I also wonder if some of our illegal labor problems could be solved if there were a law making an exception for illegal immigrant workers that required any employer caught hiring illegally to pay minimum wage to all such workers (with no option to lay them off or withhold payments until they found other work, returned home voluntarily, or the employer legitimately declared bankruptcy), and made those workers legal citizens to the extent that they would not fear reporting any employer paying them less than minimum wage. The goal would be not so much to improve or increase immigration (illegal or otherwise), but to deter illegal hiring by holding the employers participating in such practices responsible for the people they hire that way, if they haven't treated their employees fairly from the beginning (can't produce records of paying minimum wage for as long as evidence for employment exists).

It doesn't seem sensible to me that the answer to illegal behavior would be to forget about the laws that make those behaviors illegal, but rather to uproot the causes of that illegal behavior. In other words, can't we have a higher minimum wage *and* provide proper incentives, like those you describe, for the minimum wage to be higher in a workable way?

Moving to the state whose laws work best for you may work for people who can move, but I expect the people affected by these laws are pretty closely representative of the set of people who can't move.

Ok ok ok... so how about, to prove a system is intelligent, it must devise a test that can determine whether another system is intelligent.

You've got it. What I don't understand is why nuclear electricity is put in the same basket as coal and gas plants. The incidents that Nuclear has gone through in the past 60 years only reinforce my view that it's a safe solution. If given all the fsck-ups that gave us Chernobyl, Fukushima and 3 Mile Island that's all that happened I think that it's pretty much OK. I'm saying this because coal/thermal have their exhaust pipe problems which affect a much greater percent of the population and hydro is in general an ecological mess that also involves massive population relocation.

Aren't they starting at the wrong end of the food chain? Or have they already verified that all the organisms on which livestock depend will be able to survive?

They are more difficult to forge than physical commodities. My assumption (which I've adjusted due to other comments) is that this represents intrinsic value. My corrected assumption is that this represents a market value, and that intrinsic value is irrelevant for a currency.

You make a good point. I guess my question then is, why would anyone *want* to give something being used primarily as a currency some intrinsic value when the currency we've been using for decades (centuries?) has none, and probably works best that way? Isn't the whole point of a currency to represent a market value and nothing else?

Well, in the context of having something to "back the value" of a currency, that seems to be what's important because "the gold standard" is the gold standard of backing value, and I don't see how gold has any value that bitcoin doesn't in this regard. It's the limited quantity that gives it value (the ability to use something as a currency makes it valuable as a currency). The only thing that bitcoin is missing that gold has is the ability to melt it and wear it on your finger or neck. That might be the "value" of gold that bitcoin doesn't have. But when you look at all the gold sitting in Fort Knox, do you really think it (at one time) was functioning as a backing for currency because it was able to be turned into jewelry? I think it functions as a backing because of its scarcity, and its ability to be turned into coins (currency), not because of its intrinsic value as jewelry.

Bitcoin has more intrinsic value than stocks because because it's a limited resource whereas stocks can split and reverse split and are available at the whim of the company offering them. The Bitcoin supply is less volatile. The demand may be volatile, but the supply is quite predictable. Trying to back bitcoin with stocks and peg it to something sounds like nonsense to me. How do you peg something that's already pegged to a pre-determined supply. Bitcoin is every bit as "pegged" as gold as far as I can see.

That view is way oversimplified and completely ignores how our evolving society has changed the rules. If Internet and phones disappeared tomorrow, people would likely start dying in much greater numbers in the not-too-distant future. We now depend heavily on this sort of communication to know where food and water needs to be. People don't live near sources of food and water any more because they don't need to any more because other technologies have sprung up to make it possible to survive without doing so. If those go away, so do the people.

I can sure see the confusion. I can't see any difference between "hacker" and "hacker" myself. What am I missing?

That's kind of what I was going for -- the weakest analogy that was still applicable just to demonstrate how widely applicable the point is about one merchant not being representative of the whole industry.

It's not over yet. I had bought a total of about 20 bitcoins for a total of about $600. After the price went up, I sold 2 of them and got all my money back (in my own bank). Now I may have lost 13 of them on MtGox, but that still leaves me with enough in my cold storage wallet and on my mobile device to get 2 to 3 gaming desktops from bitcoinshop.us at no out-of-pocket cost to me.

And who knows, if by some miracle MtGox doesn't simply lose everything they were holding for everyone, I might even still have enough to buy about 10... at no out-of-pocket cost to me. Doesn't sound like such a bad idea either way.

I didn't say debeers group, I said the neighborhood jewelry store.