60-78% bitcoins being saved and not spent eh? ...  well I haven't had a close look at the methodology to determine this so don't put any weight in it myself but it sounds like an interesting number.

Bitcoiners in general are miserly, frugal bastards who work hard and save whatever they can get their hands on .... , so what? I could have guessed that anyway. These are the people who pick up the pieces after the grasshoppers have trashed the economy, yet again, once their extravagant, wasteful ways have run their inevitable course. The ants who get on and fix things and get them working again and saving again in case of the next 'lean patch'.

And frankly it doesn't matter that much anyway since the price is set at the margin where demand and supply is being met, not by the great mass that doesn't move and is essentially "off-the-market" for most rational prices you might dream up ... unless it does move and that I find will be unlikely to change significantly any time soon. Gold is exactly the same, only a small fraction of the total physical gold stocks is ever mobilised in trade .... in fact a good fraction of the annual physical trade is satisfied by newly mined gold, and this is exactly what makes it money par excellence (store of value role).

It seems to me that best incentive for doing this kind of work is to figure out how much information is currently available from the block-chain, so that better privacy enhancing techniques can be developed to thwart further analysis. Rinse and repeat, so to speak.

Thanks for asking Mosler that question, his shallow and dismissive answer was enlightening.

Have you considered the concept of free market money for saving Italy? Any small province in Italy could begin with trading with their own currencies for example., irrespective of what the ECB dictates.

The monopolistic nature of the modern money is what creates the massive market distortions, under/over supply, instability and etc.

http://monetaryfreedom.org/ (click on the "Resources" link to read more)

Good luck.

It seems like the down into rising selling volume is becoming entrenched, with some relatively large sales going through on down slides.

It is indicative of saturation, i.e. the huge rate of inflation of bitcoin, currently ~25%, has finally caught up to what has actually been until now a phenomenal rate of adoption. It seems that the scheduled halving of bitcoin inflation rate in 5,000 blocks can not come a moment too soon, although it too is probably throwing uncertainty over the market.

But in the meantime I can see a powerful selling down, perhaps revisiting the hard floor at cost-of-production (around $4) but may go as low as $2.5 depending on how much pain the new ASIC miners can handle with their cost of capital for shiny new hardware, i.e. will they keep pumping bitcoins at a loss or rather buy at the market?

Anyway, look out below is my advice.

Escrow, pay btc on bullion delivery ... what would be the terms?

NB: I'm not interested in any deal, just curious how it would work at all.

So how much pizza could you get for 10,000 btc today I wonder?

... at $20 per pie about 5500 pizzas?

Edit: so you could have 2 pizzas today or 5500 in 2 years time ....

He's a theorist .... not a practitioner.

So far his theories don't look all that 'famous'. But if people feel like giving him their 'real' money to speak, let him have it.

Good question ... what's the smallest device known for running Electrum client? Seems like anything that squeeze a minimal python stack PyQT could do it?

A fine workaround ... from my timewarp ftp was the web, not the workaround

You could I suppose to be ultra-thorough also post the signed hashes of source and pre-built binaries files put up on github by the other devs (so as not to centralise trust on gavin's sig.) ... e.g.

https://github.com/bitcoin/gitian.sigs

https://github.com/bitcoin/gitian.sigs/blob/master/0.7.1/sipa/bitcoin-build.assert

Maybe, but banks aren't above using regulatory efforts to tilt the playing field to their advantage.

The nation state's rush to change the function of money from an economic market-driven choice for medium of exchange, to money the tracking and snooping tool of an over-grown authoritarian state is, imho, a fatal conceit. They are undermining the state's primary cash-cow, the power to control the supply of the premium monetary product, by compromising the usefulness and design (evolved over millenia) of the final product.

AML and KYC sound wonderful and utopian, but the world is dirty, gritty and unpredictable, and doesn't usually take kindly when those 'ideal' marble-corridor theories are tested in the dirt-floor raw marketplace. The digital currency currently being issued by most nation states are undergoing a massive experiment in monetary economics that most have not even thought through, let alone planned for in the event of a "negative externalities" outcome.

Just because the digital money revolution made it possible to track, monitor, data-mine and analyse everybody's private financial dealings does not mean it was a good idea to do so. The economic ramifications of using such compromised currency systems could be with us for decades .... or until suitably private alternatives with maximally fungibile properties are widely adopted, at which point the survival of the nation state itself will be in question since its fate is now inextricably bound up with currency that it issues.

Money is a technological information tool for deferring the exchange of goods ... medium of exchange, store of value, unit of account (all of that). It leads to all kinds of wondrous benefits for humanity, such as efficient market pricing, division of labour and etc, etc too numerous to mention. It was never designed to be a tool for "catching the bad guys". What is so difficult to understand about this simple concept?

Trying to shoehorn into the design of money hooks to turn into a tool of law enforcement will inevitably creating a deficient, inferior, compromised product that sucks at being good money (as defined above).

People on park benches talking about using meager sums to traffic drugs from USA to EU probably shouldn't be taken at all seriously, or no more seriously than some whacked out zombie from needle-park. People on the streets say all kinds of thing that have absolutely zero standing in any decent court of law, or public opinion. Good for a laugh, but really how do you know what anyone says in your presence is factual unless you have some independent knowledge of the proof of their claims??

Dragging KYC 'concerns' into local bitcoin exchanges seems like a stretch. I just trust no-one, money talks, BS walks.

What will be the new dependency(s) for a typical Linux box?

Will BDB still remain a dependency also?

No, I don't recall starting any threads in Off-Topic or elsewhere regarding satoshi's identity. In fact, I'm pretty sure this is the first post anywhere I have ever stated anything seriously on the matter.

Have to confess that curiosity got the better of me one day a ways back and I did do a little sleuthing of my own .... after joining some dots here, colouring in between the lines there, tapping the networks, dabbling a little in the digital black arts, ouija boards ... to cut a long story short I think I have pretty good idea who satoshi (the bitcoin coder) was. It is one of those answers that when you are presented with it you will want to slap your forehead, hard, and go "doh! why did I not think of that" ... not obvious but hiding in plain sight in retrospect.

So while I have a pretty good idea, some tenuous facts, shaky reasoning, I can not unfortunately reveal who I think satoshi is, since they have made it clear they wish to remain anonymous and indeed advocate for net privacy in many other fields also (clue). And I respect these efforts immensely.

However, ultimately it is a free market of ideas and if donations/pledges of a suitably large enough BTC amount be made I would probably reveal what I know to be true and let the private chips and data trails fall where they may, so to speak. 

You are raising some interesting questions. Have you pointed you enquiring mind towards similar issues raised by the Open Transactions software?

https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions/wiki

Would be interested on any thoughts specific to that model. A federation of servers acting as notaries for transactions for 'ethereal' issuers and clients.

Here's some schematics to give a broader overview of possibilities (note these may change as rapidly as the technology, e.g. bitcoin mulit-sig, n-of-m voting pool auditing issuers)

Architecture Overview:


Fully Anonymous Cash TX:


Pseudo-Anonymous Accounts TX:

Came here looking for the silver spoon-feeding ... got the wooden spoon-paddling instead

http://lfb.org/today/paper-money-despotism/



Bitcoin also gets raised in the comments by the author.

Can't wait until they do the follow-up study on the Namecoin blockchain. Things must be real slow out there ....

A UBS stick?

Well there would be all the usual laws surrounding illegal use of a computer, etc, etc anyway if your machine/account was hacked anyway.

That doesn't mean that bitcoins are property ... just that your computer/account was broken into.