Since Satoshi wants to remain anonymous, this idea is obviously a non-starter. And if he wanted to go, well ... he has more bitcoins than almost anyone here and could just cash in a few.

PS: Anyway, he may already be attending as part of his "day job".

For sure you're right. But when Ayn Rand developed Objectivism, she pulled together many ideas in a very coherent way. Some of those ideas were unthinkable to many people at the time she published them, but have now become more generally understood. And as thinkers have moved forwards to accept those broad ideas, they can now see further and can fill in the finer details. Today, the person who might have been an Objectivist Libertarian in Rand's time, may be a market anarchist or other flavor of voluntarist.

Here's a specific example. Ayn Rand patiently wrote up explanations of how certain aspects of society could work in a Libertarian world. For example, she explained how the radio spectrum could be allocated based on market principles rather than by the favors of officials and committees. As a teenager in the 1970s I presented that argument to those with whom I was debating, and I was heavily ridiculed. People came up with reason after reason why radio frequencies couldn't possibly be allocated to the highest bidder. And yet here we are today, with mobile phone frequencies routinely allocated by auction in most countries.

Her novels are awesome. I've just finished re-reading "We the Living". Story synopsis: The heroine, a very cool 18-year-old chick, is having sex with two guys. One is a communist with integrity, who kills himself when it dawns on him that all of his comrades have become corrupt. The other is an anti-communist who loses his integrity and descends into debauchery. This leaves the chick feeling that she has no alternative to escape the country (it's set in Russia in the 1920s), and ... I won't reveal the ending.

Both "We the Living" and "The Fountainhead" are great stories even for those with no libertarian leanings. On the other hand, her masterpiece "Atlas Shrugged" can be hard going for non-libertarians, and the 50-page speech of John Galt is hard going even for libertarians.

As more computing power has become used for generation (particularly GPU cards), the generation difficulty has been automatically compensating by increasing greatly.

Plug your generation speed (kHash/s) into the generation calculator here, to see how long on average it will take to generate a block of 50 coins:
http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php
I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but for a laptop it's likely to be more than a year.

I run Uclue, where the answers are provided by former Google Answers researchers. Sometimes "free" answers aren't good enough.

Fixed that for you!

It would be fantastic to have both and see what people want. I know which I want though.

Until someone implements timecoin, this issue will never go away. There will be a constant stream of people demanding more inflation. I say let those people have all the inflation they want, in some other currency than bitcoin.

Ten years from now, we will struggle to remember a time when houses didn't have bitcoin-based underfloor heating.

Personally I'd like to use the symbol instead of the decimal point. You can see this sometimes on electronic circuit diagrams where a 4.7k ohm resistor is labelled 4k7 so that there's no confusion due to missed decimal points.

That solution also covers the situation of very large units being needed. So, if we used "m" for a milli-bitcoin and "u" for a micro-bitcoin, we could have denominations such as 2m50, 7504b25 or 400u.

Of course this notation will never fly with the average Joe, so I'm not proposing it seriously.

This YouTube video shows the JJgames payment process:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22JkAGGbxVA
If you haven't already seen how well the Chrome Bitcoin extension works, watch from 1:15 in that video. It's very smooth.

A very good point. BTC takes so much of the friction out of making payments, that it's sure to circulate with a higher velocity than many other forms of payment. This means that even with only 21 million bitcoins, the value of each coin needn't be as high as we have sometimes assumed in previous discussions.

Also, as soon as bitcoin becomes known to the average Joe, bitcoin banks will be issuing accounts denominated in BTC but not backed by them. This will also reduce the value of each BTC needed to support a large economy.

I don't do CPU generating anymore, but those who do may be interested in my experience.

I got 5200 kHash/s from an intel i5 quad core using the standard client. But when I compiled my own client from svn (without tweaking any optimizations, or even stripping the binary) the rate went up to 6500 kHash/s. This is on Fedora 12 Linux.

You put aside the coins when you make the bid, and don't worry about it further. Think of it as bitcoin being stable, and the US dollar dropping, if that helps any.

Well let me ask this then. Does any UK user have a way in practice to send Euro transfers economically? If so, which bank and what type of account?

You may want to re-read the "Misconceptions" section of the page that you quoted.

Perhaps UK banks charge the same for a European transfer as they do for their most expensive UK transfer, but the banks have several levels of service for UK transfers. In practice, UK transfers are usually free and Eurozone transfers are expensive (e.g. Nationwide charges a £25 fee in addition to the currency exchange spread).


Sultan, if you want to sell bitcoins for GBP, I'm buying. Send me a PM.

I had a good outcome with:

• CoinPal
• YouTipIt
• davout
• ptmhd
• SmokeTooMuch
• Mahkul
• LMGTFY
• mndrix

...or even because virtual reality becomes so good that it replaces travel for many purposes. Who knows what the future holds? It would be a pity to throw away part of one's life worrying about peak oil. The market will sort it out.

Fractional reserve banking, in other words. I'm not criticizing though. It's inevitable, and it's harmless provided the level of backing behind the "pegging" is honestly disclosed.

Humans are good at adapting, and Vinnie said a lot of wise things.


Bear in mind that the exponential growth just occurs until a certain level of prosperity is attained. Then, people start having less babies than the number needed to keep the population steady, so the population starts to drop except as negated by immigration. This has happened in every developed country. The reasons are not fully understood, but it seems to be linked to the level of education of females.

So, population pressures are not a long-term problem for the world, if we can make it past the next 50 years or so while Africa and India catch up to the west (which they are doing).

Governments fear this erosion of their tax-livestock, which is why many countries have incentives to have babies. (I think it was Australia's former Prime Minister John Howard who said each couple should have three babies, one for each of them plus one for the state. Bleagh!)

Heh, I once bought a CD-R for $10 which contained the whole of Usenet! This was 1993 or maybe early 1994.