The point is, there are no BUYERS. It will not happen. No one is going to pay $20k of REAL money for bitcoins.
I don't know WTF are you talking about but converting bitcoins to 20k USD is non-issue on most existing exchanges like coinbase, bitstamp, mtgox or btc-e. Just go and see their daily trade volume.
This assumes that 20,000$ worth of bitcoins can be converted to real money.
This assumption is correct.
First off, aircraft don't follow each other in the sky at distances of around 3 airplane-lengths apart. They also aren't confined to just two dimensions. Outside of ATC control zones, they don't have speed limits. Pilots in aircraft with HUDs are highly-trained (think very-high-end commercial jets, fighter jets, etc.) The HUD is specifically built and engineered to assist the pilot, and nothing else. Finally, unless it's a fighter jet, the HUD doesn't swallow the entire pilot's field-of-view. HUD gear is certified by the FAA before use on a given model/type of aircraft.
Notice that Google Glass on some douchebag's face while driving his/her car is the polar fucking opposite of all these things.
Google glass doesn't swallow you entire field of view either.
All the other things are also true for GPS navigation on smartphone, are you saying those should be banned too while driving?
Vehicle huds do not display emails, text messages, etc that Glass does.
I'm pretty sure that google glass is perfectly capable of displaying information similar to car HUD without distracting you with e-mails, facebook and youtube videos.
and a dash mounted tablet is legal as long as you keep it in car mode, and don't get caught watching youtube on it while driving. google glass is clearly a huge distraction while driving. if talking on a cellphone is illegal, then wearing google glass should also be illegal.
Why should be tablet in car mode allowed but google glass in car mode banned?
Yeah, just ignore the people he tried to have murdered and all.
He tried to murder a scumbag who tried to blackmail him and only because he didn't have any legal recourse. If the blackmailer reported Ross and his users to the authorities the damage to their personal life would be overhelming. Again, it's fault of the law enforcement which rages war on innocent drug users and don't protect its citizens agains serious crimes like blackmailing.
I just love it when bitcoin posts show up on Slashdot. The circle-jerk of anti-bitcoin butthurt makes me so happy. It's quieting down, though. We've got a major retailer accepting bitcoin, now.
Exactly, i'm also pretty amused by the heavily upvoted anti-bitcoin bullshit in every slashdot bitcoin story. It has been 5 years now? I wonder how long would bitcon need to stay or how widespread it would need to become for slashdot to accept it. Maybe the readers here are just too old and conservative and it will never happen, like most old people will never use internet or smartphones or online-banking. I guess when you are of some age you are too old to learn and endorse new technologies.
There's no reason that a single bitcoin should be worth more than $1, much less close to $1,000. It's all based on speculators, rather than any inherent value to bitcoins.
How did you come to the $1 figure? Why not 0.01$ or 1000$? Can you please elaborate?
ordering fake ids (another trap)... he was not trying to stay hidden at all.
Why did he order fake IDs if he wasn't trying to stay hidden at all? I think you seriously underestimate the difficulty to run hidden service. It's asymetric war, the operator must do everythink correctly, the attacker needs to find only single mistake.
Ross is not an idiot, he is a hero who tried to run usefull service which could save many lives by ensuring some quality of the goods the shop was selling (thanks to user ratings). The idiots are the politicians who run war on drugs and the voters who support them. I feel sorry for his live ruined by the government.
Very well said. BitCoins resemble company scrip more than any other medium of exchange.
You missed one of the most important feature of Bitcoin - no central authority which can issue new units at will. Also the correct way to write the word is Bitcoin, no BitCoin.
They don't have the option in the US (or most countries) to pay their workers in bitcoin
This is obviously lie. One counterexample: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/03/kentucky-town-from-colbert-report-to-pay-police-chief-in-bitcoin/
People who are getting all Drunk on bitcoin really need to look at what happens when private industry is allowed to control currency and payment systems.
Here's a start: wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
Make no mistake, bitcoin is not nearly as "decentralized" as people would like you to think, and it's not nearly as free from manipulation as is claimed. The difference is that it's the privately owned Exchanges which get to make the rules, as opposed to governments.
What do you mean by that? Scrip has central authority which controls how is it issued, bitcoin has no such think. What rules did the exchanges make? I thought all the rules are given by the bitcoin protocol described in the original whitepaper: bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. No private industry controls bitcoin.
It was BTC's "dirty little secret" that as long as you could buy drugs with it, it had value. Losing SR caused panic on the BTC market for exactly that reason.
Bitcoin lost no value because of SilkRoad closure, look at the value of bitcoin when silkroad closed (october 2013, cca 250 USD/BTC) and look at the value now (cca 950 USD/BTC). I wouldn't call it loss. There wasn't even any dramatic drop right after the news broke in october, just look at the graph at bitcoinity.
If you think about the primary advantage of bitcoin, making anonymous electronic transactions that are much harder to trace
Except anonymity is not one of bitcoin designed features, so it's hardly it's primary advantage. All the transactions are public and it's very hard to keep your bitcoin address not tied to your real-live identity in the long run.
The primary advantage of bitcoin is the lack of central authority which would devalue the currency by printing new units at will.
Indeed. The only use for Bitcoin (other than gambling) is immediate money transfers that do not need to be anonymous. But I can do those with my credit card already, and at far lower risk.
Can you send me money with your credit-card to my european bank account? What about countries in africa, south america, middle/far-east etc.?
This is only true if you believe that central banking is inherently harmful/evil, and things like a gold standard are a great idea.
Wrong. Currencies with central authorities and bitcoin-like denectralised cryptocurencies can very well coexist.
Computers will not be perfected until they can compute how much more than the estimate the job will cost.
