You could expect tech news site to know the difference between different crypto coins. No matter if you try to mine Bitcoin on millions of computers you will not get any, only dedicated data centers with thousands of ASICs can reach the hashing power needed.

Monero, like some other altcoins, can be mined on CPUs and/or GPUs.

That depends. Which year do you believe it is currently?

Of course bitcoin can be exchanged for anything of worth. This is obvious to anyone who does a few minutes of research into the subject.

The question then naturally becomes, why do you claim differently when you obviously haven't done that research? What purpose does your post serve?

(20% of all remittance between South Korea and the Philippines is done via Bitcoin. Overstock are extremely happy with their sales in bitcoin. Those were two examples of actual use - I'll let you find all the rest yourself)

Luckily instant transactions at low fees are implemented right now (as in the next few hours) on Bitcoin, with the inclusion of SegWit, enabling Lightning Networks.

I was a Premium user since they launched. The changes to the free tier last year caught me by surprise, and sure enough, since I had no reason to pay for Premium I stopped. I remember getting an automated questionnaire as to why I stopped being a Premium customer and I explained clearly that they now offered the full feature set I was interested in in the free tier.

Now they're apparently changing it so that one feature I want (emergency access) becomes part of the Premium package. Fair enough, they'll get me back as a Premium customer. LastPass is one of those tools I happily pay for, no questions asked.

Bitcoin has never been untraceable, nor marketed as such by anyone who understands the technology. With that said, we'll see MAST and Schnorr signatures as well and that will indeed open up for transactions where the originator cannot be proven, smart contracts (surpassing those in Ethereum) etc.

If you want quick settlements in the thousands per second for people buying lattes I don't think those need to be cleared on-chain, though.

1000 BTC would be about 3 million USD. That's an order of magnitude, or two, lower than the daily trading volume.

https://blockchain.info/charts...

Segwit, due to be implemented in the original Bitcoin code within a few weeks, allows for side channels (lightning networks) where such quick clearing & settlement can be performed. There's no real limit to how many transactions per second can be done that way, although it's a different kind of settlement than the completely decentralized version that's on-chain.

The best part of all this is that it tells the rest of the world how much we should trust software produced by US based companies.

(I'm not the GP)

Hi, my name is Troed, and I suffer from prosopagnosia.

For various degrees of the definition, I'm not a "normal person". Between 2-10% of the population suffer from it, to various degrees. In the severe cases, like mine, it's a cause for many social mishaps.

I long for the day when my glasses can do the facial recognition for me, the one that your brain provides and mine doesn't.

/pathetic and lazy, apparently

I'm unsure whether you meant to claim that the numbers you gave supported him, but no, they really don't. Saying he's right on "principles" while being horribly wrong on the actual facts is the whole point. He claims the number X will happen REALLY SOON NOW - BE SCARED!, and X doesn't happen. ... and that's been the case throughout his whole career.

1) He did not mean soot from wood burning stoves in India/Africa with "smog" btw, that's where the millions of deaths due to pollution comes from. Electrify now! Doesn't matter if it's coal plants or solar for this.

2) Food supply has outstripped demand. Vitamin A deficiency is a real threat though, so make sure to hit the nearest anti-GMO protestor on his/her head since they're blocking golden rice.

3) DDT hadn't reduced life expectancy to 42 years. Neither has anything else. You can't be right "on principles" when you're so horribly wrong on the facts.

Quotes from Paul Ehrlich:

***

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollutionis certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).

In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

***

He's awesome. Please give him more grant money for the comical art value alone.

Again, what _might_ happen in the future is not at all the same thing as being in the midst of one now. So, no.

Surely mass extinctions can happen in the future. I'm less sure he supports those biologists who claim where in the midst of one now though (the difference between his comments on it in 2017 as opposed to that from 2006).

Feel free to contrast with the parent post I replied to:

"The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history"

That's the kind of fear mongering junk science statements Doug is complaining about.