You don't have to 3d print a barrel if instead you 3d print a machine to make a barrel. I do know one of the first (the first?) machine tools ever designed were for making gun barrels. I'm sure building that machine would be a lot easier if you can 3d print all, or almost all, the parts for it. The parts of that machine that need to be accurate can then use off the shelf mechanical parts like precision guide rails are readily available and standardized, with the 3d printer providing the "stuff" required to put everything in the right places.

You ever heard of the Gingery Series? It's essentially a how-to manual on bootstrapping your own machine shop from scratch; at the end of the process you'll have an accurate metal cutting lathe and mill. It's quite reliant on time-consuming metal casting, as well as precision scraping to get the accuracy needed in a machine tool. With 3d printing you can replace the metal casting with printed parts, and the scraping can be replaced with pre-made linear rails and ballscrew assemblies. A 3d printing bootstrapped gun barrel making machine would essentially be a purpose-built version of this concept.

Keep in mind that in some cases you can use the 3d printer to make the tools needed to make the parts, rather than directly making the parts themselves. For instance barrels need to be made out of metal, yet a 3d printer could still make a jig, essentially a purpose built machining tool, that would give you the ability to make the barrel without purchasing a lot of expensive equipment. Even simple stuff like cutting templates can be a huge time-saver compared to machining parts manually.

Deflation doesn't prevent Bitcoin being a viable currency, it just (theoretically) prevents a Bitcoin-based economy from functioning properly.

People are free to use as their currency whatever they feel like. The economic effects are secondary.

> As for the new operation, I have a hard time taking seriously a financial institution that announces its products on IRC.

Bitinstant is well known in the community, as are the actual people behind it. What's wrong with Charlie Shrem, who frequents IRC, letting it be known that his company will be releasing a new product soon? This isn't after all their official "we have actually released this" announcement. Rather it's just a way to let people know and find some people who are willing to sign up for the first batch of 1,000 cards made.

I happen to think that kind of openness is a good thing myself.

I suspect the latter is going to be pretty common. If you're running something fully cloud hosted like imgur or reddit existing Amazon services were pretty expensive for your long-term backups; a lot of wasted money on retrieval speed that you didn't need. This finally gives the last piece of the storage puzzle: long-term cheap backups and archiving. Previously your best bet was to either download the data yourself, or use their physical drive service where you ship media to them and have them load up the data for you.

Honestly, at this point what service doesn't Amazon offer when it comes to your computing setup? (modulo the more general objections to cloud computing of course)

Myself I'll probably start using them for my home computer backups. 500GB * $0.01 is just $5 a month. I'm really looking forward to seeing rdiff-backup-like tools with proper delta support.

> Whenever I need to restore data from an archive backup, I need it RIGHT FUCKING NOW.

I don't. It'll be at least a few hours until FedEx arrives with the new server hardware in the best case, and a few weeks before we get a new building and our clothes stop smelling of smoke (and zombies) in the worst case.

Interesting question though: if I submit a retrieval job, how soon do I have to actually download the associated data? Can I wait a few hours or days?

A robotic tape system would generally give you your data back in a few minutes at most, but Amazon is saying you can expect multiple hours of waiting. I'm assuming this system is literally based on people moving around boxes of tapes and inserting them into tape readers; inconvenient but reassuring in its own way. Perhaps they've managed to automate things even further, say by setting up carts of hundreds of tapes carried around by a forklift that get plugged into the robotic tape loading system.

Also sound like an interesting operations challenge though in trying to co-ordinate all the read request jobs when your customers can store as little as 1 byte. You can see why they penalize any attempt to actually read your data, especially if you send in a read request job within a short time period of storing the data.

Anonymity ends when you interface with the real world... and actually what Zhou Tong was caught moving wasn't Bitcoin, but rather a different system of inter-exchange redemption coupons allowing people to directly move US dollars and other currencies that is anything but anonymous.

After all, don't forget that the major exchanges follow all the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations that banks do. Good luck selling a bunch of BTC on MtGox without handing over your drivers license and/or passport.

You gotta distinguish Bitcoin as a system, and users of Bitcoin. As a technological system Bitcoin has done an exceptional job of fending off attacks; the only major threat was back in 2010 when someone found a integer overflow error in the transaction verification code that allowed anyone to make money out of thin air. The protocol was designed knowing that there probably would be mistakes like that, so the developers released a patched version of the software that everyone agreed to use and got everything sorted out within a few hours. Not a major problem, given Bitcoin was nearly worthless in 2010.

As for the scams surrounding Bitcoin... It's sufficiently anonymous and free from government control that people think they can get away with major scams, not to mention illegal activity like Silk Road. Some might call that a feature. Those are probably the same people that don't complain about how terrible tor is when hackers use it.

