According to this poorly written article Slot survived the accident and Tesla still has a perfect record.

Roman Seleznev and his father, the ultra-nationalist Duma deputy Valery Selenev are on the phone. The scene is tense. There are tears.

Roman: "Father, I'm scared. The lawyer told me I could be looking at 20 years in prison. My whole life will be gone. You've got to tell Mr. Putin to help us."
Valery: "Don't worry, Rommie. We'll spin this into an international incident."
Roman: "And there's a big ObCMORMEYbCM6O (Russian for nigger) looking at my tender, plump buttucks."
Valery: "For God's sakes, boy! Pull up your pants."
Roman: "They are up. He's looking at the spot where my juicy, plump ass would be if it weren't covered up."
Valery: "Oh."

In Russia it is legal and even heroic to steal from Americans on the internet. Russia has never extradited for internet crime so let them seethe in their anger that one of their elites had a bag put over his head by the Secret Service and will now spend the rest of his life with a negro cellie whose size and penetrating capacity will soon make him forget about girls. I hope it gives them a heart attack.

I would assume the dogs don't get their treat if the flashes drives are encrypted.

The media and liberals conflate the three issues of-- Is the world warming? Is it human induced? Can human countermeasures have any worthwhile effect?" into one hoping the public will be too dumb to see the difference so that any skepticism about countermeasures like onerous carbon taxes can be shouted down as flat-earth talk. Any intelligent observer of the issue will arrive at the conclusion that the high costs Americans will be asked to pay for certain quantity of carbon reduction will be quickly overwhelmed by India and China opening one new coal fired power plant per week. Americans should be told that the extra $500 per month they will be paying for energy is largely symbolic and designed more to shame the developing world into adopting green energy policies and burnish America's image as a green nation doing its part to combat GW.

Deflation is a problem that can be managed since with universal participation and a liquid market of maybe 100MM buy/sell transactions per day the deflation rate will look something like the the inflation rate of a widely traded currency like the dollar-- 1 or 2% per year, nothing you're going to hoard to make money off of. Bitcoin could just become a token currency where it is held for the purpose of the transaction and then converted into fiat. This would be especially true if the future of the blockchain as a universally used decentralized broker of trust for all manner of transactions ( not just Bitcoin) play out.

We pay the card companies a lot of money for using their network, maintaining a secure ledger of accounts and combating fraud and identity theft, merchants pay 3% of their gross revenue through the transaction fee and the card providers also extract some of this cost from the consumer through high fees and interest. These are costs that suddenly vanish when the merchant accepts Bitcoin (or actually shrink to .1%) since the network is free, the ledger (blockchain) is free and identity fraud is impossible since a Bitcoin wallet cannot be duplicated like a credit card. You can see how merchants who are operating on very thin profit margins (10% or less) see lower transaction costs as a way to substantially make a difference in their bottom line. As a matter of fact, Wall Street sees it too which is why they are investing in Bitcoin infrastructure. My advice to you slashdot holdouts is don't wait too long before you start getting it.

Psst. Don't post success stories. You'll just make the bitcoin skeptics hate it more .

As time goes on lost coins start to stand out in the block chain. Large transaction outputs like Anonymous Cowards that have not been touched in 10 years or more will be good candidates for inclusion in the lost coin ledger.

I'd sure like to know how that would work.

Liquidity will never be a problem with Bitcoin because its 21 million coins has 1,000 times more units of value than all the worlds currencies combined. As the world needs more bitcoin the decimal just moves to the right. Just one of the advantages of a mathematically created currency.

Having an alternative currency like Bitcoin in a country with rampant inflation 'couldn't hoit'. Especially if dollar purchases are restricted like in Venezuela where holders of the Bolivar lost 56% last year due to inflation. It simply gives the victim of an inept monetary policy a way to preserve the wealth value in an asset more stable than his own currency. Gold and dollars would be better but they are hard to obtain.