It's fairly clear that Satoshi planned this absence.

Before he became inactive, he asked Gavin to take over the build process. He also removed the part of the code that allowed him to send a PGP-signed message that would put Bitcoin clients into safe mode.

So I don't think Satoshi's absence is due to having met with an accident.

It would be quite OK if Satoshi has chosen to melt away into the background, and if his identity is never discovered. The idea of an invention as great as Bitcoin having been unleashed by an anonymous benefactor is quite cool.

It will lead to some great speculation in the future though. Is Satoshi Hal Finney? Is Satoshi Peter Gutmann? Is Satoshi Bruce Schneier? Is Satoshi Gavin Andreessen?

Even if the current pricing does reflect a "speculative gold rush", it's inevitably self-correcting so it's nothing to worry about.

Personally, I think the speculative bubbles are yet to come. They will happen, and a lot of people will get rich, and a lot of people will get poor as a result. But the bubbles will be driven by large numbers of people (e.g. after Oprah mentions Bitcoin on her show, or Bart Simpson gets into Bitcoin).

The current market price, being determined by a few thousand early adopters who are mostly of above-average intelligence, isn't a bubble as far as I'm concerned.

Religion can do something that no business can do: invite payment now, with the promise of a reward after death.

But if there was a heaven after death, who would want to be there? Seriously, how could you enjoy heaven, hearing all the howls of torment from those in the other place? Or, as is perhaps more likely, hearing all the fun parties happening at the other place.

ShadowOfHarbringer and BCEmporium, if you'd care to start a thread in Off Topic I'll be very happy to join in.

Religious discussion doesn't belong here in "Marketplace" (unless you're selling crucifixes for bitcoins).

That's an interesting thought. A bitcoin-oriented VCT would be a great vehicle for investors to use, because there are substantial tax breaks.

But I don't think it's so interesting to actually create and operate the VCT, because what you earn is the percentage that you collect as trust manager (ballpark 2% to 5% a year, I think), from which must be deducted the administrative and compliance costs.

Operating a VCT is, I think, a reasonably profitable occupation. But if Bitcoin grows as rapidly as we think it will, it will be more profitable to be investing into the Bitcoin businesses, than to be operating the investment vehicle.

I looked into this too, and I found the same as Vladimir, although I think you could meet FSA requirements for a bit less, maybe £200,000.

The UK does not have the same "bottom-up" entrepreneurial environment that, say, the US does. So new technologies are most often introduced by some existing big company deciding to branch out into the new field. And often they need to get the regulations rewritten to make it possible. The BBC and PayPal, amongst others, did this but it's not possible for the "little guy" to do the same.

For this reason, none of the big internet technologies were developed in the UK. None the new business models (as exemplified by eBay, Amazon, CraigsList, PayPal, Google, YouTube, Flickr, etc) originated in the UK, even though the UK makes up a large percentage of internet users.

The best we did in the UK was a couple of websites that started selling last minute holidays, or listing real estate online. And all of today's big UK internet sites are divisions of pre-internet businesses (e.g. the BBC, or newspapers, or bricks-and-mortar retailers).

I removed the receiving addresses from that wiki page. There's no legitimate reason to have a donation-receiving address anywhere except on the organization's own website.

The lack of chargeback forces merchants to be more honest, in the long run anyway.

With chargeback, there's no incentive for the merchant to differentiate themselves as being more trustworthy than other merchants, because the customer's ability to chargeback is identical for every merchant.

Without chargeback, customers will eventually get used to thinking about trustworthiness, and merchants will have to cultivate their trustworthiness to survive.

In the short term it will be a rocky road, as consumers learn (the hard way) about the new way of doing things.

People lose physical gold every day, but the gold economy isn't harmed.

In your original post you wrote 0.005%, which equals 0.00005, not 0.005.

I'm not sure what point you think is being made by the Slashdot article.

Consumers are being squeezed because their food costs more than a year ago, their heating costs more than a year ago, their transport costs more than a year ago, their taxes are higher than a year ago, and their incomes have not kept pace. So of course they will prioritize essential purchases at the expense of discretionary purchases.

The amount of tech products they are buying now is higher than the amount they would be buying if the products hadn't dropped in price over the past few years.

Double-sided printing is possible, but it's surely too difficult to be practical for the average user to get everything oriented correctly.

I don't see any problem for these checks to be single-sided though.

It's also necessary for the redemption software to immediately spend the coins to another address in the same wallet, to make the original check useless for others.

Otherwise, multiple people can scan the QR code into their wallets, and no-one knows how many others have the coins, but the first to spend the coins will be the one who gets the value.

These checks are being printed at home by the purchaser, right? That probably rules out double-sided printing. You'll need to make sure the design is also usable for people with black-and-white laser printers.

If you use Julian Assange's image to imply endorsement it will cause problems, but I guess you know that already. Nice attention-getting idea though.

Rather than engaging a designer to produce the note, why not have a design competition with a BTC prize?

Your example shows a commission of 0.5%, not 0.005%. This is too low for a serious business. There's no reason why a Bitcoin check shouldn't have a fee of 1% or 2%. You will need to cover advertising and support costs, in addition to the server hosting costs. With a 2% fee, a check for BTC 20 would cost BTC 20.40.

Anyway, nice concept!

At the current difficulty, my phone should generate one block every 58 years. That's amazing, but not amazing enough!

You could maybe ask doublec. He's the only person I know who has compiled bitcoind for an ARM device:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2125.0

I mine on the Linux box that I use for everything else too.

I bought a 5870 for it (322 MHash/sec) which purrs away quietly and is trouble-free, except for the need to reinstall the ATI driver every time I update the Linux kernel.

I also tried mining on my N900 phone just for the fun of it (130 kHash/sec) but of course I never won a block.

And chargebacks can be a fraudster's first line of offence against unsuspecting merchants...

Obviously it works both ways, which is why the payment mechanism itself should be chargeback-free. The most appropriate protection can be layered on top of the payment mechanism, according to the needs of the parties to the transaction.

The common factor in all your examples is that the state is the organization within a geographical area that exercises a monopoly on coercion. That's enough common meaning for debates about "the state" to make sense.

You can do it too, if you provide what the customer wants, in the form that the customer wants it.

Water from the tap is almost free, yet my local supermarket sells bottled water at a higher price than coca-cola. Go figure!