A while ago I wrote that perhaps the greatest contribution the Bitcoin experiment will make to humankind is to teach you and me and our neighbors more about the realities of economics. And now I will add that the Bitcoin experiment will also contribute to greater understanding of how nonprofit industry associations are organized to protect the economic interests of for-profit businesses. A lot of new industries have discovered that a few bad actors who screw up early can damage the reputation of the entire industry, and there are many previous examples of "competing" companies in a new industry banding together to promote consumer protection, as they say, and to promote the growth of their market. We'll see how this goes for Bitcoin.
"A lot of new industries have discovered that a few bad actors who screw up early can damage the reputation of the entire industry"
Please cite some examples. I can't come up with any, and this is intuitively false to me. Productive industries steamroll over bad actors and indiscretion. Railroads, gold-mining, and arguably social gaming were propelled by bad actors.
There are plenty of forks running already. There's "litecoin", a fork that changes the proof of work algorithm to scrypt in an attempt to make GPU's less useful for mining.
There's "PPCoin", a fork that adds "Proof of Stake" alongside "Proof of Work" in an attempt to reduce the energy consumption of the mining process.
There's others as well. Some bitcoin proponents consider these "scam" coins as they have limited use other than speculation, others consider them experiments in different approaches. But they do show that forking bitcoin is fairly easy.
You wouldn't need to try and duplicate an ecosystem. People with nodes on the network would "vote with their CPU power" to support the version they liked the best - so the best one would naturally get the most support.
No, the most popular version will get the most support. You still have the problem that a forked chain stops being compatible, so if a node recieves coins in the new chain after the fork, the old chain won't acknowledge it. This is a big practicle barrier to implementation.
You could harvest a large number of new chain coins before you go public, and offer an exchange service, but that would involve you owning alot of new-chain bitcoin, which would be a concern to people switing in.
I hope we'll be publishing first-day membership numbers as well. My goal is to publish all our public keys. How cool would that be? Total financial transparency.
Ah, the long-storied September announcement. Pretty good idea overall. I'd be happiest seeing a set of security best-practices agreed upon and some sort of mechanism for organizations and businesses to elect for auditing.
Totally agreed; this and paying Gavin were my two main motivations upfront.
I really desire bitcointalk'ers to have some objective way to assess business quality when they consider how many percent per week return is a reasonable no-risk promise.
Bollocks. Linux has not been marginalized. It is dominating the server market, embedded devices, and smartphones in the form of android.
whereas the Bitcoin Foundation will work to promote a cryptocurrency sometimes used for blackmarket activity.
Haven't you heard? The dollars are used for black market activities too.