-<p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application. The last few
-days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
-aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
-that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
-It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
-allow me to drive the robot around. I picked PerlQt as I have had
-positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
-browsing the web for examples. Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
-cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
-compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
-libqt-perl. Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
-drive around.</p>
-
-<p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
-controlling the robot. Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
-
-<p><pre>
-use Spykee;
-Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
-my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
-my $spykee = Spykee->new();
-$spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
-$spykee->left();
-sleep 2;
-$spykee->right();
-sleep 2;
-$spykee->forward();
-sleep 2;
-$spykee->back();
-sleep 2;
-$spykee->stop();
-</pre></p>
-
-<p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
-peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
-implement the protocol used by the robot. I've implemented several of
-the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
-support to make it possible to control the robot from remote. First I
-want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
-the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
-without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
-so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
-going. :).</p>
-
-<p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
-where to make it available first. I will add a link to
-<a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
-those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
+<p>As I continue to explore
+<a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
+what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
+and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.</p>
+
+<p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
+verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
+is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been
+published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
+possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
+that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for
+all transactions. There I can see that my address
+<a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
+have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
+<a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
+address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
+<a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
+of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and
+every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
+fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
+address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
+generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I'm told
+there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
+organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
+themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
+
+<p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
+regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
+without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting
+laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
+If the Skolelinux foundation
+(<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
+Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
+normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
+Given that it is impossible to know if money can across the border or
+not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate
+should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay
+income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
+BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
+
+<p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
+accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to
+the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
+easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
+access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really
+a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
+so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I
+would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
+and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
+if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
+to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I'm sure they
+will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
+probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
+believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
+currencies.</p>
+
+<p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
+CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
+competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
+to see which one get the next lump of cash). The "winner" get 50
+BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
+join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
+by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
+and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
+BitCoins. Check out
+<a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
+if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a
+machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
+own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
+yet.</p>
+
+<p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
+href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
+criticism</a> of bitcoin. Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
+it was interesting to read. The arguments presented seem to be
+equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff