Are you trying to make a sick joke?

Thousands of employees who review patents for the federal government cheated taxpayers out of at least $18.3 million as they billed the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for almost 300,000 hours they never worked, according to a new investigation by the agency’s watchdog.

The report released Wednesday determined that the full scale of fraud is probably double those numbers. Investigators said they interpreted the data they gathered conservatively, often giving employees the benefit of the doubt for the time they reportedly worked.

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Patent office workers bilked the government of millions by playing hooky, watchdog finds

If someone else has any bright ideas how to mitigate evil behavior incoming from ISPs (because they will take full advantage of this, believe you me), I'm all ears.

If you can shrink this amazing technology down to about the size and cost of a microwave oven, and provide high data rates with low latency, I'd say the problem is solved. A breakthrough like that would permanently eliminate the ability of corporations and governments alike to interfere with Internet communication.

I had the same reaction. For a moment there I was regretting having thrown out my old 486 ... the one with the VESA Local Bus IDE hard disk controller and video card. Oh, and the two ISA slots. One had a 16-bit ATI TV tuner card stuck in it, and the other an esoteric 8-bit controller card for that Mars 105 black & white hand-held scanner I bought from a DAK catalog back in '89.

Well, I used the term "inflation" as a synonym for the rate of change in the total monetary supply. Obviously, in a fast growing economy increasing the money supply by 1% per year may actually translate into price deflation.

In any case, increasing Bitcoin's money supply in a fixed pre-determined rate is actually trivially easy. If, for example, you want the increase in money supply to asymptotically approach 0%, all you have to do is to let the block mining reward forever be 50 BTC. Therefore, there is nothing in Bitcoin's architecture that prevents the usage of a different algorithm for increasing money supply.

In fact, I think it is very likely that we will witness the emergence of a competitor to Bitcoin that is based on the same architecture and crypto (perhaps even forking the same source code), but whose sole difference will be the elimination of the 21 million coin hard-cap. Though most hardline Bitcoin supporters will dismiss this alternative system as doomed to fail because of the built-in inflation, I suspect it may actually succeed because people will be more inclined to use it as currency instead of just hoarding.

From the beginning there have been people alerting that Bitcoin, while technically impressive, has dubious economic fundamentals. Namely, the built-in hard-cap on the total number of Bitcoins that will ever be generated (21 million) will result in deflation dynamics once new currency stops being generated, and may induce hoarding, speculation, and the formation of a bubble much sooner than that.

The USD/BTC index for the past few months and the overall mentality seen in the Bitcoin forums seems to be confirming the worst case scenario described by critics of Bitcoin's economic model. People are talking of Bitcoins not as a currency but as a store of value. Instead of spending them to kickstart the economy, people are instead hoarding them with the expectation they will continue to multiply in value. And indeed, the steady influx of new users with the same expectation of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has caused the value of the currency to soar. However, without an actual economy taking off, there is the danger that sooner or later there may be a massive loss of confidence in the currency, leading to a catastrophic crash.

I suspect that the above dynamics could have been prevented with a simple tweak to the algorithm: instead of a hard-cap, let the total number of coins continuously increase in such a way that the inflation rate approaches a small, but positive number (say 0.1%). This small change would have multiple advantages:

• a) Miners would always have an incentive beyond just transaction fees. This means lower fees in the long run.
• b) Though in practice there may not be much of a difference between an inflation rate of -0.1% and one of 0.1%, human psychology is such that the latter scenario would likely not lead to hoarding and speculative behaviour.
• c) The inflation rate would still be low enough as to make inflationary erosion of value an irrelevant issue.

With all of the above in mind, my question is as follows: would you agree that the strict adherence to Austrian Economics espoused by most members of the Bitcoin community may render them too dismissive of the dangers of the built-in deflation, and thus end up being Bitcoin's Achilles' Heel?

The idea is to work extra, save money, and use that to buy even more free time down the road (early retirement, for example).

But most people forget the saving part, and spend it as soon as they earn it, and wonder why they feel poor on $150,000 per year.

BTW, for those of you outside the US, the above video link won't work.

I have a friend in Canada who, at least in the recent past with some alternate PBS shows, has been able to view video directly from the PBS site. So ... Canadians may at least want to give that link a try. (And I'd be interested to hear if it does end up working for anyone there.)

Boeing?

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2010/snapshots/59.html

Jesse Ventura agrees with you.

Arrrr! The Honeycomb hideout!

Am I the only one that hears this eighties commercial in their head every time the word "Honeycomb" is used for a product?

You might have a point, but maybe in this case we don't want those type of people on the network anyway? Honestly it's just a thought.

I can't help but be reminded of the current Internet before it became popular with the masses. Remember the influx of clueless AOL users?

I don't see how that can work at all.

My initial reaction is to agree with you, but an optimist's response would probably be something like, "Is that a reason to not even try?"

And as soon as I start to think that way, I consider just -- as you suggest -- managing to get cities assembled into their own intranets (not even necessarily connected with one another). Would that not be some type of victory?

And who's to say that, if that were to happen, some corporation or conglomeration of non-profits wouldn't come along and donate "dark fibre/fiber" to connect some of those cities with each other for the good of human-kind?

Or that after setting up city intranets, someone discovers a way to send data using pulsed streams of neutrinos, and that that technology is found to be economically viable enough that it can be used for connecting at least the largest of those city intranets?

Who can predict the future? And seriously ... is there a reason to not even try?