Baron's lawyer won't want the screenshots for court evidence, he will just want to see them himself to work out exactly what Baron's case is, and what real evidence needs to be assembled.

The "man uname" command says that -m means "print the machine hardware name", but maybe uname -m is actually printing the last part of the kernel version string as displayed by uname -r.

I'm currently running 64-bit Fedora, and this is what I see:

uname -r
2.6.35.11-83.fc14.x86_64
uname -m
x86_64

Auto-detection would be a good thing if it is foolproof, but otherwise it adds more problems than it solves.

The price is partly driven by future expectations.

Every month the amount of bitcoin-denominated commerce has increased. It's a simple extrapolation to see that the limited supply of bitcoins will need to be worth much more in the future to support the ever-growing amount of bitcoin-denominated commerce.

People aren't buying a bitcoin today so that they can buy a loaf of bread today, but many people are buying a bitcoin today because they might be able to buy ten loaves of bread next year.

Or maybe none, if Bitcoin fails, because it's highly speculative for sure. If, like me, you think the fundamentals are sound, it's not such a big risk.

This is is stark contrast with the UK, where the Royal Bank of Scotland is in the taxpayer's hands after being bailed out.

It just posted another  loss, this time of around a thousand million pounds. And, surprise, the bank's expenses included around a thousand million pounds of bonuses, including a hundred bankers who each got a bonus of a million pounds or more.

So every family in the UK is paying fifty pounds of tax to make sure that people richer than them continue to collect these enormous bonuses for a failed bank.

And the UK taxpayer laps this up with barely a murmur.

Although Satoshi normally chooses his words very carefully, he did once or twice let his raw anarchistic rage show through, like when he wrote that with Bitcoin, "we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled network like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own."

That comment earned him a rebuke from the list moderator:


That suggests this version of Bitcoin in 15 words or less for laymen:

Bitcoin: gives rabid libertarians a new territory of freedom for several years.

The "pay out or donate to charity" model is a big improvement, because it gives the seller of goods/services more assurance that the buyer is committed to spending the coins.

As a buyer, I would happily use this option. If the seller doesn't deliver and I divert the bitcoins to charity, I won't lose out. I donate to charity anyway, so I'll just donate less next time.

As dacoinminster implies, it needs to be clear that the buyer is not a beneficiary of the charity. But this is easily solved by having a short list of unambiguously independent charities.

Your second option (allowing the coins to be diverted to any mutually-agreed address) will be useful in the future when the coins can be diverted to an arbitrator.

Doesn't "uname -m" only give you the hardware type? Until recently, I was running 32-bit Fedora on 64-bit hardware.

OK, that's fine. The word "currency" wasn't explicit in your first post, and I assumed the "assets" could be totally arbitrary, in which case it's impractical to solve complex multi-exchange trades without introducing prices.

Both of them, when put on the spot, offered to return the disputed amount if this would get the issue closed. Just sayin'

It's for situations like this that "prices" were invented.

I'm not Vladimir, but ... there's no such thing as British Law. There is one set of laws for England and Wales, another completely separate set of laws for Scotland, and another completely separate set of laws for Northern Ireland. The law of England and Wales is often loosely referred to as English law.

Then he needs to wait until summer, because you can see from the video how cold it was in NY for the guy who did it on Tuesday.

But must he do this in NY? Surely there are suitable locations that don't require a flight?

Your web page says "We seek no control over anyone", yet "top wage earners are not to earn more than 100x their lowest wage earning employee", and licensing and permits are required after a one-year grace period.

Do you see the inherent contradication?

Oh, over the net...

I will be interested to see how that goes. I don't know if the human communication bandwidth will be high enough.

My company sued another company in 1987, when I was not yet a voluntaryist. I was "only" a libertarian back then.

Since then, I have not sued anyone. But neither have I experienced any loss to "shrug off". Voluntaryism changes your whole way of dealing with other people, in a very positive sense.

Obviously I can't be sure that I'll never suffer a loss from being ripped off. But if it happens, I'll try to make good by non-violent means, and I'll balance the loss against the savings I made by not paying lawyers.

Many people here are familiar with the GPL. I have often wondered if someone could draw up a business agreement that works in a similar way, but refers to state courts.

Something self-detonating, along the lines of "We agree to transact without invoking the power of the state. Each party agrees that if they invoke the power of the state, they immediately and totally release the other party from any legal obligations."

Obviously that's amateurish and no doubt full of loopholes, but it would be interesting to see what a lawyer could come up with.

Nor do I, because I consider it immoral and distasteful to invoke the violence of the state against a fellow human being.

Of course, if someone else initiated court action against me then all bets are off.

"Sweat equity" is a legal term in some places. It means you work for a business but you don't get paid wages. Instead, you get a share of equity in the business.

The actual price chart, just in case anyone started to panic:

Very amateurish image edit. What you smokin' man?