Several problem with this. First, the claim to communal ownership of the entire country is extremely suspect. Was it homesteaded from unowned land or purchased? If purchased, did the seller have the right to it? Governments generally move in to a country by conquest, i.e. theft on a grand scale. They don't homestead the land they rule, or purchase it from the rightful owners (though sometimes they do purchase territory from another government). Second, unlike shareholders in a company, citizens can't cash out if they happen to disagree with the direction taken by the board of directors. Citizenship is non-transferable, and even abandoning it is very heavily penalized. Citizens are opted-in involuntarily at birth and aren't allowed to opt out in any practical sense—being forced to give up everything you've earned, move to another country, and never see your family again doesn't count. (And even then the U.S. will try to keep claiming you owe taxes.)

Right. You don't have to be a charity to be a non-profit. Anyone can form a non-profit so long as the organization itself isn't intended to make a profit (i.e. to enrich the owners/shareholders or pay dividends—paying employees is fine, but they do get charged income tax on that pay). You do need to be a charity to allow your donors to write off their donations as charitable expenses on their taxes, but that's all that's really at stake here.

That's not entirely correct. While there are some minor differences between non-profit charities and other non-profit organizations, the real point of having tax-exempt non-profit organizations is to avoid double-taxing the income of organizations which aren't structured as profit centers—in other words, those which don't accumulate market value for their owners or shareholders, and don't pay dividends. There are plenty of non-profits which have nothing to do with charity and are only intended to benefit their members, e.g. industry organizations like the RIAA or MPAA. This is not a loophole; the system is working as intended. It's all a matter of simplifying the paperwork, really: if the associations were forced to file as for-profit organizations they would still pay little or no income taxes, because—by design—they have no net profit. They may keep some savings on hand to facilitate cash flow, but everything else they receive is channeled directly into expenses related to their charter.

The significant advantage charitable non-profits have is that their donations can be written off on their donor's taxes as charitable expenses. If you donate or pay dues to a non-charitable organization you're still on the hook for income taxes on that money, unless you can classify it as a business expense.

Any particular reason you couldn't do the same thing in a microkernel? I'm envisioning some form of IPC primitive that automatically spawns a lightweight thread to handle each incoming message, which isn't too different from the monolithic kernel approach apart from not having a fixed 1:1 correspondence between the client and server contexts. You would be able to use your shared data structures and locks just as you would in a monolithic kernel, at least within the filesystem code. For anything else, of course, you'd need to use IPC.

You could use Shamir's Algorithm, but the recommended way to create a multi-signature Bitcoin address is to use a transaction script which separately checks each of the desired keys. That way each key holder can sign the transaction independently of the others, and—more importantly—there is no need to get all the key fragments together in one place to reconstruct a master key.

That last point, incidently, happens to be one of the problems with this proposal; once the master key has been reconstructed, anyone with access to it would have unrestricted access to every backdoored device. Key-splitting is really only intended for cases where the master key need only be used once, not on a routine basis as can be expected in this scenario. Rather than splitting a master key, a better approach would be to have a number of separate keys and require a certain number of signatures on a digital "warrant" which specifically identifies the device to be decrypted. (It wouldn't hurt to include the other Constitutionally-mandated warrant information, either, just for future reference.) The device would then need to validate the device ID in the warrant and check the signatures against a list of known public keys before decrypting itself.

Somehow you managed to say exactly what I said while pretending to disagree and maintaining a needlessly condescending tone. I'm impressed.

Of course, this sort of absolute monopoly we're discussing only comes about when exclusivity is guaranteed by law, or otherwise backed by force. In very rare cases it can happen if someone legitimately owns the entire supply of some rare good, a.k.a. a natural monopoly. A mere de facto monopoly which results from favorable economies of scale and/or network effects always has to worry about the next up-and-coming competitor; if they abuse their position or become complacent there is always someone else waiting to move in with lower prices and better quality and undermine their market share. The incumbent enjoys a natural advantage over the challengers, but not an unlimited one.

I wasn't trying to imply that prices would necessarily be lower than they are now, merely that they would be governed by supply and demand like any other market good. The medical industry in particular isn't very price-sensitive; if you need to go to the E.R. you're going to check in to the closest hospital first and worry about the bill later. The fact that most pay for their medical costs, even routine expenses, via monthly insurance premiums and thus don't directly feel the impact of high prices at the E.R. or doctor's office doesn't improve matters. However, people aren't completely insensitive to pricing, even for medical services, especially the less urgent variety; generics vs. name-brand medicines, for example. Some individuals with above-average foresight also take into account the quality and cost of the local hospitals when choosing where to live.

Just consider what the costs would be like if there was no competition—a single monopoly provider of medical care, regardless of where you chose to live, free to set its prices at whatever the market would bear. What would you be willing to pay for life-saving medical treatment, if the only other alternative was death? Probably a lot more than what they actually charge. Competition clearly does have an effect on prices, even in medicine.

What these companies are doing is legal. That means that the tax burdens you refer to don't exist. If the government over-estimated how much tax revenue their tax codes would bring in because the companies found a more efficient way to comply with the law, that's the government's problem. They should have put more effort into analyzing their own tax codes and come up with a better estimate. The expectation, apparently, is that these companies will send in extra tax money which they aren't legally obligated to pay. When is the last time you did that? Why would you expect anyone else to do so?

Anyway, there are at least two other options which you didn't consider besides borrowing or raising taxes. The government could change its tax codes, and/or it could reduce spending to meet its budget given the actual tax revenues. As politically difficult as it might be, you could cut the expenditures of almost any government in the developed world by at least 75% without the slightest impact to any of the "fundamental" services—courts, police, emergency services, a reasonable level of national defense, public education, public transportation, basic consumer protections—considered by some to be impossible or impractical to provide any other way.

