These are pretty good for names but I would simply say.

1 BTC is one Barter Token or Bitcoin.
0.00000001 is a Satoshi
100 Satoshi is a Nakamoto or a Nak (pronounced "Knock") 0.00000100 BTC
A bitcoin is 1 million Naks.
It is 4/23/2013 and $1.00 gets you 7143 Naks. Some people are afraid to buy at $140 per Bitcoin because the number scares them.  The Nak could calm people down.

Think of a movie of the Zimbabwe economy or the Weimar Republic RUNNING BACKWARDS.
Play money in 2009 is now a substantial global currency.

Some day the Nak will reach parity with the Dollar as the penny and Satoshi head toward each other in value.

Ron.

I just saw a Lecture where a guy was talking about the Jewish Diamond dealers and Cowboys selling cattle in the west today.  These businesses operate on trust and reputation alone.  If you go to the government to try to solve a dispute you are ostracized by the group.
I'm not sure of the details on the start of this thread but bringing in the Feds as it were might be a cure that is far worse than the disease.

 

Sorry folks, got busy and off the forum for a while.

As was stated by others, speculators buy "and Store" crops to make money in the future. In this way consumers are helped because when we go to buy bread there is not a shortage just before harvest. It is available year round and the speculators flatten out the price bumps between harvests.  How this helps farmers was explained but I hope you can see that as consumers, our current needs as well as our future needs are taken care of by speculators who are happy to store and sell food to us year round.

Here is a quote that might fit your request.

"Medieval Iceland was almost a purely free market society, even the law arose from private courts and from law making bodies which could literally be bought at a price. They still had a "state" but it was disconnected from geographical location and was in a sense voluntary since the people could freely choose which "goddard" (spelling?) to protect him. The poor, if they were aggressed against, could even sell their claim to a more powerful person who would then pursue the compensation for his own benefit. So it provided an extremely effective check on power and protection of human rights. They lasted 300 years before their first civil war (eventually the various set regions were monopolized), but they lasted an impressively long time and had a body of law that was extremely rich and complex. David Friedman compares Medieval Iceland to Athens in terms of cultural development.

However, because they still had in some sense delegated authority (although technically it was voluntary until it was monopolized) they eventually had internal conflict. It is an amazing testament to how stable a free market society could be, even considering that the Vikings were pretty much brutes! Just think what America could be like if it were purely voluntary! It would be incredible.

Down with the state (and sorry, but that includes the Constitution)!
—

"Truth is treason in the empire of lies." - Ron Paul"

http://dailypaul.com/73539/is-there-a-nation-or-country-that-has-an-economy-based-on-austrian-school

I think most people are missing his point.  The people can be economically freer while not being politically free.  If you did not get on the governments bad side and were a free market business, you would do better under Pinochet.  This does not make that business man bad.  I guess people say the same thing about China today. They are not politically free but economically freer and standards of living depend more on economic freedom than political freedom.

His point is more subtle.  If you wrote angry things in news papers about the government, things would suck for you a little more under Pinochet, but if you were a free market, very productive person that stayed away from the government sector, things would suck for you under Allende.  The government was more likely to come and take your life's work.

The simple "Pinochet bad... so Allende good" is a bit too simple.

So you are arguing that protectionism is not only beneficial but necessary to build up an economy?

You can't "dump" products onto a market, you can sell products you are more efficient at making for products that the other country is more efficient at making. This makes both groups better off*.  When you "dump", you have to "dump" for something in trade. NO! the more restrictions you put up to "protect" your producers the more you hurt your consumers and there are far more of them to hurt. 

* not EVERYONE in the group is better off in the very short term. If you make the Trabant and you let Toyota's and Volkswagen's in, your Trabant employees will have to go find something else to do. They will also be better off in the long term.

... Or perhaps not   

The government has to be "cast down" so that the commoners DON'T starve.  Not all people are skilled and can provide this market function at a profit.  Thus the don't help AND they loose money. They eventually go away.  Most people need to use bitcoins not speculate in them.

As far as starvation, as I said, successful grain speculators KEEP people from starving.  That was my point.  Voluntarism is the best way to maximize the commoners standard of living in my view.

I tell friends that one of the coolest things about Bitcoin is, even if you don't use them yourself, is that it makes people as questions about all currencies.  Yes in a land where we use silver coins, you can get tipped over in a boat and loose your silver in the bay.  People loose a small amount of silver all the time and the holders and users of silver will have their silver go up microscopically in value.  There is no Bitcoin conspiracy, it works like digital cash.  There is nothing new here. 

BTW Other questions that get asked:
Q: Is bitcoin backed by gold or silver certificates?
A: No and virtually no other currency you use is.  Backed currencies have a high storage cost.

Q: Didn't someone hack into someones computer and steal their bitcoins?
A: I worked at a large bank in their engineering department. We were aware that hackers from Russia and other places were initially successful in stealing millions of USD from Citibank and other big banks, but these banks hushed it up in the press.  Bitcoin lacks a good public relations department.

Q: Can't (or hasn't) someone use it for buying illegal things like drugs?
A: Over a billion dollars in USD is used every year for buying illegal things.  Drug dealers on the corner in the bad part of down don't take Bitcoins, only USD.
 

