It seems like by the letter of the law (U.S. law) bitcoin is not a currency.  You also argued that bitcoin is not an investment contract.

To me it seems like if bitcoin is not a currency, and if it's not security (investment contract), then is bitcoin then a commodity?  Seems like you didn't mention anything about commodities, probably for some unmentioned reason.  In The Good Wife the lawyers also argued that bitcoin was a commodity.

I think bitcoin is like gold.  There is no "issuer".  Work needs to be done to "mine" for bitcoins.  Work needs to be done to "mine" for gold.  There is a limited supply of bitcoins and gold.

The value of gold goes up and down.  The value of bitcoins go up and down.  Some people choose to use gold, bitcoins, or both as an investment.

Surely, gold is not a security, nor is it a currency that is issued by a country.  Since bitcoin is so much like gold I have to conclude that bitcoin is a commodity.

Can't wait!  Can you give us a hint?

Congrats on your activation!

I have a question that is somewhat related and can move this to another topic if it bothers you.  How did you handle instant payment confirmation without waiting for 6 confirmations?  Could someone cheat the system by these instant confirmations?

Lol.  Pretty much anything can be far from impossible.

I can levitate if all the air molecules around me randomly decide to lift me up which is far from impossible.

1 or 1 gaziillion is so far away from infinity.

It is hard to access silk road.  Would it be legal to have a website that caches silk road daily but u cannot buy anything from it?  It is just for curious people or for journalistic research.

Perhaps in open source development relationships aren't always cordial.  (That was why in the video Gavin posted the leads of Subversion were venting.)  I do know that most successful for-profit software development shops where one needs to be physically at work tends, for the most part, to be cordial in environment.  Most people don't want to go to work in a hostile environment and people who don't fit in will quit or get fired.

If I were lead I would want to produce an open source environment that is as cordial as possible, even though that may never happen.

The concept of "team" is very important in all organizations and maybe even more so in open source projects.  Team interaction and communication is key.  If a person cannot communicate, lay down his ego, or continually brings up old issues then the whole team breaks down resulting in software paralysis.

Gavin seems to be a very reasonable guy on paper and in person in videos.  Gavin is also very transparent.  Satoshi, himself, annointed Gavin to lead the bitcoin project.  Gavin's voice clearly deserves to be weighted more than others.  I believe in Gavin.

I'd like to see a video of Luke to see how really socially normal he is.  It is easy to hide behind a keyboard, write BIPs and code.  But to take responsibility and ownership of a project and to put your face and reputation on it is another story.

bitsyncom is developing a an Internet cell tower that is completely, I think, separate from the Regular Internet.  Users use it by paying for it with bitcoins.  The more bandwidth u use the more u pay.  since bitcoins can handle micro transactions it is perfect.

I have been involved with a lot of clubs.  We try to raise money in different ways.  Car wash, door-to-door selling stuff, donations, etc.  However, there is one really effective way to raise money that is easy and effective.  The successful clubs I join run a raffle at each meeting and people can buy raffle tickets.  The prizes are donated or bought.  The revenue generated from the tickets funds the club.

So, if there was someway for you to run a raffle for prizes maybe you can use the money to fund the magazine, which will be for a good cause for bitcoiners.

I am American and I prefer "Armory".  Didn't realize there was another spelling, "Armoury".  Only English, non-US really care about this.  Asian, non-latin languages don't really care about the spelling.  I think it is better to be consistent and just keep "Armory". 

Thumbs up!

I am hoping Fred will ask Dwolla to integrate bitcoin into their services.

Someone could program an agent that would try to make money, and profits could be split to the "father" of the agent.

Intersango, Patrick, and Amir have a history of beef with Bitcoinica, even publicly saying "Bitcoinica is a way to separate fools from their money."  So, in my opinion there is indeed some negativity until there is some apology or proof.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_7:_Rapidly_adjusted_.28micro.29payments_to_a_pre-determined_party

Example 7: Rapidly adjusted (micro)payments to a pre-determined party

Bitcoin transactions are very cheap relative to traditional payment systems, but still have a cost due to the need for it to be mined upon and stored. There are some cases in which you want to rapidly and cheaply adjust the amount of money sent to a particular recipient without incurring the cost of a broadcast transaction.

For example, consider an untrusted internet access point, like a WiFi hotspot in a cafe you never visited before. You'd like to pay per 10 kilobytes of usage for 0.001 BTC each, without opening an account with the cafe. A zero-trust solution means it could be fully automatic, so you could just pre-allocate a budget on your phones mobile wallet at the start of the month, and then your device automatically negotiates and pays for internet access on demand. The cafe also wants to allow anyone to pay them without the fear of being ripped off.

To do this, a protocol similar to one proposed by hashcoin can be used:

    Request a public key from the access point.
    Create but do not sign a transaction (T1) which sets up a payment of (for example) 10 BTC to an output requiring both the access points public key and one of your own to be used. The value to be used is chosen as an efficiency tradeoff.
    Create but do not sign another transaction (T2) which has two outputs, one to the access points key and another which goes back to you. The initial value is 0.001 BTC to the access point and the rest back to you. Use a sequence number of zero on the input and a lock time of some point in the future (eg, 1 day).
    Send both unsigned transactions to the access point. It sees that T1 and T2 are of the expected form and signs T2. It hands T2 back to you.
    Check T2 is signed correctly, sign T1 and T2. Send them to the access point which broadcasts them, thus locking in the agreement. Note that T2 won't get included into a block for at least one day, unless it's replaced by a newer transaction, as determined by the sequence numbers.
    Each time you want 10kb of data quota, sign a new version of T2 with a higher sequence number, the same lock time and adjust the outputs so more value is allocated to the access point and send it. The AP sees that the output sizes are correct, signs it and keeps it (does not broadcast).

This continues until the session ends or the 1 day period is getting close to expiry. The AP broadcasts the last transaction it saw, replacing the original that was pending. Once the lock time passes, the value transfer is committed. Alternatively if the session end is negotiated cleanly, the user can sign a transaction that's final (sequence number of UINT_MAX) which signals that no more data quota will be purchased, allowing instant commitment of the transaction.

The lock time and sequence numbers avoid an attack in which the AP provides connectivity, and then the user double spends the output back to themselves using the first version of TX2 thus preventing the cafe from claiming the bill. If the user does try this, the TX won't be included right away giving the access point a window of time in which it can observe the TX broadcast, and broadcast the last version it saw, overriding the users attempted double spend.