> I see bitcoins as the storage of value, but not method of payment.
If this comes true, the bitcoin system is in trouble. Block reward is down to 25 bitcoins a block. It will half one more time then no more money for mining, it'll all be through transaction fees.
If people are just storing bitcoins and not using them, there wont be enough transaction fees and lots of miners will drop out, making the system more vulnerable to takeover by government or malicious miners.
> It will half one more time then no more money for mining, it'll all be through transaction fees.
Wrong, it will halve 31 more times until the reward is 0.00000001 (i.e. the smallest bitcoin fraction that you can currently have) around the year 2136. Only after that will it "halve" to nothing.
I feel like what they are describing is more defragmentation than garbage collection. The article uses garbage collection to mean taking sparsely filled blocks and consolidating them into a single block to free the sparsely filled ones. Garbage collection in the OO context is where you free memory the program can no longer interact with. Perhaps it means different things in different contexts?
OTOH, pursued as a niche market, it might be as profitable as first and business classes (while targeting similar demographics). (Aren't those generally fairly revenue-positive portions of the airline industry customer demographic?)
What you have described is more or less Diffie-Hellman. Unfortunately this alone wont guarantee your package's safe passage. If it did Verisign, would be out of a job.
The flaw is, you can basically just have the same scenario but replace Alice with the post office:
Bob puts the item in a box with a lock and sends to Alice. Post office intercepts the box, places their lock on it and sends it back to Bob. Bob removes his lock and sends the box back to Alice. Now the post office removes their lock and obtains the package contents.
The only way around this is to have some truly trusted third party. Even in RSA, if you aren't absolutely certain of the other user's public key, it won't work, which is why web-of-trust and other techniques are used.
Things are already complex enough to the point where even a very good lawyer barely grasps how things work. The latest example is the Redhat scenario. They hit Redhat, Redhat swings pack with a GPL violation. I guarantee you that the GPL never came up in conversation when they were considering suing Redhat.
We just need to make things even more complex until lawyers absolutely cannot predict the outcome of litigation. At that point enforcing patents can become a dangerous proposition.
Complexity is an advantage for the existing elite. The more complex you make patent law, the harder it will be to defend against if you're a small fish with limited resources.
IMO complexity through abstraction enables most of the evil in the world.
> Complexity is an advantage for the existing elite.
This is true, but until a point. Eventually if a system becomes complex enough, it must collapse. The elite are still human and they still have limitations. Even now, no lawyer is capable of committing the entire body of law responsible for the patent system to memory, nevermind actually grasping all of it.
> The more complex you make patent law, the harder it will be to defend against
The more complex the system, the more contradictions it contains. The more contradictions for you to exploit.
On the contrary, if we had an extremely simplistic system, the small fish would just be told NO with no recourse. Today, they can find reason after reason to counter-sue, appeal, file forms, etc.
Mind you, I'm only a fan of bureaucracy when I'm trying to destroy a particular system.
Although much changes with technology, much remains the same. People have had the technological ability to communicate solely through telephone/computer for many years which easily beats face to face communication in terms of efficiency in a geographically diverse group, but people are still shelling out money for plane tickets. There is something to be said for the ability to chat to someone about a ball game without speaking and hearing through a machine.
Although I'd say human to human and human to computer communication are very different, I'd agree with you that some languages are objectively better. There are ancient tribes that don't have words for numbers above two. Esperanto seems to be one of the easier languages to learn, at least for those already fluent in european languages. But when it comes to adoption, culture and ubiquity seem to be the most important factors.
I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
I agree. This isn't a space-saving brief. It's an attempt to inflame. But...
I think it's pretty cool that a new medium for legal discourse has been actually used. Several years after absorbing Scott McCloud's phenomenal book Understanding Comics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics), I set out to argue for a very technical (programming) project at work through a goofy comic. It was surprisingly effective, and got more eyes on it than the more traditional internal wiki plea. I assume that the novelty and incongruence of the medium brings the audience out of whatever comfort zone they routinely occupy.
Reminds me of "Why's Poignant Guid to Ruby" [1]. I can't say how efficient this medium is for transferring information/knowledge, but it's certainly captivating -- sometimes what's needed to get a point across is not efficiency, but captivation.
What would be interesting is if there were real online bitcoin banks that leant or invested the bitcoins to both make a profit themselves and offer their customers some interest on their savings.
If this comes true, the bitcoin system is in trouble. Block reward is down to 25 bitcoins a block. It will half one more time then no more money for mining, it'll all be through transaction fees.
If people are just storing bitcoins and not using them, there wont be enough transaction fees and lots of miners will drop out, making the system more vulnerable to takeover by government or malicious miners.