I was thinking more along the lines of transparency. They could publish a watching-only copy of their wallet on their public web site and then every person capable of running Armory can easily verify the fund owns as many coins as it claims.
Using an existing popular client instead of rolling their own lowers the learning curve for potential investors.
Armory as a Bitcoin client would have been a better choice for this, since they could have used the same 2-of-3 method for storing the private keys, but then they'd have the ability to use watching-only copies of the wallet for accounting and auditing purposes.
I'd be willing to pay a small monthly fee for, say, a VPN service that would allow me to accept incoming connection requests on a range of ports on their Internet-facing IPv4 address. Does such a service exist?
I believe AirVPN allows you to map up to 20 ports.
I also feel compelled to ask you, sir, why you hate roads, want your house to burn down and/or be attacked by roving barbarians/British troops, and prefer to eat food which would indubitably kill you and everyone you have ever met instantly were it not for government food inspectors (blessings and peace upon them for-ever)?
You forgot wanting to force children to work in the coal mines with no pay or education, and wishing to see piles of dead bodies in front of the doors to emergency rooms because they didn't have any cash on them to pay for treatment.
This topic doesn't just provoke strawmen, it provokes entire straw block parties.
Is the submitter under the impression that taxes can be justified via ethics? I'd be impressed if it could be done without resorting to magical thinking, logical contradictions, non-seguirs, or appeals to force.
I spent several years letting Gmail handle everything for me, but in the last few months I decided to go back to running my own IMAP server, using Fetchmail, and reading my mail on a standalone client.
So far the state of standalone clients compared to webmail is pretty dismal. I'm using Thunderbird now but I really miss a search function that works, as well as an addressbook that doesn't have arbitrary limitations such as a maximum of two email addresses per contact.
You telling your computer to fetch the data you have no license to and make a copy of it (in memory or on permanent storage) is a copyright violation.
I'm sure that's been successfully argued in court before but it doesn't matter because nobody takes those laws seriously.
The efforts of the copyright mafia to extract rent from the act of using a computer only serves to push people towards circumvention technology and degrade the respect the average person has for the law in general.
It doesn't matter how stable the exchange rate is or isn't if you want to accept Bitcoin as payment for services. You can use BitPay as a payment processor and they'll convert all received payments into your local currency instantly and automatically so you never have to deal with exchange rate risk.
Deflation caused by a fixed currency supply just means that the price of everything falls over time, so that all the products you buy behave like computers and consumer electronics do today.
The only people who lose in this scenario are the people who benefit from inflation as the first spenders of new currency. They get to live for free by leeching spending power from everyone else.
Consequently I see one of two scenarios unfolding:
Bitcoin continues to grow and fundamentally alter trade worldwide in the coming decades.
Bitcoin gets held back by a number of swift and excellent electronic payment services from large companies like Google and Facebook and remains niche to those who care about privacy and freedom.
Right now, I think the latter is slightly more likely.
All those electronic payment services from Google and Facebook are going to fall into the same trap as other centralized services. They'll have to deal with the media companies who sue them if they provide payment processing services to companies that Hollywood doesn't like. They'll have to implement arbitrary restrictions to satisfy AML. They'll be forced to restrict service because one government somewhere throws a fit if they serve customers from the wrong part of the world.
It doesn't work that way. There are no coins - there are only unspent balances. WIthout the private key corresponding to the address containing the unspent outputs you can't sign a valid transaction message.
If the loss of granularity ever becomes a problem it could be change by updating the protocol to allow for more divisibility. It's not likely that a majority of users will agree to any other change, like increasing the block reward. People who are adopting bitcoin are doing so precisely because of its feature of not having unlimited issuance. If enough people are using bitcoin such that divisibility is a problem they aren't likely to want to go back to the current status quo.
Did you not notice the fact that right now, at this very moment, the average person in Argentina doesn't give a shit about what their government says is illegal and actively ignores and works around every law implementing currency controls?
That's what happens when a national currency fails.
Slashdot Mirror
You just described all the best features of Bitcoin, which is exactly why it's seeing exponential adoption (not just price appreciation).
I was thinking more along the lines of transparency. They could publish a watching-only copy of their wallet on their public web site and then every person capable of running Armory can easily verify the fund owns as many coins as it claims.
