WOW, just WOW, I'm sure they believe all this too.

Having recently experienced SF as an outsider on vacation... Honestly, after a week, I got used to some of its quirks. I could see it as more or less basically habitable as a permanent resident.

But my impression for the first half of that week? "You fucking savages call this shithole home??? Google couldn't pay me enough to put up with this!"

In hindsight, yes, Google could pay me enough - But for similar money, they could also pay me enough to take a private jet in every day from further North.

Jus' sayin'...


/ I did find the guy spraypainted gold amusing, though - Especially when a scab stole his usual spot. Like watching monkeys fling poo at each other.

They can proclaim whatever the hell they want to; they themselves state, on their website in multiple places, that bitcoin transactions are routed through coinbase or similar.

I know, right? Such frauds... Kinda like how Mom n' Popco claim to take Visa, but in reality the transactions are routed through Network Merchants or Fiscorp or authorize.net. A bunch of lying liars! What does it matter that I can give them a credit card and they send me product, if they didn't personally wave the magic wand of money creation to turn that into USD?

Seriously, lose the hate-on (sorry, this irrational fear of BTC doesn't quite rank all the way up to the level of monkeys flinging poo... more like sheep running away from the rising sun every morning) for Bitcoin. Step back and think about what you believe about Bitcoin, and before posting more garbage, ask yourself: Could you say the same thing about the US financial system?

Ponzi schemes... Like Madoff? More SEC oversight... Like Enron? Useful for money laundering... Like a briefcase of USD$100s? Early adopters have an edge... Like the Rockefellers or Carnegies or Vanderbilts?

I know, you don't really care what I have to say about this, because you lost a few bucks trying to game a sytem you didn't understand, and no one can ever explain that away for you. But really, a great many of us use Bitcoin, for legal purposes, and find it extremely convenient. And like it or not, you can't do a damned thing about that.

Why is this lie perpetually getting repeated? Hell, some moron even modded it up. Overstock (and Tigerdirect, etc) do not accept bitcoins as payment.

You might want to tell that to Overstock and Tiger Direct, then, who both proudly proclaim that they do accept BTC as payment.

But no doubt, you know better than they do, so carry on with the Bitcoin hate.

But the experienced pilots did not make even one distress call or issue a single distress code. Why not? What prevented them from doing it?

Gun?

I don't think that means what you think it means.

First problem, the gambler's fallacy refers to a mistaken belief that a random process that has locally shifted away from its mean somehow "owes" the universe a return to its mean. After a long losing streak, the gambler erroneously believes he has a better chance of a win.

Second, for the gambler's fallacy to apply, you need an independent random process. Specifically, if the randomness in question has a history to it, the gambler's fallacy doesn't apply as a fallacy - The deck of cards with all the non-face cards played out really does "owe" you a 20 or a blackjack (Hmm, do aces count as face cards? Whatever - You get the point).

In this case, you want something more like confirmation bias or a sunk cost fallacy - Though neither of those quite properly applies to what I described, because I haven't ignored evidence contrary to my opinion (quite the opposite, I've weighed it heavily), and I haven't needed to keep pumping more money into my BTC position to keep it afloat (again, contrary to that, I've steadily syphoned money out and what remains just keeps going up in value).


It's a zero sum game, their gain will be matched by the losses of ordinary punters like you.

You have the first clause right, though you use it as though you don't realize that makes it 2.5% per year better than USD, which systematically loses value over time.

As for the second half of that - If BTC entirely collapsed tomorrow, I've already done better than break even on my original investment. Except, haters like you don't seem to get that my "investment" consists of having fun (and $50 in electricity, but hell, I've paid more for a single concert ticket). I got to play a part in the success of the first viable non-commodity non-government currency. I got to learn OpenCL as a result of tweaking miners to squeeze every possible hash out of my GPU. I got to watch my "just for laughs" investment turn into the price of a new car (if I hadn't slowly spent most of what I had over time) - And no, I don't regret spending it at $4/BTC, at $30/BTC, at $200/BTC, because I got involved for the idea, not because I someday hoped to get rich fleecing morons out of their dollars in exchange for worthless ($0.10 each, when I started) bits in a shared transaction record.

This. Over the course of a year, Amazon's free (normal) shipping easily saves me a few hundred bucks. Last year, I bought one especially large item that would have cost that in shipping by itself (and perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Amazon's price beat every local brick-and-mortar for that item by very nearly the cost of shipping). Then for some bulkier items, hey, I'd rather have something like a sofa delivered to my doorstep than try to figure out how to squeeze it into a subcompact car. ;)

That said, I don't pay for prime, because seriously, people can't wait a whoooole week to get their stuff (anything I need now, I simply buy locally)?

The only reason people were into this was to either trade in illegal goods and services or be cutting edge with something that only really served to facilitate illegal activity.

