No, I'm sure Amazon can afford much, much smarter marketing people than that.

When did bitcoin get big enough to have "name recognition"? Outside of geek circles the only people who have even heard of it have gotten their info from news articles about silkroad, and thus equate it to drug smuggling, gun running, human trafficking, etc....

I'm not a marketing guy, but if I was, and was looking for a good brand to leach off of, it sure as fuck wouldn't be "bitcoin".

The quote you included doesn't really back up your point very well, but you do make a good point anyway.

The entire concept of money is 100% dependent on general trust and perception. If you want my boat, and I agree to sell it to you for $10,000, I'm not agreeing to it because those dollars have any particular value to me. I agree to it because I have confidence that I can trade them for something that does have value to me.

In other words, "money" has value because, and only because, we all agree it does. It's simply a proxy. We only accept it because we believe that someone else down the road will accept it as well.

If that system of confidence ever breaks down (and someday it will), we're probably all screwed.

If you truly believe that, then you really haven't thought this through.

A couple of hours ago I stopped at a convenience store and purchased a 12-pack of beer and a pack of smokes. I paid with one of my credit cards. I take it for granted that multiple entities can see that I made a purchase. I also take it for granted that most of them can take the total, subtract the sales tax, and then fairly easily determine which combination of items would have added up to that amount. Hell, that's pretty simple stuff, and I assume that "they" can do hard stuff, too.

Now, if I had thrown a $20 bill down on the counter instead of the credit card? "They" wouldn't get any info at all.

So why do I use credit cards? Honestly, I don't give a shit if "they" know I bought a 12-pack of shitty beer and a pack of smokes tonight.

But if I was making a purchase that I did want to keep to myself? Hell yeah, cash would be the only way to go.

At present, paper money is the one and only way to make a purchase and be assured of anonymity. To think that there isn't anything special about paper money is simply delusional.

Forget beta. Slashdot loses its credibility simply for the fact that "https://slashdot.org" doesn't work, and brings me back to the regular http site.

Yes, yes, I know... SSL is broken by design and offers no security against the NSA and their foreign counterparts. Still kinda handy for skirting corporate monitoring crap, though.....

FTFY

Not true. There are plenty of cars out there with factory installed HIDs that completely blind me when I meet them on the highway.

It's not a problem that would probably be noticed by people who spend most of their time in the city, since there is enough light pollution there that your eyes don't dark adapt to the same degree. They've never caused me a problem in a city, but when you've been traveling down a rural highway and not met another car for 20 minutes, coming up on a fucking BMW or Mercedes with those damn things can and has blinded me to the point where I had to pull over for a few minutes to let my eyes recover.

Well, given that HID headlamps are still legal, the answer seems to be "Yes".

Yeah, windows that don't allow light to pass through them.

I believe that's called a wall.

Your shame is irrelevant.

What matters is that people in general are judgemental pricks, and the information that you're not ashamed of can and will cost you dearly when packaged properly and presented to the right people.

"Change" is not the problem. You care correct, things change all the time, and quite often it is an improvement.

However, not all change is good change. If I borrow your car and crash it into a tree, your car has been changed, but not improved.

When you take something that works well and replace it with a steaming pile of shit, you would have to be insane to not expect backlash.

And, now that it's a Dice property, exactly what you'd expect.

Um... You either don't understand what OCR is, or you're proposing a complex solution to a simple problem.

Let me guess, you're a tire salesman?

The (completely impossible) scenario being discussed is a world in which money has become obsolete.

The problem with that type of utoptia is that when you think it all the way through, after a few iterations of "working out the bugs" it turns out that the most efficient solution to those problems just happens to be "use money".