A large accumulation of bitcoins implies only spending power, and nothing more.  They have no more authority to effect another person's transactions or costs than you do.

Which would be the reason that this is never going to happen.

I'm pretty well convienced that Ulbricht was a patsy anyway, and wasn't ever the true DPR anyway.  I've seen no evidence to convince me that Ulbricht was more than a hired administrator.

Verily, however heath care is distinct from health insurance.  The health care system in the United States is, undeniablely, first rate.  The great debate is not about quality of care, or even access to said care, but who gets to pay for that care.  I don't contest that the way this was/is done in (generally) in the United States prior to Obamacare was unjust, unfair and generally 'un-American'; but that doesn't mean that greater socialism (in a society that prizes individual responsibility and merit) is a path to improvement.  Quite the contrary, I would argue that most of that afore mentioned un-American distribution of heath care funding was largely due to the decades of government intrusion into the health care market since WWII.  If you think that single-payer style heath insurance, as can be found in many other former colonies of the British Empire, is somehow more eifficient, more "fair" or more advanced; you are free to believe such things, and free to move there if it matters that much to you.  But the facts don't support your position.

The point is that users have a choice; to either manage the security and costs themselves, or contract out to another party.  Currently, consumers using fiat currencies don't have this choice.  Not really, anyway; as all real banks are part of the particular central banking system that they must adhere to.  If it's your central bank that is untrustworthy, it's a real competition among banks that is desired.  Bitcoin can offer that, but it does not garrantee it.

Nope.  Satoshi was planning on hiding from the get go.  We know this now, for no one is that good at not being found on the Internet without prior planning.

That's not a promise that you can make.  The experience with localbitcoins vendors is likely to vary significantly between regions and vendors.

Taxes are supposed to be for infrastructure and defense, not individual needs.  Do you have a right to food?  Would food insurance, subsidized by your taxes, be a good idea?

Bitcoin was never intended to run on every user's machine.  Absolute decentralization isn't a requirement, and it's long been expected that Bitcoin will scale as much as it needs to scale, and will naturally centralize as much as it needs to do accomplish that scaling.  That said, SPV mode & pruning are both among the early plans to reduce the need for this as much as is reasonable.  There is no doubt that the whole blockchain will persist somewhere, and that this is more likely to be done by an institution for many reasons. 

I don't know, since the US has done this pretty much consistly for 100 years, but we don't have a 'right' to healthcare.

Dude, that is literally the point.

An electrical engineer, reportedly.

It was a trick question, the entire set of addresses that start with 192.168.x.x are part of a reserved block of addresses for a class C intranet.  There are no Internet providers that use that subnet.

We don't need everyone to run miners.


So?  Do you think that wasn't foreseen?

EDIT: When we say that Bitcoin is decentralized, we mean that the network has no 'center'.  There is no node with more authority than others.  Massive mining centers could be shut down by fedco, but so what?

I'm doing it right now, because I need heat in my basement anyway, and electric service is 7.5 cents per KWH where I live.  That's about the same as the cost of propane, which is my other choice.  So why not, since I have the rig?

Then it's China, because the US government doesn't stand to benefit regardless, since it will lose the trade advantages that come with being the one entity that can issue the international reserve currency.

Interesting. That IP address wouldn't be 192.168.0.1 per chance?  Because that is the default internal address mask number for almost every wifi router in the world, and just means that Satoshi was testing out the Send-to-IP function on an internal network, or even within his own GNU/Linux machine. 

You, literally, have no idea of what you speak.

Can you point me to more details about this?  I'm having trouble finding it with the search functions.

One difference is that there would be dozens, if not hundreds, of bitcoin services to choose from.  Consumer choice is never a bad thing.  Another difference is that we all have the choice to run our own node if it means that much to us.


No it would not.


That already happened, to Mybitcoin.com.  Fortunes were lost, but it was an inditment against Mybitcoin.com's security model, not Bitcoin's.

No we would not.  The only reason that such wallet services would even be viable businesses is if it's generally cheaper to use such services than pay a normal network transaction fee.  But there would be any number of ways to avoid such fees, not just the paypal-like bitcoin walet service model.  Another that I think would be viable is a Ripple-like overlay network.  Another woudl be something similar to what Electrum does with their Stratum overlay network.


Of course we can, more than one in fact.  But the economic drivers for users to favor services has less to do with the size of the blockchain, and more to do with expected future transaction costs.  Currently, transaction fees are being heavily subsidized by block rewards, but future network congestion is bound to force that fee up.  The developers are still working on methods of streamlining the network, but at some transaction volume in the future, fees are going to have to total $25K per block to maintain the current level of security.  Ideally, we can improve the netowrk's throughput so that the costs are spread across many feee paying transactions, but Visa's average throughput is about 2K TPS, or about 1.2 Million transactions per block, which put the cost per transaction at less than 3 cents each.  But if we can't get there, something is going to have to give, because users aren't going to suddenly start paying GAvin's Cost (about 3.3 millibiitcoins per kilobyte) if they can avoid it, and they can avoid it if some portion of their transactions can be done off-network.

Compression of the blockchain is impossible, but there is another solution....

Completely full nodes without pruning of any kind will not be neccessary per se, but I'd expect that some institutions would want to do it.  As for bootstrapping a new client after pruning is the default state, the client could simply be programmed to download the block headers (which are persistant data tha must exist anyway) up until some known block number, and so long as that known block number has a hash that matches the hash that the node has been programmed to expect, and that the whole set of block headers have  a single hash that the node has been programmed to expect, that client could treat that special block number as it's own genesis block from that point.  After all, users normally create a new wallet'dat file at that point, and it would be strange to need the blocks that existed prior to that point unless you were mining.


This is similar to what I described above, but no network consensus about which block is required.  That special block can be updated with each realease of a client, and be differant for each indepenantly maintained client.


Unnecessary.