1- Bitcoin transactions can take hours to complete, and in no cases do they complete fast
Several years ago sure. Typically minutes with todays hashing rate.
Hashing rate has zero effect on how quickly transactions are confirmed in the blockchain. The network adjusts the difficulty to counter increases in hash rate such that one block is completed, on average, every ten minutes. This is an important part of maintaining coherency: blocks need to be propagated to (almost) every node across the network in significantly less time than the inter-block interval. If blocks occur too quickly then you get lots of forks and have to wait for more confirmations before you can be sure the transaction is properly recorded, negating any speed gains.
A better counter-argument would be that the GP is comparing apples and oranges. With Bitcoin, once you have a couple of confirmations (on the order of 30 minutes) the transaction is effectively irreversible. To reach that point with any other online payment system requires months. If you don't care about reversibility, Bitcoin transactions are generally visible to the recipient, with 0 confirmations, within a couple of seconds after they're broadcast. At that point the recipient can see that the transaction exists and is (currently) valid, though with a lot of work and some luck it may be possible for the sender to preempt it with another conflicting transaction before it's officially recorded in the blockchain.
At that point you have two factors protecting the chain from forking: the technical CPU power requirements, and the already present "good behavior" of the banks themselves, who don't want to get kicked out of the cartel for shenanigans. That could also reduce the CPU requirements a lot - the members of the cartel can simply decree that nobody seeks to acquire more than N% of the total processing power or they get kicked out.
At that point you could actually eliminate the CPU requirements altogether. There is no need for "mining" when only trusted peers are allowed to contribute blocks—any peer can just append a block and broadcast it to the rest, with some simple arbitration protocol to resolve race conditions. You would still get the primary characteristics of a blockchain, a Merkle tree of ordered transactions protected by a chain of signatures stretching back to a genesis block.
The whole point of "mining" in Bitcoin, besides providing a reasonably fair initial distribution of bitcoins, is to avoid the need to trust the other nodes or employ some out-of-band protocol to deal with forks, whether due to races or malice. The more CPU-efficient solution which would be viable for a (semi-)private blockchain with write access restricted to trusted insiders would be utterly impractical as the foundation of an open, decentralized network of anonymous (or pseudonymous) users.
Making it illegal to hire a murderer or start a riot is not a limitation on free speech. Such laws are in place to prohibit you from infringing on the rights of others, namely the potential murder victim or the people who will suffer injury and property destruction as a result of your riot.
These would be limitations on free speech, actually. Murder and rioting themselves would be non-speech actions which cause harm to others, but offering to pay for a murder, or making a speech which you hope will lead to a riot, are merely speech, and of themselves cause harm to no one. Someone else has to make the choice to actually perform the harmful act, and they are wholly responsible for the consequences of that choice.
Read the water safety standards sometime -- lead concentration safety is usually measured after water has been flowing for a couple minutes, because in many older houses and older cities it takes that long to clear out the water that's been sitting there and leaching lead, copper, and other things... from lead solder, and perhaps even large old lead pipes.
Doesn't that rather defeat the point? It's not like people generally leave the water running for several minutes before filling their glass. The water they're drinking is exactly the part the test is throwing away because it's too contaminated.
So the one effective means available of providing desperately needed competition (a fact you acknowledge) should be prohibited because it seems good?
Not "because it seems good", but despite how good it seems. The reason is the close coupling with the municipal government—even if the service isn't outright tax-subsidized, it is not unusual for the initial funds to be raised through tax-backed municipal bonds, and as a branch of the municipality there would be easier access to things like permits and right-of-way which private ISPs must negotiate for.
If anyone really thinks that their municipal broadband service can compete on equal terms with other private ISPs, there is a simple solution which doesn't require the municipality to get involved: form a co-op. The structure of a co-op is very much like a municipal government, but it doesn't have access to taxes or municipal bonds, or "privileged insider" status regarding other city services. A broadband co-op would be subject to exactly the same rules as any other private ISP, and would not be inhibited by a rule prohibiting municipal governments from offering Internet access.
The USPS delivers my mail every single weekday (and Saturday) without fail and at a consistent time.