Using an existing popular client instead of rolling their own lowers the learning curve for potential investors.
Some people are just mad that they missed the boat and didn't get in as early as they could have.
You don't need file systems to store files on a hard drive. You can just open up the block device with a hex editor and change the bits yourself.
Armory as a Bitcoin client would have been a better choice for this, since they could have used the same 2-of-3 method for storing the private keys, but then they'd have the ability to use watching-only copies of the wallet for accounting and auditing purposes.
I believe AirVPN allows you to map up to 20 ports.
For VPN providers.
I'm partial to AirVPN since they accept Bitcoins for payment and let you connect via Tor if that's what you want.
So cute. You still think government is more than just a mafia with costumes.
First asteroid mining, and now this. Once NASA is completely out of the way the Space Age can actually begin.
Because a lot of websites, especially financial sites, have stupid limitations on password length and/or complexity.
You forgot wanting to force children to work in the coal mines with no pay or education, and wishing to see piles of dead bodies in front of the doors to emergency rooms because they didn't have any cash on them to pay for treatment.
This topic doesn't just provoke strawmen, it provokes entire straw block parties.
Is the submitter under the impression that taxes can be justified via ethics? I'd be impressed if it could be done without resorting to magical thinking, logical contradictions, non-seguirs, or appeals to force.
I don't want all my emails mined for advertisement or other purposes.
I spent several years letting Gmail handle everything for me, but in the last few months I decided to go back to running my own IMAP server, using Fetchmail, and reading my mail on a standalone client.
So far the state of standalone clients compared to webmail is pretty dismal. I'm using Thunderbird now but I really miss a search function that works, as well as an addressbook that doesn't have arbitrary limitations such as a maximum of two email addresses per contact.
It's done.
I'm sure that's been successfully argued in court before but it doesn't matter because nobody takes those laws seriously.
The efforts of the copyright mafia to extract rent from the act of using a computer only serves to push people towards circumvention technology and degrade the respect the average person has for the law in general.
It doesn't matter how stable the exchange rate is or isn't if you want to accept Bitcoin as payment for services. You can use BitPay as a payment processor and they'll convert all received payments into your local currency instantly and automatically so you never have to deal with exchange rate risk.
Deflation caused by a fixed currency supply just means that the price of everything falls over time, so that all the products you buy behave like computers and consumer electronics do today.
The only people who lose in this scenario are the people who benefit from inflation as the first spenders of new currency. They get to live for free by leeching spending power from everyone else.
OMG you're right. I can't believe all the people who've been working on this project for the last three years missed these numerous fatal flaws.
Please, go onto the Bitcoin forums and let them know what you've discovered right away so they all know it's time to give up and go home.
Consequently I see one of two scenarios unfolding:
Bitcoin continues to grow and fundamentally alter trade worldwide in the coming decades.
Bitcoin gets held back by a number of swift and excellent electronic payment services from large companies like Google and Facebook and remains niche to those who care about privacy and freedom.
Right now, I think the latter is slightly more likely.
All those electronic payment services from Google and Facebook are going to fall into the same trap as other centralized services. They'll have to deal with the media companies who sue them if they provide payment processing services to companies that Hollywood doesn't like. They'll have to implement arbitrary restrictions to satisfy AML. They'll be forced to restrict service because one government somewhere throws a fit if they serve customers from the wrong part of the world.
Bitcoin faces none of those difficulties.
How do you know they aren't?
It doesn't work that way. There are no coins - there are only unspent balances. WIthout the private key corresponding to the address containing the unspent outputs you can't sign a valid transaction message.
Will you retract this statement if it can be shown that tomorrow bitcoin will have more users than it has today?
If the loss of granularity ever becomes a problem it could be change by updating the protocol to allow for more divisibility. It's not likely that a majority of users will agree to any other change, like increasing the block reward. People who are adopting bitcoin are doing so precisely because of its feature of not having unlimited issuance. If enough people are using bitcoin such that divisibility is a problem they aren't likely to want to go back to the current status quo.
Did you not notice the fact that right now, at this very moment, the average person in Argentina doesn't give a shit about what their government says is illegal and actively ignores and works around every law implementing currency controls?
That's what happens when a national currency fails.