paisible

Holy balls you guys are awesome for releasing this.

I think you need to take care of yourself before you can take care of others. Even if you are very close to your parents and don't want to "abandon" them, the most immediate thing you can do is find a job that will give you financial and mental stability - you probably underestimate what it is you are able to bring to a company, and if you are willing to start somewhere with a clean slate there are probably a lot of job opportunities around. You'll then be in a much stronger mental state, and will be able to look for ways to a)help them transition to a retirement home b)pay for someone to help them take care of themselves c)incorporate them into YOUR life, by inviting them to live with you in the future for example. You need to find a purpose for your own life, and it is clear that you do not share the same "apathy" which you are finding in this new environment - therefore staying there can only lead to disappointment. If in the short-term this means disappointing your parents, as sad as it is to say, they won't be around for ever, and disappointing yourself will have a much longer-lasting negative impact. Take care.

Isn't that what the distributed system aims to solve in the first place ? If they can't shut bittorrent down, how can they shut bitcoins ? They can crack down on the e-currency exchangers, but only those that operate within their jurisdiction. Would like to know if anyone has concrete examples of how they would go about doing this.

Let's separate "bitcoin-as-a pure speculatory play" and "bitcoin-as-a cryptocurrency". At any time T, a bitcoin is worth W on the bitcoin exchange. Volatility means that at T+1 the bitcoin's worth might increase or decrease, but supply and demand still provide a pretty decent arbiratry price at this time T.

When seller A and buyer B (who are involved in a dubious transaction) are looking for a safe way to transfer money, they can simply agree (at time T) that their 1000$ transaction can be translated to 1000/W bitcoins. It doesn't matter if 1 bitcoin = 1000$ or 1 bitcoin = 10$, what matters is that both parties agree on what bitcoin price they are doing their transaction in, and therefore how many bitcoins A is expecting from B.

The transaction is then 1) Buyer buys agreed number of bitcoins so that at market price it represents the dollar amount of the transaction 2) sends over the bitcoins 3) Seller cashes out the bitcoins IMMEDIATELY, thus getting the real-market value for his "good or service"

The argument as to "why would seller A want to cash out his bitcoins if deflation means they will increase in value" is besides the point here. Seller A is a drug dealer, not a bitcoin speculator. All he cares about is that receiving that money was as simple and anonymous as downloading a software client and logging in from some internet cafe somewhere.

In this scenario, bitcoins are extremely valuable, and not going anywhere. I suspect that market will adjust, and at some point supply and demand (from people who actually use it for these kinds of activities) will lead to less volatile price variations - and therefore increased use on the black-market. Whether you want to profit from these activities is another question.

so this is an example of content being sucked into and hosted on bo.lt ? Does it mean I should be looking for changes that someone @ bo.lt would have made to the original article?