The difference with Bitcoins is that the entire transaction chain is by definition permanent public record. The bank might record the serial numbers of bills issued to you at the ATM, but the chain is pretty much broken as soon as you spend them because intermediaries rarely take steps to record serial numbers and link them with those who spend them. At best they might know what you bought and how much it cost, but not necessarily which bills you used to pay for the purchase. Unless you use your Bitcoins in a way that doesn't expose your identity, either by buying them in person at one of these ATMs or spending them in a way that links your wallet to your real identity, they can actually be less anonymous than cash and even one slip up exposes all of your previous transactions using that wallet.

I would say that the difference between those crimes and the one being discussed here was in the intent. There can be no doubt that the intent of the man who killed the British soldier in London was to intimidate the society at large into changing the foreign policy of the British government with regard to lands that the killer and others consider to be Muslim. Indeed, he made a statement on camera to that effect immediately after the killing so that there can be no doubt that the killing and the statement of intent were linked and intended to achieve a political goal. Contrast this with a killing done not for the purpose of political change but rather for revenge or due to prejudice or a grudge against a specific group or persons. It is the explicitly stated threat to society at large and the political goal that makes this terrorism and not simply a murder for hire or a crime of passion.

The killer very clearly expounded the reasons for the killing, including references to British foreign policies in "muslim lands" and "an eye for an eye", while holding the bloody knife and cleaver in his red hands. The obvious intent of this statement, which was made to the camera immediately after the killing so that it would be recorded and seen by the entire world, was to intimidate and effect political change through fear of more violence if those changes desired by the terrorist and his confederates were not made. If that's not the very definition of terrorism, I don't know what is.

The VCs are free to be as stupid as they want to be with their own money, but with titles like "Head of Regulatory Strategy" you know that they will be going after government money too which means that us taxpayers may still be footing the bill for this bullshit. That's what really chaps my hide.

As far as the gun control lefties are concerned, every gun in private ownership is a "wrong people" gun. Like you said, they're idiots.

You forgot board with rusty nail

Yes, but liberals believe that it is or at least they see no problem in eliminating all of your rights to try because in their minds it was worthwhile if even one life was saved (which it probably wasn't).

Well, they failed to account for those crafty Mormons finding a way to tax them, so I'm not so sure.

Well, you've got to hand it to the Mormons; they're clever in their business dealings. Frankly I'm surprised that the NSA guys didn't see this one coming.

Here is the in-depth answer if you're interested. I usually get shot down for posting this link here on Slashdot because it doesn't comport well with the groupthink on health care, but if you honestly want to hear a good economic argument explaining why health care in the United States is so expensive instead of the same old "greedy insurance company" canards, it's probably worth your time.

This appears to be a common sentiment here on Slashdot, but the concept of money does indeed have value in an economy quite apart from any additional value that the monetary commodity may or may not itself possess. Ask yourself, what is the purpose of money? Why do we use money when we could use barter instead? In a word, efficiency. If I have milk to trade and you have a car to trade and I want the car but you don't want the milk then I must take time and effort to find someone who wants milk and is willing to trade me something that you want so that I can come back to you and trade for the car. It's entirely possible that I might have to make a great many such trades in sequence before I can finally acquire the commodity that you want for the car and even then there are no guarantees. For example, I may be unable to organize a series of trades that ends with me trading you for the car on a given day and even if I can all of this takes time and effort that I could have spent doing something else which is also a cost. Money solves what economists call the coincidence of wants problem by creating an artificial commodity that everyone wants simply to facilitate exchanges and thus save everyone time and effort. We all participate in this system willingly because we're better off participating than refusing to use the money and demanding barter instead. Indeed a large and complex modern economy would not be possible without a stable unit of account to serve as money. The fact that the idea of money has arisen independently many times in different cultures who had no contact with each other proves that the development of a money commodity is a natural evolutionary step along the path to organized and complex society.

The reason why gold was so often chosen, at least before electronics and computers become widely available, was that it's rare enough and compact enough to serve as a meaningful unit of account while at the same time being easy to recognize, difficult to fake, easy to subdivide or recombine and relatively impervious to rot, corrosion, rust, tarnish or other forms of degradation. In preindustrial societies there really wasn't anything better to serve as the monetary commodity wherever gold and to a lesser extent silver were available in sufficient quantities.

You're arguing over whether the cat should be black or white when all that really matters is that it catches mice. The money commodity is chosen and accepted by the marketplace because it's vastly more efficient than barter. Indeed, markets cannot grow beyond a certain size or complexity without the standardization that a monetary commodity brings. As you said, the commodity that is ultimately chosen as the money is not important so long as everyone agrees upon the choice. Throughout history money has been at various times and places sea shells, salt, copper, iron or even large circular stones with holes drilled in them, it just depends upon what's available. However, gold and other precious metals have been common choices, where available in sufficient quantities, because they're rare and yet easy to recognize and difficult to counterfeit. Gold in particular also had other advantages. It didn't rust or otherwise degrade and it was easy to divide as necessary to provide the necessary units of account. So even in your example the gold, where it available in sufficient supply, would probably displace your bottle cap money in much the same way that contact with Europeans and other outsiders led the Yapese to abandon Rai stones in favor of more convenient alternatives.

I think that Bitcoin or schemes like it will always be with us from now on because they serve well a niche that until recently was poorly served by physical cash: the black market. Just consider the many advantages of Bitcoin transactions, legal and otherwise. They're anonymous (or at least they can be if done right), easy to verify, difficult to reverse and require no centralized clearing authority. The design of the Bitcoin system also makes it extremely difficult or even impossible to counterfeit. So you see, these types of distributed electronic crypto currencies will always have value to those who wish the convenience of electronic transaction without the transparency that's attached to official channels. They may not become mainstream for these same reasons, among others, but sites like Silk Road need a way to clear transactions without everyone being identified and arrested and Bitcoin provides a means to do that.

Who do you think spends your money better, you or the government? The government wastes vast sums of money on nonsense and bullshit, so I can certainly understand why somebody would want to make sure that as little as possible goes to them by way of taxes. From where I sit, it doesn't look like anybody in Washington DC has a damned clue what it means to really work or how difficult it was for many of us to earn that money in the first place. Most of America is having a hardscrabble go of it these days while dishonest politicians and their fellow travelers in DC just keep spending like drunken sailors, it's disgusting.

I take it then that you're no longer using Ubuntu, so what are you using instead these days?

How about we send everyone on the list? Have you seen those videos? Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel.

We on Slashdot who use ad blocking are in the definite minority of users out there and especially so on sites frequented by the masses, like Facebook. They know that we block ads but they don't care because 90+% of regular Facebook, Disney and ESPN users don't. If the ads weren't effective, the advertisers wouldn't still be paying for them. I'm actually fine with this arrangement because it means that a sort of détente exists between us and the advertisers. They have no desire to engage us in an arms race of counter measures and counter counter measures while they're still reaching the vast majority of their intended audience, it's not worth it. That may change in the future but for now it seems that nobody wants to fire the opening shots in that war.