You must have a more reliable post office than I do, then. I have repeatedly received mail intended for another address, usually one of my neighbours—though on occasion they've gotten the street wrong as well. I can only assume that the neighbors have received my mail on occasion. With a few exceptions, if it wasn't eventually delivered I would never know what I was missing. (Most of it's junk mail, of course. I really ought to be able to bill the USPS for their part in helping to dump other people's unwanted and unsolicited advertising trash on my property.)
In my area, at least, USPS leaves parcels on the front porch the same as UPS. Unless signature confirmation was required, of course; since I live by myself and work during standard delivery hours, that means that the package gets held at the post office, which is only open while I am at work... at least UPS provides a way to authorize delivery for most "signature requested" packages online through their UPS My Choice program. They also let you see when you have packages in-route to your address, whether or not the shipper bothered to notify you of the tracking number, and you can reroute those packages you can't pre-sign for to a UPS Store, which is open later in the evening. With USPS, the tracking data generally becomes available only after the package has already been delivered.
Plus, even if you ignore any principled objections; are you really going to win a war of ideas by looking like an utter coward? "Ohh, jihad is so attractive that we can't let kids hear about it or they'll adopt it for sure and go out and start attacking our decadent immoral civilization!" That's not fighting 'the terrorists', that's agreeing with them.
Exactly. The right response to ISIS propaganda is to first thoroughly and very publicly dismantle their arguments, and then, if they continue to push the same propaganda, laugh at them. In a war of ideas, humor can be a very effective weapon. The last thing you want to do is show everyone that you feel threatened by your opponent's propaganda.
To be fair would say it would have been better if under a certain height on private property without a camera did not need to be registered for private use.
So the FAA's official position (as of a statement made in 2010, at least) is that the navigable public airspace starts at 500' AGL, barring airports and so forth. Aircraft below that height are, in general, considered to be trespassing against the owner of the property below if they are in that space without permission. There is also a 1946 Supreme Court ruling (United States vs. Causby) establishing that landowners control the airspace above their property to an altitude of not less than 83 feet. It would be interesting to see whether the FAA can actually enforce any registration requirements for "drones" flown below 83-500' AGL, outside the public airspace, with the permission of the property owner(s).
If I understand the issue correctly, this isn't something that can be negotiated. The problem is the hash algorithm used by the CA to sign Facebook's public key, not hash used for the content itself (which would be negotiated). Under normal circumstances a site only has one CA-signed certificate which it presents to all clients. The problem is that new browsers won't accept certificates signed by the CA with a SHA-1 hash, while older browsers will reject certificates signed with SHA-2.
OK, I can see how the "or other action" language can make that overly broad. You wouldn't want something said in casual conversation to result in termination of all your licenses. On the other hand, I can see why they wouldn't want to limit it to only fully-formed lawsuits, since that would open the door to patent holders trying to extort payments through settlements without actually risking license termination by carrying through with a lawsuit.
Still, that seems like a mere case of poor wording rather than malicious or evil intent.
So what if it's the best place to put the telescope. It's their land!
On what basis? How have they used this land, or improved on it? Apparently most people can't even travel there without taking special precautions due to the altitude, so it's unlikely that anyone bothered to stake a real claim before this telescope project came along.
If someone was actually living there, of course, then that would be a different matter. But we seem to be talking about unoccupied land rather than property.
No, something is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. What the owners want is irrelevant, unless that's what they would pay for it if they didn't own it.
What the owners want is not irrelevant. If the owners were offered $1M for their land, and they turned down that offer, then it was worth more than $1M to them at that point in time. How much more remains an open question, but they had a choice between the land and $1M and they chose the land, so it was worth at least that much. In particular, the fact that the highest offer that has been made so far is $1M does not imply that the land is worth at most $1M.
It can be argued that we do indeed have these freedoms. Since you are free to commit murder, theft and rape, nothing is stopping you for the most part. And indeed people obviously do that. However we enforce consequences to these acts after the fact.
The real trick is that you are free to do absolutely anything so long as you don't complain when others do the same right back to you. You want to go out and murder people? Fine, but don't complain when you receive a death sentence. You want to be a thief? Fine, but don't complain when others don't respect your property rights.
