The target after which bitcoin system is going, aren't the other *currencies*.
The point is not to replace USD or EUR with BTC.

Bitcoin is going after system which transfer money. They point of the bitcoin system is to displace/replace PayPal or Western Union.
The closest thing which ressembles to what bitcoin brings to the table are SEPA payment.

Bitcoin (like SEPA) brings :
- Direct end-to-end payment without any intermediate (as long as both banks support SEPA you can send money accors. As long as both end-points support bitcoin protocol, you can send BTC accross). No need to get anyone else involved (you don't need MasterCard to come in do some shit).
- Complete freedom of choice regarding what you use (The choice of the SEPA-compatible bank that the merchant use, doesn't force me to use a specific bank. The merchant might be using some banks in Germany, and I might be at Raiffeisen in Switzerland. Similarily the bitcoin merchant can be using bitpay for seamless BTC-to-EUR payment processing and conversion, whereas I might be sending my coins from my localbitcoin account). (Compare the situation when paying USD online: both end of the transaction are required to by client at PayPal, for exemple). It goes even further in that SEPA can't directly send EUR from the wallet in your pocket, you need to have an account in a bank. Whereas you can send bitcoins from your own copy of bitcoin-qt client, from an offline armory, etc.
- High speed (SEPA payment take a couple of days, a week in worst case scenario) (bitcoin are even faster payments take minutes, a couple of hours in worst case)
- Low fee (SEPA payment between two compliant bank is a couple of EUR, bitcoin payment are the equivalent of a fraction of cents).
- No charge back. SEPA transfers, money hand exchanges, and bitcoin transfers: when it's done, it's done.
- No payment or account freezing. (All the complains against paypal are gone !)

In addition bitcoin goes a bit further:
- As mentionned above: bit faster, cheaper, than SEPA and you can even be your own bank account.
- bitcoin aren't geographically restricted (SEPA is Europe only. Bitcoins are internet-wide and even a bit more).
- bitcoin aren't fixed to a specific currency like EUR (you could have obtain your bitcoin using CHF, and the merchant you're buying goods from could be converting them to USD).
- a bank account could still be seized by government or law enforcement, whereas, depending on how you setup your stuff, you can be 100% in charge of your account. (possibility for 0% risk of seizing/freezing). That's negligible in the (somewhat) stable environment where SEPA is used, but that a very useful property for people living in unstable regions.
- possible implementation of security at the payment procotol-level. using 2-out-of-3 signature scheme you can implement trusted escrow-like system, except that the escrow CAN'T run away with the money by design.
(The security model is rather different than charge-backs, where the credit-card company or paypal function as jury/judge/executionner at the same time. The model is that in case of dispute, a trusted 3rd party can be asked to arbitrate how should get the money. That trusted party by design has nothing to do with the payment processor or wallet used by the merchant and client, and is agreed upon before hand. With credit cards, the merchant just has to accept that charge-back will happen).

bitcoin has some peculiar quircks:
- banking is about trust (your bank should be trusty) and secrecy (some countries like Switzerland are very paranoid about banking secrecy).
- bitcoin is about handling payment between untrusted partners, and the security comes by the fact that anybody can check the transaction, meaning that absolutely everything is broadcast to everyone else for verification purpose. Bye-bye secrecy and privacy, only pseudonymity is possible. (you can follow all transaction by account numbers, but you won't necessarily be able to stick an exact identity to each number).

You could use Python:
You need to write your own interpreter which takes scripts written in your special subset of python, and compile them into the special bytecode that the NFTable kernel interface uses.

The thing is, the internal representation of NFTables needs to be highly efficient (as explained by other posts here) and very likely the official NFTable bytecode isn't really feature complete or maybe not even turing-complete.
The current special language will map nicely to it. But you will probably need a very narrow and specific subset of Python. Or a vast a mount of pre-processing and optimisations. You probably will never be able to use the full extent of python on current ntfables and for exemple "import" nice modules in your network filtering code.

