so this is a guy that wants people to buy some land and think that it only takes 51% of the population living on the land to desire to call it a town.

ok fine i know a farmer that has lots of land. so all he has to do is declare himself a town.(he is divorsed and lives alone making him 100% of the population)

and now magically country government law, state government and county government laws dont apply. as soon as i heard the first video when he said the town would be a safe zone where they couldn't extradite you i laughed my head off and realised this guy has no clue. and stopped watching.

pfffft facepalm..

it does not make it a tax/political freezone purely by creating a town. it just makes a leader become the major to decide how they spend funds they gather from the population of the town.

its not just about buying land. there is more to it. the native Indian reservations and the amish communities didn't just have a bit of land to automatically make politics irrelevant. there were lots of laws and lobbying to allow these communities to be political free zones.

so lets just end this new mexico thread to wither away and atleast concentrate on the new hampshire project where atleast they seem to be doing it the right way.

the more important question is what is bitcoins policy on paypal..

and most people agree this:

if you have a verified paypal account then you obviously have a bak account. so use your bank instead to guarantee payment cant get reversed and stop scamming people by using paypal and charging back

"occupy" are the freedom fighters / soldiers of fortune. it is upto them to decide if they want to use bitcoin instead of fiat, as part of their protesting against banks.

after all if they are protesting that banks/gvernments are evil, then continuing to use the currency owned by banks and governments is then hypocritical

much like a vegetarian who says eating certain types of meat is acceptable

much like the postal service of great britain use to work for decades without stamps. where the queen and kings paid the 'postmen' food and horses to be able to transport mail between districts. but then the stamp was invented to allow individuals to use the service.

much like ripple. for years used by kings and queens (the big timer exchanges) and now using xrp for individuals.

starting to see why the stamp analogy works soo well..
opencoin do need t make money, that is true. they are a business after all. not a charity. but xrp are not gold or silver. they are simply a method of showing a costbase per transaction (decimal of an xrp per transaction) which when people buy xrp are paying for the ability to sending the transaction.

XRP are not intended to be analogised as a jewel or gold. but as a receipt/stamp as a payment of service.

please get out of the cave and read the purpose of ripple from ripple. not the chinese whispered twisted words of the youtube sofa anarchists and wiki editors.

i bet 98% of people that say ripple is a scam have never even used ripple to move bitcoin from their wallet to convert into fiat with bitstamp.
instead they just hang around these forums buying xrp off of other people and trying to sell it on to other people believing that XRP holds a value over and above that of a postage stamp.

bitcoins are in a different ballgame to xrp.. but this is the problem people think xrp are the exact same thing. once you realise to treat xrp differently, to treat xrp as just the "transaction fee" and not a jewel you will see.

bitcoins have value of a jewel because of the miners doing hard work to earn them.. xrp is not a mining coin..there is no proof of work, so its not a gold or a jewel. so should not be used as a item of value to be traded alone. just used as a tool to ensure secure transport of other currencies.

facepalm + slap across the face with a wet fish..

see this is YOUR misunderstanding. ripples are not dealing out jewels.. xrp is not a jewel or a currency. xrp is simply a stamped address envelope they offer for people to use to do transactions. but its people like you that wish to think that XRP is an item of value to be hoarded and traded for its own asset value.

yes i know there are stamp collectors that like to collect stamps. but that is not the purpose of a stamp. so stop treating xrp as a high priced item and then cry when you don't get much money for it.

ripple made billions of them because they only value xrp as pennies, purely to cover their costs. the same as the postal service printing billions of stamps and selling them for pennies purely to cover their costs.

once you realise its not a currency, alone. but more of a method for the company to get paid for offering the peer-to-peer exchange service you will all stop trying to sell xrp for bitcoin. and start holding onto your 1000 xrp and using them to exchange bitcoin into fiat, fiat into bitcoin where the xrp slowly decreases by decimal amounts as they get USED.

much like i have a drawer with a handfull of stamps that i hold so when i post a cheque i can peel a stamp off the pack and put it on an envelope.

