probably get the women entrepreneurs out there now that are growing in numbers to adopt it, for example through sites like Etsy.

I think this basically hits the nail in the head. I think the success of bitcoin will be a large part depend on what will hopefully become a hindsight 15-20 years from now, just like the internet itself was in 1992.

The fact is crowdsourced content generation and social media, the main new internet trends in the past 10 years, have propelled many new companies formed recently to be smaller and more agile. What's more important is that these organizations can operate anywhere in the world, and many don't even physically need to be in the same place. Adding to this are the globalization trends led by developing economies such as China, India, those in South America, and many more. Having lived in several countries the past few years of various economic developments and political stability, I found it amazing that more and more people are speaking the same language by ways of the internet, regardless of religious, political, or economic backgrounds.

Furthermore, trades between smaller merchants and consumers that made the likes of eBay, Paypal, Alibaba, and to some extent Amazon so popular today are seeing great demands for internationalization. We are even seeing the interesting reverse trends of manufacturing heading back to fully developed countries like the US, perhaps because latest technologies have enabled manufacturing costs to go down, and also we are seeing the trends of greater international demands for US/European produced goods, because people internationally now can afford higher quality goods or even vanity products.

In summary, there is an ever-increasing demand for a platform that can be used to conduct trades globally at a smaller scale, basically in a c2c fashion. A decentralized currency like bitcoin is a great foundation to the payment facilitation piece of this puzzle, and it can build upon the foundation laid by c2c eCommerce platforms like eBay and the rising crowd-based brand advocacy made possible by social media.

That said, It's not an easy road though and require a lot of effort by the community to continue to pour significant energy and investment in strengthening the infrastructure and integration points, and perhaps a few "killer apps" along the way to speed up adoption. But from that standpoint, it does look like it's heading towards the right directions.

thanks for this, just watched the first few videos so far and seem like a solid course!

Listening to some of the politicians in Hong Kong speak today it seemed like much of Hong Kong actually supports what he's doing and will be helping to delay the extradition process as long as possible, possibly years.

exactly, I would just post up ads on HK's Craigslist and any other popular classified ads site looking to sell bitcoins for HKD, it should work out fine

heard about it from a friend who read Satoshi's paper and was super impressed and asked me to read it too.

Mind = Blown

and here i am.

the block headers designed to be 80 bytes so that "lite" clients can be built and only need to store the necessary transactions for verification purposes. But in general right now I think blocks can be up to 1mb each.

the deciding factor will be if the new infrastructure that will be built to support growth can maintain the unique properties it started with that made it unique and interesting.

It's kind of similar to tax evasion really. Most people that got their money through illegal means wouldn't file the tax properly and thus need to hide it. it's just an easy way for the government to collect the taxes due to shut down the entire system.

If you noticed in the press coverage that Preet Bharara invites you to get your money back if you were using Liberty Reserve for legit purposes. Well criminals aren't obviously going to call. and if you call, well, probably need to start reporting them in taxes as well. govt takes all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/nyregion/liberty-reserve-operators-accused-of-money-laundering.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0  

I learned that I need to start following people with Japanese names more often in crypto related forums and threads in order to get in on the next big thing before it cost over $100 to buy in

might still be better to use the larger denomination as the standard since it does sometimes help to have decimals, much like pennies and dimes for dollars.

emperor's new clothes was no fairy tale after all, what a visionary Hans Christian Andersen was

The catalyst for true globalization

It's a very interesting read. It's not super technical and you can get a lot of it by simply skimming, but I've read it several times since and each time I read it I learn something new about bitcoin that makes it a lot easier to work with technically. I highly recommend reading through it several times, especially as you learn more about the system.

Awesome thanks! Do you plan to keep this updated automatically so we can keep checking the status, or how often do you plan to update this?

Indeed my christian friends mentioned the exact thing when I introduced them to bitcoin, and they were very excited about the system because of the bible's prediction of one currency and it seems destined to happen. Personally I think it's a great thing to get the religious motivated as they have a very large and widespread network and it's a great way to spread bitcoin to a larger audience.

I think the reference implementation sets the TX fees for you automatically based on the size and age of the content. There might be other implementations of the clients that allows a more customized settings for giving transaction fees.

Can treat this as more of a game more than anything that can also make some money at the same time.

amazing, i knew i should've bought more

great idea! will be working on this soon to get started earning.