Democracy is when three men and two women have a vote, and decide to legalize rape, and the rape victims just have to accept it because the decision was made democratically.

But Direct Democracy is one intellectual step on the journey from "Representative" Democracy to Libertarianism to Voluntarism.

So you need to find someone against whom you can hedge your mining risk. The counterparty gets the first 'X' bitcoins that your rig mines, in return for delivering 7500 minus 'Y' bitcoins at the end of six months, where 'Y' is the number of bitcoins that your rig mined.

That needs new terminology. I would call it a "Bitcoin style difficulty hedge"

If you let us know the hashing rate of your mining rig, we can consider whether we are interested.

On the other hand, you could throw caution to the wind and mine away, keeping everything you make without incurring any hedging costs.

I think it would be unwise to transfer all of your wealth into bitcoins. Bitcoin is still in its infancy, and problems might emerge that would make bitcoins worthless.

You could transfer some part of your wealth into bitcoins. You can use an exchange like MtGox, or you can trade person-to-person via #bitcoin-otc.

You can't yet buy all "the essentials of life, ie food and energy" using bitcoins. But the number of things that you can buy is increasing every week. Many of them are listed on the "Trade" page at bitcoin.org.

If you can't wait to get started, you can get 0.05 bitcoins for free from the Bitcoin Faucet, thanks to the kindness of Gavin Andresen and those who have donated coins to the site.

Enjoy the ride!

For certain definitions of free:



Here's an excerpt:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvSJY3Xiwdg

In the long run, the difficulty is likely to be affected by changes in the value of BTC. A higher value will encourage more people to generate, leading to an increase in difficulty level. And vice-versa.

But in recent months, I think much of the difficulty increase is due to the ongoing movement from CPU to GPU mining, which is (in round figures) 50 times more efficient.

If anyone wants to prepare a graph of difficulty vs. MtGox price, it would be interesting.

Well, you are an individual, so of course only you know what you think you would do.

For the masses, deflation means going into the cellular phone shop and saying "wow, I thought I could only afford a dumphone, but it turns out I can buy a smartphone". Deflation means Joe Public saying "My TV has broken, and it seems that I can buy a 46-inch TV rather than a 32-inch TV like my old one". Deflation means Fred saying to Martha "Last year we could only afford a week's holiday just across the state border. This year let's have two weeks in the Bahamas".

This, of course, is good for the individual. Some might even say it's good for the "economy".

It shouldn't even need a click. The client should check on starting for a new wallet. I would like to see a wallet subdirectory that you could drop any number of wallet files into, and the client would recognise all of them when starting up.

Provided you understand that you only win the fee if you solve the block (in which case you also get the 50 generated coins).

It's a misconception that "the economy" is an entity of its own, that it is anything other than the aggregate of what is done by people. You are essentially saying that people should be forced to do something other than what is in their best interests, for the benefit of a statistic called "the economy".

But if "the economy" can only show the statistics that you want to see, when society is structured against the best interests of the people within it, then I think you're looking at the wrong side of the equation.

The Bitcoin protocol only prevents double-spending. It doesn't say anything about double-selling.

Thank you, da2ce7, for using a logarithmic vertical axis.

That sounds like a good solution.


As the bitcoin economy grows, there may come a time when that makes sense, but I think it's a while in the future still.

...And as a result he attracts a band of largely-unhappy followers. It's a real pity, because he's highly intelligent and articulate. If Molyneux could take a cue from Harry Browne's optimistic writing in "How I found freedom in an unfree world", his slice of the voluntarist movement would be much more fun.

Delaware is 6452 square kilometers, or 909 bitcoins. My rough visual estimate is that 35% of Delaware lies north of Dover, so you're looking at around 318 coins.

PS: If you want to own the Brooklyn Bridge too, I can sell you that for another hundred and fifty.

Thank you, I stand corrected.

Now it just needs a fractal mapping from an integer to a location on the planet. That keeps nearby integers grouped together, like the XKCD Map of the Internet. Over time the map will get more and more fragmented, until eventually it really does look like dust.

When the reward drops from 50 to 25 BTC per block, we will see whether or not it has any significant effect on the difficulty level. Until then, I don't think anyone needs to worry or speculate, because hard evidence will come soon enough.

Why don't YOU be that person, then when you become rich you can give away your coins to "people who don't have the time or skill to set up their own Bitcoin-earning service/product".

Gavin, I think you misunderstood what I'm trying to say.

I'm not worried about the developers of gcc. I'm happy to trust them. I'm worried about the person who prepares the virtual image, and who could include their own patched malicious version of gcc.

What I suggest instead is simply to specify the build environment (tools, version numbers and configuration options) and allow others to set up that environment with software from standard repositories.

A virtual image of the build environment is not a big risk, but it seems to me it makes things slightly worse rather than slightly better.

The analogy doesn't stretch further than being a cute graphic. Individual bitcoins don't exist in any meaningful way, nor do the individual specks of bit-dust. There is no notion of 21 million coins, numbered 1 to 21,000,000.

All we have in Bitcoin is a sequence of transactions, whose inputs and outputs are quantities of bitcoins. There's no way to "assign" those coins to a specific part of your graphic. The next time those same coins are spent, it will be with different keys.

Homeless people are often those who are made helpless by the state.

Homeless people are cash-poor but time-rich. There are types of homes that require a lot of time but very little money to build. Two examples are straw bale housing, and yurts.

Suppose a homeless person finds a farmer who will let them build such a dwelling on an unused piece of his land, perhaps in return for some help with milking the cows. Do you think the state will allow this?

The land has no "planning permission", and the building is too non-standard to be approved. So the homeless person is denied an honest way to lift themselves up, back into mainstream society.

In my country there are a few people who have managed to convince the bureaucracy to allow them to live in straw-bale houses or yurts. But the people who succeed in this interaction with the state are not the ones who are struggling and really need the permission.

As for voluntary charity, it's empirically shown that charity flourishes when the state is smaller, and that charity languishes when the state moves in on its turf. But even with a dominant state, private charity flourishes when there is an exchange.

What I mean by this is, for example, that the Salvation Army is always willing to help you, but in exchange you may need to listen to the word of God. Fair enough. If I was a destitute atheist I would respectfully do that, in order to lift myself out of poverty. Then, I would gratefully make a large donation back to the organization that had helped me, before severing all ties with it.