No, that Butterfly labs platform will currently mine about 0.37BTC/day, or 11.17BTC/month. Currently the exchange rate is $12/BTC, with fluctuations of about +-$1/BTC in the past few weeks. GPU's use up way more power, although they hardware cost is less. Either way, it's easy to turn a profit after power costs, albeit with the risk that your capital investment and coins generated will be useless if bitcoin busts. Obviously lots of miners immediately sell every coin they generate to recoup that capital investment.

It's irrelevant what Bitcoins are, only how scarce they are, what's the inflation rate, and what people are willing to pay for them. The latter driven because the scarcity and inflation rate is fixed, and you can transfer them from one person to the other easily.

They also are *not* a series of 1s or 0s in the correct pattern; you're confusing Bitcoins with hash cash. Rather it's an accounting system where the number of Bitcoins you have is based on a transaction trail back to the original creation of a Bitcoin. That creation happens out of thin air, but in a manner where the network only allows a (on average) fixed amount every 10minutes, automatically adjusted both to slowly decline that amount over time, and to ensure that as more people compete for that amount, it gets harder to get coins. All this stuff about "mining" is just proving how much computer power you control, so that the users of the system can vote on what is the authentic and true ordering of transactions. If the system didn't vote on transaction ordering, people could spend money twice, by signing statements to the affect of "I, Alice, transfer x coins to Bob" followed by "I, Alice, transfer x coins to Charlie".

It's just a form of fiat with a fixed, and declining, inflation rate that happens to be transferably digitally and can't be counterfeited, where all those properties are controlled by a distributed group of computers with many different owners. It's really not that complex or magical.

Modern banking is actually really similar, except that transactions guaranteed by accountants, and we say the government decides how many coins to create.

Go ahead and store your value in gold if you want. But there still is a need to transfer value digitally, and Bitcoin provides a way to do that without getting trusted third parties involved, and with having some hope of anonymity if you are careful. Yeah, you still have to put some trust in the person you just handed some dollars, or grams of gold too, in exchange for Bitcoins, but that person can be different on either end, and can be a different person each time.

Is Bitcoin a good way to *store* value for the long term? Probably not. But in some situations it has features, like irrevocability, pseudo-anonymity, and lack of dependence on government, that no other digital currency can currently provide.

Just don't hold more Bitcoins than you need in the immediate future and you can take advantage of it's features when you do need to transfer value digitally.

I think you're really missing the point of Bitcoin mining. It's like gold mining, in an economy using Gold as a currency; you'd never expect the majority of economic effort being involved in digging the stuff out of the ground. Rather a small segment of society does that, and the rest of society does whatever they do in the economy, buying gold from other people as needed.

Bitcoin mining was *never* meant to be the way that the majority of people would get their Bitcoins. Rather it's a way of securing the network, namely in that Bitcoin essentially consists of an accounting system, where value is exchanged by writing public key crypto signed messages saying things like "Alice gives 10 bitcoins to Bob". Mining is required because there needs to be some canonical way of ordering those transactions in time. That's done by saying that whatever at least 51% of the computing power in the network thinks is true, is. So long as no one party ever controls that 51%, you can determine if coins have been spent to another party before you decide to accept them.

Look at the pool hashrate diagram. Each of those pie slices is a group of dozens to hundreds of users, each with at least a few hundred dollars worth of mining hardware, securing the network. Do I care if they are making more in Bitcoins than their rigs are costing them? Heck no. I just want a secure network so when I receive some Bitcoins I can know that they haven't been spent before. FPGAs and the upcoming ASICs are good for that, because they perform so much faster than off-the-shelf CPU's that any attacker would have a hard time getting enough computing power to attack the network.

Besides, if I did want to become a miner, all I'd have to do is spend about $600 on a Butterfly Labs fpga platform and I'd gradually have Bitcoins trickle in. But it's a lot faster to just buy them from someone else, just like it's a lot faster to buy gold from someone than mine it.

Great advice. Also use the Google Authentication feature of blockchain.info, that way even if someone manages to steal the passphrase they still need to hack into your phone to get the Google Auth code. For that matter, use Google Authentication for everything... I do.

Regarding backups, if you did use a secure passphrase, you can also have blockchain.info automatically send copies of your encrypted wallet to an email address every time a new address, IE, a private key, is added to your wallet. If you ever need your coins back and blockchain.info is down you can get them directly out of that backup as long as you still know your passphrase.

Transferability is the very point of Bitcoin. Sure it'd be nice to have a stack of gold, but good luck sending that over the internet without involving any trusted third parties. Look what happened to e-Gold services, all shutdown by the Feds. Possibly the only alternative will be trusted devices such as the in-development MintChip, although the final version is likely to be restricted to very small amounts and not as anonymous as claimed.

Of course, hilariously on the MintChip Challenge website, the most commented upon idea for what you could do with MintChip is buy Bitcoins...

I posted this link elsewhere in the thread. Myself, I'm pretty convinced it was the guy who made the site. After all, it was a 17 year old immature kid.