I'm just starting to enter into this BitCoin world and I have 2 main questions:

1) How long until goverments start persecuting bitcoin users?
2) What will happen when they do?

It's not a matter of if governments have the right to do so. Ofcourse they theoreticaly don't (or shouldn't have).
But US government also didn't have the right to press other countries to outlaw bittorrent, but look at what happened in Sweden, Canada, Spain in just the last 2 years.
If the corporations that own copyrights of movies and musics are being able to protect theyr profits by changing laws and bending governments, courts and police force, imagine what the banks can do!

Of course to reach that point the community should have grown incredibly larger, but to all of us who believe in the future of virtual currencies this is a point to be considered.

Would then bitcoin be banned to underground usage hence every single coin would become black money?

After someone "mines" a block, any transactions with fees going through the block will earn the block owner some money. But is there a way to trade blocks? for example, i give someone 60 BT, in exchange for a block that he owns. the owner then relinquishes control of that block, and sends it to me, and he pockets 10 BT.

I'm curious. I think it's a fair question, there are plenty of miners in BTC community at this point, and press will inevitably bring more miners into the system.  How does everybody feel about it?  [edit, did say: "mostly miners" edit 2: did say something to the effect of that the question might be unfair/heretical. i still don't think it is.]

How do you fund a bitcoin account? I understand there are people you can buy them from, but where do they get them or how do they generate them or move external money into the bitcoin system? This very well maybe a dumb question. Just trying to grasp the concept

Hi Fellow Bitcoin Users,

I'm writing a legal essay on Bitcoin for my Banking Law class at a top U.S. law school. It will explain how bitcoin works, describe the current ecosystem, compare bitcoin to other payment systems and digital currencies, explore arguments for and against bitcoin specifically, and analyze salient legal issues. After I am done, I am hoping to publish the article in some way, perhaps bringing some attention to bitcoin.

It would be useful to get a sense of who the current bitcoin users are. I'm assuming that the votes are completely confidential so individuals can answer freely (but I'm not sure -- if you think differently, please post a reply).

I know that some of these overlap, but please answer whichever is the best for you.

Thanks,
Bosshyip

It seems some ability to script local bitcoin wallet actions would be useful.  For example, give the user the ability to add "rules" to the local wallet which specify operations such as

if local block generated, send to address X when it matures
if money received to account A, move it to account B
if money received to account A, send it to address Y

WARNING:  this topic is just a crazy idea, I don't even know if it makes any sense.  Please be indulgent.


Today I was again responding to the classic critic about bitcoin, concerning the initial distribution, which was accused not to be "fair".

As I have already explained it, I see no other way than using CPU power to distribute an electronic decentralised anonymous currency.  I have already stated that this is probably some kind of a theorem that could be proved:

"The initial distribution of an electronic currency that is both decentralised and anonymous has to be related to the distribution of CPU power in the network."


However, I came up with quite a crazy idea about an alternative way to distribute a currency in a fair way.

I'd call it the toecoin.  It's just a crypto currency like bitcoin, but with a tiny, and yet quite huge difference.

Every human being has the right to receive 2 toecoins for free, just because he is a human being.  That's the rule.  The currency is decentralised and anonymous, and thus, according to my theorem, it can not be purely electronic.

Here is how it works.  I am a human being and I have no toecoin.  This is not normal, and I want to claim my right to own two toecoins.  I wait for the next block to be found.  For the sake of the discussion I'll imagine that the average time for discovering block is one day, and not six minutes.

Ok, there is a guy who finds a block.  Now here is the first difference with bitcoin:  the guy doesn't receive a reward yet.  He publishes the block, with a spectial generation transaction, but this transaction doesn't worth anything yet.

I hurry and I go this guy's place, or some public place meeting address he published on the web.  I have some time to do so.  About 24 hours.

Here I am at the place, and I am not the only one.  Basically a whole bunch of toecoinless people who wants to claim their toecoins just as I do.  Now, the guy, because he has found the proof of work, he is granted the right to give 2 toecoins to anyone he wants, under one condition that I will describe later.  He could give them to himself, if he fullfills the condition.

Negociation start.  Everybody will promess to give a fraction of their new toecoins to the guy.  There is some kind of an auction which starts.  Let's say I'm the winner.  I promess to pay 0.2 toecoins.  Most people didn't agree to pay more than 0.15.  They'll have to wait an other day, an other block.

To have the right to receive the 2 toecoins (1.8 after I give 0.2 to the block discover), I have to do the following:

1.  I cut each of my little toes and I film the scene.  This will prevent me from getting more than two toecoins later in my life;
2.  I have to put the toes in a machine that will analyse the toe fingerprint and the DNA and turn the corresponding data into a unique ECDSA private key.  This will ensure that the created toecoins do indeed belong to the person who cut his toes, because it should be possible for me to have computed the ECDSA key in the past (I can analyse my DNA and print my fingerprints).  The whole process has to be public and recorded so that anyone can verify there has been no fraud.


This sounds silly, but my aim is to show how difficult it would be to distribute something in a "fair" way in a decentralised, anonymous manner.  At some point, I really think you would have to use people's flesh, meaning that the money can not be purely electronic.