The US government want to exchange them for money.
Only the few major exchanges with enough USD reserve needs to coordinate. (MtGox, Bitstamp, and BTC-e maybe, I think), and the government is barred from exchanging them, and is forced to either only exchange small portions on exchanges that don't participate in the ban, or trying to find a direct buyer on person-to-person systems (like bitcoins).

Now all it takes is that only a single buyers accept the whole lot only for 1$ max. And the goes on to spend the acquired bitcoin on donation and charities. And thus becomes an instant bitcoin community hero.

There is no such thing as an "official blacklist".
On the other hand, bitcoins are traceable by design (the security of the cryptocurrencies works this way).
For any transaction, it's possible to traceback and see if the coins have been through the wallet that was identified as the where the government put the seized silk road bitcoins.

So when someone offers you a payment in bitcoin, you can determine if they are the governement or someone who accepted the government's coin.
Now it's up to you to decide if you accept those coins or not.

So even if the coin aren't really blacklisted, they could be effictively be refused by people who are pissed by the seizure of silk road.
On the other hand, nothing prevent other people who don't give a damn about them to still accept them.

We'll see which situation will predominate.

A third solution would be the major exchanges - the exchanges with the actual monetary reserve able to exchange that many bitcoin to collude and refuse accepting them, forcing the government to exchange through an person-to-person exchange (like bitcoin) and then some individual buyer accepting them only for a ridiculous price, well under market value... and than subsequently using the acquired coins at their current market value to give them away (charities, donnations, fawcets, etc.) in a way that is accepted by a big chunk of the community.
Such a coup would require coordination (hard...) but would insure that the government doesn't make much money, while at the same time avoiding a bunch of controversial coins sitting on a wallet.

And there are tons of such exchange.
Bitpay was mentionned, coinbase is another, and there are several others too.

And the peculiarity:
- With paypal (which is a particular online service), the only way to receive money from a paypal using customer is to use paypal your self, accept the payment to your business' paypal account and wirhtdraw it. You can't use anything else than paypal. And if paypal freezes your account, you're screwed.

- With bitcoins (which is simply a protocol), you chose were to receive your coins (official bitcoin-qt client, web-based wallet, web exchange, offline wallet, etc.) and you have the freedom to choose your methode to convert it back into your local currency (payment processor as mentionned above, or an on-line crypto-currency exchange, or person-to-person exchange like localbitcoins, etc.)
The choice of system of your customer doesn't impose anything on your choice of payment processing. And vice versa. As long as both end-points of the transaction use the same crypto-currency protocol.

Bitcoins brings to the whole internet, the freedom and easiness of payment that SEPA brought to european countries (except that bitcoin is much faster than SEPA money transfers).

They can *listen and read* everything we're doing. That's true. That has been suspected as a possibility by experts for a long time, and Edward Snoden's revelations are a comfirmation that it has indeed happened, and a revelation of the methodic large scale of the whole spying program.

BUT

The NSA doesn't have the ability to *decrypt* everything. They have the ability to make sure that the software you're using is broken and doesn't encrypt well, choses its key from a small pool of only 10 alternatives, or plainly leaks the clear text... or even hack you PC and put a keylogger in it... all this thanks to bugs carefully planted either by them (while undercover) or by the companies making the software (after paying them).
Also, if you're dumb enough to re-use password, any policeman with half a brain has the ability to first try all the passwords they already have to see if they can open the encryption without needed a password.
But the NSA can't magically pry AES open. That doesn't work. The maths and cryptology behind it are still sound. And bruteforcing it is in the "not before the heat death of the universe" range of time requirement.

Here lies the small distinction.

If you're careless about your secret stuff, at some moment or another, they are bound to hear something that will help them obtain your secret.
That's why NSA is a massive danger to the privacy of Joe Sixpack. He's careless, and his privacy is completely violated.

If you systematically follow proper security procedure (as in being anal-retentive about it, to the brink of sanity), NSA can nothing about you. That's how Edward Snowden manage to evince detection and to successfully orchestrate the whole leak. That how the journalists managed to keep the whole procedure secret. See Bruce Schneider's explanation about the security procedure).

