How could we?

Dude, I waited for months to buy my first bitcoins, and was kicking myself because the price doubled in that time frame. I bought my first batch at 6.5 cents. Pity I spent almost all of them before $1, I ended up missing out on most of the appreciation, even though they were more than 10 times as valuable.  There are very few investments in all of human history that compare to the first four years of Bitcoin.

Nope. This is a forum, not a marketplace. If you make a deal in a public forum, let the buyer beware.

It's typically fine if it's properly marked, but it still has to be legal within the United States, where this forum's server is located.

No, he didn't. He's still around the bitcoin economy, just not this forum. I offered to send him another pair of pizzas about a year later for half price, he declined.  I'd wager that he's far from bitcoin broke, though. At the time, 10K bitcoins literally had no known value. It's this historic transaction, and his willingness to engage in it, that established the price.  Granted, the value of a bitcoin rose fast, both then and now, but someone had to be first; and that is why he did it.

When the forums changed to the current forum software, some old & abandoned usernames ceased to exist. You can't find my old username either, and that's a good thing, because I was unwise enough to use my real name.

This tech is getting seriously dated. It won't be much longer before it doesn't even matter anymore.  And old android smartphone & a gotenna transceiver and this tech would be irrelevant.

Compared to myself, you all are.

BTW, in all my recollection, I've never been white.  So don't assume that just because some study somewhere said something that it actually means anything.

Newbies come into here, read old threads, and wake the dead.  Seriously, the OP was just trolling FOUR YEARS AGO!

Honestly, I'd like to know where all the American supporters of this law have vanished to.  I'd like to find out if they still stand by their prior support, and if not, why not?

Despite popular belief, this is also true in the United States generally, but not on a national level.  Some states actually sponsor something very close to a universal health care system for anyone who isn't covered privately (and in some states, many who are).  Each state does things a bit differently, and the process is rarely widely known, but no state doesn't do it at all.  Before Obamacare was passed, roughly half of all medical care spending was some stage of government agency; usually state or local.  After all, even Medicaid is legally a state by state program, as it's technically forbidden to be a federal program under the Constitution.  The federal Medicaid legal language is written in such a way that it's just regulation of a common state program.

BTW, my state of Kentucky does it piecemeal.  There is a state program specificly to cover otherwise uncovered children (passport), one to cover the elderly & disabled, one to cover other poor adults (medicaid), as well as a network of free public clinics in urban areas wherein doctors get a tax deduction for volunteering for a couple days a month.  My three youngest children are covered both by my employer sponsored plan & passport.  Under normal circumstances, just about anyone can get passport for their kids, but it's always "secondary" to a parent's coverage, so there simply isn't any economic reason for most middle class adults to bother, since Passport will never actually pay out for their kids.  In my case, however, the situation is legally reversed because those three kids were adopted as former wards of the state; so the law regards it similar to a divorced parent remarrying.  Since the state was their legal guardian before I was, the state's coverage pays for them first.  But, of course, only them; passport does nothing for my natural kids.

There is also the law that requires publicly licensed hospitals to admit and treat anyone with an emergency condition, regardless of citizenship or ability to pay for services.  In that case, the hospital simply deducts those losses on their regular corporate taxes; so in a roundabout way, taxpayers still support that kind of coverage as well.

So, since Europe also sponsors government health care on a nation-by-nation basis, it's not really different.  There is no European Union wide program, but there also exists a form of EU 'standardization' program.  If you think of US states as what they are, mini-nations within a larger union; then the comparision to Europe become much more fair.

There is an investing newsletter called "Whiskey & gunpowder", it's a crisis investment kind of thing.

He's not ignorant.  In the absence of governments that raid private gold vaults in order to shut down competing gold backed currencies, he'd be correct.  None of us who knows what we are talking about disputes this.  Bitcoin would be inferior to digital gold warehouse reciepts if they were allowed to compete.  But, of course, they are not; and that is part of the design advantage of Bitcoin.  There is no gold storage vault to raid.

