pantaril

Fiat money isn't a pyramid scheme. You don't buy in on the assumption of future market growth that will drive up the value of what you have. You expect your fiat to become worth less, not more, over time.

Wow, so if bitcoin is or isn't pyramid scheme depends on your assumption when you buy it? That's a new one. Than i guess I'm safe because i bought it to buy goods with it, never expected that price will soar so much.

You usually don't know if the address is known drug site wallet, dark markets usually generate unique address for each transaction. Even if you do know it, you can't know if the user bought something illegal, there is also legal stuff sold on dark markets. Keeping everyone legal interests in mind means that you don't give personal data to police or anyone else without proper warrant.

"A person in the US who, for example, wants to watch all but the latest season of Game of Thrones"

This is simply not true. In my experience, only the most mainstream content is available legally on portals like itunes or netflix. If you want to watch something more rare (art film, old foreign film, film with subtitles in different language) you can try to buy very expensive DVD+shipping and wait few weeks for it to arrive or you have to use illegal sources.

A computer on the other hand does have access control. The default response then becomes "wow the authorised user of this computer set the background image to 2 gay men kissing".

I wonder what is so bad about two men kissing? Would man and woman kissing spur same reaction? Or are there any anti-homosexual propaganda laws in USA similar to Russia?

we need to be on the right side of the fence

I agree but i think that current copyright is on the wrong side of the "fence".

As copyright is regulated federally

It's even worse, copyright is regulated by international treaties[1]. Every time someone comes up with an idea to reform copyright, shorten the terms etc. it's immediately shot down by the argument that we are bound by those agreegments and cannot change anything ourselves.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internationa...

and if you take away the ability for people to monetize media

He is talking about figuring out another way for creators to monetize their media without artificial restrictions on sharing/copying. He doesn't want to take away money from creators, just the copyright. And i couldn't agree more with this idea.

"On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed under the protection of your passcode. Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data"

Too bad they (and other phone manufacturers) don't protect phone calls with some kind of end-to-end encryption.

But if you have a billion dollars of gold in your basement, you should be very, very paranoid.

If i had so many bitcoins as Satoshi Nakamoto i would certainly not store them in my basement. I'd split my private key using n:m scheme and store them in secure deposit boxes in banks.

DNS is useful because it is authoritative. What would happen if two parts of this 'distributed' ICANN disagreed on something? Different parts of the internet would see a completely different state (e.g. who owns gov.uk?), Thus rendering DNS effectively useless.

This problem can be solved in distributed system using bitcoin-like proof of work scheme. If two parts of the network disagree, the bigger part is considered right. Namecoin project is trying to implement distributed DNS using this technique - http://namecoin.info/ .

I've been thinking a lot the past few weeks about the preservation of art and goods in general.

I've been thinking about this myself. What i found out is that current copyright law is terrible for preservation of our culture because it makes attempts to archive, share, backup or digitalize abandoned games, music or movies illegal before their copyright expires, at which time, most of them would be probably lost foreever.

Seems like a brilliant solution to this problem

The law students worked on this for months for free and the paten troll got away without any fee. I don't see what's so brilliant about it. Looks like shity system to me.

Bitcoin was released in staunch opposition to the banking system.

No, i think that quote makes it clear that bitcoin was released in staunch opposition to centralized currency, where some authority (central bank) can issue new units of currency at will and devalue the currency for everyone.

If i understand it correctly there is no open source baseband available because of various patented technologies and it is imposible to create one. But why not treat the baseband as part of insecure transit network? I'd like to see phone where voice data and text messages would be securely encrypted before sending to baseband chip and securely decrypted on the other side. I think there would be great demand for such device but i don't see any in existence. Am i missing something?

English is not my primary language and i don't know the exact etymology of the word 'sanitize' but it sounds more to me like you have to make the input 'sane' or acceptable. It doesn't imply to remove anything, rather to escape problematic characters, in this case the quotes.

"We're not making any money off of it" is kind of a moot argument.

Sure, sharing intelectual property should be OK even if you make money on it.

But very rarely does it have properly synced well-written subtitles, multiple audio tracks, and a quality encoding.

My experience is diametraly different. Legal sources like netflix, TV or some DVD's are usualy low quality, cenzored and cropped versions, terribly dubbed with no original audio or subtitles. On the other hand, i have usually no problem finding pirated copy which has none of these issues.

Exactly. When i hear a discussion in public, i won't ask for permission if i want to use or reproduce part of it elsewhere. I would give them attribution (i don't like to pretend that i came up with some idea when it isn't true) but that's all.