There were recent report that indeed, NSA is drowning in too much information. Finding precisely what they need among the see of gathered information is hard (finding a needle in a haysack is hard. When you gather and pile all the haysacks you encounter inside a huge farm, finding the very specific needle you need is getting even harder).

The problem is everybody's privacy. While finding something precise is hard, accidentally landing on something sensitive is much more likely. That's why everyone's privacy is utterly fucked by the whole thing.

Answering open wide question is hard. "Where are all the terrorist of the world ?" is a complex request that can't be answered easily, even more so given the mass of data to scan.
Answering targeted small question is easy. "I want all the photo of naked people !" or "Please keep getting all the data feeds from my ex-girlfriend" are typical abuses that can be done more easily. "Please help me eavesdrop on my competitor" is a type of industrial espionage that can be done as an abuse of the current system.

I think that's the first in /.'s history when a goatse picture is actually on topic.

To go back to the parent poster and Bruce's declaration:
AES, RSA, DSA, SHA256 (SHA-2), Scrypt, ... they are all used out there in production for quite some time. They are even used in some quite lucrative sectors.
If anyone was actually able to break (as in find a fundamental flaw that helps finding the solution without need to brute force-it) they would be making a killing of money. Thing about hacking e-banking transaction (AES, RSA, DSA), hacking crypto-currencies (DSA, SHA-2, Scrypt, SHA-3), etc. and earning tons of money.
That has not happened yet.
The algorithms and their mathematical and cryptographic basis have stood the test of time (although not yet for more recent addition like SHA-3).

The only methode left are:
- brute forcing, but it's mathematically and physically provable that it's not possible to scan the whole key space before the sun has gone supernova (or even before the heat death of the universe). No matter how much ressources you throw at this problem, you can't brute-force them within the current boundary of science. (and the hashcash-like technology behind crypto-currencies is a nice example of the limits of bruteforcing.
- going around it. find a flaw in the implementation of the software that created the encryption. AES could be the best encryption in the entire universe, it would be no use if the encryption software is stupid enough to leave behind temp file with the information in clear. Or if the user is a moron and doesn't follow proper security procedure (uses the same laptop to surf porn and install every single tool bar and smiley pack, and thus has 25 different key logger constantly listening for all the typed password)

There would be nothing surprising in the police revealing that they have recovered the password. That would be no surprise (specially given the quality of some software or the brightness of some criminals).
The only secret worth keeping, would be hiding that the bugs that were exploited to recover the password, the fatal stupid flaw in the software, weren't accidental but were planted by paying the company / by having an undercover agent hired by the company.

I don't think that pretending that they don't have the password in order to keep for a longer time would be a very legal method.
If the defending lawyer manager to get suspiction about this (e.g.: if the password was never revealed, but the guy still got charged on fraud anyway), he would have a field day with it.

That's actually a good question. Password re-use has repeatedly been proved to by a frequent security flaw. Re-testing all the previous known password should have been done immediately, even before asking for collaboration.

all this, while at the same time not serving the purpose of Snowden: "To show how NSA is spying on everyone, specially when this 'everyone' specifically include innocent by stander like US' own population or friendly ally countries. To show abuses of surveillance"
- "Look all the nasty things NSA is doing on US population themselves, in the name of war on {bogeyman du jour}": that suit the purpose and shall be revealed by journalist, after the currate everything to remove dangerous informations.
- "Look at all the things we've managed to steal, here are some documents from Russia and China that should have remained confidential, but did not": that only brings problems.

Even if Snowden did manage to get such documents (no proof exists), these documents aren't likely to get released.

Why do people keep thinking that the information inside Snowden's documents are a total surprise to Russia and China? These countries have had their own intelligence services *FOR AGES*. People at current top level inside the NSA weren't *even born* back when Russia already had cheka. This countries and their intelligence services have way much more experience and resource than a signle rogue consultant like Snowden (although, for his defence, Snowden *is* brillant and *does* have lots of knowledge and enoguh discipline to have run his stint successfully, without early detection). If Snowden has managed to gatter all this, then one can only imagine all what top opperatives of FSB, MSS, and others have managed to collect.
The same information that Snowden did manage to gather in his documents, and (probably even more) are probably secretly know by Russia and China thanks to their own intelligence channels.

