wait, what? there are dividends on Bitcoins?

you just described the case against allowing people to use cash. (you know, "folding money" as my grandparents called it)

Cash is anonymous, and is regulated only when it comes to transferring into or out of a bank (or if you try to import/export it overseas). By its very nature of being decentralized, cash cannot be regulated in any practical or meaningful way between two private parties, which is, in practice, effectively no different from the current crop of cryptocurrencies. The key difference is that ALL transactions in the Bitcoin protocol are public, and therefore Bitcoin is actually much less private than cash transactions.

If the senator truly wanted what he said he wanted, he would push to regulate or abolish the use of cash and demand electronic payments in all circumstances. It's more of a "problem" than bitcoin is. How often do you see huge stacks of millions or tens of millions of dollars in cash when there's some big cartel bust? None of that would be possible if cash was regulated and traceable. But no, it's Bitcoin that's the problem, according to this guy.

same way people salivate to submit the "Beta sucks" posts.

so you've read the white paper, then, I presume.

You know, the one that described the use case for the design and the foresight and theories of application.

you're assuming he *has* to convert to dollars. It should be obvious that he could simply keep the bitcoin. Takes 2 minutes or less to start up an online wallet, which would be perfectly acceptable for a 1 bitcoin balance.

I'm pretty sure it's the same guy just arguing with himself.

you're right... unless his landlord takes bitcoins.

hell, even cheapo Avaya telephone systems use this as a licensing scheme, and it works well enough (until it doesn't, anyway)

what you're describing (the port listening part) *is* a firewall - just locally installed and managed. The traditional idea of "a firewall" is exactly that, but in a centrally managed package that makes changes somewhat easier to manage and MUCH easier to scale. No difference functionally, really, except for the "listening for specific secured encrypted messages" part, which is an application-level thing anyway. Furthermore, if planned carefully, the "secured encrypted messages" part can be offloaded to a layer 6/7 switch as well, so even that's not always a restriction.

So really you just want application hardening (a good idea in most cases) and a firewall to filter the port, but you want to do that N number of times for however many hosts you have doing the same job (speaking about more complexity!) instead of centralizing it once or twice to redundant switches, etc.

...for a very specific (but entirely unpopular) definition of the word "everyone", I suppose you might be right

just don't try this in Italy.

Vacuum tubes! You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down to the mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt in front of a window so our brothers and sisters would have something to watch.

That's 12,857,426 double-density 3.5" floppies, or 73,336 years' worth of free AOL

They rely on outside organizations to purchase the results of their efforts. What you're citing as a counterexample is simply a loosely formed variation of a corporation.

so far, there have been no implementations of the Communist ideology *without* suppression of free people to the extreme of mass murdering the dissenters.