ripple dont have bitcoins to offer customer. ripple allow bitstamp to list their address so that bitstamp is the place to deliver fiat to to get bitcoin in exchange. much like i can send a cheque to a business and get a product in return.

i will say it one last time because you seem to not realise the truth. ripple are not a pawn shop, a bitcoin trader they ar a postal service of IOU's between individuals and other businesses. ripple don't owe you anything. because they dont give out bitcoin or fiat. they just handle the cheques and deliver them to the named people involved.

so rely on what the desciption says on ripple.com. not the inept misuderstandings that individuals tell you that then get edited onto wiki. quoting wiki as a valued source of information is  a failure because its been wrote by individuals.

much like the value of quoting youtube videos as 100% truth purely because something is said does not make it the truth. do your research!
i dont hold stamps to try making money out of, i hold stamps to send cheques/letters in the mail.
that is the true purpose of ripple. a postal service for finance. not a pawn shop for jewels

ripple is not a scam you guys just have no clue what ripple is.


imagine the world where the postal service at first gave out free stamps for you to be able to send your paycheque from one person to another for free, and then they start saying the stamps were worth a few pennies to cover their expenses.

you lot of inept people shouting the postal service is a scam don't even realise the postal service exists to transmit finances between people. but complain that the stamps value is a currency and has been printed on mass purely to make the postal service money.

wel that is ripple. ripple is a peer-to-peer exchange where just 1 XRP is enough to transmit more then 1 transaction between people/exchanges. so having just 1000 xrp is enough for many many transactions. yet you lot of inept people dont use ripple for its intended purpose. but purely to trade the stamps(xrp) as an item of value.

please get out of the gutters and realise that xrp is not a blockchain, you cant mine it!! it is just a database coin much like amazon coin. use XRP as the transaction fee for exchanging bitcoin to fiat. and stop complaining that ripple(postal service) is making money seling stamps(xrp).

in prison people trade cigarettes to ensure they dont get raped in the shower and to pay for extra food from other prisoners. in european countries alcohol is used to get friends to do you favours. such as helping you fix a car or paint a housewall. these are not money. these are currencies. money bears the trademarked symbols of the governments using it EG £ $.

so you are right bitcoin is not money. bitcoin is:
functionally: a currency(product used in trade)
physically: an asset(a possession holding value)

bitcoin (paper wallet) is not a payment system. it is just a bunch of letters and number and a promise that those letters and numbers can be redeemed for a value they represent.

much like the serial numbers and 'promise' on a bank note

the payment system (bitcoin client/miners) is not essential to bitcoins use. as there are many off the chain methods of moving bitcoin.

we need to get a trusted service to start a calculation based on how many coins are made per day (3600) divided by the number of miners, to get an average income per day/month/year value.

and then compare that to food, commodity values. much like governments compare cost of living vs minimum wage. then we will be free from the fiat controls. if we can easily see that bitcoin is worth X loaves of bread, milk grams of gold etc.

bitcoin is not a commodity but we do need to start pricing bitcoin against commodities instead of the fiat value of commodity

not a newbie idea, this has been the case since 2011.. the only difference is now that mtgox has problems with movement of dollar. its alot harder to shift it back to BTC-E to buy in cheap again.

oh well someone is late to the arbitrage game of 2012, but atleast they think they are smart enough to have thought of it first....., a year later 

the same way the postal service can say that stamps are not a currency yet that is their method  of getting paid, by people buying stamps. then look at the profit and loss sheets of the postal services of your native country. and you will start coming to the arguments MPOE-PR is coming up with

the point is instead of using ripple as its intended use, a peer to peer exchange for bitcoins to fiat between people and exchanges like bitstamp...much like sending a cheque through a postal service, everyone is using it just to buy and sell the stamps between each other(xrp). as if the stamp/xrp is more important then the service ripple/postal service offer.

