Except that's not how the net worth is calculated for tax purposes. Otherwise, nothing would be taxable. Even ordinary employees labor for dollars of equal value.

When you trade A for B (whether A is labor, or B is labor, or A is dollars, or B is Bitcoins, or B is beer, or whatever) your change in net worth is calculated by what you got minus what you gave. But the value of what you gave is not the fair market value. It's the *lower* of the fair market value or what it cost you to get it. (Called your "basis".)

This means if you buy some stock, or Bitcoins, or wine for $50 and its value goes up to $500, that's not taxable. But if you sell it for $500, your profit is $500 minus the lower of $500 or $50, hence $500 - $50, and thus $450.

So if you barter, say, a paint job for a trailer, your profit for tax purposes is the fair market value of the trailer less what it cost you to provide the paint job. Sadly, if you bought a car for $35,000 and then traded it something after its value dropped to $8,000, $35,000 is not your basis. (Too bad, because that would be a great tax evasion strategy) $8,000 is, because that's lower.

It's not distributed proportionally to CPU resources. It's distributed as a payment for a service it requires in order to operate. In order for the Bitcoin system to operate, transactions have to be secured with computing power. It's the nature of the way the system operates -- it takes computing power to secure the transactions. New currency is paid out proportionally to those who provide the computing power needed to make the system work. When the block rewards stop, computing power will still be needed. At that time, people who provide the computing power needed to make the system work will be paid out of fees for each transaction they securely add to the block chain.

The early adopters didn't get anywhere near half the total wealth to ever be available. As of mid-November last year, the total value held by early adopters was around $12 million. The current value of all Bitcoins is already around $50 million. (Actually, this is measuring the value using the market cap method, which is not actually realistic. In truth, both values are much less, but the proportions are roughly the same.)

The miners are engaged in the voluntary exchange of products and services. The service they provide is securing the block chain and preventing double spending and 51% attacks in the Bitcoin system. In exchange, they get the block mining reward and transaction fees.

Bitcoins mined is just one source of new currency. There are others. For example, new dollars are created by dollars being printed and coins being minted, but they're also created by fractional reserve banking, mortgages, and many other mechanisms. Bitcoin just has one fewer mechanism -- coincidentally the one missing is the one that makes the government richer and everyone else poorer.

No, this is not correct. There is a limit on the total number of Bitcoins that can be mined in the block chain, but this won't cause deflation of other things act as the equivalent of Bitcoins and increase the total effective number of Bitcoins. For example, the total number of effective dollars is much greater than the total face value of all bills and coins in circulation because other things (such as bank balances) act just like printed dollars. If Bitcoin deflation ever became an actual economic problem, it would be trivially solved by allowing other things to act as Bitcoins, increasing the effective supply. (These other things could include other crypto-currencies, IOU, web-based wallets using fractional reserves, and so on.)

Those claims are correct. While an SSL BIO could be a network socket, the ASN1 code never talks directly to the SSL BIO code. The SSL protocol has to be parsed first to find the ASN1 structures, and by that time, they're not in the SSL BIO any more.

Because what he wants to protect is not the dance performance, but the trick. The trick is a way of accomplishing a particular functional result. Consider two possibilities:

1) This same "trick" can be done with dozens of possible dance performances. In that case, Teller gets his performance but anyone can use the trick.

2) This "trick" can only be done this one way. In that case, Teller loses his copyright. You can't copyright the only way to get a particular job done or accomplish a particular result. You can only patent the one expression you chose among millions of equally good expressions of the same idea or result.

We tried that, and the evidence suggests the risks are greater. What happens if you do that is that crew members just say they're fine when they're not. Studies show that giving crew members the option to nap at their stations makes it more likely that they actually *will* nap when they need to and consequently are more alert during critical stages of flight (like approach and landing) where maximum performance of all crew members can make a major life and death difference.

I assume you're being sarcastic, but you're actually correct. When we finally have the technology to do something about the problem, if there is one, we'll need to be rich enough to deploy it on a grand scale.