I'll note here, that in both those cases, those extreme circumstances were, in large part, due to their governments being captured by homicidal sociopaths.

Every government is run by sociopaths, it's what they are good at.  Fortunately it's fairly rare that intelligent sociopaths are also homicidal.  This is, notablely, an argument for the abolution or severe limitations of governments; since it's impossible for a homicidal sociopath to take the reigns of power in a nation that doesn't have any reigns.  Seriously, when have you ever heard of some Swiss general attempting a coup with the Swiss Army?

Pictures or it didn't happen.  I'm not sure I'd believe it with pictures.

Yes, we had a great many hecklers on this forum in the first year at least.  Some are still around, I think.

I've been tuned in for some time, as I intend to have one of the first 100 in the world.  Roughly eight weeks ago the timeline for release was late October, so can you at least let us know if things are on track, or are there more delays?

Sad, but true.

Ask people to explain how paper money works, and not one in 10 will give you a remotely accurate answer.

Yup, at least five times what domestic cell service costs.  I pay $25 per month for 300 anytime minutes, unlimited text & data, and my smartphone cost me $75 two years ago.  The baseline satphone costs $599 and the service is comparable to an in-the-air airline phone call.

BTW, I've been paying for my cell service entirely with bitcoins for going one a year now.

Um, I'd like to see that service offer.  My experience with satphones is that they cost at least 5 times as much than a comparable domestic cell service.  Yes, I've looked.

I was just referring to the abilities of bitcoin to deal with short term disruptions such as  a power or internet outage following a storm.  Longer term issues, such as living in the middle of Africa, can also be dealt with in it's own way.  Regular power or not, there are more people who have access to a cell phone than have access to a flush toilet; and if you have access to a cell phone, even with intermittent connectivity, then you can deal in bitcoins.  Search for the term "MPesa" if you doubt it.  There are a number of ways that those who live distant from high speed Internet can be served by bitcoin, but not the least of which is that bitcoin adoption potentially drives Internet solutions in those distant locals.  Yes, a satphone data link is expensive, but easier to take when you have 50 vendors in a marketplace pitching in to pay for the connection.  There are a number of other solutions as well, from shortwave DRM datacasting of recent blocks to sneakernet movement of thumbdrives with the blockchain.  If you can do it with email, you can do it with bitcoins.  I'd be willing to wager that I coudl do it over psk31 using pskmail, it would just take a while.

And yes, I have a ham license, and it is possible to transact via HF via a 300 baud radio modem, but an ad-hoc mesh network, such as the kind proposed by the creators of the bitcoincard or by the design characteristics of Dash7 networking, would be much better at moving transactions even if there were only one decent internet connection within the entire disconnected town, which is something that isn't likely even in a distant city in Africa with at least 200K people living there.

Maybe it was two years ago.  I'm old, so a year, give or take, isn't all that much anymore.

Sugar I know not, but you can buy honey from Bees Bros.

I wouldn't even know how to do that.

I'm also not sure that I could do it anyway, considering I'd be buying stolen property.

That's another one that a bit high-end for a child.


A punch knife?  I don't think that would be a good idea.


Wow.  Just, wow.  Were's the valve for the kitchen sink?

That thing has got to be huge, although My son would just love to have a Swiss army knife with more gagets on it than my leatherman tool.

Yeah, it's kind of a rediculous statement, considering interest predates fractional-reserve lending and 'flexible' monetary systems by 4000 years.

Yes, a sat-phone with a 12 volt car adapter would be enough to support an unknown number of bitcoincards within the two-hop mesh range of about 4 city blocks.  The limiting factor would be the number of transactions-per-minute, since the bitcoincards are really just hardware based, blockchain-less 'light' clients.  The connectivity is only required for quick checks with the main bitcoincard servers & for forwarding transactions to the network, but even the transaction forwarding can be delayed without breaking the system.  A 14.4Kbps link should be able to support 5-10 transactions per second, so it should be able to support an open-air marketplace the size of a Wal-Mart.

Again, bitcoincard to bitcoincard transactions don't necessarily require a live connection anyway, so long as the sending card can prove that it has the inputs to such a transaction, but the smartcard is memory constrained, so it wouldn't be able to keep a great deal of inputs, and thus would still be limited in how many transactions that it could perform between interactions with it's supporting server.

Actually, it can.  I've done it personally in a couple of different ways.  Cascious physical bitcoins is one obvious way, but I've done it by ad-hoc wireless.  The bitcoincard smartcard based hardware client works in much the same way, and limited transactions can occur in the absence of live connectivity.  The trick is that the sending client must have copies of the input transactions that it's using, must be able to send them to the receiving client, and the receiving client must have some method of checking those input transactions for credibility.  It's not as trustworthy as a pair of full clients with live internet and updated blockchains, but for most common interactions one might have in meatspace it's easily as trustworthy as paper cash, since cash can be counterfitted accurate enough to fool most inspections by the unaided human eye.

That's a bit of a high-end knife for a kid.  But for argument's sake, what would you want for it?

I'm looking for some pocketknives to give to my older kids this Xmas.  When I was a kid, my father would get used pocket knives for myself and my siblings because kids lose them often.  If you have a pocketknife that you no longer use, I'm interested in buying it.  Expecially if you have a pre-import-ban balisong or other one handed pre-import-ban pocketknife, but I'm interested in those for myself.  (I have a state license for carrying concealed deadly weapons, and that includes knives, so unlike some who live in The Peoples' Republic of California or NY I'm not risking jail time for owning these types of knives.)

That's actually funny.

He means that there is no way for anyone sniffing on Blockchain's side of the connection to capture the passkey, but I'm not sure that I agree with that statement.

If you have malware on your computer, a local bitcoin client isn't safe either.