All of these people make arguments that are based on faith and hand waving. While I will freely admit that arguments the other direction are no better, I do not think that making a snarky conclusion that it isn't money is a justifiable opinion based on any of the available arguments.

Executables are demand paged. I'm not convinced that it will be largely long, contiguous reads.

Maybe you're right. But I strongly suspect that if I profiled disk accesses that I would see the SSD being hit for reads far more often than my home directory. But I should do that just to be sure.

Hah, hah. Very funny. In what way are they not money?

Unfortunately for your logic, bitcoin keeps on ending up with more people using it. It's not a rocket growth curve to be sure. But it isn't negative either.

I've met the VC (actually angel investor) in question. He's a really good and honest guy. He's not a shark.

This is due to two problems. First, the changeover to new management had not been completed yet, and when one of their systems was hacked it gave an opening to hack the trading site itself. This was a really serious failure, but also understandable since they hadn't finished auditing things to figure out how to secure them.

The second problem is that Bitoinica was hacked together quickly by a very talented individual without a lot of experience. He didn't cover his bases. The lack of backups is one of the major bases he didn't cover. He did at least take the precaution of making sure most of the bitcoins his trading platform was managing were in an offline wallet, which is why bitcoinica lost 80k USD work of bitcoins instead of some much larger amount.

I trust this far more than I trust the legal framework surrounding our current banks. If they're big enough, they don't really have to comply with the law, just give the appearance of doing so. Most of our laws and regulations designed to reign in larger business actually work that way. They might accomplish something for a few years, but as soon as people stop paying really close attention the regulators start acting on the behalf of the industry they regulate instead of the people they're supposed to be serving.

The amount of money that was stolen was only a fairly small fraction of the total money held by the exchange. The site designer at least had the good sense to keep most of the site's money in offline storage.

Of course, the lack of database backups make it really difficult to figure out who's money it is now. :-/

He or she is not a theorist. All of the things (s)he mentions actually happen. It's become increasingly common for banks to refuse to do business with someone because someone in power disagrees with them. And then it doesn't matter how many people want to vote with their dollars, there is no longer any way for those dollars to get to them.

They all exist to make Microsoft more money. In this case, they want to manipulate developers into developing for a platform they're trying to push because they think they can make more money off it it. Everything you do when you base your stuff on their platform exists to enrich them. And if it happens to enrich you in the process, well insomuch as the vague promise that it might happen keeps people developing for their platform, Microsoft cares. Otherwise, they don't care at all, and if you become really successful, they'll look for a way to make sure your success feeds their success at the expense of your success.

That's the nature of the Microsoft game, and they haven't ever changed how they play it. They can't. Their chosen business model depends on it.