Very well, I withdraw my objections.

I realize that this is not particularly critical to your point, but I'm calling bullshit on this claim.  Perhaps you wrote the ratio backwards?  References please.

There are no requirements.  The common understanding of what capitalism actually is, is false.  Capitalism is both a political ideology and a description of a set of natural laws, that together, give rise to an economic order that is emergent among any human population.  The ideological version of Capitalism is more of a religion than an economic system, and I won't address that here beyond saying that it's not really capitalism at all.
Capitalism doesn't require that the laws of a given society honor the natural laws that produced capitalism, and this really has never fully happened at any point, nor in any nation, since at least the Age of Judges in old testament Israel.  That is not required.  If the natural order is supressed, by law or otherwise, capitalism will still express itself in onther ways; usually in black markets & contraband trade.  There were capitalists in the former USSR and communist China the entire time.

If you are talking about using a QC to simply brute force key 'collisions' in order to take the coins from random accounts, then  QC is almost certainly not going to be the best way to do this.  Moore's Law, assuming it holds up, would create a greater threat to the current algo first; IMHO.

There are several ways, actually.  Upon first boot, the client will depend upon an internal list of 'persistant' nodes that accept all  connections, and then it can receive the addresses of new nodes across the p2p connection itself that the first node is aware of.  On later boots, it remembers who it's been connected to in the past an randomly attempts to reconnect.  You can also specify particular nodes to connect to, if you know their address.

99.9999% of the time, they are bullshit.  I was rounding off for expediency.

On another note, the laws of physics don't exclude the possibility that the force of gravity could suddenly reverse itself and destroy the entire universe in another 'big bang'; but I find that possibility rather not worth considering.

Well, even that isn't entirely true with how Bitcoin uses public key encryption.  Simply publishing a single bitcoin address doesn't actually publish the private key, it publishes a structured hash of the public key.  The actual public key isn't published until the first time funds are spent from that address.  If SHA-256 is subject to being brute forced into collisions by a quantum computer, a different hashing algo may not be, and that could be used instead.  If you use a new address for each transaction, which is how bitcoin does it by default and really is a best practice, it would be very difficult for a quantum breaker to steal your coins.

He's also a professional entertainer who practices hours every day to be able to do those trick shots.  He's amazing because the ability to do such things with a revolver is beyond 99.9999% of gun owners.  He's an aberation, not a example.

No mate, you disqualified yourself with your first post.  There is no debate to be had.  No one on this side of the pond really gives a fat flying fuck what "arguments" against our human rights some Eurotrash might be able to present in an obscure Internet forum.  I get so tired of this bullshit.  If you want to have this debate, come to my house and we can have a little chat over tea and crumpets.  I bet you have no idea how many of your countrymen have moved to this country just to get away from asshats like yourself.  I've met several, particularly down at the BBC (http://www.bbcbrew.com/) and all of them would have preferred to stay in their homeland.

And make no mistake, myself and many others really do consider it to be a human right.

http://www.a-human-right.com/

Bugger off, wanker. 

We aren't talking about you, some self-rightous statist who has been programmed by the German educational system all his life.  If you had the time to shoot 5 bullets (38 special revolvers only hold 5 rounds, this ain't no Dirty Harry movie) at an attacker, it's because they were willing to keep their face in your sights instead of retreating, or even falling down and surrendering.  This guy did neither.  In order to even take more than one shot to the face without giving up, considering he didn't appear to have a gun himself, he had to be hyped up on PCP or some other major drug.

And even in the best hands, such as this obviously well practiced mother, firing all five rounds in a 38 special revolver (particularly with this kind of accuracy) takes several seconds.  This article doesn't give many details, but I'd wager that he got all five because the first four didn't stop him; and not because she just kept firing as fast as she could.  Those old west movies that show gunslingers shooting by slapping the hammer while shooting from the hip are total bullshit.  And even the fact that this mother was willing to run upstairs and call the cops first shows her consideration for the intruder; because it proves that she was willing to let him take anything and leave.  She lives in Georgia, which is a 'castle doctrine' state.  Said simply, this means that anyone who uses force to enter into your home is already presumed to have violent intent, and she could have waited at the door for him to break it down and shot him in the atrium, and she wouldn't even have been arrested.