yea a postal stamp is worth a few pennys when you go buy them at a postal service. but that is not the whole point of a postal service. a postal service does not exist purely to sell postal stamps,  its just its method of getting paid for the actual service it offers

ripple does not exist purely to sell ripple, its just its method of getting paid for the actual service it offers

ripple is not selling you a product, its a service (peer to peer exchange)... xrp are only important for the transmission of the requests for bitcoin-fiat. the sooner people see that XRP is not an altcoin the better.

yet again more useless threads showing a lack of understandin of what ripple is all about.

best analogy i have found to describe it
ripple is like the postal service sending transactions (cheques/checks) in the mail to each other where everyone knows a cheque is not the actual money, but just a IOU/request for bank(exchange) to authorise payment you person named on the cheque on behalf of person B and XRP is simply the postage stamped envelope used to send the transaction.

yet everyone just see's XRP as an alt coin. avoiding the actual purpose of ripple

EG

convert bitcoin for FIAT where it costs a smal decimal of a single XRP. meaning that if you have 500xrp you can do many many transactions before needing to buy more XRP(stamps).

only the mega exchanges need hoards of XRP to do many dolar to euro, euro to yen, dollar to bitcoin, transactions..  the whole btc to xrp transactions should only be needed as often as someone goes to a post office to buy 500 stamps.. so please please realise the true purpose of ripple and stop complaining about XRP as if was always intended to be an alt.

once people start using ripple for its intended purpose XRP will be worth pennies. but i fear ripple as s payment utility will be ignored and XRP will continue to be traded as purely a altcoin against other coins directly..

which leaves me to face palm alot of community members that still don't even read the descriptions of programs and use them for their desired functions.

yet another taxation thread. all im going to say is

think income tax when you cash out to fiat

nothing at all to do with capital gains(from UK rules atleast), bitcoins are not a share (percentage of a company) or a commodity(raw material).

treat it like going on vacation and buying $2000 of foreign currency. then coming back 1 month later having won a foreign lottery and changing the $1,000,000 foreign value back into your native currency.

bitcoin is over 4 years old.

the term viral is where there is a sudden and unexpected growth.

eg.. medically a 24 hour bug which transmits person to person within hours
eg.. on youtube where something gets 100 hits, 300, 900, 2000, 6000, 18000, 54000, 162000 in a small space of time.
(also note "charlie bit me" is not as viral as gangnam style or kony2012, guess the OP missed those)

bitcoin is on a steady growth, which banking industry would consider more of a cancer then viral. taking month's/years to grow to a point that its effects become noticable. and then in some cases too late to keep under control.

and now reveals why bitcoin mainstreaming wont happen anytime soon.

1. starbucks does more then 7 transactions a second.. add on the transactions of walmart.. instantly with just 2 major retailers bitcoin cannot cope.

2. buying a $1 loaf of bread with a visa card would cost the customer $1 and the retailer would get 99c. with bitcoin he would only get 93c.. why?
well the transaction fee of 0.0005 just to get a fast confirm would cost 6c then add bitpay 1% fee to convert to fiat.

3. as bitcoins fiat value increases gavin andressens ignore dust feature will also add more costs onto small transactions.

so if you want to buy a drink, sandwich or coffee at a vending machine. don't look at bitcoin for your solution.

i would prefer a very simple code that people can input a bunch of randomness into a variable and it gives the output of a private and public key.

basically just the brain wallet section of bitaddress, without the extra functions or html code.

wrote in:
PHP
Python
VB.NET
C++
Javascript
Java

etc

then people can themselves play with whatever they like as a random number/word/phrase etc to link to the input variable. and play with how to display the output variables.

im more thinking along the lines that some half whit 17yo basement dweller proposes to be an insurer, and not a proper insurance institution with all the legal licences.

i read like 50 threads which seem to be from 'teentrepreneurs' with their business plans.

escrow is exactly what bitstamp/mtgox/etc are.

if some bank account is going to receive more then $1000 a day from a multitude of people, without a wire transfer licence. then the banks will investigate it. if the story of "its personal use" is given. the taxman will nibble at each transaction.. plus by having an escrow/third party used as a trusted bank. you have now just demolished the whole idea of p2p transactions.

