Right, so the answer to this has already been stated:  Bitcoins are almost infinitely-divisible.  Lost coins simply increase the value of existing coins.

No.  It's perfectly reasonable to communicate the approximate current value of an undisclosed asset in terms of a widely-used currency.

The topic is "backing" of Bitcoin.  Market value is not the same thing as "backing".

Could it be Bitcoin Magazine?

The non-aggression principle is a logical quine.  That's what's so special about it.

There are four options:

1) You agree with it and abide by it;
2) You agree with it and don't abide by it, in which case you have explicitly consented to it being forced upon you;
3) You don't agree with it but do abide by it, which is basically the same as #1;
4) You don't agree with it and don't abide by it, in which case eventually it will be forced upon you, and you will have implicitly consented to it.

So, regardless of which option you choose, the result is that either you abide by the NAP, or you consent to force being used to defend against you.

In case it wasn't clear, I meant a million USD worth of real assets, not fiat fun-bux.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_The_World

I wonder how many of these people are already aware of Bitcoin.

Epcot Center.

I've suggested this before here.  The hard part is finding people to donate the backing.  Specifically, finding people to donate enough backing so that the peg sticks.  I estimate it would need to be on the order of a million USD.

I'm going to go ahead and state the obvious, that this is highly subjective.  The entire Bitcoin network has huge potential value density, but in order to measure it correctly you'd have to include all of the capital behind it.  Same goes for IOUs, bank notes, and gold.  Human slave is obviously the least valuable.

Potentially, plutonium could power a replicator that can create almost anything.  It wouldn't even have to be very big, smaller than a city block.  But an IOU could be used to trade, say, Dyson Spheres.  And the Bitcoin network might not be able to scale that large.  I imagine bank notes would not have much value at that scale, but that could be mistaken since they have in the past been used for, eg the Louisiana purchase.

By automating work and externalizing risk.

The thorium doesn't burn, it just glows.  It would be a completely uneconomical waste if it were actually consumed.

Besides, no one uses candles for lighting.

Technically it's not just the Federal Reserve but large-scale capital in general that necessitates a constantly falling population, hence large-scale warfare.  The centralized, government-linked nature of the Federal Reserve definitely promotes large-scale capital and debt-financed wars, but they would both still exist without it.

But obviously the Federal Reserve is a major enabler.

It actually seems to be a bunch of simultaneous transactions of the same Bitcoins over and over.  So it's not actually 1.6 million BTC.  It's ~9150 Bitcoins that are whittled down to ~7850 incrementally.

This is total amateur-hour.

Not a bad talk, but it really just drives home the point that the majority of the problem with unsustainable energy consumption is simply idiots who neither know how much energy they use nor even care.  This guy is a physicist, and admits that he eliminated 50% off his heating bill simply by reading his meter and setting his thermostat properly.  If that's typical for a physicist, the average person doesn't really stand a chance.

As for the rest, it comes off as very anti-biomass, which may make sense for Europe but makes no sense in the Americas or Africa.  Consider that I can heat my house with 1/4 acre of miscanthus.  But consider also that my house is smaller than average, and better-insulated than average, and in a warmer climate than most of Europe and in a country with 1/8 the population density of the UK.

Really, though, no one should have the slightest pity on the British for wasting all of their fossil fuels on warfare and empire building rather than planning for sustainability.  Like "oh you overpopulated your little island with its miserable climate and consumed all your resources attempting to subjugate half of humanity and supporting a failed welfare/warfare state?  Tough shit, deal with the consequences."

In general, Europe is fairly screwed on the energy issue unless they can expand renewables into Northern Africa in a major way or, you know, sacrifice their quaint brick siding and learn to insulate their ancient houses properly.  The British are just double-screwed, and it's really only karma catching up to them for harboring the world capital of ponzi economics criminals that they actually bought into their own bullshit and believed that finite resource consumption could go on forever.  Oops.

This is actually an interesting example of a rather intriguing idea.  If the ponzi is big enough, and goes on long enough that it affects the money supply, it will eventually invite a response from the central bank.  The central bank will interpret the constricted money supply as deflation, and print.  But, instead of reversing the "deflation", this newly-printed money will simply feed the ponzi and cause it to grow.

