It's a self-reinforcing cycle. Gold started out being valuable for industry and jewellery (don't forget that part, it is pretty significant), and for that reason (combined with other nice property), people started using it for exchange and as a store of value. Using it as a store of value increased its scarcity, which drove up value even more. The same thing happened to silver, though not quite to the same extent.

So the value of gold is originally due to its industrial value, but has long since then gotten out of hand. It's basically a bubble that is thousands of years old.

Since you mentioned copper: I sincerely hope that the same thing will not happen with copper. Unfortunately, it seems like some banks are actually setting up funds where they physically hoard copper for an indefinite amount of time, which could cause a similar self-reinforcing cycle. That would be a shame.

By crash I meant an economic crash. BitCoin is valuable only by common consent, which could collapse over night, independently of the stability of the network as a peer to peer system. Note that this is different from the US$, which has value mostly by common consent, but in addition to that, it is backed by the fact that US citizens have to pay their taxes in US$ - so it will retain value even if common consent were to disappear (of course, via democracy, you could call that taxation is by common consent as well, but I digress).

Similar things apply to gold. You are right: the value of gold is seriously inflated compared to the purposes of gold in industry and jewellery. However, how do you think people came up with the idea of using gold as a medium of exchange and store of value in the first place? That was precisely because gold started out being valuable (for industry and jewellery, and scarcity reasons). Then it became a self-reinforcing bubble because people started hoarding gold for its value, thereby increasing its scarcity and driving up its value.

BitCoin has none of these properties.

Transactions are verified by means of public/private key pairs, which are not directly tied to an identity, especially if you create a new key pair for every transaction. So it's not like there is a list of who owns what in the BitCoin system. It might be possible to analyse the graph of transactions starting at some known public/private key pairs to deduce this, but it's certainly not trivial.

You are right though, claiming that being untraceable is an advantage of BitCoin is misleading.

You do need the public key, but the public key is not tied to your identity. Apparently, it is common practice to create a new public/private key pair for every incoming transaction. In other words, everybody knows all the transactions, but the transactions are only tied to one-off public/private key pairs that are not tied to any identity. I suspect that if you are given some known key identities, you might be able to analyse the graph of transaction to draw conclusions from it, but I don't think this has ever been demonstrated.

As for the size of the coins, this is not by itself an issue. There is no "coin" object in BitCoin, only transactions, whose size is dominated by the cryptographic data involved, but this is essentially constant. However, every node in the BitCoin network needs the entire history of transactions. This could become problematic if the network were ever used for a significant number of transactions. (In principle, the history can be pruned, removing old transactions whose knowledge is no longer important. I'm not sure how well that would work.)

(Note that I am not a user of BitCoin, and I think it's a bad idea from an economics point of view. Still, it's a very interesting cryptosystem.)

More importantly, the first time there is ever a serious BitCoin crash, the game will probably be over forever. Unlike gold or government run fiat money, BitCoins really are valuable only by common consent, and if that consent ever wavers, that's it.

Gold has real value because it does have actual uses (although the price of gold is seriously inflated by hoarding, compared to what it should be based on natural scarcity alone), and government run fiat money has value because the government requires you to pay your taxes in it. BitCoin has no inherent value at all.

I think part of your characterization of religious people is slightly unfair. After all, atheism was originally developed by people who started out being religious, simply because everybody was religious as a default if you go far enough back. There are intelligent people that are moderately religious, and who are able to change their opinions on a matter - as long as this matter does not conflict with their religion.

As a side note, I would like to point out that the real villain here is not religion, but belief in a god. It is totally feasible to be part of certain religions while being rational and without having any supernatural beliefs, while people who are not part of a religion but believe in the supernatural do tend to exhibit the flaws that you describe. After all, there is no way supernatural beliefs can hold up in the face of rational thinking, so at some point, people either have to make a choice between the two or compartmentalize their world views. In fact, I believe that one of the great challenges for humankind is to move everybody over to religions that provide for humans' spiritual needs while embracing rationality - if we can manage to do that, then we're on a good path for the future.

I also think that it is a valid observation that "left wingers" are more open to changing their minds, and then to fight amongst themselves over slight differences of opinion, while "right wingers" have a much stronger tendency to stick together no matter what. Evidence of this is that in multi-party democracies, one sees multiple parties on the left much more often than on the right.

The thing most people seem to forget is that the spirit of democracy is not only about one person, one vote. It's about one person, one vote, preceded by reasoned, rational debate in which the people form their opinion on what to vote on. Unfortunately, this last aspect tends to be a bit difficult to implement because the concept of one person, one vote is not manifested in the public debate; there, your vote is basically proportional to the amount of money you have (to spend on advertising and to influence the media).

Neither does your graphics driver, at least on Linux (I suspect that Windows is similar, but I have no knowledge of it). Everything related to OpenGL is implemented in user space, and then the user space component simply sends a command stream to the GPU via the kernel. The kernel module (drm) verifies the command stream to ensure that it does not violate any of the security constraints, and/or sets up the GPU access control registers appropriately (yes, modern GPUs have such features).

Of course, these security checks are geared towards the requirements of a multi-user system. Basically, one user's OpenGL program is not allowed to mess with a different user's data. So it's entirely plausible that exposing WebGL will cause problems to be noticed that simply haven't been visible before. But then those get fixed, people get used to the new security constraints, and we all move on.