Where you find injustice and lack of freedom is when the "enforcement" involves a disproportionate response, doing to other people what they did not do to you. A death sentence for theft, for example, or fines or prison time for unapproved speech.
Those terms seem perfectly reasonable to me. If you want to cling to your patents, don't use their code. We could do with a few less patents in the world.
Suing someone over patent infringement while taking advantage of code they've freely contributed for everyone's use, on the other hand—now that would be evil.
Without the "scheme", which is a pretty critical part of the definition. It's as much like a pyramid scheme as any new company's IPO, or a new commodity, or really just about anything else new that has value in trade.
... and it is estimated Satoshi has at least 1 million bitcoins (the current value of which is over $400 million dollars). So I think many people are curious as to who holds this wealth, which is an unduly massive reward for having created a crpytocurrency.
You really think $400m is "an unduly massive reward" for putting together a worldwide, decentralized, distributed transaction system currently handling transfers worth over $100m per day? Plenty of others have received a lot more money for much smaller contributions.
In any case, that's merely theoretical paper wealth. There is no guarantee that Satoshi still has the private keys to all those early coinbase transactions, which were worth very little at the time. Even if he did, liquidity is not yet so high that anyone could sell a million BTC over a short time at anywhere near the current market price. Sold over a longer term, it represents a couple days' worth of normal trading volume—enough to lower the price a bit, but not enough to flood the market.
You're supposed to IMMEDIATELY put aside the $30,000 and only spend $60,000, then pay the IRS at least every three months. So according to the law, everyone had the ability to pay their taxes. If you owe the IRS it's because you improperly spent their money when you had it in your possession.
That does kind of break down in the not-unheard-of case where someone receives non-divisible goods valued at significantly more than their disposable income. In that case you never had any money to spend or set aside; you won a house, a yacht, a fancy vacation... and unless you decide to sell it, assuming that's even an option, you don't have anything with which to pay the taxes they claim that you owe based on the (estimated) market value of your prize.
Also, it's not their money. Theft only confers possession, not ownership. Unfortunately, they're the ones with the courts and police and armies, so good luck recovering your stolen property.
the bitcoin technology is more suitable for internal banking systems than public use.
A "blockchain" designed to keep records under private, centralized control between trusted parties is more commonly known as a "database", and is much more efficiently implemented without the overhead of a cryptographically-secure blockchain. The whole point of the "bitcoin technology"—the only reason to accept the corresponding overhead—is to enable decentralized transfers between untrusted parties. In other words, Bitcoin itself, or something very much like it.
Which means either using them to pay for something (and thus sending them to a payment processor)
You can make purchases with Bitcoin without going through any payment processor. Sure, a lot of sites use BitPay or Coinbase or similar, but there are some that accept bitcoins directly. For that matter, not all of the ones that do use a payment processor require any personally-identifying information, particularly for online services or digital goods. (Obviously if you need something shipped to you, that isn't going to be very anonymous.) The payment processor itself doesn't collect any of this information; they just present an order-specific Bitcoin address and ensure that the funds are received and delivered to the merchant, typically with an option for automatic currency exchange. They can identify the merchant, but not the buyer.
It could be made illegal, of course, but the communication itself was probably illegal anyway. It would only stand out if implemented poorly, however. Done properly it will just look like an unknown (proprietary) binary protocol, which isn't particularly uncommon. They can't possibly have the manpower necessary to reverse-engineer every unknown data format they happen to intercept, and it would be easier and cheaper to ban the Internet entirely than to enforce a rule that their subjects use only registered and documented protocols. Notice that they only added measures to intercept HTTPS, when they could have simply blocked it and/or banned encryption entirely. They know that they can't exercise effective control over the format of the traffic.
Even if they did, you could just encode your encrypted traffic as "noise" in a funny video of your cat, or any number of other innocuous-looking formats. Even text formats are possible carriers, albeit at much lower throughput.
"Soccer mom"s" are expected to follow the laws your dreamed of elitist society would enact. Are you really saying they should have no say in the matter?
