By the way, casascius, when I asked what new Bitcoin would be worth to you, I meant now. After all, you said you're already starting to value new coins more than old ones. I have a few new-ish coins mined in the last couple of months. Care to buy them, I'm sure we can come up with an exchange rate to suit us both.

Or would you then be taking unfair advantage of your realization that BCP is the future? Or just taking a risk (big IMO) that you deserve to be rewarded for if there turns out to be a profit to be made?

Is this such a bad thing?

So how much would a newly minted Bitcoin be worth to you, in older Bitcoin?

The reason people want to see physical bitcoin is to enable BTC payments without being online. This does not do that. If, for some reason, I bought BTC on a CD or USB stick, the first thing I'd do is load the wallet.dat in there onto a computer somewhere and transfer the coins to another address. As long as I haven't done this, the original seller is able to spend the coins at will.

Who said that? The main attraction for Bitcoin is that it's not controlled by a central authority, is easily transferred and can be highly anonymous.

If you haven't sold a lot of coins, you haven't made a fortune. It's not profit until you use the coins for something. The exchange rates might crash tomorrow.

Anyway, as I said, all this talk about who deserves what is tedious. I'm wondering if this system you propose is even possible. As you've noticed, you have to have a mechanism for destroying BTC converted into BCP. Your solution is to send the BTC into an invalid address. Can this be done? The default client won't do it, so you'd have to use a modified one. Would "vanilla" miners accept such transactions into the block chain? If not, you can't prevent double-spending. If yes, then the vanilla Bitcoin client could be modified to not accept such transfers, if enough people wanted to make life difficult for your new currency.

Someone please do this. I don't think I'll be willing to buy these new coins, but I'd like to see competition. There are several uncertainties in Bitcoin's future, one of them being how other distributed Internet currencies might affect the Bitcoin economy. Implement this idea and we'll get some data on that.

Anyway, I don't see the point of talking about fairness. The only thing that matters is what you can get people to buy. Perceptions of fairness may play a part in that, but mostly people care about expected profits for themselves, not what profits others might have made.

For me, the "fairest" currency would be one I minted myself and no-one else had any of, but obviously that's not going to have much value.

Aw, I was hoping this was real, but probably it's just someone trying to scam a few BTC out of the gullible easy-to-frighten demographic.

The odds in a regular lottery are dismal.

None. If I need to use USD, it's simplest to just pay with a credit card. Not that I ever do need USD apart from buying things on the internet.

Is it possible to have a decentralized pool, or is a central authority required to ensure miners are honest?

That's actually quite accurate.

Highly unlikely.

Any attempt to appeal to women in general will likely just come across as sexist. Hell, it would be sexist, since you would be implicitly claiming gender is important in economic affairs.

Bitcoin as a system is about as egalitarian as it gets. The block chain doesn't care about your gender. It has no way of even knowing your gender.

I'll believe anything I think I've seen sufficient proof for, and start to disbelieve anything I've believed before if I feel the idea in question has been sufficiently discredited. What denomination is that?

There's a reason economic theory is highly politicized. Answers to questions are rarely obvious, and it is difficult to get unbiased data.

As with anything important, keep several backups. I prefer to store my wallet.dat in an encrypted container stored on Dropbox. Whenever I close the container I also make a local copy of it. Others prefer more copies, but for my purposes I feel this is enough, and I don't have to worry about keeping off-site backups up-to-date.

You might have better luck offering prayer services. Same thing, but people do pay for it. Maybe not here, though.

Apparently it is quite tough, since there are competing exchanges yet Mt Gox is overwhelmingly the most popular. What would it take for another exchange to gain popularity. I mean what could a competing exchange offer, not what Mt Gox might do wrong.

Is there another exchange that acts as escrow in the way Gox does? I think that's a big part of the appeal, only having to trust the exchange,  not the people you're trading with.

Regarding early adopter rewards, I think if Bitcoin ever becomes big on the scale being discussed here, the coins early adopters have accumulated will have been spread out considerably. Consider the hypothetical owner of 1% of all Bitcoin - what will they do with that money? Bitcoin, like all other money, only has value insofar as  you can exchange it for something. Currently anyone holding, say, 200,000 BTC is only hypothetically a USD millionaire. Trying to sell even a few thousand BTC will move the market significantly. The same will continue to apply in the future. No-one with 1% of Bitcoin could actually swing that much wealth around without seriously moving the market at the same time. In effect, such a person could spend smaller amounts at will, but try to hire an army of workers or build new pyramids, and they'll find their (and everyone else's) buying power rather seriously diminished.

tl;dr:
If you hoard large amounts of a resource and the market develops without those resources in circulation, you can't expect to be able to dump your hoard and not see a large drop in prices of said resource. Hoards are theoretical wealth.