So to go back to your "Russian foreign ministry" exemple, I'll probably keep rellying on exclusively all that FSB (and before KGB) has gattered. They are good guys with experience and ressources, and most of their intelligence can be trusted. I'll absolutely avoid getting anywhere near Snowden's document. The debriefing at the Russian consulate very likely didn't at any point at all concern the intelligence gattered by Snowden. Almost all the time was very probably spent trying to solve all the diplomatic hassle to manage to find a way to safely bring Snowden to russia and find him a place there (and deciding on an exact status, etc.) all the while avoiding hurting allies. Simply bringing Snowden to Russia publicly is a big enough madness that explains alone all the time spent. Given all this already existing circus, trying to get hold on the documents would be the worst idea possible. The "Russian foreign ministry" didn't probably give a fuck about Snowden's documents.
- Peeking into those publicly known documents would have angered even more the USA and would have been even more detrimental to the diplomatic ties of Russia and any other country concerned by those documents. Peeking these documents would be damaging.
- Chances are, that anything in these documents happened to already be known through Russia's own spying program. It's not worth looking at them to begin with. Peeking these documents brings almost no advantages at all for Russia.

Given this, Russia has probably decided "forget about this" regarding the document. And concentrated on the difficult task of bring Snowden to them.
- That has also been a diplomatically complicated task .
- But at least it can be exploited as a PR stunt, putting a good light on Russia as a "deffender of free speech", "protecting whistle blowers from persecution in their own country", etc. that comes handy at a time when Russia has been criticized by the international scene. (see also how they are now freeing pussy riots and making other similar deeds to positively impress people who criticize them)

So, to sum up: If i'm the russian Foreign Ministry, my idea would be: try to get Snowden, this is going to be tricky, but at least its good publicity which come handy after the recent blunders. Regarding the documents, don't touch them, they will only bring problems, while not bringing anything new.

I agree that what he did - To bring to public consciousness what cryptographic and security experts have been suspecting for long time - has had a dramatic impact on the population, way much more than revealing some spying techniques that might have been useful to gatter some confidential data from some probable enemies at some point of time (and which techniques are probably already known by the other big players in the field anyway).

This invertly mirrors the problems of the NSA: they might have a few times in the past managed to gatter a few informations about some "remomtely terroristic" groups, but to achieve that they routinely rely on method which are massive surveillance abuses on everyone including their own population. Is it right to completely fuck the freedom, security and the privacy of absolutely everyone, just on the ground that perhaps you might managed to find a few point of data that might become handy in the next chase of Child-Molester/Terrorists/Communists/Whitches/etc. (under the condition that you can actually extract meaningful information from all the mass)

Thanks to these revelation, random Joe is a bit more aware that privacy *might* need to be protected.
Technogeeks have been insisting on using better channels with more security and privacy (use end-to-end ecryption, don't trust 3rd party storage, etc.), and avoiding using unkown "black boxes" (don't trust closed software, don't trust hardware, etc.), but until recently these warnings have fallen flat. People just dismissed them as some academic rambling of some cryptographic nerds, and have kept with their insecure ways.

Now that random Joe 6-pack has read about NSA and Snowden in the popular press, he might get a little bit more interested:
Tor usage is increasing. Demand for VPN increases. Several projects have started to produce better next-gen e-mail/chat/VoIP/storage solutions, etc.
With all this, overall security/privacy of the population will increase. Chances are in a few years, when NSA decide to try fuck even more with everybody on the ground of hoping to learn something about the latest bogeyman du jour, they will have a bit less chance of accidentally leaking some very embarrassing and/or sensitive information about some random innocent citizen or some well behaved and legal company.

BUT if you need less energy, then you need LESS to fill the gap too.
That's the whole point I'm trying to make. You mention that your reserve of fossil energy source serves you well on cold nights. I mention that if you spend the money on equiping the house better against cold, then you'll need to waste less money on said fossil fuel. My idea is that there are better way to spend the money that piling reserves of fossil energy.

