Why do you say that? You make a statement of fact, and then don't even try to back it up.

Riddle me this. If the Bitcoin market cap is 4 billion dollars, i.e there is a 4 billion dollar market incentive to hack the network, why hasn't it happened in the last five years? That seems like enough money to be a legitimate target for a lot of very smart people, certainly major corporations have been hacked for less. For a network with such poor security it seems to be doing a pretty good job...

And the fact that the "shitload of electricity" secures a peer-to-peer trust network with a 4 billion dollar market cap capable of doing trusted transfer between parties on the Internet in a provably verifiable way that can't be counterfeited, intercepted, or modified. When did the Luddites completely take over Slashdot, news for nerds indeed.

I don't think its terribly biased to imagine a future where consumers aren't paying a 3% spread to some mega corp for the right to spend their own money online, especially when the security and other guarantees by those corporations are fairly weak. Who hasn't had their credit card stolen? Risk and fraud analysis only get you so far, they are after-the-crime measures. Bitcoin has built security from the ground up.

Then you aren't doing it fast enough. Remember its programmable money, if you can pay a tight spread in both directions and almost no network fee you can do it cheaper and faster. I'm not speculating, I've done international wire multiple times it sucks. Businesses such as Xoom and Transferwise that have float on both ends, and / or get group rates for transfer do it well enough for most people, but their reach is limited to the markets they operate in. Bitcoin is a decentralized alternative to money exchange monopolies, and ultimately money exchange is just scratching the surface of its underlying utility.

Why does a bot net have value, but a massively secured trusted transfer network and ledger for digital information doesn't? A 4 billion market cap, a hundred million a year in network security via hashing power, its the beginning of something big.

Perhaps you are the wrong type of consumer at this point the development curve of Bitcoin?

If you wanted to send money back home to the Philippines, or engage in any type of remittances you may find value in being able to do it at a substantially lower rate than existing commercial offerings. I'm obviously biased, but to discount everything about Bitcoin because you don't see a use case for YOU right now is incredibly short sighted. Remember the early internet? The exact same kinds of arguments, why would you ever want to watch video online, whats the point of taking a class remotely, etc, etc etc. The reality is that Bitcoin redefined how we do trusted transfer of information on the Internet, and the first use case for this technology is in almost friction-less payments. From experience I can say paying engineers abroad in 5 seconds for 4 cents beats the hell out of an international wire transfer.

Before people start screaming volatility, there are ways to combat that, like not holding bitcoin when you don't want it to fluctuate. I know its novel, but since its digital currency you can acquire it, transfer it, and sell it very quickly, and that entire process is being automated such that Bitcoin becomes the conduit rather than the value store. Programmable money.

Slashdot surprises me because in general the people here have a very uninformed opinion when it comes to digital currency, despite the fact that it is the most exciting technical innovation in the last ten years by far. The value is in the network.

I know you can write good software in Javascript. I wrote my file transfer plugin for gmail SenderDefender for the curious, entirely in Javascript, but it seems to me that going forward well defined interfaces and something like NaCl / PNaCl could really change the landscape. I'm hoping that happens not because I'm afraid javascript will take my job, but that there won't be any other options for the web. I think the points you make are good, but don't you think the javascript software quality is generally lower than the other languages? Its entirely subjective, but with few exceptions I find many Node projects to be very rough.

Oh this is already happening. The node.js stuff is bridging javascript to every ORM, DB, and NoSql technology that exists. It is just an unfortunate reality but I fully expect it to eclipse every other language in terms of popularity over the next ten years, for exactly the reasons you state. Driving down the cost of labor, and unifying skill sets so that people are even more interchangeable.

Ah Javascript. The language we all love to hate, but isn't going anywhere. It seems like a good portion of all development will be Javascript in the not-too-distant future as legions of low paid programmers take up code writing and maintenance.

It is like boiling a frog. Intrusive ads might drive users away onto a competing platform, and since there isn't anything much to the technology they need to preserve their user base. At the same time they have to monetize. This intermediate solution is to slowly ramp up revenue, we'll get to the creepy targeted ads sooner rather than later...

Its a cool idea. There are things that are problematic about it though, like the fact that the browser itself hasn't been properly anonymized. The Tor browser package tries to disable plugins and third party software that might inadvertently reveal your identity or cause other information leakage. There is no such guarantee in this instance, which is a bit of a false sense of security. Tor isn't a panacea for all anonymity issues, and you wouldn't want to route most of your traffic over it.

I'm personally more interested in the hardware, any specifics on that? I think it would be a nice platform for a lot of interesting projects, hardware based firewalling etc.

I love the model M and all of it's variants. It just doesn't feel like work unless I'm using it.

I don't think this would help.

You are using service jobs as an example which by definition are location-specific. Programming, IT, Networking can be done from almost anywhere. At least the H1B system is increasing dollars circulating in the US. I don't think the choice is between American workers at American wages and H1B workers. The competition is entirely foreign firms that can just offer more competitive pricing and American workers. If we force that equation to be evaluated the American worker loses until we get labor cost equalization.

I think in the business context cheaper is almost always "better". I've dealt with reams of horrible code also, but at the end of the day most people just want a product that looks like it works. They don't have the technical experience to determine whether it was well built or not, just how it behaves on the surface under ideal conditions.

Programming as a profession is getting priced out. First they came for Support, then IT, etc. DevOps will eventually fall to the wayside of automation which is the whole purpose of the job. Programming will get eaten away. There will be high level consulting and architectural jobs for a while, but anything else is a losing proposition.

I would love to see a Power 8 workstation. If I could afford it I would definitely be doing my development on one, but alas this is where it gets crazy. They are afraid of cannibalizing the high end server sales with affordable desktop machines. This is probably not a good plan because exposing more people to the platform will pay dividends in the future, but in the short term and due to volume concerns it makes sense.

The power systems are very impressive. I think the last time I used them was around the Power5. Still, very good hardware, excellent performance characteristics, ran Linux like a beast.