http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=CAD&to=USD&view=10Y
I got a nearly 10% raise thanks to a strong Canadian economy and weak American one. Keep it up guys.
According to your chart a year ago 1 CAD got you around 1 USD and today it gets you 0.90 USD. Normally that's not interpreted as a decline in the strength of the dollar.
The same is true if you generate a private key with a lower entropy source to simplify encoding (called a brain wallet for some reason.) Yes there a longer passphrases that do have more entropy, but you are still limiting the alphabet and the complexity for dictionary attacks.
I mean apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the [government] ever done for us?
If you really want no tax, go move to Vanuatu. It's a lovely, sunny place, the people are happy, the army and the police are the same thing and only 800 strong, the government is small, it's off the political radar so draws little interest from TLAs, English is an official language... and there is no income tax (with the exception of landlords), nor are there several other taxes on businesses (as it's a tax haven).
You don't want money 'stolen' from you? Then here is a realistic option available to you, one that is entirely achievable rather than pretending that it's possible to turn a country with a major economy into a tax-free zone, and wringing your hands that it obviously can't be done.
ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
Despite the extremely common misinterpretation by the public, ~90% of libertarians are not anarchists who completely oppose taxation. They are "small government" (aka minarchist), not "no government".
While you're right about binaries, there is nothing impractical about compiling things (cf ports tree).
Open Source is something that works now, today, here. It's not a great solution -- see above -- but like democracy, it might be the best we've got. (Or in this case, got left.)
Unfortunately it's a huge pain to do with existing toolchains.
One way to mitigate the attack: if your compiler is open source you could compile the compiler with multiple (open source and proprietary) compilers, then compile your application code using the resulting compiler binaries in the deterministic build process. If the resulting application binaries match, then either none of the compilers are compromised, or all of them are. The latter seems highly unlikely.
Also, open source software compiled by the user would be just as vulnerable.