Schoolsucksproject.com is relevant to this discussion. Very good podcast imo.

That sounds awful (and way better than the US). So if you want to buy more education you can't buy it from the people you get most of your education from? Or you aren't allowed to buy extra from anyone? Either way sucks.

I'll still pay if you stick it on the side.

Try searching for the address at blockexplorer.com. All I can guess is that you grabbed a different one than you though. The address listed at the top of the Bitcoin client changes on it's own so if you grabbed that one and payed to it you might not have noticed that it changed on you.

I just checked and the generate address from the most recent block is showing it's firstbits, so our database updater is not broken.

Are you saying that someone could lie? This is big news. Can anyone lie or just certain people? Should we trust everyone without thinking? Please tell us more.

You think it's right to say that people care about things even if they refuse to work to fix or save them?

I'm not saying that people never lie. You will certainly meet people who claim to care about something, but if they only devote other people's resources to it they are just using the issue as cover.

There is no 'case' I can make. The way I tell what people care about is by watching what they do so I'm just always right on this. What is your way of telling what people care about? Listening to what they say?

Nice.

How about a set of "Bitcoin Blocks" they could have the actual block number and transactions inscribed on them. In fact you could make only 1 of each block so every one would be unique and the chain would get "distributed" all over the world. Obviously the blocks should link together, but only with the next block in line.

So if I take out the checkpoints that means it's suddenly decentralized. 

I can't believe the weird shit people fixate on when they hear about bitcoin.

A hash function takes any arbitrary chuck of data and returns a fixed size chunk. It's a one way function, you can't get the original data from the output. For bitcoin mining you hash transaction data + the hash of the previous block + a nonce. You hash over and over iterating the nonce each time until the output is lower than the current target. It is easy for others to verify and then they add your valid block to their chain.

IRC is just used for hearing about other nodes, it isn't vital it's convenient.

Caught up to this point. No promises from here, but I'll try to check in and keep going for a while.

I would be very interested to hear about anyone using it in the real world. So far I've mostly used it for sending between machines in my house in stead of emailing myself. I did use it in one in-person trade. I had the guy read me some of the address form his wallet and then I showed him what came up and he verified it was the right one. It was a little awkward because I had to ask for a used one though.

I imagine a good use would be integration at point of sale. A little screen displays a QR code and the text address. If you are using a web wallet w/ firstbits integrated you don't have to take a picture you just start typing until the full address shows up and you pay.

I should clarify, you'll either have to see a bunch of wrong addresses popping up as you type (suboptimal imo) or type one char more than the firstbits to indicate that you are done. In the POS scenario I just mentioned the retailer doesn't even know about firstbits except to make sure that they post an address that is in the chain. But they don't need to look up their firstbits or mark it in a special way.

If people care about it, which they clearly do, they will voluntarily devote their own resources to solving the problem, maybe even try to convince others to join in.

Whenever someone schemes about how to get my stuff in order to solve a problem they see I know they don't care much about it. When someone really cares about something they devote their own resources. It's easy to spend other people's money on garbage plans.

Maybe your government doesn't like the dollar, but if the people in your country actually didn't trust it then your government wouldn't have to make a law against it. People would just refuse to accept it for payment.

This is an important distinction because it could happen with bitcoin. When an old fat politician writes down that we shouldn't use bitcoin anymore it will mark the point where lots and lots of people trust bitcoin more than the dollar, not the opposite.

And I use mullvad when I do.

I can't even tell you the other things I buy.

Then I bought some design work.

Then I hired a programmer.

And the time I bought a domain name, firstbits.com.

Then there was that time I bought buttons.

This other time I bought coffee.

One time I mined a block and bough a piece of gold.