I would be interested in this. I would seek a safeguard along the following lines:

At any time, on demand, holders of 1% or more of the shares can convert their GLBSE holding to a regular voting share in the company.

That way, the company never has more than 100 shareholders to deal with (because this is expensive for a company to do), yet there is no limit to the number of small players that can participate throigh the very efficient GLBSE platform. And yet, the GLBSE shareholders are not at risk of becoming "second-class citizens" because they can always group together with others and convert to company shareholders.

This could actually be a good way to do something productive with bitcoins that you're not needing to spend immediately.

Survival of the fittest. The better-adapted agents can afford to pay more for their hosting, and the others eventually die off. No need to kill them.

I'm not sure if you're serious, but ... price inflation is positive, and greater than interest rates. Because of this, most people can't effectively build up a low-risk nest egg for the future security of themselves and their families. They therefore become dependent on the state, and to help fund this the state creates even more inflation.

Damn straight. It's a false dichotomy of course, but if I had to choose I'd prefer the Arkansas inbred to be ruling over me than the political scientist.

Technically, it's a "milli-Bitcoin" or mBTC, but in the year 2020 the populace call it by it's nickname: the "Millie".

There is also a "micro-Bitcoin" or uBTC, which is colloquially called the "Mike".

Mike and Millie are the everyday coins. You might deal in Bitcoins if you buy a nice car, and the Bitcoin base unit (the "Satoshi") is used as a denomination for small payments, for example the automated "Thanks" that your browser sends for viewing a YouTube video without any ads.

I used Youtipit in its earliest days, and would like to see it succeed. However, it's a difficult business to bootstrap. It's hard to get critical mass: to get to the point where enough content providers participate to persuade people to become tippers. Even Flattr, which had strong early growth, seems to be struggling to keep up the momentum.

Um, Gavin, you do realise that your Bitcoin Faucet is a zero-sum game?

Gavin is very smart, dedicated, trustworthy, and hard-working. I don't think he is wise yet, but give him time.

Andrew, you miss the point. Sure it's nice to have money and be famous and have shiny toys.

But it's even more rewarding to ride the rollercoaster of life doing what you can with what you've got.

You know, for something as serious as this they should be OK for you to phone and wake them up.

Taxation is theft from the current generation of taxpayers.
Deficit spending is theft from a future generation of taxpayers.
Inflation is theft from holders of a currency.

However, it's different for people who voted for politicians who tax, voted for politicians who spend into deficit, and voted for politicians who inflate the currency. Taxation is not theft from those voters, who asked for it. One might even say those voters are complicit in the theft from those who did not vote for it.

Mdosi, thanks for the link to that great Paul Graham article, which I found interesting not so much for the ideas themselves, but for Paul Graham's ideas about how out-of-field ideas can turn into reality.

Having said that, I agree with mav that your ideas are just "standard" ideas with added Bitcoin. This is not really a bad thing. Plenty of people made lots of money in the 1990s by implementing "standard" ideas with added internet. (It's hard to imagine now, but I recall when Amazon started up, and most people thought that a business like that would never become profitable. Incredible!)

One downside of "standard" ideas with added Bitcoin, is that the hard work will be done by Bitcoin pioneers like those found at this forum. Then, after they ahve proved the concept, the big guys who are already doing those "standard" ideas will simply add Bitcoin to their repetoir, and collect the big bucks.

So, like Paul Graham says, you have to edge your way in by filling a niche that seems so way-out that others are not interested.

Graham's third idea ("Replace Universities") is going to happen for sure, and Bitcoin could be one of the enabling technologies. The idea of cloistering knowledge, and reserving its dissemination for the chosen few, is on the way out.

On this idea, Graham is remarkably unadventurous. For sure, credentialling will (not "may") separate from teaching, as will syllabus development. This idea is wide open for exploitation, and none of the existing players will find it easy to muscle in to the field once the early implementors are in business. Especially not the universities, whose ideas are far too entrenched.

I slept with the Prime Minister's wife back in the 1970s. It's true! We were both in the same audience for the Chinese Opera. It was really boring and long-winded, and most of the audience nodded off.

LOL, maybe that site takes Bitcoin or something.

I'm the guy who first suggested (on 10 February 2011) that the Bitcoin base unit be named a Satoshi, and by the end of the thread the usage had already caught on.

Then botnets won't be sending spam anymore, because they make more money mining

Lawyers use "gratis" to mean "free as in beer", and "libre" to mean "free as in speech".

Since you asked: The Nokia N900 phone has a 600MHz processor and mines at 130 kHash/s.

You guys seem to be assuming that this means Amex is afraid of Bitcoin.

Perhaps it actually means that Amex is working on a Bitcoin application that they don't wish to discuss yet.

Forget my last post. I found a way to rewrite the block chain:

Fortunately I found a song about my exact Bitcoin balance. I found most of the bitcoins in a wallet.dat at Sydney's Luna Park, which happens to be where the song's video was filmed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcfJ060o-NU


PS: Apologies to those neat-and-tidy people who want the number to equal the post count. Feel free to delete this.