It has already happened. Someone exploited an integer overflow to create a huge amount of bitcoins. The transaction was accepted into the block 74638, but is no longer in the longest chain due to action taken by >50% of the computational power of the network.

e-gold is a "fairly hard" currency, but it's still centrally controlled so in principle transactions could be reversed. It's only due to a policy decision that they aren't. This is in contrast to an anonymous cash transaction which cannot be reversed (without initiating violence).

Bitcoin is somewhere in-between those two. A transaction can only be reversed by action taken by >50% of the computational power of the network.

Nowhere in the definition of a government can you see that there is some guarantee that everyone can achieve survival, and in fact governments do rather poorly at this.

The very poorest segment of society (such as those who sleep rough on the streets) accesses far less of the state's resources than the other segments. Many government programs need you to have an address, or need you to have a bank account, or need you to have a computer, or need you to have a birth certificate, or need you to have ready access to transport, or need you to be literate.

Statist laws take away much of the ability for the destitute to improve their life. In the UK, many old people are very poor, many are really struggling to stay warm and get enough to eat. And yet old people can be the most valuable child carers. They have plenty of time and patience, flexible availability, and lots of wisdom to pass on. But current laws make it almost impossible for them to care for children on a casual basis. Even if they can meet all the paperwork requirements and the bureaucratic inspections, it can take many months for the permission to come through.

Younger people suffer too. In past centuries, a youth who has fallen on hard times could improve his lot through hard work, starting one step at a time with "odd jobs" like chopping firewood. But employment is so regulated nowadays that it's not worth anyone's while to pay people for odd jobs. For the unemployed, it's "all or nothing", whereas humans are best at getting themselves out of a bad situation if they can improve their life incrementally.

The number of people who are truly unable to survive without welfare is very small, and those people do better under voluntary charity than under state bureaucracy.

... and England has never had snow in winter before.

At the moment we seem to only have people who want to buy, so an exchange won't help much. I've done a few private transactions with other UK bitcoiners in the past, with good results.

I'm currently buying BTC at 20% above MtGox rates, for payment in GBP, if anyone is interested. The time, hassles and risk of going via LRUSD or using cash-in-the-mail exchanges makes the 20% difference worth it for me.

Taking the responses to this blatant joke at face value = fail!

It's the miners who set the fees, so this is a self-correcting "problem".

I think a virtual machine image is a bad idea, because a malicious person could include a modified tool within this virtual image. The C++ compiler, for example, could be modified for malicious purposes, and this might not be detected.

Surely it's safer to specify the build environment (i.e. version numbers and configuration of each tool) and leave others to assemble the build environment from those specifications.

Ken Thompson's very readable 1984 presentation describes this form of attack:

"Reflections on Trusting Trust"
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

That is the interesting one. If you just use the land surface, each bitcoin will be represented by 7 square kilometers, about the same as the territory of Gibraltar.

It would be great if it was possible to "zoom in" and see each individual piece of "bit-dust" (the minimum amount into which a bitcoin can currently be subdivided). That would have an area of 709 square centimeters, just slightly larger than a sheet of A4 paper.

There is still some value solving a block with no transactions, because it increases the security against double-spending of transactions in previous blocks.

I think your analysis of future mining is spot-on. When transaction fees become the dominant source of income for generators, variance in block times will be greatly reduced due to economic forces.

Government is the ultimate manifestation of the Tragedy of the Commons. It's in everyone's economic interest to try to extract money from the government to fund their own pet project, to the economic detriment of everyone else.


It doesn't even need the provision of legal and monetary incentives, just the removal of legal and monetary disincentives. Plus the removal of the corporation's ability to internalise profit while externalising risk.


Historically, this has never happened. Any large organization devotes a large part of its resources to perpetuating itself regardless of its utility. Historically, meaningful change comes suddenly, when all the right forces are lined up and the population is ready to accept it.


There are some interesting figures that show a correlation between the increase in US government spending (as a percentage of the economy) and inequality between the top and bottom slices of society. I can't track down the URL at this time, but I have seen them referenced on one of the FreeDomainRadio videos.

Also, those who receive the most aid from state spending have (on average) lower educational outcomes, lower lifetime incomes, poorer health etc. There is some high-quality evidence for this, taken from cities that straddle US state boundaries and therefore have different educational and health "entitlements" on opposite sides of the same street.

Yes, it appeared in version 3.11. Here's the thread discussing it:

"Development of alert system"
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=898.0

But I think Satoshi took it out of recent builds, to avoid accusations that he was a point of central control (because his key would be used to sign the alert). If I can find the reference to that announcement, I'll post it.


edit: here's the announcement about the removal of "safe mode". It's not clear to me whether the alert itself was removed, or whether the ability to have the alert shut down transaction processing was removed:

Removed safe mode (0.3.19)
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2228

Yes, I'm discovering that. I'm up to page 100, and have been noticing some wishy-washy "filler" creeping in here and there.

I would subscribe.

How about leaving the optimizations in there, unless/until they cause some problem? If an optimization causes a maintenance problem, then it can be removed.

If there's hostile action against bitcoin, it might be valuable to muster every last CPU cycle by encouraging everyone to turn on generation.

When the standard client was patched to fix the overflow bug, the "valid" block chain overtook the "sabotaged" one in less than a day. One of the reasons for that was the success of the pleading (in this forum) for everyone to install the new client as soon as possible, and to turn on generation.

At some point, the standard client might detect and support graphics cards "out of the box". It's unlikely to happen soon, of course.

One of the things that the state does, is to turn subsets of society against each other. Each group clamors to be awarded a bigger share of candy (i.e. confiscated property) by the government, to the detriment of the rest of society. As soon as you take away the state, it's more productive for people to co-operate.

I had become aware of this empirically over the years, but I hadn't seen it explained in this way before, by focusing on the nature of property.

I also found the tie-in with entropy interesting. Total entropy (disorder) in the universe is always increasing. But living organisms take in energy and can achieve a local decrease in entropy - not just in their bodies, but also in the things they create: their property. I've never thought about property and entropy like that before.

I'm working through Chapter Three at the moment.

I don't think you should dismiss this out-of-hand as a scam. I sent the requested 10 BTC and have already received an email copy of the WILL so that I can send it on to the bitcoin authorities together with my endorsement.

If anyone has an email address for any of the the bitcoin authorities, please send them to me by PM. I'm having a bit of difficulty with that part. Thanks in advance!

Even if every computer in the world was generating a thousand per second, it would take more than a million times as long as the known life of the universe to generate a full set of addresses.

Well yes, to some extent, but "Boundaries of Order" still carries a copyright notice and strongly-worded IP warning.