No, there are no tokens, not even in the transactions.  There are only the transactions, with entries on who is sending bitcoins to whom (via addresses) and how much.  That is all.

I'm going to have to dissent here for technical reasons.  In reality, bitcoins are no more than a mental construct.  They don't even exist as a digital object.  Only transactions exist, and they are not, themselves, bitcoins.  There is only the accounting system.

Once again, the absurd part is that a commodity is something with a use other than as a monetary unit.  A currency is a unit of exchange by design.  Even commodity monies (gold silver) are currencies once minted into coins.  Until that happens, those monies are not actually monetary units.

Tell me what other use bitcoins serve and I'll agree that it's a commodity.

http://iang.org/papers/triple_entry.html

TL,DR version....

Triple entry accounting is wherein there are three ledgers that record a transaction that must agree.  In this case, one personally trusted by the buyer, another personally trusted by the seller, and a third party trusted by both.  This is the classic trusted third party problem.  In the case of bitcoin, the blockchain serves the role of all three ledgers.  Each of the two parties involved in the transaction have their own local copy, and the trusted third party is the rest of the bitcoin network.

That's exactly what a currency is.  A currency isn't the paper it's printed upon.  A currency is a standardized unit of measurement, in this case, of relative valuations.  The accounting in a cash economy is performed by the exchange of paper scripts that abstract value, bitcoin does the same thing using a collective & distributed triple entry ledger system (the blockchain).

Not yet, but there is no reason that I can think of that Java couldn't be added.

That's a good idea.

I do not want to ensure any such thing.  An Internet connection defeats the point.  I'm presuming that two people transacting in near-meatspace probably know each other well enough that defenses against a double-spend attack are unnecessary.

Ah, no.  His son's full name is Randal Howard Paul. 

Um, no.  The airlines are private (mostly), but airports most certainly are not.  Not even in Britain.

There's another lesson to be learned here.  Both the US Marines & UK NHS are government run systems.  If the systems is private, they lose some measure of funding whenever mistakes are made.  Government agencies do not.

Sure, but they are only here in the newbies section.  See how that works?

Wait, the UK system works?  For whom?  It certainly didn't work for the guy who had to drink water from the hallway flowerpot.

Roads are an example of a decentralized transit system, if we are going to consider the infrastructure to be equal to the system.


I would wager that the opposite is true, but time will tell.  In the meantime, I won't object to sceptism, but I wasn't suggesting that any of these systems had staying power, only that decentralized private transist systems actually exist.


Not necessarily.  In the long run, access may prove to be more important than effiency.  I've seen a number of small PV installs around my city lately.  These people aren't putting them up for monetary reasons, primarily, unless they are stupid.

Yes, I do.  ARPANET was a project that received funding from DARPA, a sudo-government research agency. However, that's not the same as ARPANET was a government creation, it was not.  And ARPANET is not the Internet, either.  Difference between a primate and a human being is still more than just evolution.

My initial impression of the protocol, as explained in the dissertaition, is that it's much like the exchange of cryptographic tokens over a ssh connection directly between peers, as well as a digital receipt of said transaction, with a built in mediation system upon the breakdown of honesty.  Based upon that limited initial impression, I can think of a number of ways to screw with the system that wouldn't work with bitcoin, mostly modified web-of-trust attacks.

Currently reading the creator's dissertation, and encountered this gem...

"Following the cash paradigm, it needs to be done peer-to-peer and offline in a repeatable way. Such a transfer is called teleportation. The main technical problem is to guarantee fairness under all circumstances. The fundamental effect of the Byzantine Generals’ undecidability state issue (see page 57) does not allow conducting such a transfer without a (trusted) third party. This fact seems to contradict the offline attribute of the aspired cash transfer. To the author’s knowledge, there has not been any treatment of this challenging problem, neither in the practical field nor in the literature over the last 10 years.[/b]"

It appears that this person, likely German born and a graduate student in California, has been researching the academic media available on the subject of digital currencies, and managed to completely overlook Bitcoin during the past two years.  Poor bastard, I hope that he managed to complete his degree, at least.

Does anyone here have an intimate knowledge of Faircash?  (http://faircash.org/home.html) From what I can tell, it's a central bank for a cryptographic token based digital currency.

Proof that Google had considered creating it's own digital currency, but backed away from it for fear of opening up another battle front with governments.

1) the Internet is not a government creation

2) no one could realisticly destroy the internet by any means whatever.

And messing with DNS simply aggravates the naming system, which is a far cry from being a critical component of the network.  If the US government started to do any such thing, browser plugins that permit alternate DNS servers, or completely differant naming systems such as namecoin, would spread like wildfire.  Even if this isn't true, the DNS system mainly exists to support the "Wide world web", otherwise known as 'websites', which use the hypertext transport protocol.  HTTP isn't the Internet either, it's just one (quite popular) protocol that uses the Internet.  Bitcoin, as an example, doesn't even use DNS in any mission critical manner; so if the entire DNS system were to fall off the Internet, the bitcoin network might not even notice.  Most other Internet protocols aren't terriblely dependent upon DNS either; for example, most ftp clients can use DNS to resolve a server name, but save the IP address into it's account settings.  If your web browser does the same thing (none do, that I am aware) and DNS drops off the Internet, then you could still visit all of your bookmarked favorites and likely not notice any change.