Gavin will visit the CIA

[kiba]

Nobody's saying he couldn't accept the money; the question is whether he keeps it for his own purposes.  He's not being asked to speak about his childhood but about Bitcoin; in that capacity he's like a fiduciary for the Bitcoin community.  If he doesn't see that as his role in this context, that would be unfortunate.

The first thing that the lead developer needs in order to work full time on bitcoin is to pay himself bitcoin/USD/etc.

What would the bitcoin communal enterprise need his money for that's more important than the development of the bitcoin client/bitcoin protocol?

[kiba]

Why is it some people so want to install themselves in position to tell other people what to do with their money. Gavin put a lot of effort into bitcoin and should there be some fruits of his labour he is surely entitled to use it as he sees fit including buying more alpaca socks, paying mortgage/rent or buying a great gift to his wise or putting some away for a rainy day or blowing it all in Vegas or whatever.... maybe publicly burning it if he so desires...

Amen. His money, his choice.

[MoonShadow]

can u explain the downsides of being the reserve currency?

Not well, but how about a quote and a link?

"This cost comes as a choice between rising unemployment and rising debt.　 The mechanism is fairly straightforward.　 Countries that seek to supercharge domestic growth by acquiring a larger share of global demand can do so by gaming the global system and actively stockpiling foreign currency, mainly in the form of, but not limited to, central bank reserves.　　 This allows them forcibly to accumulate domestic savings while relying on foreign demand to compensate for their own limited domestic demand."

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/04/bogus-threats-to-us-reserve-currency.html

Basicly it's about the current account deficit.  Foreign producers can export to the US and accumulate US $, but unlike under a gold standard, this requires that the US become a debtor nation.  This works fine as long as the economy keeps humming along, but contributes to the public pain under a recession, like now.  Prior to the US $ becoming an international reserve currency under Brenton-Woods, the vast majority of the debt of the federal government was held by wealthy private citizens rather than central banks of foreign nations or sovereign wealth funds of dictatorships.  Of course, national debt is bad, because the 'debtor is slave to the lender'; but at least if the government is owned by the wealthy class of it's own citizenship, these same citizens have a vested interest in a stable social order and the legitimacy of the government.  Foreign investors do not, always, mind the losses if they can sow difficulties in the 'great Satan'.  Not all of them mind you, as China doesn't want to do it because it would harm China to a great degree, which was the strategic beauty of Clinton making China a 'most favored trade nation' back in the early 1990's.  In this way, he led to the Chinese middle class becoming dependent upon the economic health of the United States; and he foresaw a future that China could become the only single nation on Earth capable of challenging the US military in a conventional ground war if only by shear numbers.  Of course, he didn't foresee the adventurism of his successor nor the harm this has caused to the readiness of the US military; but if we were not presently in three major open conflicts at the same time, we would still be the most "effective" military on Earth.

And, of course, the present stability of the Chinese ruling class is highly dependent upon the quality of life of that same middle class.

[MoonShadow]

I wouldn't be too surprised if, instead of a 3,000USD cheque, Gavin would receive some nice bracelets once he arrives there:

Not if they openly approached him.  If they weren't going to play nice, they wouldn't have bothered with a ruse.  Like I said, openly inviting him to speak and offering him a speaker's fee tells me that they intend to play nice.  It's a very bullish signal.

[grondilu]

Not if they openly approached him.  If they weren't going to play nice, they wouldn't have bothered with a ruse.  Like I said, openly inviting him to speak and offering him a speaker's fee tells me that they intend to play nice.  It's a very bullish signal.

Yeah, I wasn't too serious.   We can indeed be happy that things happened this way.

[mrb]

gavinandresen: pause frequently during your talk to ask if the audience has any question. For technical talks, I favor this technique over reserving the end of a talk for Q&A time. Remember that the crypto guys in the audience will get it, even if the presentation is of average quality. Your goal is to make the non-technical guys understand it as best as they can. Quite frankly Bitcoin is very hard to explain correctly. I have never watched or listened to a Bitcoin presentation that did a good job at explaining it. The only reason I understand it is because I read the white paper and have a crypto background.

[grondilu]

Quite frankly Bitcoin is very hard to explain correctly. I have never watched or listened to a Bitcoin presentation that did a good job at explaining it. The only reason I understand it is because I read the white paper and have a crypto background.

Bitcoin is not that difficult to understand, really.  I also understood it only once I red Satoshi's paper, but it's because this document is very well written.  I understood it after reading it only three or four times, and yet I don't have any particular background.  I'm just the average linux nerd and I used wikipedia to learn the concepts I didn't know.

That's also why I keep wondering what they need Gavin for exactly.

[MemoryDealers]

gavinandresen:  Your goal is to make the non-technical guys understand it as best as they can. Quite frankly Bitcoin is very hard to explain correctly.

Why would we want additional people in the CIA to understand bitcoin?

[grondilu]

Why would we want additional people in the CIA to understand bitcoin?

Finally someone who shares my view about this!

[Anonymous]

Now, that's just silly.  Speaking fees are a market, like any other.  You would think bitcoiners would understand that

If Gavin becomes in-demand, I would hope that his speaking fees increase.

Nobody's saying he couldn't accept the money; the question is whether he keeps it for his own purposes.  He's not being asked to speak about his childhood but about Bitcoin; in that capacity he's like a fiduciary for the Bitcoin community.  If he doesn't see that as his role in this context, that would be unfortunate.

Why is it some people so want to install themselves in position to tell other people what to do with their money. Gavin put a lot of effort into bitcoin and should there be some fruits of his labour he is surely entitled to use it as he sees fit including buying more alpaca socks, paying mortgage/rent or buying a great gift to his wife or putting some away for a rainy day or blowing it all in Vegas or whatever.... maybe publicly burning it if he so desires...

I hope he can lie in a bed of cash and make snow angels in it.

[mrb]

Bitcoin is not that difficult to understand, really.

Yes it is difficult. Don't get me wrong, I wrote a miner from scratch, code to parse the block chain, etc, I think I would personally understand Bitcoin if I listened to, say, gavin's econtalk for the first time. You have to learn to put yourself in other people's minds. Most non-tech people gloss over mentions of decentralization, assymetric crypto, etc. I have a friend who mine who still thought there were central servers somewhere distributing the work and did not know Bitcoin was distributed. That's because the Bitcoin presentations he watched did a poor job of re-iterating the core concepts of Bitcoin multiple times to engrain them in his brain :-) Mentioning the word "distributed" once in the intro is not sufficient, you have to build a presentation, a talk, that mentions multiple times the core concepts and why they are necessary for X, Y, and Z, to make sure you don't lose the audience.

[Anonymous]

It would be much funnier if you did this with the cia's money. Why do we have to go to them and not the other way around ?

They should  join the community if their motives are pure. Im reminded of the recent situation where Obama got an award for open government - which was held in a closed door meeting...

Or  winning a nobel peace prize then bombing brown people's weddings in Pakistan with drones.

These people are vicious killers and violent thugs who use double speak to confuse and bewilder and torture people.

[SzeChun]

Why would we want additional people in the CIA to understand bitcoin?

Finally someone who shares my view about this!

Because we have nothing to hide?
I sense much of the community members mentality have some irrational extremist hate against the government. Any slight injustice is taken to the extreme and paranoia rules their logic.

[gigabytecoin]

CIA will put a bug in Gavin's house, tap his phone, and attach a GPS to his car.  They goal is to find out who Satoshi is.  Beware!!!

Lol, stop trying to scare our fearless leader.

He's fearless.

Congrats on the invite Gavin. This looks like it could be quite a big step.

[grondilu]

Because we have nothing to hide?
I sense much of the community members mentality have some irrational extremist hate against the government. Any slight injustice is taken to the extreme and paranoia rules their logic.

That's not the point.  Why should we give precious information to these people?  What have they done to deserve it?

When you discover something cool, you want to share it with other people.  But then if you ask yourself "who should I tell it to?", the CIA members are certainly not the first kind of people that come up to mind!

[MemoryDealers]

Why would we want additional people in the CIA to understand bitcoin?

Finally someone who shares my view about this!

Because we have nothing to hide?
I sense much of the community members mentality have some irrational extremist hate against the government. Any slight injustice is taken to the extreme and paranoia rules their logic.

Why would anyone ever feel hatred towards governments?
They only murdered (NOT including wars)  more than 150 Million people in the last century alone.

Including:

61,911,000 Murdered: The Soviet Gulag State
35,236,000 Murdered: The Communist Chinese Ant Hill
20,946,000 Murdered: The Nazi Genocide State
10,214,000 Murdered: The Depraved Nationalist Regime

I guess in your book, that is only a "slight injustice."

I for one,  want absolutely nothing to do with the CIA.
I wish they would stay far far away.

[carlerha]

CIA has seemingly been hanging around for a while; they have the competence to understand what Bitcoin's all about. No reason for Gavin not to give the speech. It's a great opportunity for "us" (gavin) to deliver unbiased information to the guys in power.

What's more, if the feds get involved, the Bitoin protocol is prone to be tested for its strengths and weaknesses. Someone mentioned the protocol would from now on cease to be anonymous: would this not indicate that the protocol is weak?

About the $3,000 I say: grab it. It was yours to begin with, given that you've been forced to pay taxes all your life.

[SzeChun]

Because we have nothing to hide?
I sense much of the community members mentality have some irrational extremist hate against the government. Any slight injustice is taken to the extreme and paranoia rules their logic.

That's not the point.  Why should we give precious information to these people?  What have they done to deserve it?

When you discover something cool, you want to share it with other people.  But then if you ask yourself "who should I tell it to?", the CIA members are certainly not the first kind of people that come up to mind!

What? Why are you making such a big deal over this?
Regardless of us telling them or not they will get the information from the news or media later on.
Just think of it this way, were giving them the charity of knowledge, brother.

Do not be cynical just because CIA is related to the US Government.

[fetokun]

Because we have nothing to hide?
I sense much of the community members mentality have some irrational extremist hate against the government. Any slight injustice is taken to the extreme and paranoia rules their logic.

That's not the point.  Why should we give precious information to these people?  What have they done to deserve it?

When you discover something cool, you want to share it with other people.  But then if you ask yourself "who should I tell it to?", the CIA members are certainly not the first kind of people that come up to mind!

Yeah, lets not let them in in your ultra secret bitcoin society!!

They are just like vampires, as long as we don't invite them in they will never be able to access the wiki, Satoshi's paper and the sourcecodes.

And I bet they never thought of googling about it either before inviting Gavin.

[Shortline]

I want to get this out in the open because it is the kind of thing that will generate conspiracy theories:  I'm going to give a presentation about Bitcoin at CIA headquarters in June at an emerging technologies conference for the US intelligence community.

I accepted the invitation to speak because the fact that I was invited means Bitcoin is already on their radar, and I think it might be a good chance to talk about why I think Bitcoin will make the world a better place. 

I'm very interested to hear the content of your talk, Gavin. I assume you'll be posting it here or that it will eventually be available online somewhere?

And on a side note, I wrote this parable a while ago but never found a fitting time to post it:

HISTORY OF MAN AND BITCOIN

Child walks in jungle. Cub walks in the jungle.

Man hunts in the jungle. Tiger hunts in the jungle.

Man cuts down jungle. Tiger runs.

Tiger  in zoo. Man in ticket booth.