They *might* be worth more tomorrow. There's no guarantee of that. You will, however, definitely need to eat regularly. Usually spending money is involved in that.

Look at it this way, computers get better all the time. If you wait a while, you can get better value for your money. Somehow, people still buy computers all the time.

It's not impossible at all. You could escrow some bitcoins with a reputable escrow operator, for instance...

The fake debt collection agency from across the ocean is going to have their legal department get an ex parte ruling against their victim?

No-one can say what a bitcoin is worth. All they can say is what it's been traded for. As for why "miners" get money, that serves a dual purpose.

Bitcoin is a solution to the problem of creating digital cash without a central authority to prevent double spending. "Miners" act as notaries. When Alice sends Bob some BTC, "miners" witness this and if they manage to create a new block on the blockchain, they note this transaction down in the distributed ledger. Without this ledger, Alice could simply send the BTC she sent Bob to Charlie, but since the notaries have noted Alice's transaction with Bob, Alice can't scam Charlie or Bob by double spending.

This is a service "miners" provide, and they are paid for it. Finding a block, and therefore being able to note down the transactions a miner has seen into the blockchain is a computationally expensive task. It has to be to make it unattractive to try to falsify the record. Currently the majority of the reward for these notaries comes from the new coins created with each block. This is the second purpose of mining - creating the Bitcoin money base in a manner that distributes the coins to many people over time. As you probably know, the amount of new coins being created will taper off over time, and transaction fees are expected to pay the notaries enough to bother with it. If they do not, fewer people will bother with using their electricity on "mining" and it will get correspondingly easier to find a new block until things even out.

You can send money across the globe almost instantly, with low fees and no-one to stop you from donating to your favourite politically unpopular charity using cash or a real bank?

Yes, they're screwed. They trusted a third party with their coins, which is simply a bad idea. Now, deposit insurance is great for bank accounts, as most people don't really have any other choice than to give a bank their money to hold for them. That's not true with Bitcoin. You can be your own "bank", and it is, in fact much safer than using a third party as one. Rule of thumb: do not use web wallets. If you must use one, only store small amounts for short periods of time there.

So instead of paying 5 EUR for my groceries just now, I paid 500 cents?! That's highway robbery!

Quick, simple answer: The backups don't contain bitcoins. They contain encryption keys that can be used to transfer the bitcoins to another key. The Bitcoin client used checks how many bitcoins the keys it is given still control.

How do you arrest someone when you don't know who they are? I seem to have missed the part where the FBI learned DPR's identity before september or so this year.

From my reading of the news coming out, there's no proof of a murder being committed. In 2012, DPR tried to have an employee who had been arrested killed, but as it happens, the "service provider" here was a law enforcement agent. Later, DPR was contacted by FriendlyChemist in a blackmail attempt, and he similarly arranged to have him killed, as well, with photo proof provided. Canadian authorities say no-one matching the name and address of FriendlyChemist found in Silk Road chat logs exists, nor is there any sign of a murder fitting the description taking place.

One explanation would be that LE were behind FriendlyChemist as well, perhaps thanks to information gained from the not-killed-at-all employee they'd arrested in the first place. In any case, there's no indication LE were able to identify DPR until quite recently, making the point of them believing he might order another hit rather moot.

Certainly it's volatile, there's no known way to bootstrap a stable currency without a powerful, stable entity behind it AFAIK. Bitcoin takes a different path, and volatility is unavoidable, initially. It's whether that will reduce with increased adoption that's the interesting question. So far, the last big crash has been much smaller than the 2011 one, but obviously it's going to take a long time still before much can be said about how volatile bitcoin is in the long term.

You assume banning harmful substances is the most effective way to reduce the associated public health issues. Why?

Well, the point I was trying to make is, controlling human access to specific data isn't the issue. It's the automated collection, retention and potential analysis of data that is most worrying.

It seems when they say the NSA doesn't look into what Americans do, they mean no human has access without proper authorization. From TFA, a quote from an NSA spokeswoman: “All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period."

Now, that's nice. Let's assume for a moment that's true - that's not saying anything about automatic collection of data, about computer analysis of such data, about how long data can be kept etc. "No-one is listening to your calls" is a complete red herring. It would be better if their methodology were based on purely human-conducted surveillance. That kind of work is expensive, and therefore must have a limited scope. What is apparently being built now is much worse than having some person listening to people's calls.

Everything we're being told is going on now just reeks of the Total Information Awareness programs which were, to some extent, supposedly discontinued. The goal seems to be the same - make it cheap enough to have total surveillance capability of everything anyone does. You can't do that with humans, but if you manage to build a computer system broad and smart enough, you can do a whole lot more. Humans aren't being phased out of the process because they present a larger risk to the population being monitored - they're just too expensive.

Fortunately, automated intel data analysis is still a very tough problem, but it seems clear a lot of work is being done to "improve" things in that field. That's not good news, it's bad news. Less human involvement in this context means less legal oversight and greater overall capabilities. You can't jail a computer system.

The only plausible scenario seems to me to be the one where a leak took place well in advance of the news release. For a few milliseconds to make any difference, someone would have to have a bot capable of unambiguously parsing the Fed news release in order to make the correct trading choice. Unless such announcements are made in some highly structured, machine-readable format, a human had to have made the call on how to trade, and humans don't act that fast.

Then again, maybe it was Skynet...