the only way it would work is having a bank that has API tools to inform of payment transactions. and communications with bank managers that it will only deal with small amounts under $1000 thus avoiding the identification requirements. but even then the OP's project may end up requiring users to register their ID when signing up to the project.

after all FIAT is involved so you cant make up your own rules or pretend the government rules dont apply.

but its those old grandma's and grampa's that fall for these "web browser miner" web-links that are trojans that will also be later informed about clauses x,y,z of insurance policies stating not having antivirus, not having their bitcoins in paper wallets, basically not protecting their property = no payout.

much like house insurance that probably asked a few questions as to how the computer could cause the fire, and challenged if it may have been deliberate, attempting to avoid claim payouts. which with a majority of the elderly, may not have the smarts to give viable answers to ensure the claim is successful.

its far cheaper to not have flamable products near a computer and a lock on the door. and be told the precautions to take. then to just pay a premium with promises before hand and a long list of breached clauses after the fact.

im not interested in doing a voice interview, but as a written opinion. here goes.

creating a new alt-crypto-coin should not only be for the sake of "pumping and dumping" much like the penny shares of industry do with new businesses that have no infrastructure, but to also have plans and developers/entrepreneurs/infrastructure in place to offer proper products and services for the coin.

this is why namecoin (offering domain names etc) and litecoin (offering a multitude of services on the same scale as bitcoin did in lets say late 2011) are what i would consider proper alt-crypto-currencies. and dare i say it, XRP (used as the stamped envelope/chequebook analogies for exchanging other currencies.)*

i wish to highlight and emphasise the difference between an alt-crypto-currency and an alt-crypto-coin.
an alt-crypto-currency is a item used as a medium of trade of products or services(has a function)
an alt-crypto-coin is just another coin offering nothing more, but speculation.(has no function)

i personally try not to use the term scam-coin as that is a social term used in the chatrooms of BTC-E and IRC for all coins that are not the top 3 alt-currency coins. There are obviously scam coins out there which never intend to offer use as a currency, that have been pre-mined and are only on an exchange as a temporary contract deal.  but they should only be called scam coins after the fact(after being dropped off the exchange). but highlighted as either a future currency tool or just a coin whilst active (based on who is involved and information on projects that are actually going on).

as a comparison, crypto-coins VS the internet. many people in the 1990s created websites, not to provide legitimate services for customers, but to be designed in such a way that gave websites value, such as domain name parking of popular keywords and submitting the domain to every search engine to show a high volume of visitors. purely to sell on for profit.
alt-crypto-coins is just the next generation to what was referred to as the internet bubble of domain parking.

overall opinion is that alt-coins are not necessarily scams if used right and have a proper purpose/function to fill. But i do find that having such a variety of them does dilute the perceived value of bitcoin as being a limited resource, due to the fact that anyone can replicate the bitcoin featuresmaking the hard code 21mill coins. not so hard because people can just flip to a new chain after the 21million is nearing.. which is why natural diamonds do not have the same investment scarcity as gold, because diamonds can be replicated using carbon.

with bitcoin's 6c transaction fee(0.0005btc) to be guaranteed a place in the next block, i can see the bitcoin being easily replaced by a identical coin code and rules. minus the transaction fee's(block reward being the only reward). which would take over the main-streaming projects. due to the fact star bucks wont take on bitcoin for 6c per transaction + 1% bitpay fee. and attempting to buy a candy bar or a loaf of bread is next to impossible now due to the transaction fee, as well as gavin andressens satoshi dust ignore feature in the latest client.

after all would you honestly pay $1 worth of BTC instead of just using 85c FIAT for a 85c candy, knowing that andressens 'feature' plus fee's are pricing small item's 'out of the game'?

---

*xrp is slightly different to crypto-coins as it was never intended to itself hold value purely for trading XRP direct, it was to be a tool such as a stamped envelope to transmit transactions. but even stamps in the real world have value and people trade/hoard for a value, not for the purpose of posting letters through postal services.