The problem is the other way around: we're expected to follow the laws they enact. We should get a veto—the only form of representation that actually makes a difference. As should they, of course; it doesn't matter which group is in charge.
The difference between privilege and rights are purely subjective.... The UN believes Internet access is a right. Our exalted king believes life itself is a privilege.
They can believe what they want; that doesn't change the definition. A privilege is something which someone else grants to you. It exists by their will and sufferance. A right is inherently yours, and not dependent on anyone else's consent or approval.
If someone else has to take action for the "right" to be upheld (e.g. Internet service, which someone else would have to provide), it's not a right. Real rights come about due to reciprocation: if you take action which infringes on what someone else considers their right, you have no cause to complain when they (or their representative(s)) take the same action toward you. You can't simultaneously claim that something isn't a right (by violating it) and that it is a right (by claiming protection for yourself). If you murder someone, for example, then you have no cause to complain should your victim's appointed representative sentence you to death in return. The same goes for theft, or any other violation of one's property rights; however, the response has to be proportional to the original offense.
Are you willing to cut off all traffic to and from the UK? China? India? Mexico? Italy?
Yes.
Well, then I'm very glad it isn't your decision. Or the President's, or Congress's, for that matter, short of a constitutional amendment revoking freedom of speech, which would never pass.
If you're the EU having to chose between Russia and the Middle East and America, you'll pick America.
It wouldn't just be "Russian and the Middle East", it would be any country that doesn't join the club. By which I mean any country which actually cares about principles like liberty and freedom of speech, or for that matter simply doesn't want to turn into a authoritarian dictatorship like the very countries we're theoretically fighting. Just look at the countries which have the kind of national firewall you're proposing; do you really want the U.S. to be like them? You'd just be saving ISIS the trouble.
I think you overestimate how "necessary" the U.S. market is to the rest of the world. Sure, we're influential now, but we're only a small fraction of the population. While it would mean some major cuts in the short term, India and China could do well enough on their own, as could the E.U. They already resent the dependency and how the U.S. abuses it to serve its own interests; it wouldn't take much to drive them out of our sphere of influence entirely.
3) Cut the cord, Great Firewall of America. We stop routing traffic to and from unfriendly parts of the world. For this work we have be willing to cast a broad net.
Indeed, a much broader net than you seem to think. For this to be at all effective you would need to cut off not only "unfriendly" parts of the world, but also anyone who doesn't go along with your plan and cut themselves off from places you consider "unfriendly". Otherwise it becomes trivial to route traffic through other still-connected countries. Are you willing to cut off all traffic to and from the UK? China? India? Mexico? Italy? At least some of these countries are not going to go along with your plan. And so long as any route remains from the U.S. to "unfriendly" countries, communication remains possible. It would hardly even count as an inconvenience.
From a purely technical point of view, this plan is unworkable without cutting the U.S. itself off from pretty much every other country in the world. And that's not going to happen; we have far too much invested in maintaining that global communication infrastructure, not to mention the political alliances and dependence on foreign trade. You would be better off suggesting that we physically lay siege to the entire Middle East—you'd have a better chance of success. The fact that the plan is completely reprehensible in terms of principles and fundamental rights is almost beside the point.
Choice 1b) you install the certificate, your traffic is snooped, but knowing this to be the case you tunnel a real TLS connection inside the MITM'd connection. (Secure TLS via a compromised TLS VPN.)
One of the nice things about encryption is that it's composable. Outer layer compromised? No problem; just add another layer inside. As long as they allow any information to be communicated, there will always be room for an encrypted communication channel, though it may need to be disguised with steganography.
That would be up to the venue. They could make exceptions for vetted organizations, or issue a limited number of one-time transferable tickets (probably at higher prices). If it's for a company event they could issue tickets usable only by employees of that company. Any such arrangements would be under contract between the issuer and the other organization, and not open to the general public.
Or they could just say that you have to do your raffles/prizes with vouchers and buy the actual tickets after you know who wins. Of course, in that case they might run out of tickets before you get around to buying them, so you'd better have a backup plan. They have no obligation to support alternative means of distributing tickets. They may be OK with handing out tickets as prizes, or the may want to maintain control over distribution themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
1- Bitcoin transactions can take hours to complete, and in no cases do they complete fast
Several years ago sure. Typically minutes with todays hashing rate.