In Europe, part of the success of eco-energies is also due to the fact that people don't stop at simply planting wind mills and solar panels, (because in that case you'll need to keep the same amount of fossil energy, just to be able to make up for when these don't work). There are efforts to lower the power requirement (so in that, during gaps, there's less power that need to be compensated).

Or adapt you standard of living so they can survive even if you switch to more wind and solar. If at night all people start using lower-power LED instead of incandescent light-bulbs, the "gap" that the utilities need to compensate is smaller.

Well, in Europe we have more mountains, we cheat: we can also use dams for the peaks. These things fill themselves up on their own (or can even be filled with pump powered by the excess power the rest of the day) and then can be turned on when need arises.
Indeed that's easier for us (we already have this possibility) than for you in the great plains (you probably will need to slowly start things like compressed-air energy storage, etc. or other such technologies)

But even without dams, by taking proper measure, you can make it so less coal and nuclear is needed to make for the gaps. That's still less waste produced than being 100% of the time coal and high level.

I've already looked up. In fact on a rather regular basis. See my nickname? Hint: The first two letter aren't random.
I'm sorry for you if your health system is ready to use critical devices which cannot survive being unplugged for several hours. I would consider this a liability that has to be address (I mean, what happens it there's a power outage? or the house's power box or fuse are burned? if a wind storm disrupts the power grid's distribution lines? If someone's life depend on it, a medical devices should survive such problems, should also survive interferences, should survive tons of other random but still common events, and should fail gracefully when problems exceed its capability to survive them. Most of the devices I've seen professionally work on such design principles.)

It simply brings back the level of simplicity that cash transaction have (but makes them online. But just like cash, it's basically direct people-to-people transfers.)
Or put it into another way, the kind of simplification that SEPA has brought in Europe (strongly simplified Bank-to-bank transfers, with much lower fee [sometime even free], and relatively shorter delay [well, still in the order of days, but that's already better than internationnal wire transfers], and total freedom of choice: as long as your bank and the bank of your merchant both support SEPA you can still do transaction together, without needing to involve a specific mantadory 3rd party actor like paypal)

Overall, bitcoin is like the strange offspring of a forbiden love between SEPA and Cash, but targeting the whole internet, and born as a perfect nemesis for PayPal (and other such 3rd parties with a big control over transactions).

So in some part of the world, the power isn't that much new, it's just a newer way to exercise the power you used to have.
(Okay there are other part of the world where your are automatically considered a criminal if you use cash to pay anything more expensive than a chocolate bar. These other part of the world are going to HATE bitcoins)

Also *NOT allowing* bitcoin isn't something easily done. It's not as if the government simply needs to ask its police to raid the local branch of "Bitcoin and Brothers Inc.". There's no central authority. The whole protocol is distributed. There's no single point to choke to stop it functioning. The only legal leverage would be for a country to forbid its merchant to accept payment with it (like Thailand).
But trying to prevent users (using their own wallet, and/or trading person-in-person, and/or buying goods on foreign websites) that is going to be the kind of whack-a-mole game that the media loby already tried playing against pirates.
(expect bitcoin being used over Tor in those countries).

Osram CFL have outrageously long warranty (at least when you buy the "quick startup time" variants, the one with the silver border on the box).

But it's a German brand. I have no idea if its sold outside of Europe.

You're doing something wrong, that's quite a lot of replacements.

Some pointers:
- The thing that gets killed first with CFL is the driving electronics, specially the starter.
This get more quickly used up by strart/stop power cycles, rather than long burn times. A CFL that you constantly turn on and off is going to die fast. Better consider using LED lamps.

- Build quality: CFL and LED lamps have a much more complicated circuitry that the plain simple filament of classic light bulb (or the slightly better but more or less halogen bulb). The quality does matter a lot.

In my personnal experience:
Best quality for CFL:
Osram, the "fast start-up time" variants (with the silver border on the side of the box).

Best quality for LED:
Philips (absolutely best I've had), Osram (slight delay at startup, don't like the colour temperature as much as philips').