He's right. Using WebGL, you do not directly upload executable code to the GPU. You send textual shader programs, which are Just-in-Time compiled by the OpenGL driver into hardware instructions. This is pretty much exactly what modern JavaScript engines are doing already.

Now it is true that things can go wrong in this translation stage. A JavaScript engine can have a bug that allows arbitrary code execution, and so can an OpenGL driver. So adding WebGL increases the amount of code that can have security-relevant bugs, but so what? This happens every time you add a new feature. Flash or Silverlight are no different in this respect, and neither is JavaScript itself for this matter. If you're really that paranoid, you should already be browsing without JavaScript enabled.

Until the altruists develop the mental capability to recognize the non-altruists, and exclude them from their group. Then the non-altruists lose - or rather, it becomes a fight of increasingly subtle non-altruistic behaviours to get an edge over pure altruists.

Ignoring for the moment the fact that you do not have to chose between one and the other (voting still makes sense given how low-cost it is compared to the alternative), this is something that more people need to realize. We the people need protections against lobby and media people. Hacking them - in the general sense - is an important tool and needs to be done more often.

I'd be interested to hear why the Mozilla developers don't use an existing compiler framework like LLVM, which already implements many advanced optimization techniques. I am aware that JavaScript-specific problems need to be dealt with anyway, but it seems like they could save themselves a lot of hassle in things like register allocation etc. Those are not so interesting problems that are handled by existing tools like LLVM quite well, so why not use that?

Is it really nonsense? You are still American, aren't you? It seems you really didn't understand my point at all, so let me reiterate one last time.

If, instead of part-owning a company in Ecuador, you were to move to Ecuador to work there, you would of course pay Ecuadorian income tax. However, as long as that tax is lower than whatever the US income tax rate is, you would then have to pay the difference to the US government. In effect, the tax rate you are paying is the maximum of whatever the local income tax rate is and the US income tax rate. In that sense, as long as you keep your US citizenship, you cannot evade those taxes by moving abroad.

All I'm saying is that it would be both possible and fair - and remove a lot of the tax evasion incentives - to apply similar rules to the taxes that a US-owned company has to pay. Basically, let the tax rate that applies to a company be the maximum of the rate of the country where it operates and the rate of the country of citizenship of its owners. Yes, there are details that need to be worked out - and they can be. It's the big picture that counts.

I agree with you that e.g. sales taxes should simply be based on whatever country the sale happens in. But when you're talking about corporate taxes that are essentially the corporate equivalent of a person's income tax, then there is really no reason not to apply a similar system.

I don't know why you're doing business in Ecuador. If it is indeed purely for tax reasons as you seemed to imply, then you might disagree with me because you have vested interests. That's okay - but please at least be man enough to admit that, instead of making up some fake "reasons".

In reality, actual founders (as opposed to those mythical creatures in the economists' dream world) do not choose the place where they set up a new company based on tax rates. Most of the time, they simply set up where ever they happen to live. Please show me all those mythical Brits who give up their citizenship and become let's say Taiwanese, because the tax rates there are better for them, otherwise your argument has no basis in reality. You have to understand that this threat of moving to another country is largely a bluff. Shipping the jobs of somebody else overseas is one thing, but actually changing your own citizenship for a small tax benefit? Very few people are prepared to do that. Don't fall for their bluff.

As for your point on international tax treaties - such treaties are changed all the time when parties feel that the terms are no longer beneficial. If both the US and the UK required income from assets to be taxed at their respective rates, then things naturally balance out again, and your argument on investment becomes moot.

So what? Then the corporation would perhaps be able to make a higher profit and if - as I originally suggested - existing tax loopholes were closed, this would result in them actually paying more taxes domestically. The composition of the work force would change, but these things can be dealt with.

What's this obsession with competitiveness? The entire point of why we come together as a society to form states, to form a government, what legitimises the whole system, is that it should work towards the benefit of the public. Competitiveness may be a useful tool to achieve that end, but it can never be an end in itself. If, in the pursuit of competitiveness, we are actually hurting the well-being of the general population, then I say screw competitiveness.

Taking a step back, I think the thing that baffles me is that you seem to want the wealthy and corporations to have privileges that are not accessible to the vast majority of the population in terms of taxation. Is that what you want? If so, why?

Or, alternatively, if you do want a more fair system of taxation, in which corporations do not have unfair advantages compared to what the general population has available, then what is the point of your argument? Do you have something better to propose? I would appreciate constructive input.

Except that the empirical evidence contradicts your claim. I will reiterate: Americans who work abroad have to pay US income taxes (of course they can deduct whatever amount they paid in taxes in the country where they worked, and obviously it would work the same way for corporate income), yet the number of Americans who give up their US citizenship because of that burden is insignificant. Perhaps you personally would switch, but clearly the vast majority of people value their original citizenship more than a small monetary benefit. This is not an opinion, it's an empirical observation.

It is possible that the super-rich might not care enough about their citizenship and prefer to become citizens of some small island in the Pacific or something. Personally, I would consider this a benefit: at that point their influence on domestic politics would essentially disappear, because even conservatives would start labelling them as pariahs.

I understand your knee-jerk reaction, because it just seems so unreal to imagine a world where corporations and the super-rich have to abide by the same rule as normal people. But this is exactly the problem. So try to think outside the box, and start imagining. The only reasons we do not live in such a world are political, there are no other fundamental obstacles.