I don't agree with that in all cases.  If some drunk guy breaks into your house, and you flee up the steps with your kids; the deciding factor is wether or not he follows you.  If he just passes out on the couch, he probably thought he was home and was confused as to why his keys didn't work.  If he chases you up the steps, it's prudent to assume he has real ill intent on his addled mind, and he brought upon himself whatever happens next.  This guy was no burgler, he wanted something from the wife and kids.  If I was to hazard a guess, he was a serial rapist, and shooting him dead on the steps would have only improved the violent crime rate going forward as well as saved the taxpayers the money in prosecution and incarceration.

An armed society is a polite society.  What is rarely mentioned with that old saying, is the reason is that the 'criminallly impolite' have relatively short expectancies in an armed society.

She doesn't need a bigger gun.  She obviously knows how to use that one quite well.  To be able to put all five rounds loaded in a 38 special and hit a target the size of a melon from across a room, particularly while hyped up on adrenaline, is the halmark of a sharpshooter.  Furthermore, the most effective (not most deadly) handgun calibers, statisticly speaking, are the .380 automatic followed by the 22LR.  In every defensive case, your goal is to get the attacker to stop, not necessarily to kill them.  With that in mind, the above small calibers are well known for accuracy as well as their ability for follow-up shots.  The most important factor in a defensive handgun caliber is your personal ability to hit what you are shooting at, everything else is a secondary consideration.  Also, statisicly, the 45 is a terrible choice for a defensive handgun, because the recoil is so harsh that nearly everyone under 6' 2" and 240 lbs has trouble bringing the sights back onto target for a follow-up shot in any speedy fashion.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdr14xVetXM

Or maybe just not enough functioning brain matter in order to make the critical kill area large enough that even 5 head shots were fatal.

Those are funny when edited for a modern context.  Originally, they were intended to be as horrorific as that Navy bath salts video.  To conservative women of the age, the idea that MJ might cause them to lose their sense of reason and inhibitiions would (more often than not) cause them to regard the date who offered them some to be a whoremonger simply out to get into their pants.  This, in turn, would make conservative young men less likely to get involved in MJ for fear of their image.  Safer to stick with the 'acceptable' drugs such as alcohol and tobacco.  To a point, it worked.  Note also, that they played on racial prejudices of the age, by referring to MJ as "Mexican MJ". 

Restarting your bitcoin client with a new wallet.dat will require that you start the client with the -rescan command line switch, in order to force the client to destroy the database and rebuild it from the beginning of the blockchain.

Most definately, yes.  Unless you happen to have a faraday cage to keep it in.


There would be a temporary disruption, probably delays; but the outright destruction of bitcoin or the blockchain might actually require a Death Star attack or Giant Yellow Construction Spaceships making way for an interstellar bypass.  Even the destruction of the Internet wouldn't likely destroy the blockchain, although it probably might not be of much value after that.  Bitcoin uses the many-copies-keeps-data-safe method to an extreme, but only one complete copy of the blockchain is required to rebuild the network.


Probably, but then how would you read it?  CD's have a limited data lifespan, unless you spend the cash to get archive grade disks and keep them in the refrigerator.  'Bit rot' has a literal meaning with regard to most commercial quality CD-R's

The format is the same, excepting the fact that many Windoze files have an end-of-file discriptor that Mac files generally do not.  Still, this is an expert level activity that should not be attempted without full backups.  You can't do this without understanding the command-line in both systems, and knowing where the wallet.dat file should be found in both cases.

Strangely reminds me of the anti-pot propaganda put out by the government some decades ago.  I'd wager dollars to doughnuts that the vast majority of the 'bath salts' dope craze will prove to be as much hype over extreme reactions and psycotic triggers than anything statistically relevent.  That's not based upon direct experience, mind you, but only the history of the practical accuracy of government produced anti-drug propaganda.

I was actually listening to last night's podcast from Free Talk Live.

Maybe, but Bitcoin's code provides 'hooks' for two secure hashing algos to be used together.  At the moment, we just use SHA-256 twice in a row, but simply changing one of them to a quantum hardened algo would solve the problem fine.

Long story short, quantum computing is not a near term threat to bitcoin, and may never be a significant threat.  Even if, for a time, someone with a very expensive quantum computer (and willing to comit it to hashing bitcoins) can effectively hash at several orders of magnitude faster than everyone else combined; that isn't going to break Bitcoin.