Not that bad? 14 dollars fee to purchase "a few things" is INSANE! Most of the world live on less than that each day.

I do not accept payment in gold. I cannot pay my rent in gold.

What was your point again?

I can think of a hundred things, but for one, try buying anonymous VPN service with your gold bar. Having a hard time fitting it through the USB port?

The problem is a startup company called Blockstream, financed by traditional financial institutions, has managed to hijack the Bitcoin Core implementation, its developers, and forums. They are intentionally driving fees up through refusing to scale the blockchain as the original Bitcoin whitepaper outlines, and though their reasons are unknown, a good guess is that they are trying to force transactions onto side chains, which is a technology on which they have patents.

Because of this, the bitcoin blockchain was hard forked by a community wanting to restore Bitcoin to its original vision, and there is now a scaled version called Bitcoin Cash, which will allow for eight times more traffic (to begin with) without raising the fees. The fee for a transaction of any size on that chain, is at the moment about 3 cents.

Funny I just bought stuff at the corner store and the checkout girl's eyes glazed over when I asked if I could pay in American dollars. Then I ordered some delivery from a fast food joint and once again the dude on the phone said "what?" when I asked if I could pay in American dollars. Some standard you have there, which isn't even accepted in Europe.

I think this has already been established.

Everything that Trump does is motivated by growing his and his family's wealth. Russian banks gave loans to Trump, and that's why he's being so friendly towards Russia. Qatar did not agree to a loan, and look what happened to them.

What a convenient way to avoid answering all his valid points!

By that logic, we can't have musicians. Sure, some people can be musicians, but what would happen if all people were musicians? No one would farm the food we eat, and everyone would die! Musicians must therefore be causing harm to society, and we should make being a musician illegal.

And you need to look at this WTC 7 NIST Model vs. Reality It's a two minute video comparing the real footage of the collapse of Tower 7 to the NIST simulation. Can you tell me with a straight face that they match up? The simulation bends and twists all over, while the actual collapse is so smooth that most of the windows even remain intact until the very end.

But those are chemically different and kan be removed through chemical means, if not straight up mechanical.

We're talking about some extremely sensitive equipment here. This approach allows the landing to be highly predictable as it comes to mechanical stresses on the components, contrary to the high randomness of a parachute + airbag landing. Add to that the fact that many of these missions cannot be returned to land, and soaking the engines in atlantic salt water is a good way to make sure they never fly again.

Well, I can't pay my taxes with US dollars, since I live in Europe. But they still have their use from time to time. The same goes for bitcoins, which I use quite often.

It's really nothing more than that - an inflatable test module which wont be used for anything, at least yet. Here's a NASA blog post which contains some information.

The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) is an experimental expandable capsule that attaches to the space station. After installation, the BEAM expands to roughly 13-feet-long and 10.5 feet in diameter to provide a large volume, where a crew member can enter. During the two-year test mission, astronauts will enter the module for a few hours three-to-four times a year to retrieve sensor data and conduct assessments of the module’s condition.

No it's not. It's $1000 per year per developer per platform. So if you want to target Android, iOS and Windows Phone, it's $3000 per developer.

Well, if the US hadn't disbanded all of Iraq's armed forces, which then were humiliated and unemployed without most of them ever having had anything to do with the Baath party, maybe the insurgence wouldn't have had so many upset men with local knowledge, military training and no other way of feeding their families? That, in my book, is the most severe error that was made. They should have just gotten rid of the uppermost of Saddam's old buddies, then promoted some lower chaps to take their places and put them all to good use, instead of starting an enormous recruitment campaign and trying to re-build the Iraqi army from scratch.