You say this as though the concept of American democracy being broken should shock us.

We can quantify the damage done when a window is smashed. Books that are removed from a library must be replaced or they will be unavailable to patrons; that can be quantified as well.

Can you quantify the damage Aaron did? I suspect it is somewhere around "13 cents in electricity costs."

Right, because Aaron being in possession of them did not stop anyone else from reading them.

He did have access, MIT's network is open and anyone who has access to MIT's network can access JSTOR.

So strict that they give them out in PDF form to anyone who asks.

DNT is a compromise. If we were unwilling to compromise, we would build ad-blockers into browsers as a default, much like pop-up blocking ten years ago. It was because of people like you who would not stop whining about how important advertiser dollars are to keep the web alive that we even considered something like DNT. It was because advertisers promised that they really do respect our wishes, that ad blockers and legal restrictions on tracking are not needed, that DNT was ever considered by anyone.

The advertisers showed their true colors. They never wanted a compromise, they just wanted a facade that allows them to pretend they respect us while continuing to do what they have done all along.

When my CPU is spinning because of your Javascript-super-fancy-tracks-all-the-things advertisement, you are consuming my resources. When I have to download a megabyte of Javascript/Flash/whatever to see your ads, you are consuming my resources. When I have to spend time trying to navigate around annoying hover ads, you are consuming my resources.

At least when I receive spam, I know the spammer has no idea who I am or whether or not I opened their message. Website advertisers try hard to track everything, even when you are very clearly trying to stop them; that is what DNT has demonstrated.

No, the page is what is requested. My browser is not obligated to do anything at all with the webpage your server sends it. There is no implicit request; you explicitly asked my browser to request ads from the advertisers you choose to do business with.

You put your work on the open web. You did not put it behind a paywall. You did not force me to view your ads before seeing your page.

Nobody wrote an ad blocker because they were angry about textual ads or banner ads. Ad blockers exists because the advertisers have no respect for anyone's desire to not be tracked, to not have hover ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, Flash, Java, and other adware annoyances. Advertisers have shot themselves in the foot with their own greed, and if your website is not saying, "No, I do not want you to piss off my users with these antics" then your website is part of the problem.

Sure, but ABP has an easy-to-find checkbox to enable/disable whitelisted ads. There are also many other ad blockers out there that can be used if ABP ever stops working effectively (and being easy to configure).

You are acting like tracking and advertising are inseparable. They are not, you can advertise without tracking people and you can make money doing so. I do not want to be tracked, and the only technical solution at this point is to block advertisements -- because even loading a static image from an advertiser will be used as a data point to track me.

If a website wants me to view its ads, it should refuse the business of advertisers that create privacy-invading ads. If websites were standing up for their users they would not be at risk of becoming collateral damage in this fight.

DNT is not more challenging for technical reasons. Today's ad blockers remove almost all advertising. The real challenge is politics: the popular browser makers are all in bed with the advertisers.

Why spend the effort on the courts? Ad blockers take under a minute to install.

"Do Not Track" is pretty clear. It means "do not track," without exceptions, without room for debate.

This fiasco has basically proved what everyone knew from the beginning, which is that advertisers do not give a damn about people who do not want to be tracked. Luckily, we have a technical solution to the problem: ad blockers. Much like spam filters and pop-up blockers, ad blockers are the solution to advertisers who have no respect and who cannot be trusted.

DNT had exactly one use: to determine whether or not advertisers respect the wishes of people who do not want their browsing habits tracked. The verdict is in, and to nobody's surprise advertisers have no respect for anyone. Now we know that we are justified in using ad-blocking plugins and building browsers that block ads by default.

Is this a job interview question?

What if those misdeeds include such crimes as participating in a peaceful antiwar rally or blowing the whistle on criminal activity occurring within the government? Just because someone has something to hide does not mean that they are doing something evil.

...so I guess we are in agreement?

Yeah, and as you yourself admitted, that security definition is based on the existence of a central authority. It is not possible to apply such a definition to a system without a central authority, which means that security definition is irrelevant to Bitcoin. This is not just a slight variation, it is a fundamental departure from the definition of security for digital cash. If you think I am wrong, write a proof of security for Bitcoin using the definition of digital cash, or a variant that accounts for the lack of a central bank.

Which is irrelevant to Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is not an encryption system nor is it a signature system. It is also false to claim that there is a security definition for public key cryptography, since the definition for encryption is not the same as the definition of signatures, and there are several definitions for each that cover different notions of security (e.g. chosen plaintext attacks, adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks, etc.).

Bitcoin is not a hash function, so this is irrelevant too.

No, it does not, because it is a subfield of cryptography that encompasses several related classes of protocols and security models. There are notions of security that are generally applicable to all those protocols -- semihonest, malicious, adaptive malicious, universal composability, etc. Again, you can read the background material yourself if you do not believe me, which apparently you don't.

Look, I'll just reiterate my challenge from above. If you think I am wrong, prove rigorously that Bitcoin is secure, the same way that cryptographers prove that other systems are secure. Leave no room for argument or doubt, and then you can call yourself a winner.

Bitcoin is a multiparty computation system. The fact that it does not build on previous work does not change what Bitcoin is, nor how it can be analyzed.

Yeah, and guess what? The security definitions of those systems assume a central bank that issues the money. You do not have to believe me; here, you can read the actual work on it:

http://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F11889663_20

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.44.8279

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5443458&tag=1