You think normal currencies are stable? Google "forex." They're absolutely not stable.

Tinfoil hat much?

Yup, just like all of those people had protections from being screwed over by banks in 2008. Real dollars are so much better, you've convinced me.

All currency, whether it's bank notes, hunks of gold, bitcoins, goats, glass beads, or anything else, is a commodity. The only thing that determines price of that commodity is demand and supply. If people think it has utility, it has value. If people stop thinking any of these items have value, then they become worthless. All of these are speculated on as well; that's what foreign exchange markets are, that's what commodities markets are. None of them have intrinsic value until we decide to put a price tag on them in order to exchange them for other things.

Right now I can name about 4 local vendors who accept bitcoin because they prefer it to the 3% transaction fee charged for credit cards. And they're pulling in still more vendors. They're not involved as speculators, they're involved as people who want to accept it because it makes their cost of doing business lower.

Pyramid schemes aren't ponzi schemes. They're different things, with a few similarities.

You really have no idea how bitcoin works, do you?

Exactly. What people are missing is that this is still relatively new technology. With the big boom in mining over the past few months, we can consider this to be the true shakeout period. The exchanges that have problems will fall, and the ones that don't will be the cream rising to the top. This isn't something new. The fact is, a lot of vendors like cryptocurrencies because they don't require processing charges outside the occasional transaction fee when the transaction exceeds a certain size.

So, why wouldn't he reach out to one of the 3 letter agencies involved with things like this (namely the FBI)? At the very least with their help he could have pulled in the 3 companies into a conference call, explained what was going on, and gotten this resolved pretty quickly. It's pretty easy to say "Here is the information that was used to open the account, block all recent changes." Or did the hacker somehow get control of his phone too? Am I missing something?

Because Danica Patrick in skimpy clothing sells.

I'm the GP, and I actually *like* OSX, but my reason is pretty simple; I hate dealing with desktop UNIX. Having to spend days to get 3d acceleration and the desktop configured "just so," only to have the next OS update torch all of my settings to a state where it may be impossible to recover... well... it's just not worth it to me. That's why I pay the apple tax; it's an exchange for not having to do all of that work, and it's worth it for me to never have to see glxgears ever again. I'm not a fanboy by any means; I'm a pragmatist. But I will say that OSX did finally bring about the fabled "year of the *nix desktop," it just wasn't linux, it was BSD. And it wasn't really heralded as such.

Did you know that Goebel approached edison and attempted to sell him the patent for the lightbulb, but Edison refused, allowing Goebel to fall into destitution and die penniless. He then went to his destitute widow and offered her a fraction of the original asking price, effectively screwing Goebel's estate out of any royalties of the invention that Edison is most well known for? That's my whole issue here; people who steal other people's work, or who lie and cheat to get their hands on it. Edison was an asshole, if you don't believe me, just look at how he treated Goebel.

Fact for you: I am writing this comment on a mac, running OSX. What pisses me off is that people are crazy Steve Jobs fanboys without realizing that he had little to no technical ability. He was a sales guy, and had an idea about how things should work and how they should look. That's it. He didn't build anything. The original apple was built by Woz, and Jobs helped to sell it. Don't believe me? You can download the schematics for it; they're entirely the work of Woz. The same with the Apple II. Jobs' sole contribution to the projects was color suggestions on the boxes. His career would have not started except for the work of other people, whom he later screwed over at any chance he could take. He was like Edison, find engineers, find ways to suck work out of them or get them to put patents under your umbrella, and then take all of the credit. They won't sell? Blackmail, cheat, harass until you can get the patents under your control. He was a disgusting human being. The fact that he admitted other people were involved in this video is surprising. For those of us who met him, he was a royal douche who is incredibly overrated. The world is in a far worse place for losing Dennis Ritchie than it is Steve Jobs.

Actually, historically speaking, he did not have any part in the original apples. That was all Woz. Steve Jobs was just notoriously good at selling; he was in no way, shape, or form an engineer.