Hashing rate has zero effect on how quickly transactions are confirmed in the blockchain. The network adjusts the difficulty to counter increases in hash rate such that one block is completed, on average, every ten minutes. This is an important part of maintaining coherency: blocks need to be propagated to (almost) every node across the network in significantly less time than the inter-block interval. If blocks occur too quickly then you get lots of forks and have to wait for more confirmations before you can be sure the transaction is properly recorded, negating any speed gains.
A better counter-argument would be that the GP is comparing apples and oranges. With Bitcoin, once you have a couple of confirmations (on the order of 30 minutes) the transaction is effectively irreversible. To reach that point with any other online payment system requires months. If you don't care about reversibility, Bitcoin transactions are generally visible to the recipient, with 0 confirmations, within a couple of seconds after they're broadcast. At that point the recipient can see that the transaction exists and is (currently) valid, though with a lot of work and some luck it may be possible for the sender to preempt it with another conflicting transaction before it's officially recorded in the blockchain.
At that point you have two factors protecting the chain from forking: the technical CPU power requirements, and the already present "good behavior" of the banks themselves, who don't want to get kicked out of the cartel for shenanigans. That could also reduce the CPU requirements a lot - the members of the cartel can simply decree that nobody seeks to acquire more than N% of the total processing power or they get kicked out.
At that point you could actually eliminate the CPU requirements altogether. There is no need for "mining" when only trusted peers are allowed to contribute blocks—any peer can just append a block and broadcast it to the rest, with some simple arbitration protocol to resolve race conditions. You would still get the primary characteristics of a blockchain, a Merkle tree of ordered transactions protected by a chain of signatures stretching back to a genesis block.
The whole point of "mining" in Bitcoin, besides providing a reasonably fair initial distribution of bitcoins, is to avoid the need to trust the other nodes or employ some out-of-band protocol to deal with forks, whether due to races or malice. The more CPU-efficient solution which would be viable for a (semi-)private blockchain with write access restricted to trusted insiders would be utterly impractical as the foundation of an open, decentralized network of anonymous (or pseudonymous) users.
Making it illegal to hire a murderer or start a riot is not a limitation on free speech. Such laws are in place to prohibit you from infringing on the rights of others, namely the potential murder victim or the people who will suffer injury and property destruction as a result of your riot.
These would be limitations on free speech, actually. Murder and rioting themselves would be non-speech actions which cause harm to others, but offering to pay for a murder, or making a speech which you hope will lead to a riot, are merely speech, and of themselves cause harm to no one. Someone else has to make the choice to actually perform the harmful act, and they are wholly responsible for the consequences of that choice.
Read the water safety standards sometime -- lead concentration safety is usually measured after water has been flowing for a couple minutes, because in many older houses and older cities it takes that long to clear out the water that's been sitting there and leaching lead, copper, and other things... from lead solder, and perhaps even large old lead pipes.
Doesn't that rather defeat the point? It's not like people generally leave the water running for several minutes before filling their glass. The water they're drinking is exactly the part the test is throwing away because it's too contaminated.
So the one effective means available of providing desperately needed competition (a fact you acknowledge) should be prohibited because it seems good?
Not "because it seems good", but despite how good it seems. The reason is the close coupling with the municipal government—even if the service isn't outright tax-subsidized, it is not unusual for the initial funds to be raised through tax-backed municipal bonds, and as a branch of the municipality there would be easier access to things like permits and right-of-way which private ISPs must negotiate for.
If anyone really thinks that their municipal broadband service can compete on equal terms with other private ISPs, there is a simple solution which doesn't require the municipality to get involved: form a co-op. The structure of a co-op is very much like a municipal government, but it doesn't have access to taxes or municipal bonds, or "privileged insider" status regarding other city services. A broadband co-op would be subject to exactly the same rules as any other private ISP, and would not be inhibited by a rule prohibiting municipal governments from offering Internet access.
The USPS delivers my mail every single weekday (and Saturday) without fail and at a consistent time.
