The Treasury Secretary does not work for Congress.

Again, no technical explanation of how the government will shut down Bitcoin, just a general statement that the government is very powerful. Indeed.

Knowledge is best gained in an environment that is economically productive. The greatest productivity has occurred under a gold standard. In the 19th century, the United States went from being a bankrupt, backwater country to a global superpower that produced more than any other nation. If you are truly on a pursuit to gain knowledge, I strongly recommend Henry Hazlitt's book Economics in One Lesson, a book which does a fantastic job at explaining why a gold standard is superior to fiat currency, among several other economic issues.

Don't know what your point about pizza is, but the people in Zimbabwe and Weimar Republic Germany certainly understood that while their currency could be measured out in some amount to buy gold, it was an amount below where it was then they earned the money, representing a huge loss of wealth. The reason a static money supply is desirable is to preserve wealth. When the supply increases, wealth is removed and transferred to those who receive the newly created money. There is no need for a growth in the money supply as the value of the money will increase with the growth of the economy, thus no need to transfer wealth to the wealthy. This gradual increase in the value of money is desirable because it discourages malinvestment. When people realize that their money is going to be worthless when they retire they feel pressure to invest. With security in their wealth, then they will tend only to invest in things they understand and thus are more likely to succeed, as opposed to real estate, Yahoo!, Bernard Madoff, etc.

We are well headed towards 70s level inflation as the government has been increasing the money supply at an historical rate. The biggest difference is that now the government even more heavily manipulates the numbers that we use as metrics for economic performance. For the CPI, the lack of inclusion of most things people purchase, such as food, real estate, and energy, combined with what they call the substitution effect, means that the numbers they provide are substantially lower than what the real inflation numbers are.

The history of fiat currencies is that 100% of the time they are ultimately abused by governments to support the rich and impoverish rest. We are on our way there. Labor participation rate has fallen to the same level it was 1979, a time when women were still significantly underrepresented in the workforce.

Isn't that the same strategy they use against drugs? Also, I think the percentage of the population that desire child porn is negligible compared with the current demand for bitcoins, yet child porn has not been shuttered.

How apropos: after posting my reply I see a new slashdot article New Pirate Bay Greenland Domains Suspended that demonstrates just how seriously governments take online piracy - shuddering a domain less than 24 hours after its launch.

You may find this hard to believe, but I know quite a few adults who download torrents. The RIAA/MPAA are very powerful and have been able to introduce and pass legislation in most nations and even the U.N. They take it quite seriously and have manipulated every level of government to support and enforce their schemes. Even if it is "kids downloading movies", consider that the government cannot stop kids from downloading movies. How on earth are they going to stop people from using a currency they desire? And if we're going to talk about stuff the Government fails to stop people from doing, that pretty much encompasses everything banned by the Government - drugs, insider trading, prostitution, speeding, talking on cell phones while driving, ponzi schemes, etc.

Counterfeiting is not the same as competing currencies and is not generally something done digitally. All I have seen with regards to government interference is fear-mongering that the government is going to come in and shut things down with a magical law, but what I have not seen is a technical discussion on how Bitcoin is going to be shut down.

Each bitcoin can be subdivided into 100 million units referred to as satoshis. Just an FYI.

The Fed loaned trillions of dollars to foreign central banks and gave untold billions to select private companies. There is nothing that states the Fed cannot create as much currency as it desires.

The Fed sets interest rates, and nobody else can. Banks are required to be members of the Fed and it is a private organization that operates without Congressional oversight. Just going by the Wikipedia article on Cartels, I'd say it's a pretty close match.

Rothbard never argued for eliminating banks. No clue what your point is.

The Fed is currently adding $40 billion per month directly through the purchase of mortgage backed securities. The Federal Government continues to run $1+ trillion deficits. Insane is certainly a subjective term, but the amount of currency currently being created seems unreasonable.

Similarly, the "save to diskette" icon can be used to save to, well, anything.

This is not historically correct. Most of the currencies containing specie do not get melted down and are instead exchanged at or near their melt-down value. It's more of a wealth store than a product that is melted down and recycled.

How do you feel about online piracy? What is the success story for the government's attempts to end it? What about Wikileaks - what has been the success rate of slowing them down? Why is the government suddenly going to be so much more successful at stopping Bitcoins than at stopping BitTorrent?

BlackBerry phones are encrypted as OP suggests, so when a user forgets a password, then there is nothing BlackBerry can do to help the user.

This is one of the reasons I think the next 10-15 years could get interesting. There was a story a couple years back about how a company had failed an appeal against a troll that had a patent which broadly covered distributing digital music. IIRC, the patent was going to expire in 2017. There are a lot of patents like this that have been filed in the 1995-2010 period and I think the more savvy small businesses will begin searching expired patents and making them work for their needs.

"The few practice lawful plunder upon the many, a common practice where the right to participate in the making of law is limited to a few persons." Frédéric Bastiat, The Law.

And, by extension, participation in the legal system.