Elliptic curve cryptography takes less than one-tenth the space in the block chain, because the keys are so much shorter for the same degree of security.

If sending a 10 BTC transaction has higher utility to me than sending a 10000 BTC transaction, why should the system care?

The only rational basis for fees is for the fee to reflect cost of processing (e.g. size in block chain, or number of inputs).

The Bitcoin faucet started paying this fee, to avoid the transactions being stuck. This has unclogged the blockage for other transactions too, by freeing up "free transaction" space.

If Country A doesn't have a government, it's damned near impossible for Country B to take it over by force. Wars generally work by one government taking over the institutions of another government (military, police, administration etc).

If country A doesn't have a government, what is country B going to do? Separately take over every individual home, farm and business? Country B will go for easier targets instead.

Now let's suppose that I'm wrong, and Country B does try to take over Country A. Naturally the citizens of Country A are going to forcefully resist. If Country A defends itself, this does not conflict with it being anti-war. Self-defence is totally different from the initiation of war, because self-defence aims to neutralise the war, not start it.

Whenever a country is genuinely threatened, there has never been a shortage of highly-motivated volunteers to defend it, and they are likely to overcome the less-motivated force of the attacker.

In addition to all of the death due to war, governments have killed more people outside of war than in the battlefields of war, at least during the 20th century.

If you're keeping the currency, you must have the intention to use it eventually.

In the meantime, there is some amount of economic activity around Bitcoin. If you are keeping some coins, it doesn't affect the level of economic activity of others, but it does raise the value of those coins that are economically active, this increasing the size of the Bitcoin economy that can be supported when you and the other savers do eventually start spending.

And every key within that block begins with 1  :-)

No I don't.

I was discussing welfare recipients, the dependent classes whose housing, education and sometimes food are provided by the state. They are the ones who live a miserable life of semi-poverty.

I am less wealthy than some welfare beneficiaries, but infinitely better off.

15 BTC sent. I could see how bitterly cold it was, and I hope this covers the cost of the gloves he had to buy after 45 minutes.

Yes I live in Europe.

This problem solves itself in anarchism because barriers to becoming the capitalist employer are removed. Therefore the capitalist pig can't pay his workers too little or they set up in competition to him. Employee exploitation is only a problem in statist systems.

It needs to be simple for the user, yet effective for controlling spam.

How about a single setting in the standard client, that controls the fee per transaction input. The default can be something very low (0.0001 per transaction input).

That will also incentivize someone to write code to make the client's input coin selection more optimal, to the benefit of the network as a whole.

And get started quickly, because the hashing difficulty factor has been rising every 10 to 14 days.

In the meantime, please reword the notification email, which currently says "If you like this answer, you may select it as the best".

It's not optimal if transactions are not being processed while there's space available in the blocks.

Why not experiment, in the next client, with a setting that allows the user to specify a very low default fee for all transactions (well below 0.01 BTC). Then see what happens.

If I'm paying the bounty, I want to be the one to decide whether to award it.

If the answer had not met my needs, I would be angry and upset for BitQnA to pay out the bounty against my wishes.

Satoshi might have heard this before releasing Bitcoin, but not before designing Bitcoin. Here's a post where Satoshi says "The design and coding started in 2007".

He repeated the comment in this post:

This is because the Nordic countries don't waste a huge amount of their wealth on overseas warfare.

We needn't fear inherited wealth, because within a generation or two the family inevitably procreates a playboy who blows all the family's wealth on hookers, coke, yachts, and fast cars.

What we do need to fear is a society that is structured to funnel the wealth of the poor into the pockets of the rich on an ongoing basis.

...thereby dooming them to miserable lives of semi-poverty and blocking them from fulfilling their potential.

There are plenty of statistics showing that people who receive government benefits have lower job satisfaction, lower educational attainment, poorer health, shorter lifespan, are more likely to be in prison, etc. Some of these are quite good controlled studies (e.g. of families on opposite sides of the same street who happen to be in different towns and therefore qualify for different government "benefits").

However, time is short and I'm not going to dig out the references right now. I accept that this makes this post fairly unconvincing.

I got a good answer to my question. But when I went to the site to "award" my bitcoin bounty to that answer, the answer seemed to have already been selected as best answer (by someone else, or by some automatic process), and all mention of my 5 BTC bounty had disappeared from the question page.