You must have a more reliable post office than I do, then. I have repeatedly received mail intended for another address, usually one of my neighbours—though on occasion they've gotten the street wrong as well. I can only assume that the neighbors have received my mail on occasion. With a few exceptions, if it wasn't eventually delivered I would never know what I was missing. (Most of it's junk mail, of course. I really ought to be able to bill the USPS for their part in helping to dump other people's unwanted and unsolicited advertising trash on my property.)
In my area, at least, USPS leaves parcels on the front porch the same as UPS. Unless signature confirmation was required, of course; since I live by myself and work during standard delivery hours, that means that the package gets held at the post office, which is only open while I am at work... at least UPS provides a way to authorize delivery for most "signature requested" packages online through their UPS My Choice program. They also let you see when you have packages in-route to your address, whether or not the shipper bothered to notify you of the tracking number, and you can reroute those packages you can't pre-sign for to a UPS Store, which is open later in the evening. With USPS, the tracking data generally becomes available only after the package has already been delivered.
Plus, even if you ignore any principled objections; are you really going to win a war of ideas by looking like an utter coward? "Ohh, jihad is so attractive that we can't let kids hear about it or they'll adopt it for sure and go out and start attacking our decadent immoral civilization!" That's not fighting 'the terrorists', that's agreeing with them.
Exactly. The right response to ISIS propaganda is to first thoroughly and very publicly dismantle their arguments, and then, if they continue to push the same propaganda, laugh at them. In a war of ideas, humor can be a very effective weapon. The last thing you want to do is show everyone that you feel threatened by your opponent's propaganda.
To be fair would say it would have been better if under a certain height on private property without a camera did not need to be registered for private use.
So the FAA's official position (as of a statement made in 2010, at least) is that the navigable public airspace starts at 500' AGL, barring airports and so forth. Aircraft below that height are, in general, considered to be trespassing against the owner of the property below if they are in that space without permission. There is also a 1946 Supreme Court ruling (United States vs. Causby) establishing that landowners control the airspace above their property to an altitude of not less than 83 feet. It would be interesting to see whether the FAA can actually enforce any registration requirements for "drones" flown below 83-500' AGL, outside the public airspace, with the permission of the property owner(s).
If I understand the issue correctly, this isn't something that can be negotiated. The problem is the hash algorithm used by the CA to sign Facebook's public key, not hash used for the content itself (which would be negotiated). Under normal circumstances a site only has one CA-signed certificate which it presents to all clients. The problem is that new browsers won't accept certificates signed by the CA with a SHA-1 hash, while older browsers will reject certificates signed with SHA-2.
OK, I can see how the "or other action" language can make that overly broad. You wouldn't want something said in casual conversation to result in termination of all your licenses. On the other hand, I can see why they wouldn't want to limit it to only fully-formed lawsuits, since that would open the door to patent holders trying to extort payments through settlements without actually risking license termination by carrying through with a lawsuit.
Still, that seems like a mere case of poor wording rather than malicious or evil intent.
So what if it's the best place to put the telescope. It's their land!
On what basis? How have they used this land, or improved on it? Apparently most people can't even travel there without taking special precautions due to the altitude, so it's unlikely that anyone bothered to stake a real claim before this telescope project came along.
If someone was actually living there, of course, then that would be a different matter. But we seem to be talking about unoccupied land rather than property.
No, something is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. What the owners want is irrelevant, unless that's what they would pay for it if they didn't own it.
What the owners want is not irrelevant. If the owners were offered $1M for their land, and they turned down that offer, then it was worth more than $1M to them at that point in time. How much more remains an open question, but they had a choice between the land and $1M and they chose the land, so it was worth at least that much. In particular, the fact that the highest offer that has been made so far is $1M does not imply that the land is worth at most $1M.
It can be argued that we do indeed have these freedoms. Since you are free to commit murder, theft and rape, nothing is stopping you for the most part. And indeed people obviously do that. However we enforce consequences to these acts after the fact.
The real trick is that you are free to do absolutely anything so long as you don't complain when others do the same right back to you. You want to go out and murder people? Fine, but don't complain when you receive a death sentence. You want to be a thief? Fine, but don't complain when others don't respect your property rights.