The attitude of content creators is quite schizophrenic. On one hand, they want to spread their work as far as possible, on the other hand, they want to limit access to it. The source of this stance is of course their business model often based on copyright law which links the financial reward of the author with the artificialy created copying limitations. Replace this with some other model where content creators reward is not depended on the number of copies sold or on number of page hits, but rather on some more rational measure like the amount of time and effort put into the creation itself, on the popularity/reputation of the creator and quality of his previous works. Then, this 'copying is stealing and stealing is bad' attitude disappears because i believe that no sane author would realy object against spreading of his works.

False, sending/recieving bitcoins/litecoins/dogecoins/monopoly money is not regulated in us. Only if you exchange those for real money in certain ammounts you need to aply for money bussiness transmition/exchange licence.

You are wrong (no citation needed either).

On the other hand, the apple store is complete joke. IDK how anyone can use a store where such basic application like bitcoin wallet is missing.

"Fuck Kim Dotcom. He's a scumbag piece of shit who deserves to rot in prison. He plots and schemes way to put hundreds of millions of dollars into his pocket off of the works of others. Anyone who supports him should be ashamed of themselves."

Fuck YOU and current copyright. By running megaupload/mega Kim Dotcom did nothing wrong. He created service for sharing information, that is a good thing. The artificial limitations copyright imposes on usage of our technologies is retarded.

But they are accepting payments in bitcoins.

Dunno about overstock but when i'm buying humble indie bundles with bitcoin, they use coinbase too and i have no coinbase account. I just scan the QR code using my android bitcoin wallet (called mycelium) and tap 'send'. No confirmations needed, beause it's small ammounts. Maybe overstock will need some confirmations for larger purchases.

So yes, there is actual bitcoin transaction going on if you don't have coinbase account.

<i>The whole "replication" angle is a total red-herring brought up by apologists for movie pirates. People are entitled to sell their work for the price that they can get for it, irrespective of the marginal cost of production, and should not be required to compete with entities that do not produce their own products, but simply free-ride on the work of others, being able to "sell" to consumers for the cost of distribution because they don't bear the cost of actually creating that work.</i>

Megaupload and pirates in general don't steal content from anyone. They create their own copies of publicly available content. I don't understand why digital data should be treated differently then physical objects. It's like calling a carpenter, who creates a copy of some furniture that he likes and sell it, a thief. On the other hand, proponents of copyright are seriously hampering the right of everyone to use publicly available information around us for our creative efforts. This seriously limits our creative potential because it's not like creative works are created out of thin air, they are always derived from our past experiences which influenced us in some way. The proponents of copyright are standing on the shoulders of giants but they don't want anyone to further build upon their work. p.s.: before someone accuses me that i don't want creators to be paid fairly for their work - i think that some regulation is necessary which would ensure promotion of fine arts but this regulation cannot be based on artificial limits on distribution of public knowledge/culture.

For example Trezor hardware wallet ( http://www.bitcointrezor.com/ ) generates its private key when it is first initialized. This way, the key never exists outside of the wallet.

How is it worthless? It protects you against passive monitoring/data retention!

There are flaws with current PKI infrastructure but as you say, it's better than nothing. There are also several initiatives to improve this situation. Google has come with certificate transparency ( http://www.certificate-transparency.org/ ) which essentialy creates public log of all issued certificates so everyone can see and verify that certificates authorities don't issue bogus/fake certificates

There is also an idea to use proof of work to estabilish network-wide consensus about valid certificates (like bitcoin or namecoin blockchain). This would be fully decentralised solution.

From http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/opinion/the-drone-that-kil... : "The missile killed him, his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians on Oct. 14, 2011, while the boys were eating dinner at an open-air restaurant in southern Yemen...The attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., said only that Abdulrahman was not “specifically targeted,” raising more questions than he answered."

I don't know if it is common for u.s. army to kill people without targeting them but if it is the case they should better learn how to aim.

You say that the legal system only works for the rich and powerful, but don't back it up.

I cited from the article that $50000 is required to hire lawyer and fill the required paperwork to defend the case. As i said i'm not from U.S. so i don't know if it is actualy true.

I could probably give you another example... if i'm not mistaken there is very high rate of cases in U.S. which end with some kind of settlement without ever getting to the trial. Often fears of financial expenses play a big role in those settlements which seems hardly fair to me.

I don't know what this guy is getting so upset about, he claims his company isn't infringing the patent, so all that he'll have to do is file a DJ for non-infringement. If he's not infringing, he'll win

I gues this is how it should work in any modern country with working juridical system. Unfortunately it seems to me (note that i'm not from USA) that in U.S., justice is available only to the rich and/or powerfull.

From the article: "Perhaps not coincidentally, $50,000 is just about what it costs to hire a lawyer and file the initial set of paperwork to defend a patent case"