That's a foolish and tired cliche. It has centuries of history. People realize that society would collapse if we just gave up on the dollar overnight. I'm no fan of our current president but I certainly know that the checks and balances in our system would make it virtually impossible for his administration to ruin the currency. (fears which propped up gold) There is apocalyptic military might backing it up. People have been making that argument since we went off the gold standard (not the first time in U.S. history, btw...was a common practice during wartime) and most realize these things (at least subconsciously) and rest easy that their fellow citizens will not allow the economy to spontaneously combust and return to the barter system.

Unless you're a college student who is just waking up to how the world works, it's ridiculous to make that statement. Adults will simply reply: We know, and we don't care.

Damnit sladhdot, phone users like me need an edit function.

"...the pro-bitcoin crowd takes a massive problem..."

Once again, the pro-bitcoin problem takes a massive problem and attempts to diminish it. The combination of unregulated markets and deflationary currency creates a huge problem with regards to human nature. If we were all robots and behaved how the currency wants us to, it wouldn't be a problem. But we're not. We will speculate. We will hoard. We will look at the currency late and go "fuck you, I'm not going to make the early adopters rich" which was one of the flaws of the original design. The problems with Bitcoins and its alternatives was in the design phase. I'll be the first to admit (as a certifiable hater) that it was brilliantly engineered, from a technical standpoint alone. It was poorly socially engineered.

sadly we might need some entity with a record on privacy (i.e. EFF) to regulate a currency similar to a fiat for some of the benefits of Bitcoin to be in a future viable currency, but sadly EFF is in love with Bitcoins. I guess part of the reason I'm a hater is because Bitcoins are holding back the alternative(s) we truly need.

I'm a certifiable Bitcoin hater and I agree with DiSKiLLeR. I feel that Bitcoin was brilliantly engineered but poorly designed, the designers and many of its proponents write off human nature as a small problem (rather than the ultimate cause of its instability), but it is indeed a fascinating concept. As long as Slashdot stays on the level and reports fairly on the bubblings and crashes, it doesn't bother me.

Try looking at a yearly or lifetime graph. $90 isn't the mean, it's the denial phase before it drops back down to the real mean, which is 20-25. Though we may get a double bubble if enough people believe 250 is a sign of its legitimacy.

He admits that the USD isn't perfectly fixed, but it is exponentially more stable than bitcoins. If you only need to gripe once every few years about how your cheez-its are 10% more expensive, you have something that's as stable as humans need it to be.

I think the real story here is the bitcoin bubble burst. No one saw that coming...oh, wait, WE ALL DID (second link)

Tulip bulbs, anyone?

They are definitely not outliers either, as Family Guy has brought the big band genre to 20-somethings and 30-somethings. FWIW, I've lately been frequenting a 30's-50's station on Pandora -- inspired by a flash animation which featured "Reefer Man" (saw 8 years ago), I now listen to songs like Louis Armstrong's "You Rascal You" and "That Cat Is High", both recorded over 40 years before I was born.

It's a shame my (long since deceased) father's Stones collection is lost to the ages. I've grown to like them.

Mod parent up. I myself almost forgot about the PATRIOT Act, let alone countless others. Obama's love affair with drones had a seven year setup that had nothing to do with him.

'Tis why I still buy CDs. It makes me a luddite, sure, but I can easily digitize it and so long as I delete the copies, I am still protected by first sale. (Guess this only works if you only buy music where you get it for the entire album experience)

Sorry, I meant it 'features a single' that blah blah...though he also performed it on SNL and other places on his'buy my new album' tour...

Bit of a generalization there. Notice a trend in the music industry for retro everything? Album of the year went to a band influenced by the 1800s, probably lamenting that none of those original works were ever recorded. The current #1 album on the charts is Justin Timberlake's throwback to the 50s and 60s. That digital collection would be enjoyed just fine.

A good portion of the snowflakes on the site were six sided or clearly used to be six sided. Expecting the level of precision (that they are implying) in nature is ridiculous, though....

I'm talking about the true internet natives, children...you probably don't hang out with many. How much they know compared to how much my generation knew at their age makes me reeeeally envious, heh. I'm surprised that I got mod hate for my optimism (politics, meh) but I really do think this generation will be far more capable of making good decisions than our own. I'm already of a bent where I feel government intervention and overregulation makes people lower their guard, making them more vulnerable since their critical thinking skills(and various other skills, like bargaining with employers) are diminished. (Kind of like how my command line skills have gone down the toilet since 98% of my work is faster to do via gui) These policies will be a lot less defensible in the future.

Libertarian here, and I do agree somewhat with the second sentence...but give it time. There has been no better time in history for libertarianism to flourish because information has never been so widely available. There will always be the terminally ignorant (sentence 2 point b) but as the population shifts from internet clueless to internet savvy (sentence 2 points a and c), a far greater percentage of the population will get why bad companies are so messed up and will know how to seek out alternatives.

Libertarianism rewards the thoughtful. The reverse drags everyone down to the level of (and breeds more of) the ignorant.

Will this end the stereotype of the discount butcher? Probably not, with all the talk of "green" around here...