Where you find injustice and lack of freedom is when the "enforcement" involves a disproportionate response, doing to other people what they did not do to you. A death sentence for theft, for example, or fines or prison time for unapproved speech.
Those terms seem perfectly reasonable to me. If you want to cling to your patents, don't use their code. We could do with a few less patents in the world.
Suing someone over patent infringement while taking advantage of code they've freely contributed for everyone's use, on the other hand—now that would be evil.
Bitcoin is a bit like a pyramid scheme, ...
Without the "scheme", which is a pretty critical part of the definition. It's as much like a pyramid scheme as any new company's IPO, or a new commodity, or really just about anything else new that has value in trade.
... and it is estimated Satoshi has at least 1 million bitcoins (the current value of which is over $400 million dollars). So I think many people are curious as to who holds this wealth, which is an unduly massive reward for having created a crpytocurrency.
You really think $400m is "an unduly massive reward" for putting together a worldwide, decentralized, distributed transaction system currently handling transfers worth over $100m per day? Plenty of others have received a lot more money for much smaller contributions.
In any case, that's merely theoretical paper wealth. There is no guarantee that Satoshi still has the private keys to all those early coinbase transactions, which were worth very little at the time. Even if he did, liquidity is not yet so high that anyone could sell a million BTC over a short time at anywhere near the current market price. Sold over a longer term, it represents a couple days' worth of normal trading volume—enough to lower the price a bit, but not enough to flood the market.
You're supposed to IMMEDIATELY put aside the $30,000 and only spend $60,000, then pay the IRS at least every three months. So according to the law, everyone had the ability to pay their taxes. If you owe the IRS it's because you improperly spent their money when you had it in your possession.
That does kind of break down in the not-unheard-of case where someone receives non-divisible goods valued at significantly more than their disposable income. In that case you never had any money to spend or set aside; you won a house, a yacht, a fancy vacation... and unless you decide to sell it, assuming that's even an option, you don't have anything with which to pay the taxes they claim that you owe based on the (estimated) market value of your prize.
Also, it's not their money. Theft only confers possession, not ownership. Unfortunately, they're the ones with the courts and police and armies, so good luck recovering your stolen property.
the bitcoin technology is more suitable for internal banking systems than public use.
A "blockchain" designed to keep records under private, centralized control between trusted parties is more commonly known as a "database", and is much more efficiently implemented without the overhead of a cryptographically-secure blockchain. The whole point of the "bitcoin technology"—the only reason to accept the corresponding overhead—is to enable decentralized transfers between untrusted parties. In other words, Bitcoin itself, or something very much like it.
Which means either using them to pay for something (and thus sending them to a payment processor)
You can make purchases with Bitcoin without going through any payment processor. Sure, a lot of sites use BitPay or Coinbase or similar, but there are some that accept bitcoins directly. For that matter, not all of the ones that do use a payment processor require any personally-identifying information, particularly for online services or digital goods. (Obviously if you need something shipped to you, that isn't going to be very anonymous.) The payment processor itself doesn't collect any of this information; they just present an order-specific Bitcoin address and ensure that the funds are received and delivered to the merchant, typically with an option for automatic currency exchange. They can identify the merchant, but not the buyer.
It could be made illegal, of course, but the communication itself was probably illegal anyway. It would only stand out if implemented poorly, however. Done properly it will just look like an unknown (proprietary) binary protocol, which isn't particularly uncommon. They can't possibly have the manpower necessary to reverse-engineer every unknown data format they happen to intercept, and it would be easier and cheaper to ban the Internet entirely than to enforce a rule that their subjects use only registered and documented protocols. Notice that they only added measures to intercept HTTPS, when they could have simply blocked it and/or banned encryption entirely. They know that they can't exercise effective control over the format of the traffic.
Even if they did, you could just encode your encrypted traffic as "noise" in a funny video of your cat, or any number of other innocuous-looking formats. Even text formats are possible carriers, albeit at much lower throughput.
"Soccer mom"s" are expected to follow the laws your dreamed of elitist society would enact. Are you really saying they should have no say in the matter?
