Does anyone know whether this is likely to have an effect on scales other than the galactic?

For instance, on small chaotic systems.

FUUUUCK.

Tired and forgot to anonymise. It's been nice knowing y'all.

Don't worry. Islam is just as (IMHO more) barbaric than the Old and New Testaments.

While we're posting biased but well sourced links: http://www.wikiislam.net/

Posted AC to reduce the probability of my murder.

Then as a recreational one.

If a game can have a medically recognisable affect, it falls under the purview of those who would regulate your private activities for reasons of their morality.

If this is approved, what's the over/under on how long it takes before it is used as a justification for government interference with a tool that is used to bring pleasure in a manner contrary to a morality?

Probably meant Namecoin; the distributed DNS alternative.

And, just as it is reasonable to expect that sociopaths will spy on you for their own advantage, it is reasonable to expect that sociopaths will steal your stuff if you make it easy.

A predictable percentage of humans qualify for ASPD or whatever they're calling it these days. Anybody trusting a significant number of humans should take appropriate precautions.

What thing did they take that doesn't belong to them? I see that they made unauthorised copies of data, and know that this is a crime in many jurisdictions, but see no thing that has been taken.

I'm shocked by the number of people who take pleasure in Bitcoiners' recent misfortune. A lot of people are putting effort into something they care about, and snide little shits on the internet lol it up.

I don't hold a significant number of Bitcoins (50+change), but I have found them utterly fascinating for the last year, and will read anything published about them. The concept of a low-friction trading platform could revolutionise many industries, and change a lot of people's lives for the better.

It's entirely possible that the spread of Bitcoin will make a few millionaires or billionaires (in USD), but that doesn't seem especially important. All paradigm shifts have moved wealth from those who profit from inefficiencies to those who introduce the more efficient system. Like every single human on the planet, I had the opportunity to mine Bitcoins from the beginning, to buy and hold when they were extremely cheap, but I was too stupid to do so.

If you haven't made a few 10s of thousands of USD from Bitcoin, you were also too stupid to invest in the new technology.

I'm still too stupid to make significant amounts of money from trading, so I voluntarily use Bitcoin as a tool, not expecting my coins to increase in value. It works extremely well.

Would you like to watch a train wreck in slow motion? Would that much human suffering excite you? Do you watch WWII documentaries before lovemaking?

No. Your client is your authority. Unless you have the light client, it will not accept an invalid block. An extremely powerful attacker may be able to confuse a light client.

If any one miner goes offline, they simply cease to process transactions. The blockchain goes on in every other miner's GPU.

Individual coins really are the least important part of Bitcoin. The blockchain is all.

Yep. They see public keys transferring BTC to each other. If the humans behind those public keys don't pay attention, they might be linked with their public key and consequently their transactions. Bitcoin laundering is possible, in which BTC are transferred to a pool, sloshed around and reissued to whatever addresses you want over time, currently with a 0.5% fee.

The miners are not a Central bank because they cannot meaningfully change the algorithm; they're are more similar to Western Union or similar (and massively more efficient.)
MyBitcoin.com is more similar to a bank, as is the client you run on your PC.

The only entity that can claim to have been the central bank of Bitcoin is the possibly fictional Satoshi Nakamoto who created the protocol in the first place. His role as that authority has ended.

1) and 2) are both examples of the double spending problem for cryptocurrencies, which is the very problem Bitcoin is trying to solve. A chain of transactions is maintained by every Bitcoin "miner" who performs proof of work on the transaction data. If they "solve" the block of transactions first, they are rewarded with the transaction fees and the BTC that are being issued until 21000000 is reached (50 per block, approximately every ten minutes.)

3) At the moment it grows forever. Useless data can be pruned, and light clients are possible.

4) I think each coin is signed over to the new public key that is its owner. That signing is the transaction.

5) "Making" BTC cheaply isn't really meaningful. A miner might be able to get their hash rate above everyone else's by implementing SHA256 much more efficiently, using ASICs for example, but said miner would need to possess a significant fraction of the computing power of the network to cause difficulties.
The production rate is stipulated by the initial algorithm which adjusts the difficulty of the proof of work to keep blocks generation to 1/10minutes. Shenanigans (attempting to award yourself BTC arbitrarily) will not be accepted by other nodes.
It works if you have a new identity for every transaction and amuse yourself all day by sending bitcoins to your millions of alter-egos. If these are all free transactions, they will probably end up looking like spam and taking a long time. Attach 5 mBTC to speed up a transaction.

6) This will definitely happen. The people who run the botnet will make coins.

I'm very bullish about cryptocurrency, and excited about Bitcoin at the moment, so do your own research and take my assurances with a grain of salt.

I invent a solar powered car that grows from modified hemp seeds. You just need to feed and water them. Once a year, my car drops more seeds that others can grow into cars.
The auto industry can no longer make money.

SeedCar is banned. It would have been close to unstoppable without end-user persecution.

Enter Bitcoin, in which the transactions are stored in a block chain on multiple computers.
"Miners" are incentivised to process and store the transactions by small transaction fees and by the issuance of BTC itself.

You can indeed confirm the signatures belong to thee public key to which the Bitcoin had been assigned, as this is just a long alphanumeric string, with no necessary personal data.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs

If drugs were legalised and taxed, the revenue may end up being being distributed across the population. This is undesirable to our owners, the banks, who would rather that revenue were distributed to the small number of people with influence.

Odd.
They're not usually self-aware enough to call themselves something like "r. stallman".

Incompetent shill is troll shill?