I like the way he starts by saying how impressed he is that the design of bitcoin foresaw and solved so many of its possible problems. [edit: and I like the way he ends by saying "Bitcoin is a cryptographically-secure, anonymous, digital currency ... that exists!"]

The speaker seems to have an extensive knowledge of Bitcoin and is a very enthusiastic presenter.

Bell Telephone Labs Inc was a separate entity, jointly owned by AT&T and Western Electric. Although those corporations enjoyed government-protected monopoly status, Bell Labs did not, nor was it taxpayer-funded.

Why just inventors or programmers?

A skilled carpenter just hung a new door on my house. Why shouldn't the government force me to pay him a penny every time someone uses that door, for some period of time not to exceed his life?

I just made Banoffee Pie for dessert. This recipe was invented by Ian Dowding in 1972. Why shouldn't the government force me to pay him a penny every time I cook his recipe, for some period of time not to exceed his life?

Google Maps just showed me a better route into town than the one I've been using. Why shouldn't the government force me to pay them a penny every time I drive that route?

The whole notion of government-enforced monopolies degrades society by setting people against each other.

If you don't know any of your addresses, you could search for all the addresses in the block chain.

Bell Labs, and Xeroc PARC. They were spectacularly successful research centers that weren't funded by stolen money.

They flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, before it became more profitable for big corporations to spend their R&D dollars building up government-enforced patent portfolios instead of doing real research.

I still remember when Bell Labs announced that they had invented the spell checker. From memory, this was in the early 1970s. I still recall the press release, where a guy with a beard ten times the size of Stallman's was holding a computer printout with misspelled words on it.

This was revolutionary for its time. Back then, the mainstream didn't even accept that computers had a role to play in text processing (just numerical processing and data processing).

Some other things to come out of Bell Labs included the transistor, the laser, the C programming language and Unix.

PARC was responsible for the invention and/or maturation of bitmap graphics, graphical user interfaces, WYSIGYG word processing, page description languages, ethernet, object oriented programming, IDEs and Smalltalk.

Underwhelming enough for you?

It seems that his widow, Pamela Wolfe Browne, maintains his old website and looks after the sale of Browne-related items. Just last month she added a Harry Browne Bust Statue to the shop!

You could email her at plwbrowne@harrybrowne.org and ask about reprints.

The whole of human development has been incremental. Everything builds on what has been done before. Humans are largely co-operative beings, but copyright law tries to pit them against each other.

Disney is happy to make their own adaptations of pre-copyright stories, but they will fight anyone who wants to do the same with what Disney produces.

The United Kingdom today has incredibly restrictive planning laws. People love the old city centres, but you could never get permission to build anything similar today. Doesn't meet planning requirements for car parking and disabled access, and has too many big windows pointing in the "wrong" directions.

It can't be quite that straightforward, because in the early days bitcoins were created using much less energy than the most recent bitcoins. Even though we can distinguish them, we don't value them any differently.

Not to mention that the previous government paid off the national debt before the US/Europe financial crisis.

For some reason, physical copies of this book are really expensive when they are available. The last one I saw for sale was $175!

Option three is that a peer-to-peer society arises that makes governments impractical and redundant. By using bitcoin, you are part of that solution.

Chaord, would it be sufficient to have the ability to split a bitcoin wallet into online/offline parts, without needing to tie each private key to an account? This would not harm the existing account functionality, and would be very useful to a lot of people.

Sorry, I can't implement it. Although I'm a software developer, I have no experience with C++.

It sounds like a big task because quite a few Bitcoin internals will need to be changed (for example, coin selection for payments will need to become account-aware, as will change-handling).

Finally, I think it was a conceptual mistake to put account handling into the standard client (it belongs in the business logic, external to Bitcoin), so this is not a development task that I would find interesting.

And: "How do I get started?".

Thank you. It's not the easiest site to grok, but for ease of use it beats fivegrinder hands down!

I'm not participating in BPMA, but I very much want this association to succeed.

In any association larger than say half-a-dozen people, there's a risk of much time and energy being wasted deciding on how to make decisions, allocate work, and keep track of things. You may wish to use the service provided by BetterMeans. Although they charge a fee to corporations, it's completely free for organizations that have publicly-visible workflows.

It seems well-suited to an association with an anarchistic leaning. Here's their introductory video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAlnMWlvw9g

I presume you mean "getaccountaddress". That call returns a receiving address (public key). Any bitcoins that are paid to that address get recorded against the corresponding account.

But when you make a payment from some account, the bitcoin client doesn't care which coins it spends. If you make a payment from account "B", it might spend coins that were received against a receiving address associated with account "A".

The bitcoin client adjusts the account balances correctly, but doesn't associate the balances with the private keys that correspond to the original receiving addresses.

First post from a new user, promoting a high-value commercial site (OnLive), equals a high chance of spam.

Dissipate, as a show of good faith why not delete that link from your original post.

[edit: thank you!]