You know, I hate to be the one to point this out, but nearly every one of those things can be attributed to governmental overreach as much as it can be attributed to the environment. Just look at the water shortage statistics. States that were hit the hardest all had laws against rain water collection. Wildfires, likewise, may also be related to the insane laws we have in place. Insurance companies are being regulated to death, and are playing it as safe as they legally can. It has more to do with this insatiable need to regulate the hell out of them than it does with actual conditions. Sea levels go up and down all year long, and no amount of climate change legislation is going to have any power to control that. Of course the government is going to tell you that climate change is a big problem, and that more of your tax money is needed to combat it. They have a profit motive to do so, duh. The people to listen to here are the ones who have no political or financial agenda.

Every innovation in crypto is step forward. I'm curious to see if this will be adopted by other currencies.

This is an outright, prima-face lie, based on nothing.
Why is this even on the Slashdot home page? Are we dedicated to spreading liberal and progressive propaganda now?

And if Copper were rare, you would be talking about the exquisite shades of brown and green.

You're delusional if you think gold is not a digital good.

It is awful.

I would make a case for entrapment. If anyone comes to you and says something along the lines of, "I've got some drug money to launder, I need $30,000 in bitcoins..." don't say yes. I mean, Jesus Christ, how fantastically stupid do you have to be to go for that?! Still, law enforcement is breaking the law when they create crimes to arrest people for. Beyond that, unless they're going to make private money transactions illegal, this case doesn't really mean anything for the bigger picture.

I just find the whole idea distasteful.

PC's have a totally different tool set than mobile devices. This is what's making mobile devices so popular. If you could incorporate a touch screen and a camera into PC's, then load Android onto them in a way that makes sense (it would take some real work), that would go a long way to making desktops more appealing to the average user. As a hacker, though, I think I still prefer my Ubuntu desktop for the time being. But that could change. We'll see.

This is just nuts. The internet isn't growing up, big money sites like the LA Times and Reuters are just getting lazy. What ever happened to comment moderation? Why is it so fantastically difficult to screen these things?

Why doesn't he just change the password on his wallet?

It's trading at over 300% of its original value. Granted, when you figure in that it's only worth a fraction of a penny, it doesn't sound like much. But it's one of the faster growing altcoins right now.

This is not a problem unique to cryptocurrencies. This particular incident is one that can be chocked up to kids not using php properly. Bad website implementation is not the fault of any cryptocurrency, be it one for pomeranians, or human beings.

Actually, I have it on good authority that Bitcoin was written by time traveling aliens from Sirius 2. The same people that built the pyramids, and gave mankind astrology. The block chain was first implemented by the Inkas, and passed down for generations on tree bark. There were millions of copies of the ledger, and mining was done with toothpicks and lasers. If you look at the numerological value of the name Satoshi Nakamoto, you get 9. Osiris was also 9. Coincidence? I think not. I think all you non believers just need to wake up and realize that the alien gods are now among us, and they're terraforming our financial system! Make no mistake my friends, they're in with the Illuminati, and they know where Lora Palmer is buried, because Satoshi Nakamoto is an alien who knows everything! Why do you think the NSA need to spy on us like that? Why do you think Alex Jones is buying evil death robots, and keeping them in his basement? Seriously. I don't know how people can look at the overwhelming evidence for all of this, and come to the conclusion that we're not like, totally, in serious trouble.

My father is brilliant, but he's not a computer person. So the last time a virus took out his system, I treated him like any other non technical user on my network. I limited his ability to do damage to himself and others. NT user permissions in Windows 7 are useful for this. You can adjust anyone's group permissions, be they on a single PC or an Active Directory. It's not difficult to learn how to use these things, if you're not a systems administrator; and my dad hasn't had a single problem with viruses since I set it up for him. Remember, when you're running any PC, a virus needs admin permissions to do real damage. Deprive your users of admin rights, and (while you may still have issues with viruses) you're not going to fry your PC.