Six generations in one day represents the generating capacity of around twenty 5970 cards, so it's possible for a determined and wealthy individual to put together this much computing power.

As others have said though, it's likely to be from pooled mining.

I'm not sure what your point is here, but it's worth noting that there is a correlation between freedom from government control and freedom from pollution.

There are some good controlled experiments available: West Germany versus East Germany before reunification, for example. The totalitarian East German economy was driven by production targets, and pollution control was usually the first thing to be dropped.

Freedom from government control leads to increased prosperity, and believe it or not people actually like to have an unpolluted environment for their workplace. It's in the interest of both the employers and the employees, and as prosperity increases it becomes easier to achieve.

The government doesn't look beyond the next election, whereas the owner of private property has an inventive to maintain the quality and value of their property (including its environment) for the long term.

There are a number of possible solutions, if more precision is ever required. One of them involves using the existing "sign bit" to represent a precision shift of the remaining bits of the 64-bit amount.

But really there's no point planning for this now. The world will have changed in unimaginable ways if ever Bitcoin gets to the point of needing more precision.

Wow! Not only is gavin a great software developer, he also has superb presentation skills.

He's TED Talk material for sure.

Although direct government intervention can help a business to screw its customers, it's often more subtle than that.

All it takes is for the government to add a bit of friction to the process of setting up a business.

It anyone can set up as a competing bakery, the existing baker has no scope to screw his customers. But if setting up a bakery requires a permit which takes six weeks to arrive, and costs a fee, and if inspections and approvals are needed before the doors open, it adds enough friction that the existing baker knows he can get away with a certain amount of customer-screwing before anyone else will bother to compete.

Voluntarist.

Every one of the poll options assumes that I want to be ruled by someone else.

The ability to "screw" your customers tends to reduce to zero in a free market, if only because any customer that is being screwed can "cross sides" and become a supplier instead.

If your baker is screwing you, you set up a rival bakery next door and make a killing. Of course, not everyone wants to become a baker, but you only need one person willing to do it to make the existing baker reluctant to "screw" people.

MtGox and MyBitcoin already provide this merchant-independent stored value service with instant confirmation.

All it needs is for a message to pop up if there's no block chain present when the client starts up. It could say something like:

Do you think it will grow that much? I think it will grow by 100 times, at most. But I don't tell that to other people, because they'll think I'm crazy.

I tell people that it's a speculative investment which has 50% chance of being worth 10 times as much, and 50% chance of being worth nothing.

What an interesting idea! An edit doesn't get accepted unless at least 50% of the network accepts it.

Now that doublec has ported Bitcoin to the N900 smartphone, I think the easiest way to live for one month off Bitcoin would be to send some coins to the phone and go on a road trip across the US.

Each night, stay at the home of a bitcoin user and pay them in bitcoins. Also pay them to drive you to your next destination.

With a bit of planning, it should be possible to travel from one coast to the other this way in a month.

The first payout (4.75 BTC) happened today.

But if we want the economy to move forward, then these "less than rational" economic decisions are actually rational after all.

You would be locked up for fraud, because no jury would believe your appeal to statistics.

When I was trading at Bitcoin Market (where you see the PayPal addresses of the people you trade with), all of my trades except one were to .ru addresses.

Although it's theoretically possible, the chance of this happening is zero for all practical purposes.

It's a novel. A summary of a novel, no matter how "perfect", is never the same as reading the novel.

Read the novel to laugh about her dated attitudes to cigarette smoking, if you don't want to read it for the philosophical overtones.

1. You probably visited the Bitcoin Faucet while your newly-installed Bitcoin client was downloading and indexing the initial block chain. In that case, your Bitcoin transaction wouldn't show up until you downloaded the end of the block chain. Future transactions should indeed show up in a few seconds.

2. Even if you have seen a transaction in the block chain, there is a small possibility that there is more than one version of the block chain floating around the network. When everything settles, the block chain supported by the majority of the network will be propagated and the other version(s) will die out. The more blocks since your transaction, the greater the chance that the block containing your transaction will become permanent. Waiting for six confirmations is arbitrary, but it seems to be plenty for most purposes.

There are always people who will prefer to buy tangible products from the primary source. The original studio has "first mover" advantage which will count for quite a lot too. But the studios will no longer be able to exploit their monopoly by (e.g.) releasing in some continents several months before they release in the rest of the world, or by releasing products that are inferior to the free ones (e.g. DRM-laden).

Consider that great music was composed and performed long before copyright existed. Consider that there are companies making money from bottled water, when you can get water almost for free from the tap. Consider that iTunes is successfully selling many songs that you can hear for free on YouTube any time you like.

Creativity flourishes without violence (or the threat thereof).