Last but not least: avoid no-name brands. Not only is it for reason of build quality. But because shit happens and a bulb could burn within the first 1-2 years. Given the technology, such a short life span IS abnormal and should be covered by warranty. But that requires the continued existence of some company able to honour the warranty.
Thus buy brands that won't become bankrupt tomorrow, from shop which will be able to handle warranty after 2 years.

And that perhaps the single somewhat justifiable uses of consumer tracking: if you've used a fidelity card and paid using a debit/credit card instead of cash, that means that the transaction can both be tracked from their and your history. Thus if you lost the receipt, you're still able to do something about it.

I'm not speaking *against* power at all.
I'm arguing that, in the specific case of "cold windless night", the house is only slowly loosing heat through conduction.
If you upgrade the house to better thermal insulation, you're going to lose a lot less heat on "cold windless nights" and thus you will need less energy.

So instead of spending money on a big pile of fossil fuel to run your heating on, you could invest in better insulation, that will make lose less heat in the first place that you would need replacing by heating.
Less heating: less energy spending.

So you can either:
- buy less fossil fuels for your heating needs on cold windless nights.
- redirect the same energy to where it is needed. Spend energy on cooking warm milk for Junior and on keeping the lifesupport[*] of Granpa, instead of wasting said energy on making up heat to replace the lost heat due to bad insulation.

European countries which have success with eco green electricity (like the often cited Germany, or like Switzerland), among other reasons, are also successful due to non-electricty related reasons, like upgrading building code to mandate better insulation, which in turn helps lower power requirement by lowering the need to make up for lost heat from bad insulation.
You'll need less energy if you don't need it to warm up the house, and thus the "cold windless nights" are less problematic.

---

[*]: which you cited for illustration purpose, but accidentally happens to be a bad example. Medical devices don't work this way. Critical medical device are built to be autonomous. Not only in your though experiment of a region were power is in short supply when there's no wind nor sun, and choices have to bee made. But it has to survive other catastrophic situation as black-outs, power outage due to broken power lines, or as mundane as the power box blowing up due to thunderstrike or the fuse blowing-up, of the old-school type where there's an actual filament burning, instead of electronic reset.
To be able face this, most critical medical devices have a battery, on purpose so that Grampi doesn die just because the power broke.
Also oxygen is provided from a pressurized bottle/tank rather than a generator that continuously extracts it from the air. (the bottle themselves could be locally filled that way instead of shipped from the factory) but still, oxygen consumption is not power dependant, its mechanical (pressure based) and completely oblivious to the current state of the power distributions grid.

But still, your observations are valid (some uses do require power during the night) hence are mine too (before anything else, try not to waste power through stupid reasons like bad insulation, thus you have more power free for the critical uses).

I think a hack involving crypto-currencies would be the perfect next subject for Underhanded C Code Contest (the current one involves social networks with "friend distance" calculator in an imaginary "ObsessBook").

And I'm almost expecting that the winning entry for such a subject will be under the form of a link to an old commit on the git of some popular Joke-Coin.

This has already happened.

There are so many alt-coins, that few people actually take time to check the source code. Or even compile their own.
some are just in for mining and/or for speculation.
They quickly download a pre-built exe of whatever is the latest minor trend du jour.

Unscrupulous persons HAVE packaged malware in some of these installers.
And you've seen regularily complains poping up on bitcointalk forums of users who got their bitcoin/litecoin/peercoin and a few other wallets emptied.

Thus currently you can soft people into three categories:
- regular people who only use old established coins. by the time some software has reached, it has stand the test of time, has been checked multiple times, etc.
(I'm doing that)
- bleeding edge people who are still interested into getting the latest piece of software (in the hope that some will take-off and bring massive money). they rely heavily on virtualisation to separate all dubious pieces of software in separate compartment. (so malware can't find much other wallet files, and can only key-log password typed within the virtual machine - only for the 1-2 software isolated into that instance)
(I'm doing that too - even if I only use a couple of established coins, I'm putting them all in separate compartment, just for the sake of security)
- blind idiots which install watever they find (they are the same people who used to have 25 different bars on internet explorer, and their home computer has probably spitted spam for the last 15 years at least, as part of several different huge botnets).