Unless you bother to examine the public record of all Bitcoin transactions.

Except that you need to broadcast the transaction to the Bitcoin network, which must then confirm that the transaction is valid. What I said is that most people rely on another agent to complete their transactions for them -- because most people want fiat currency, not Bitcoin currency, and they usually do not want to wait for confirmations (nor do they want to accept payments without confirmations) or deal with an ever-fluctuating exchange rate.

Let's put it this way: try to use gold to buy a car, or even to buy something as simple as a single meal.

Bitcoin has never been anonymous. There is a public record of transactions. You have to rely on a separate mixing service, which almost nobody does.

Most important, though, is this: very few people actually want to use Bitcoin. Most view it as a way to make an electronic transfer of government-backed fiat currencies, so they rely on services that do the Bitcoin transfers for them and exchange Bitcoin currency for fiat currency. Those services are going to comply with the law and require things like identification. To put it another way, cash is anonymous too -- but large numbers of people use credit and debit cards, which are not anonymous.

Speaking as someone who has done exactly that...it is not really so bad, as long as you have time for it. The biggest problem was not with being on a train (it is far more pleasant to spend 4 days on a train than one hour on an airplane), but with delays caused by freight railroads prioritizing their traffic. If Amtrak were running on its own right-of-way rather than leasing, the journey would probably face far fewer delays, and the trains could run much faster (though not as fast as Japanese trains).

It is hard to talk about what makes "economic sense" here, since the passenger rail business was killed by competition from heavily subsidized alternatives: the interstate highway system, and airplanes. Had no federal money been spent promoting cars and airplanes -- had the government instead allowed competition between businesses determine how Americans travel -- passenger railroads would probably remain a viable business (but I doubt we would see high speed rail, for the same reasons that private Internet services are slower than the government-run services in other countries).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_mission

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_highway_system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_canal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_dam

...just to name a few. I guess if you just ignore the successes of the US government (except for your personal favorite), though, federal money would seem to be wasted on failure.

If we make exceptions for the blind, our next step might to make exceptions for the deaf, for libraries, for schoolchildren, for the poor, and then one day the movie studios might have to actually adapt to new technologies instead of trying to kill them.

Opinions are not facts, so they cannot be "wrong." The view itself is not at all unprecendented or even unusual.

What I think is not really the issue here. My only point is that there are people who have no issue with homosexuality but who still oppose gay marriage.

No, it is just a matter of defining the purpose of marriage. Just because you think marriage is only about love does not mean that everyone else does, nor that everyone else should.

As we all know, calling people who disagree with you "scum" is a productive activity. You're really going to make strides in convincing people to support gay marriage with that approach -- keep up the good work!

How is that homophobic? It says nothing about homosexuals, it is a statement about marriage, a legal construct that is defined by the government. You do not have to be homophobic nor do you have to be a gay-basher to take issue with gay marriage, despite what the Republicans might want you to believe. Plenty of people believe that the purpose of marriage is to encourage procreation, rather than a way to formalize love with a commitment. It is likely that the Republicans shot themselves in the foot by conflating gay-bashing with opposition to gay marriage, which alienated a large number of potential supporters (and voters).

Yes, the Ender and Shadow series demonstrate some Mormon influence, which is hardly surprising given that they are written by a Mormon. Most novels communicate their authors' views and biases. If we refused to read novels because with disagree with the worldview of their authors', we would have to cut ourselves off from the majority of literature written before the 1960s. The overt racism in 19th century novels is shocking by today's standards, but we still consider those works to be "classics."

One cold year says nothing about the trend in the Earth's climate.

Earlier in my career as a PhD student I wrote a short paper about FHE and homomorphically evaluating block ciphers, and I wrote about that construction there. We tried to publish it but there was not really enough material, and since then I have been more focused on garbled circuits.

My point about function privacy was that the randomness might be "lost" in a sense. For example, in plaintext, 0 might be "0 xor 0" or "1 xor 1", and there is no additional information that can be used to distinguish those two cases. On the other hand, you might be able to distinguish the two cases if it was "A xor A" versus "B xor B," where A and B are ciphertexts for some FHE system. If I remember correctly, function privacy in FHE will guarantee that these two cases are indistinguishable.

Can I contact you off site? I am doing work in a related field.

How is that? Wherever the encryption algorithm samples random numbers, the FHE evaluator would sample a random number and encode it using the encrypted "0" and "1".

The only tricky part to this is that it might not work if the FHE system does not have function privacy, though I am not sure that requirement is truly necessary.

Interestingly, there is some evidence that today's FHE systems are secure against quantum computing attacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_security

Let's put it this way: you could do the same with any public key cryptosystem by using the public key to encrypt the dictionary you described. The reason that does not work is that there are many (exponentially many in the security parameter) possible encryptions of each plaintext.