And, if you think about it, this is exactly what the too-big-to-fail banks did over the last decade or so in the US.  They simply took the money that the FED printed for them, and traded it back and forth among themselves in a pointless unproductive game, creating $600 trillion in fraudulent derivatives in the process.  When this eventually dried up all the money in the real economy, leading to the crash of '08, the FED's response was to print more money to give to the banks, perpetuating and expanding the ponzi.

So the question becomes then, in a way, was the '08 financial crash just another example of blowback?  We know that the CIA had a hand in crashing the Soviet economy in the late 80's / early 90's.  The failed Soviet economy prompted Mavrodi to develop his ponzi in '94, which was wildly successful due to the widespread economic destruction in Russia at the time.  So, perhaps it got the attention of someone who exported it to America?  That would give the banks just enough time to begin lobbying for the repeal of Glass-Steagall in '95 in order to address "market realities" by removing the barrier between printed FED money and ponzi investments, enabling US banks to "compete with foreign firms" ie Russian ponzi schemes.  This legislative coup eventually succeeded in '99, just in time for the "terrorist attacks" in '01 and the resulting money printing that followed.

The rest, as they say, is history.

So, perhaps there is some truth to Paulson's claim that Russia caused the '08 crash.  Maybe he knew more about this than he let on.

I could've sworn this was discussed last year, but I can't seem to find it.

Apparently it's Bitcoin-denominated:


http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsergey-mavrodi.blogspot.com%2F&act=url

Not saying you're doing so, but it's important to realize the error in simply equating velocity with a healthy economy.  Velocity is just one measure of a healthy economy.  It's possible for a healthy economy to actually have no velocity at all.  What's the velocity of the Star Trek economy?  Zero.  They don't trade anything at all.  Everything they want is just replicated out of thin air.  That's important to keep in mind.

But let's say the economy is like a person on a bicycle.  A healthy economy can ride the bicycle very fast.  An inflationary currency is like a lawnmower engine strapped to the back of your bicycle.  It will make you go very fast, for a while, until the gas runs out.  Once the gas runs out, it will instead make you go very slow, as you are now weak and emaciated from never pedaling, and you have to haul around a worthless lawnmower engine.

The Federal Reserve, of course, is the guy selling you gas in exchange for you helping him siphon it out of a competitor's tank every once in a while.

It really is unfortunate for the Clintonite bureaucrats that they have latched onto this agenda of attempting to blame "capitalism" and "suburbia" for the unsustainability of modern industrial civilization.  Because they are hilariously wrong.  It's a pack of first-world petty bourgeois repeating the exact same failures of Lenin and the Soviet communists.  Even Gore didn't seem to be that ignorant.  His tack was at least scientifically plausible, if wildly unpopular.  Kind of telling, the infighting going on now as Obama spent his entire term ignoring the eco-fascist agenda in favor of busting the budget propping up the gain in living standards of middle-class blacks instead.  And he has no regrets, even if he is a one-term president.  Of course nothing the American political left does will ever be sustainable.  But it's hilarious how each little faction wants to go in their own misguided direction.  And as a result they can't ever hold it together long enough to maintain power for more than a few years at a time.  Sad, really.  The vast majority of the US electorate, dominated by complete incompetents because all the white males are too politically correct to point out to the women and minorities that their ideas are facile, have been tried before, and will never work.  Not that most of them really care, anyways.  They're happy with a few make-work jobs, some pork projects, and the opportunity to stand up and say "I fought to redistribute this wealth from the people who created it" to a crowd of perpetually-downtrodden admirers.  Sustainability is nothing but a distant dream in Democratic realpolitik.

In reality, suburbia is a response to failed bureaucracies.  The flight from incompetent government being fomented right now will be truly epic in the years to come.  And capitalism is the most efficient means of wealth preservation mankind has ever devised.  Even the Chinese have now conceded this.

So contrary to the wishes of the global central planners, as we speak, capitalism, courtesy of the Chinese, and suburbia, thanks to Chairman Greenspan, are quietly engineering the destruction of the failed fascist model so faithfully-copied by both the Soviets and the American bureaucrats in their zeal to emulate the efficiency of the German state without first understanding its fundamental underpinnings.

Central planning simply doesn't work.  It is being abandoned by local governments all over the US.  This will be bigger than just the failure of Agenda 21.  It will be the failure of incompetent government in general.

Decent video overview of Agenda 21:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjqgdWcKLlk

Okay, you're trolling.  No one is this stupid.