Fuck you very much, sir.

I, and the vast majority of Bitcoin users, engage in entirely legitimate commerce with BTC as the medium of exchange. Heck, I even declared my BTC gains on my taxes last year, fer chrissakes.

Now, when I want to score a quarter of weed - You ever actually try to buy anything with BTC, or just mindlessly parroting the FUD about Silk Road? My dealer takes USD only, thanks.

If you hold your own Bitcoins in a local wallet, then yes, a handful of confirmations adequately proves you really do have those coins.

As soon as you entrust them to someone else to store in a pooled account, bam, confirmability lost.

A key philosophy behind the BTC protocol assumes direct person-to-person transactions. If you adhere to that, you don't get screwed by a failed exchange; for that matter, you don't even care about the existence of an exchange... Except insofar as they help define the "worth" of a Bitcoin as a medium of trade. Though, with the likes of Overstock accepting BTC now, the marketplace itself might soon serve that function without needing an external point of reference.

All these 'with-it' trendy people got to brag about about being ahead of everyone else and 'cool' because they were so smartly investing in this scam.

So do I still get to brag, since the handful of BTC I still have currently trade at USD$650, while my initial investment comes out to less than $50 in electricity?

Boo hoo, people who trusted an unregulated exchange got burned - Color me shocked.

Are you aware that we rely on other species to survive? We evolved with those other species around - removing them from our environment might indeed change the balance of wildlife to the point where things we directly rely on start being affected by our changes to other species.

Don't worry, we're adaptable. We can just find some other way to metabolize glucose into ATP after we kill all the oxygen-producing creatures on the planet. Just one little atom, anyway - And heck, other critters use sulfur instead of oxygen, why can't we? ;)

After the 2000-ish dot-com crash, California was flooded with unemployed developers, making jobs very difficult to find around 2001-2004. I found that the best place to find jobs and contracts was in states with cold weather: Minnesota, Ohio, etc. Places with lousy weather have a harder time finding employees and are thus less picky about finding an exact language or buzz-word fit.

As best I can tell, CGI's competitors all suck also. Gov't contracting is a screwy industry that rewards screwy behavior and thus shapes screwy corporate behavior.

That was my immediate thought. Any decent system needs to ensure that it isn't running at a loss. To make that happen, they need an accounting system in place.

Rather than a loss, they managed a significant profit. The profit didn't go to the company.

I've seen lots of affiliate systems (sign up for a sight, the referring webmaster gets x%). In the adult industry, it's called shaving. The referring webmaster has a percentage of their sales (I've seen up to 25%), where it isn't recorded that they got the sale. Instead, it is credited to another account. The owner of the system doesn't always know. They see sales come in. They see payments go out. The shaved sales go to one of the developer's accounts (usually to a difficult to trace 3rd party).

If I were the developer, I'd have a friend in another country set up his affiliate account. The "lost" sales get paid out to him. He keeps a percentage, and pays me the rest. It can be very difficult to trace until there is a code audit. The audits don't usually come until the boss knows there's something funny going on. As long as the boss is getting a large profit, they have no reason to audit.

In the rest of the corporate world, it's skimming. Accountants can make it look like the missing funds are going to nondescript costs.

In both skimming and shaving, it becomes obvious when the person doing it gets too greedy. Like, it's difficult to justify that $1M/yr goes to miscellaneous custodian costs. And yes, I've seen exactly that, in a company that only made about $3M/yr profit. Sometimes it goes to consumable costs. It can be tricky to track if they're smart. When they get greedy, smart falls out of the equation.

You need to read up more on economics. Maybe swing by a local college and audit some economics courses.

No, most (all?) of the current in use today is backed by nothing. Well, nothing more than the idea that it's worth something.

I have a $20 bill in my pocket. It's not worth anything. There is a perceived value of it, so I can exchange that piece of paper for goods and services.

If it were backed by anything, there would be an obligation by the issuing party to exchange it for the commodity it was backed by. You can't go to the federal reserve and say "I want to exchange my $20 note for $20 worth of gold". Best case, you'd get a smile, pat on the head, and be sent on your way.

We effectively work with a bartering system. The perceived value of one service or object, for another. You can barter drugs, ammunition, or sex. That doesn't make any of them a currency, even though they'd each be good examples in your description. Actually, I think I like my examples better than the ugly paper in my pocket.

Who's got the money to pony up for some experimental fab runs for billions of transistors with reconfigurable mesh network? This is basically an Intel i7 fab process we're talking about here, so think beeeeelions of dollars.

You don't need your own dedicated fab, you just need your own masks. Those will run you on the order of 100-150k per layer (and a modern CPU like the i7 has around 20 layers).

Still not cheap, but a few million vs a few billion means the difference between "not gonna happen" and "bored Silicon Valley millionaire's hobby project".