I don't expect Bitcoin to repeal Pareto's principle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

If everyone tries to produce the best they can. I expect 80% to go to the top 20%.  This is actually fractal and so the top 4% get 64% of income.  This is natural and fair to me.
But Politicians and other Tax Parasites might have to find honest gainful employment instead of riding along with their feet up and not peddling.

Sorry but it is a bad Idea to centrally plan bitcoin. To say people aren't using it correctly so we need and incentive to make people spend it more is pure hubris.  The same fallacy could say, computer prices HAVE to go up because if they went down no one would ever buy one.  Well we have been in an economic experiment for decades that shows that people STILL buy even though they know in 6 to 18 months the computers will provide more bang for the buck.

Bitcoin, though not perfect, is well thought out and is modeled after mining a precious mineral (unobtainium perhaps) and it behaves like that. It would not help the gold market to make gold that spoiled. One thing may be true. the inflation of modern currencies has caused too little savings.

Bitcoin is a free market currency and people will be attracted to it for it's lack of inflation. The future value will eventually be factored into prices and loan interest.

Citizens of Ancient Rome thought it could go on. The fall of that empire was financial. The fall of all empires are financial. Politicians can't cut and that brings it to an end. 

This is a common misconception about market functions.  What good traders will do is smooth out the price.  They are like a capacitor in a parallel DC circuit acting as a voltage reculator. The voltage is the abundance of bitcoins (low price).  If the price were high on Thursday and low on Saturday, then this means the supply on Saturday is over average and Thursday it is under average. If you buy when it is abundant (cheap) and take coins off the market, and sell when it is scarce (high), you smooth out the curve.
This is what grain contracts do which is why the price of wheat does not crash at harvest time. Speculators are buying like crazy, storing, and selling later in the year.  This helps everyone.
Communist Revolutions are lead by violent economically ignorant people and these "speculators" are some of the first to go to the gulags. Why not, they aren't working for a living, the farmers are growing the food and they make money by gambling. Note that some form of famine usually follows a Communist take over as there is not enough food later in the year before the next harvest.

Did you finish prematurely, perhaps you can talk to your doctor about that.

It is great work!
 Something has to come up like this in the future. The symbols are important. Some males are color blind but that is not a big issue.  Buying something in the future priced at 0.00345 is odd. People are comfortable with around 3 or 4 decimal places so 3.34 mills is a good label on a product. Your Idea is on the right track.

People often ask me after I explain bitcoin, “It sounds great... , but who takes it?”  This is an interesting question.  Take the first credit card.  I quote wikipedia.

“The first credit card charge was made on February 8, 1950, by Frank McNamara, Ralph Schneider and Matty Simmons at Major's Cabin Grill, a restaurant adjacent to their offices in the Empire State Building. McNamara was bought out two years later by department store heir Alfred Bloomingdale,”

After this credit cards filtered down slowly to the people and to smaller and smaller merchants.
Unlike this Bitcoins are taken by everyone who downloads the client or simply opens a myBitcoin account.  The next step is to get more and more businesses to take it.  Smaller merchants is where it seems to be starting.  It is a grassroots phenomenon from the bottom up, instead of top down like credit cards.

Also I guess when the miners started the difficulty level was low what they got out of it was 50 coins of something that started out as play money.  Now a few years later this “play money” is actually worth around $100 million USD.  This could be compared to currencies that started out as serious money such as the Zimbabwe Dollar and the Weimar Republican Mark, that ended their lives as play money. 

I often ask myself “is Bitcoin ready for primetime?”.  When I want to impress someone on how it works I have to, I repeat, HAVE TO use myBitcoin.  I get them to open an account and then I send them some money.  It arrives quickly and these people were on the phone and all over 1000 miles away.  They liked that. I did not tell them that you could download a client that was almost unusable for over two hours as the block-chain history came down to their computer.  I did not send money to them from my client to their myBitcoin account as this takes what seems like a very long time to someone used to using debit cards.  I suppose the POS systems will have to go through an online wallet in order for the customer not to hang around for 15 mins. 

I’m still very hopeful that we are witnessing the beginning of a revolution.

Yes Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson is a great place to start.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Hazlitt

As you learn more you have to end up with Ludwig von Mises' "Human Action" you can download the text or and audio reading on Mises.org or iTunesU.  It is his magnus opus on Praxiology, or the science of human action which Economics is a subset of.

Pretty much right on, I would recommend checking out the late economist Julian Simon on YouTube, he and others have found that the worlds is the opposite as you may think.  The more resources we use the more resources we get.  When Whale oil for lamps got scarce the switch to Kerosene opened of the door for gasoline, cars, plastics. Scarcity causes natural conservation and the search for alternatives, which in turn causes innovations and a rising standard of living.

Two cannibals are eating dinner.
One says "Hate my mother-in-law"
the other says, "well then... just eat the noodles"

Two cannibals are eating a clown.
One says to the other,
"Does this taste funny to you?"

To cannibals, all fights are food fights.

1JyvSzqb5z2jJfjYSWJ14XHETJCJ4iTGyt

I noticed on YouTube most miners seem to have there cases off.  I thought most computer cases were designed with airflow in mind and with it removed you just have convection cooling.  Do you people put external fans blowing on your units (watch the jokes here) to keep them cool?

I'm not doing any mining just curious (and of course looking to get my posts count up ;-) )