Digital copper?

the amount of poo you can produce is not really limited.


gold is a very clear concept for everybody and it is a very positive one.

cryptographic anomalies, Virtual Scarcity, superimposed quantized deflationary value representation - you throw that at a normal person and they will call the doctor.

emailable precious bits

hm, precious bits

I'm going to be using this phrase.

'virtual scarcity' is open to the interpretation that it's not quite scarce.

I prefer something like 'Mathematically ensured scarcity' 
or 'Mathematically enshrined scarcity' 

Perhaps bitcoins are 'Globally Ensured Mathematical Scarcity'  or 'Deals In A Money Of Network-Distributed Scarcity'

(sorry.. couldn't help myself)

There's also the expression of "sieving" already used (integer factorization, e.g. "number field sieve").

Precious bits - sieved at great expense from the vast deserts of the nonce space.

of course, having "mining" in there is a plus.

I suppose (most) the alternate block-chains would be considered semi-precious.

I like the fact "precious bits" seem to fit nicely into gaps in the Fintrac Guidelines. Until now, I was assuming that a "Money Service Business" would be the closest analog. (Though I fail to see how "alternative money remittance systems, such as Hawala, Hundi, Chitti, etc." can be reasonably included.) Precious Bits neatly fall outside the scope of "Dealers in precious metals and stones", at least until the law/regulations are changed to include "bits" (with the clarification that copyrighted works are not considered precious because they can easily be copied).

Edit: Which bits, specifically, are precious? Only the block-chain (and some novelty addresses) are computationally intensive. The private key (for a funded address) is what lets you move/create/destroy/merge/split funds precious bits.

The private key is just a random number.
The public key is just calculated from the private key.
The public key address is just calculated from the public key.
Vanity addresses are just randomly generated public key addresses that happen to match some pattern.

The "precious" part, the part that takes all the time/effort/energy to generate, is the hash of the block that meets the difficulty criteria.  For example:

000000000000055a165e49e80b04a7b5df29bedd7bdb23fec6d5d42052d3ad86

Getting all those zeros to happen in what is basically a random number is "hard"  so this is a "precious" number that was created by the system and the miner who found it was paid 50 BTC for their efforts.

So I contend that the block hashes are the "precious bits" or "cryptographic anomolies" that are being "collected".

Well at any rate we all seem to agree that "precious bits" sounds cool and does seem to fit the system (somehow).