Don't make that mistake yourself. Taxes are a matter of legality-by-fiat and the application of force to deprive people of their rightful property "for the greater good". Morality in this case favors the corporations, and would continue to do so even if they implemented some hypothetical scheme to successfully avoid paying any taxes anywhere.

None of that stuff is free; it's bundled. All or nothing—and if you choose "nothing" they make you move out of the country, among other costs. You're still paying for everything you get, and more, but you're deprived of your right to decide for yourself whether a particular service is useful enough to justify its cost, who supplies it, or how it's implemented. That's plenty of reason to be annoyed even if you do feel that you get some value back in exchange for what the government takes in taxes.

It's not like any of those services would go away if the government didn't provide them. You would just move from paying for them through political and bureaucratic middle-men to paying for them directly, with a choice of suppliers catering to your specific needs and competition to keep the prices down.

The target and difficulty aren't set by voting, they're set based on the time required to mine the last 2016 blocks—which should be about two weeks at the nominal target of 10 minutes per block. More than two weeks and the difficulty decreases; less than two weeks and it increases.

The biggest problem with the concerns over a mining pool having over 50% of the hashing power is that the pool operators are only coordinating the effort; they don't actually own all that hardware, and the owners can decide independently which pool(s) to slave their mining rigs to. If a pool operator tried to abuse their position the fact would be noticed, and miners would quickly switch to some other pool.

There is also no reason why individual miners couldn't track transactions as they're broadcast like any full node and validate the candidate blocks the pool sends out, rejecting any which involve possible double-spends or other attacks. I don't think they do that currently, but only because none of the major pool have tried to abuse their position that way.

The alternative appears to be asking the government to employ force on your behalf to continually coerce every provider of so-called "public accommodations" into taking your disability (and every other possible disability) into account, regardless of actual demand, and at a far greater expense than simply providing you with individual assistance as needed or working out some alternative method of providing the service. Perhaps the coercion feels more "dignified" to you, but I find it quite the opposite. There is nothing undignified about asking for help when needed. It seems like you've simply found a way to take for granted as your right (and others' obligation) that others will make accommodation for you without being asked. That makes you more dependent, not less. Finding ways to induce others to help you voluntarily would be a form of self-sufficiency, which would be much more dignified than stooping to force or manipulation.

Ridiculous. You can't agree to anything just by being born; you aren't even sentient at that point. There is no meeting of the minds, no clear agreement. If this so-called "social contract" existed, it would be a contract of adhesion which no human being in history ever explicitly agreed to, and any competent court would throw it out with prejudice after a cursory hearing.

On the contrary, there is no need to adjust the quantity of money to reflect population growth or GDP or anything else. The value of the money will adjust automatically based on supply and demand; it's impossible to have a shortage or surplus, as the units are arbitrary and have no direct use apart from serving as money. Changing the quantity of money in an attempt to regulate the price ruins an extremely useful economic signal regarding the demand for money and the balance between consumption and investment, leading to overconsumption and/or malinvestment.

Bitcoin is inflationary for now—any new currency must be, during the initial distribution phase—but over the long term the supply will be relatively constant and the price thus will be fully determined by the demand for bitcoins. Variations in the price will thus signal changes in the demand for money—to the extent bitcoins are used; the effect is diluted by the presence of other, centrally-managed currencies—which in turn informs the market about which investments are better or worse than average. Assuming a growing economy, any investment which does not outperform the expected price deflation is worse than average: investing in it would reduce the rate of growth. Under forced inflation there is more investment, but some of it is malinvestment, driven by the fact that simply holding the money causes it to lose value (artificially, due to the increased supply), and thus contributes to a lower average return and a poorer economy.

One could argue that the entire universe as we know it is nothing more than "an invention of the human mind", leaving no scope at all for discovery, but that is hardly a useful position to take in this context. Even if you did take that approach, mathematics should still be excluded, because mathematical relationships exist independently of human thought. The ratio of a circle's radius to its circumference is tau, and would remain tau even if no human ever existed to discover that fact.

Invention implies an element of creativity, deliberate choice among the available alternatives. The only choices in math are in the selection of axioms. Mathematical axioms may be invented (under significant constraints necessary to keep the results applicable to the physical universe, though there remains some flexibility), but everything beyond that follows mechanically from the axioms—and is thus discovered. Similarly, once your requirements are known, developing a software algorithm comes down to little more than solving the system of constraints described by the requirements—given the requirements specified in a formal language, this is something that could be solved in principle by a search through the solution space using tools similar to mechanical theorem-provers. Intuition helps in narrowing the search space (at the cost of possibly missing the solution entirely), but it isn't essential given sufficient time and memory. Of course, an actual program includes additional elements such as comments, identifiers and code style which are chosen by the programmer and have no effect on the program's behavior; these creative elements would be invented rather than discovered.

Science, moreover, is not "purely an invention of the human mind" any more than mathematics is. It consists of both discovery and invention. Science is essentially the process of making observations and developing statistically consistent models. There is more flexibility here than in math; models can fit the data to a greater or lesser extent, and the best-fitting model is not always the most useful. A useful approximation can thus be considered an invention; just the same, most of science consists of discovery rather than invention of new models, even more so when the goal is simply to fit a standard statistical model to the available data, pure math combined with discovered observations.

The algorithms have been known for about 30 years, but they've always existed as a solution to the problem Bitcoin was intended to solve, waiting for someone to discover them.