waves on
Yes!! ride the wave!!

It means that you can be pretty certain to have a way to run a Bitcoin exchange in the US without being thrown in prison for running it.

It depends on the power of the attacker.
DDoS are a relatively cheap way to attack.

What do you mean with "interest"? Why doesn't the bitcoin price reflect it?

It would allow someone to pay for a law that taxes X to fund Y. As a result you would get more taxes not less.

It's pretty hard to tell the positive story in a way that can be told in a establishment friendly newspaper or TV show.

If you can actually craft a story that works mail it. If you just want to mail them your positive personal view of bitcoin it probably won't do much.

Google is a company that tried to get money transfer to websites that support copyright infringement stopped.

They have no intent at all to provide a service that support annonymous transaction.
Google is trying to sell content with Google Play. They want to get good deal with major labols to sell music and films.

At the present bitcoin doesn't have any defense against a single new miner with 51% overtaking the network.
That isn't necessary.

How could bitcoin defend against itself?

Every miner should sign the blocks that he solves with his own key. After a miner has created a lot of blocks
over month that get accepted by other miners, new blocks of the same miner deserve more trust than blocks
of new miners.

How do you defend against one established miner using this new voting power to attack?
Allow every client to make the choice to distrust a miner. If a miner attacks the network than the community
can decide to distrust the key of that miner.

Julian Assange's own story of what happened in those two night isn't open. There also various other information about the issue that isn't open.

Facebook actually has it's own coins. The same goes for Amazon.
I don't think Google would design a crypto-currency in a way that it can be effectively 51% attacked.

If you are Google and actually can sign things with Google certificates, why rely only on proof-of-work for trust?

In an age where an attacker can rent a botnet of 1,000,000 PC, you don't want a function that can effectively run on a normal PC.
Who's that bitcoin that you want to pay a bounty?

Under spectulation I would welcome a model for the "real" worth of bitcoin.
How do you price the various risks?

I don't think you understand Assange.

Assange didn't publish the identity of the people who left Wikileaks along with Daniel Domscheit-Berg to found OpenLeaks, even through the OpenLeaks folks took a harddrive of valuable data with them that they afterwards deleted.

How do the parties establish their trust?

I think you get that wrong. Being a developer in no way implies that you are a serve.

Lead developers in open-source projects get titles such as benevolent dictator.

In the case of bitcoin, the lead developer gets payed by the foundation and the foundation has a bunch of important stakeholders in it. The foundation together has probably the political power to do anything with bitcoin that it likes whether or not you approve.
Are you willing to pay for that hard work to be done?

That update allowed some people to engage in double spending. It not an example of a seamingless transition.

Don't forget that Litecoin is essentially a coin that's build to be easily mineable with botnets.

They aren't immune. They are just big and therefore expensive to attack.
Even banks can be attacked : http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/bank-ddos-attacks-resume-wells-fargo-con/240151825
The folks that attacked those banks weren't even all that powerful. Just one random group of angry hackers.

MtGox is effectively a profitable gambling site.

Seriously? Why do things have to be free? There money to be made in providing a better exchange and over time a better exchange will pop up.

While you are at it, how about trying to convince paypal to add bitcoin support?

Not impossible but harder.

A small nation can be coerced pretty easily.

The kind of person who describe isn't an ordinary person. There are much more Mr Zhangs than Mr Smiths. Half of India's population has no bank accounts. http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/11/01/why-few-indians-have-bank-accounts/

There are many people in this world who have cell phones but no bank accounts. In ten years they probably have smart phones.

Those people might want to do low-wage online work and get payed despite having no bankaccount.

A lot of bitcoins economy will however still be illegal payments. Some third world towns that make their money through the drug trade
might switch to using bitcoins for their regular transactions as well.