The school kids on my bus in the morning used to spend their journeys using BBM on their blackberries. Now they have cheap Androids and converse on WhatsApp.

We are making the plastic anyway, so the only thing we need to consider the the energy cost of converting it back into oil once we have finished using it.

Legal tender means that it must be accepted as settlement of debt. The IRS will in practice accept checks and bank transfers as settlement of tax liabilities, but that does not make them legal tender.

When the Feds bust a normal street-corner drug dealer, they get "legal" property, such as cars, and illegal property such as their inventory of drugs. The illegal property is retained as evidence until the court case is concluded, then destroyed. The legal property gets sold off.

The Silk Road bust is subject to the same laws as any other drug-dealer bust, so by auctioning off the bitcoins, they are declaring that they are legal property.

There are lots of people with $600[1] in the bank who could bid for one bitcoin. There are not so many people with $1.8m in the bank who can bit for a block of 3000 bitcoins. Therefore they will probably sell for less than market value, and the winning bidders will likely make a profit from selling them off individually.

[1]$600 is based on the current prices quoted on Bitcoin Charts rounded to one significant figure.

I guess this would be like the red mini-buses in Hong Kong which supplement the green mini-buses and big buses that operate to a fixed route and timetable.

But does this bus go where you want it to go, or would you need to take the bus to the central bus station, and another one back out in almost the same direction to a stop not particularly far away from you?

In the UK, the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act means that past offences get wiped from your record after a certain period of time depending on the nature of the offence. In some cases, it is never wiped from your record.

The two launch markets for the MotoE were the UK and India. That appears to be where they are most popular, not USA.

Well no end user deals with Visa directly. You have to go through an intermediary, usually a bank, and Paypal is one of the intermediaries you can use.

People deposited fiat money with MT Gox in exchange for Bitcoins, however MT Gox did not have enough Bitcoins in stock to give them out to all the people that bought them, so the Bitcoin denominated account balances at MT Gox were liabilities with limited assets to back them. They relied on the fact that most people would not withdraw their Bitcoins, therefore it was a fractional reserve system.

The difference between banks and MTGox is that while banks also use fraction reserve, the full liabilities are backed by assets in the form of loans they have handed out, and security on the assets of the borrowers such as property. At the time of the financial crisis, those assets and collateral were not sufficient to cover the fractional reserve liabilities, but at least they had something, unlike MTGox which had nothing to back the fractional reserve liabilities.

Governments do generally recognise that you can steal things other than legit currency.

The problem is that you still need PayPal or a similar system (such as BACS, SWIFT, Visa etc) to get your fiat money to the exchange.

No, the police can do a "stop and search", and arrest if they find something.