Astrohacker

There is a solution to this problem. Websites should allow people to log in with their public key. You can create a new, internet-only identity with a public key. This would be a little cumbersome at first, but if browsers supported this ability, it could be just as easy as logging in with a password.

Here's how it could work: There could be metatags that specify where to submit the public key. The website will then send back a message that can only be decrypted with the private key. The browser has the user type in the password to access their private key, decrypts the message, and sends it back to the website. The user has now started a session with their public key.

Since you would use the same public key on all websites, your identity would be the same. This would not require a central server like OpenID.

There are two sides to this story. Here is Mt Gox's response: https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=20250.0

Sounds like a startup opportunity.

Due to some US law, they restrict withdrawals to $1000/day. That includes bitcoins. Presumably, they do that to make sure they are well within the law.

> I'm tired of the Kurzweil meme because I feel that it gives people a comfort that we'll reach some kind of Utopia without much effort.

Sounds like you're arguing we shouldn't hold comforting beliefs because, even if they are true, they might make us less productive. However, I think it is wiser to hold beliefs that are true, always. The reason is that it is, in general, far more valuable to hold correct beliefs than false ones. The fact that there are some special cases where holding false beliefs is better is useless, because there is no way to know when those cases are without first having correct beliefs.

Further, Kurzweil has (obviously) never argued that it wouldn't take any effort to bring these technologies about. What he has argued is that we will put forth the effort to make them happen. If anything, it is rather discomforting to think about how much work is going to have to go into this.

One of Kurzweil's important points is that humans consistently underestimate the speed of exponential growth. We have a natural bias to assume rates of growth are constant. But with exponential growth, the rate of growth is exponential, and the rate of growth of the rate of growth is exponential, etc. So although it seems like his predictions are pretty wild, they are merely based on extrapolating out the present exponential curves to the future. Keep in mind your own bias about this when criticising his conclusions. To refute him, you'd need to argue that the exponential growth was going to stop, or that his calculations about the rate of growth are wrong.

There's no way to know which IP address corresponds to which bitcoin address.

> Banks are regulated by law and have the funds insured by FDIC. i.e even if the bank goes belly up, the FDIC will make sure the depositors get the money. With BitCoin, how do you trust a bank?

There were banks before the FDIC and people trusted them. The threat of insolvency can (but doesn't always) keep them honest.

It's not a free lunch. They can sell the bitcoins on the market if they need USD.

Thanks, this is a lot better than the truecrypt system I had set up. Although I have a sqlite database that seems not to work with this... that will be staying in the truecrypt file system.

They're Bayesian probabilities, not frequencies.

This is a nice list; I haven't heard of most of these before. I was wondering, due to all the recent press about bitcoin, if there are any competing currencies for bitcoin, and this article helps answer that question. However, all of the resources listed seem to solve different problems than bitcoin. Several of them enable the user to create their own currency rather than provide a single new one. None of the systems/protocols/programs listed have all of the following features that bitcoin has:

1) Decentralized and solves the double-spending problem without a central server

2) Automatic and controlled production of new coins

3) The rules are governed by the software running on a majority of the computing power, and thus the rules can change if the majority of the software changes

So bitcoin is unique, but there these other tools may be complementary to bitcoin.