The point of demurrage is to impose a 'storage fee' on holding value in the currency, as if you were keeping gold inside a rented vault.  Inflation functions more like a tax.  The difference being is that demurrage is supposed to be something that can be avoided within the context of the currency regime that demurrage applies to.  For example, while a gold owner can rent a vault, he can also buy one.  Proper demurrage in a cryptocurrency context would be like losing some small portion of your savings value for not moving your cold storage funds around the blockchain; but this fee could be avoided if the funds were moved periodicly (invoking a transaction fee) or by sponsoring a mining rig (owning your own vault).  However, inflation effects all user relative to the numerical value that they possess, and is practically unavoidable no matter the actions of the user.  If demurrage is set up so that it's unavoidable, then there is no practical difference between inflation and demurrage as measured in the purchasing power of the user's holdings.

Is that so?  You did know that Bitcoin is currently in it's inflationary stage, right?  We've been over this before boys, demurrage cannot be implimented in a secure fashion without reintroducing a trust or identity model, and even if we could, no rational & self-interested investor is going to willing participate in demurrage if an alternative exists.  Which, obviously, it does.  This has always been a futile debate.

I think it's an enbaressment, no matter it's potential.

While it's true that delegates have the real power, they don't set the agenda either.  I've been both a Democratic delegate (a voting elector for Dennis Kucinich in 2000) and a Republican delegate (due to being a youth chair in 2010), and while the Repubs are much more democratic (ironicly) a single delegate cannot alter the agenda set by the state "leadership".  The Democrats are a mockery of their own name.

Regardless, the best one can do by voting is a form of self-defense, as you mentioned already.  I don't fault anyone for acting in their own defense, and I fully expect it.  I'm simply trying to point out the downside to the game, that defensive voting really is the best you can do.

"All the world is a stage, and the people, merely players..."

-As You Like It, Act II; by William Shakespeare


We live in a world full of fictions.

Government is one such fiction.  Governments are merely an idea, given
form by those people who choose to work towards that idea.

No matter how well intentioned, nor how well written, the documents that
define the ideas of government; they are still just words on a page.  A
well formed fiction.

So what is a government, then?  It is that group of people who give their
time and their resources towards the fiction.  Like any group of people;
there are those among them with strikingly different views in interpreting
that fiction.

And, like any group of people, the flaws of those people will reflect in
the institutions that they create.  If the people are corrupt, the
institution will be corrupt.  If the people are violent, the agency will
be violent.  If the people are flawed; the government will, also, be
flawed.
So, no matter how well written that fiction may be; no institution, no
bureaucracy, no government; can ever hope to be a more perfect union, than
that of the people themselves.

Worse yet, every institution declines as the first generation; those who
truly believe in the fiction, pass control of the fiction to others.  In
part, because younger generations do not have first-hand knowledge of life
prior to the fiction, and so they come to expect that the fiction will
endure.  The grandchildren of the founders look at the buildings and
monuments of the fiction; and fully expect that the fiction is as certain;
is as permanent, as the concrete and stone of those monuments.

The institution also declines, in part, because the fiction has very real
influence on how the people think & act; and those that control the
narrative, also control those people.  This tends to attract the kind of
person who doesn't believe in fictions, but who is willing to play a part
to gain influence over the narrative.  These are exactly the wrong kind of
people necessary to maintain the best storylines.

So, before you go to the voting booths this fall, in an effort to choose a
new narrator, please remember that all storytellers are telling you more
fictions.

Perhaps it's time to write your own story?

-MoonShadow

Well, that's a good point.

It's still an open question concerning the genesis block coinbase.  Actually, that's not quite true.  The genesis block coinbase is spendable, but since the genesis block is hardcoded, there remains doubt that doing so won't break the running network; simply because a transaction that references back to the, very non-standard, genesis block would crash the verification code.  This could be fixed, if it had to be, but since this effects exactly one person on the planet (who doesn't seem inclined to do it anyway) why bother fixing a bug that isn't a real issue?  It's also possible that Satoshi didn't really want this coinbase to be spendable.