The problem is the other way around: we're expected to follow the laws they enact. We should get a veto—the only form of representation that actually makes a difference. As should they, of course; it doesn't matter which group is in charge.
The difference between privilege and rights are purely subjective. ... The UN believes Internet access is a right. Our exalted king believes life itself is a privilege.
They can believe what they want; that doesn't change the definition. A privilege is something which someone else grants to you. It exists by their will and sufferance. A right is inherently yours, and not dependent on anyone else's consent or approval.
If someone else has to take action for the "right" to be upheld (e.g. Internet service, which someone else would have to provide), it's not a right. Real rights come about due to reciprocation: if you take action which infringes on what someone else considers their right, you have no cause to complain when they (or their representative(s)) take the same action toward you. You can't simultaneously claim that something isn't a right (by violating it) and that it is a right (by claiming protection for yourself). If you murder someone, for example, then you have no cause to complain should your victim's appointed representative sentence you to death in return. The same goes for theft, or any other violation of one's property rights; however, the response has to be proportional to the original offense.
Are you willing to cut off all traffic to and from the UK? China? India? Mexico? Italy?
Yes.
Well, then I'm very glad it isn't your decision. Or the President's, or Congress's, for that matter, short of a constitutional amendment revoking freedom of speech, which would never pass.
If you're the EU having to chose between Russia and the Middle East and America, you'll pick America.
It wouldn't just be "Russian and the Middle East", it would be any country that doesn't join the club. By which I mean any country which actually cares about principles like liberty and freedom of speech, or for that matter simply doesn't want to turn into a authoritarian dictatorship like the very countries we're theoretically fighting. Just look at the countries which have the kind of national firewall you're proposing; do you really want the U.S. to be like them? You'd just be saving ISIS the trouble.
I think you overestimate how "necessary" the U.S. market is to the rest of the world. Sure, we're influential now, but we're only a small fraction of the population. While it would mean some major cuts in the short term, India and China could do well enough on their own, as could the E.U. They already resent the dependency and how the U.S. abuses it to serve its own interests; it wouldn't take much to drive them out of our sphere of influence entirely.
3) Cut the cord, Great Firewall of America. We stop routing traffic to and from unfriendly parts of the world. For this work we have be willing to cast a broad net.
Indeed, a much broader net than you seem to think. For this to be at all effective you would need to cut off not only "unfriendly" parts of the world, but also anyone who doesn't go along with your plan and cut themselves off from places you consider "unfriendly". Otherwise it becomes trivial to route traffic through other still-connected countries. Are you willing to cut off all traffic to and from the UK? China? India? Mexico? Italy? At least some of these countries are not going to go along with your plan. And so long as any route remains from the U.S. to "unfriendly" countries, communication remains possible. It would hardly even count as an inconvenience.
From a purely technical point of view, this plan is unworkable without cutting the U.S. itself off from pretty much every other country in the world. And that's not going to happen; we have far too much invested in maintaining that global communication infrastructure, not to mention the political alliances and dependence on foreign trade. You would be better off suggesting that we physically lay siege to the entire Middle East—you'd have a better chance of success. The fact that the plan is completely reprehensible in terms of principles and fundamental rights is almost beside the point.
Choice 1b) you install the certificate, your traffic is snooped, but knowing this to be the case you tunnel a real TLS connection inside the MITM'd connection. (Secure TLS via a compromised TLS VPN.)
One of the nice things about encryption is that it's composable. Outer layer compromised? No problem; just add another layer inside. As long as they allow any information to be communicated, there will always be room for an encrypted communication channel, though it may need to be disguised with steganography.
That would be up to the venue. They could make exceptions for vetted organizations, or issue a limited number of one-time transferable tickets (probably at higher prices). If it's for a company event they could issue tickets usable only by employees of that company. Any such arrangements would be under contract between the issuer and the other organization, and not open to the general public.
Or they could just say that you have to do your raffles/prizes with vouchers and buy the actual tickets after you know who wins. Of course, in that case they might run out of tickets before you get around to buying them, so you'd better have a backup plan. They have no obligation to support alternative means of distributing tickets. They may be OK with handing out tickets as prizes, or the may want to maintain control over distribution themselves.