I have a bank account and bill pay. The bank account comes with a Visa debit card that is accepted everywhere Visa is for payment and my bank offers bill pay services via ACH transfer. BitCoin cannot do either without additional hoops or places that could add attack vectors to my finances. You're twisting yourself in knots trying to justify something that just isn't better for payments unless you're buying illegal goods. Cash is also perfectly anonymous.

What, like MtGox? I will say this. BitCoin in and of itself may not be a Ponzi scheme, but it sure is a mighty fine developers kit and sandbox for one. It has way too much in common for it to be used by much of anyone other than as a mechanism to create a Ponzi. Plus, add the fact that it is unregulated and you add a dimension for nefarious activity nonexistent in any other legal financial instrument today. The foundation of this wanna-be currency is flawed and fracturing. It just wasn't as good an idea as it appeared to be in someone's head. Try again.

You didn't pick a hard committee. You studied in a department that cared about the grad students they were sending into the world. The "Insightful" guy above obviously didn't.

When there is obvious chicanery involved and the experiments aren't reproducible, that is not science. Why does this story of science fiction get a science tag? It's not science if it's fake, folks. That's called fraud.

I will drink to that. ShockWave sucked, but I do wish they had kept Lingo. Was a good scripting language with an intuitive grammar and syntax. I did a lot of cool stuff with it in the 1990s.

I love you, man. That one should be modded to 11.

One way to a known dead end. So, yeah, face palm city.

Java supports object oriented code. It's still a bit icky if you ask me. Not as icky as Flash, mind you. Nothing makes a browser go boom like Flash, but Java comes close.

Who writes code and thinks a new standard is going to have unicorns and rainbows? Wait, ok, idiots that don't write code and use WYSIWYG tools. Well, when you set an expectation bar too high or are looking up from the bottom of the pool ...

It replaced a product that was not web friendly in the Macromedia product line, Director. Director created ShockWave files, the code name that became the product name for the web plugin. Director was raster graphics based and Macromedia saw that this wasn't going to fly and created Flash as the vector graphics replacement for Director. The Flash plugin allowed SWF packaged files to play in a web page. We creatives had tools at the time, thanks for thinking we were left out, but we weren't. We weren't starving for a multimedia authoring tool that didn't suck as bad as AuthorWare, a.k.a. Awfulware.

Bzzzt! Wrong. I was a BETA and ALPHA tester for Macromind/Macromedia when Flash was being developed. It was developed specifically to replace their Director product as it was doomed being a primarily raster graphics animation and multimedia authoring tool. To claim Flash started as anything but shows you weren't there. When Flash began the Internet was still really slow. I think the university had three T-1 lines at the time for the whole campus to use. Flash could create animated interactions (all the rage in the early 1990s) in really small files because they were vector graphics. Perfect for 56k modem users. Anyway, Flash was written as a vector animation package that also had a scripting engine (ActionScript) for controls. It handled audio files at first and eventually got video capabilities. As for HTML5, it's barely out of the blocks as a standard and folks are shooting it down? How about wait for it to mature, as it does have a bit to go. Heck, we just got CSS3 working cross browser within the last two years without gymnastics. Give it some time.

Nice. I was going to say if everyone is collocated to use a big paper map on a wall. He did say they were "local". Sounds like he's trying to use tech he doesn't really need to solve a problem. But, that's most Ask /. questions these days, that and not knowing how to use a search engine to do your own research.

Easy. For the same reason you'd be pissed off at a builder that built the rooms ten percent or more smaller than advertised in your house, or translated requirements to meters and intentionally then built in feet. It's fraud! If you needed a twenty-by-twenty room to fit your living room in and the builder made it sixteen-by-sixteen wouldn't you be pissed? Networking technology is known to have degraded efficiency percentages due to transients, bad cables, etc. there is an acceptable amount of loss expected, but if gige only gave you 200Mbps you'd get pissed. Memory is known to have certain defects, but we usually don't tolerate those as swapping out ram is not detrimental to your stored data. When HD manufacturers went to tens to calculate HD sizes, we the consumers were defrauded. The whole change was a way to make drives that wouldn't normally pass yield sellable so the manufacturer could make more money at our expense. And we just let them...

I will second that. The other inevitable thing about Bitcoins is that they will end up regulated and they will not remain anonymous. That's what will happen if Bitcoin is going to be successful at all as a global currency. Only idiots trust their money to anonymous, uninsured and unregulated financial instruments. The only people that make money with those instruments are the greedy and the corrupt. And before anyone says anything about businesses legitimizing them by taking payments, why wouldn't a business take your money in any form to convert to their local currency? After all, a fool and their money are easily parted.

That could be said of any commodity, gold, silver, oranges, etc. Society drives the value of commodities via supply and demand. If you can create demand for a limited supply of something, you're going to be rich and most likely turn corrupt.