If you lose banknotes, you don't lose all of them at once.

Fifty years ago, a chicken cost three hours average wages. Today a farmed chicken costs fifteen minutes average wages, and an organic free range chicken costs two hours average wages.

The free market provides both choices, and provides them excellently.

Editor-in-chief is an important job, and I think you should get 30%. You will be the one who "makes it happen" and you deserve enough to make it worthwhile.

And of course you should get an author's share for any articles that you write, in addition to your editor's share. You may need to split the author's share based on number of pages/words instead of number of articles.

You should also encourage people to find advertisers. Anyone who finds a new advertiser should get a 30% share of the advertising price.

I have often noticed a reluctance amongst people in this forum to allow for business-like profit margins, but in the real world most paths are greased with incentives. It's better to have a magazine that pays 70% to authors and gets published, than one that pays 90% to authors and doesn't get published, or doesn't have any advertisers.

We are trying to drive the adoption of a new idea (i.e. Bitcoin). It tilts the odds towards failure if we also require people to learn other new things, such as unfamiliar notations.

For that reason, the notation should be well-known. It could either be decimal (e.g. 0.001 BTC), or it could use the standard metric prefixes (which are well-known just about everywhere in the world except perhaps the USA, e.g. 1 mBTC), or it could use different names for the smaller units (by analogy with dollars/cents, pounds/pence, e.g. bitcoins/bitcents/bitdust/satoshis/whatever).

That's a cop-out. It just gives the ultimate power to those politicians who make the decision as to which scientists, sociologists and philosophers are selected as decision-makers.

I am one of those who thinks the Amazon is important to the prosperity of humans, which is why neither the government nor its pressure-groups should be involved. Government rarely looks beyond the next election. But an owner of a forest who preserves a species that might otherwise become extinct, has tremendous opportunities to profit from that in the long-term future.

That doesn't really make sense, because the overhead of a micropayment is no bigger than the overhead of a large payment.

Perhaps what you mean to say is: "Bitcoin was not designed for a big volume of payments", but nowhere have I seen any statement that mentions what volume of payments Bitcoin was designed for.

Thanks, Hal and Theymos, for clarifying this.

ShadowOfHarbringer: An algorithmic default fee would last longer than a fixed default fee, for sure, but it can't adjust to the future requirements of those who are generating the blocks. Therefore it still needs to be a default that can easily be changed.

It's probably more straightforward, and just as workable in practice, to ship the standard client with a fixed default. This default can be adjusted with each new release of the client to match the realities of the market, provided the end user still has the final control.

Before it's suitable as a serious and reliable currency (for non-geeks) it needs a lot more work to make it convenient, robust and secure for the average Joe.

As you correctly said earlier, the market leads towards the optimum solution.

I would like to preserve the Amazon for aesthetic reasons, and I would contribute plenty of money towards that, as would some other people. I have no doubt that the optimum amount of jungle would end up being preserved.

Undeveloped land is actually really cheap to buy. Even in the United Kingdom, you can buy farmland for £5000 per acre. If you want land that comes with permission to build, that will cost you a hundred times as much (due to the government monopoly on approving building), but if you just want to preserve land it's cheap. I'm sure the prices in Brazil will be much lower than those in the UK.

The websites don't do it because the Certificate Authorities want to protect their business model and have persuaded the major browser makers to support only their profitable system. I think.

Why don't the excess fees just get returned as change to the originator of the transaction?

It's looking quite dark, with the dark walls, dark computers, and dark cloak.

No. It's all hearsay. But then again, the gold in Fort Knox has not been audited for decades.

People are looking at what's happening (e.g. Rothschilds quitting the London gold bar quotations business) and trying to come up with explanations.

Ribuck is an old Australian slang term meaning "the real thing" or "genuine" or "fair dinkum". It's also spelled ryebuck, as in the Australian song The Ryebuck Shearer.

Instead of stamping onto the banknotes, why not affix a small label, the kind that can easily be peeled off. Then no-one can say that the note has been defaced.

That's the only way it will work in the real world. It's a business decision when to regard a transaction as complete, and how (or whether) to handle invalidated transactions. Different businesses will have different policies and procedures.

That reminds me of the 1970s, when the libertarian party in Australia changed its name to the Workers Party to make that point. Of course this caused great confusion and was generally regarded as a failure.

I think that sentence would fall foul of the United States Defacement of Currency legislation. It's like saying that the money is worthless, which might be interpreted as "intent to render such item unfit to be reissued".

Also don't overestimate how much text can fit on a rubber stamp without becoming too small to be legible on a piece of paper that gets scrunched up. I would think that "bitcoin.org" or even just "bitcoin" is about all that will fit without making the text too small.

The money-tracking websites (wheresgeorge.com and whereswilly.com) no longer sell rubber stamps, and no longer encourage people to write the website name on the money, even though the Canadian site (Where's Willy?) says "We cannot locate any Canadian statutes that prohibit writing on currency". Perhaps they were advised to stop promoting marking of the currency.

The "finger" protocol has already been reinvented as "web finger", which seems to be pretty much what the original poster is proposing.

How about I should only have to know your Bitcoin receiving address, nothing more.