Not quite true. Nobody has lost any insured money in a bank failure. Up to the FDIC limit. Plenty of people have lost money due to bank failures who had more than the insured amount in their account.

Strangely enough, very few people with balances over the FDIC limit actually lost any money due to the larger bank failures which occurred in 2008 and 2009, because the U.S. government brokered agreements with other large banks to buy their assets whole in exchange for some big tax breaks. Wells Fargo's purchase of Wachovia, for example.

Wells Fargo took on almost $30B in liabilities which would normally have made the purchase impossible, but the U.S. government relaxed some laws and allowed Wells to declare those liabilities against future profits to reduce their tax bill. Essentially, the U.S. government bailed out the bank customers of Wachovia.

However, a good chunk of the bank failures since 2008 were liquidations and any customer with a balance greater than the FDIC limit will have lost the difference.

-Matt

What regulations surrounding the dollar? Perhaps you mean regulations on banks and brokerages. Unfortunately, MtGox was neither a bank nor a brokerage. Plus they are run out of Japan, so they are hardly going to be subject to U.S. law.

Customers who got creamed by MtGox were idiots. I feel sorry for them, but sometimes it takes a hard lesson to punch through blind idealism.

-Matt

If you are looking for a riskless investment that maintains your buying power over time then no such beast exists anywhere in the world.

I haven't paid a single dime in bank fees in over 30 years. If you are, then you don't have the minimal amount of sense required to avoid it. It isn't rocket science. Or perhaps you are just parroting what the media heads are shoveling into your head?

The stock market in 2008 crashed. And it recovered. Big difference between that and something crashing and not recovering ever. My parent's retirement portfolios dropped 40% in 2008. And 2 years later they had recovered completely.

-Matt

Hey, that would be great... because, ya know, all the MF Global customers are likely to get all of their money back (if you haven't been keeping track of it). But the victims of MtGox and other exchanges that have gone dark probably never will.

I'd say MF Global is a case that shows just how good regulation can be when the shit hits the fan. Even if they didn't follow the law, there was enough there to make it recoverable for the customers, including the freezing of funds at the target institutions that had already been transfered out of MF Global.

-Matt

I think you are confusing Intel's under-powered mobile cpu's with the cpu's they are stuffing into the Chromebox and Chromebooks. These cpu's are MUCH faster than anything ARM has on offer.

-Matt

You can DD the whole disk... but unless you have another machine that can take a M.2 form factor SSD you have no easy way to restore it from the image.

The Acer c720 laptop will boot the Acer/Google recovery image from a USB stick but all it can do is completely wipe the M.2 SSD, so you'd lose whatever you had on there. If you do not follow the BIOS directions properly you might also get into a situation where it refuses to boot from the USB stick while the M.2 drive is installed with the non-conformant OS.

-Matt

I read a bit more on the ASUS Chromebox. There are three cpu choices. The 2955U, The i3-4010U, or the I7-4600U. The I7-4600U is very similar to the I7-4700MQ that I have in one of my laptops, and that is a very respectable cpu and very suited for desktop use.

The only one I see on Amazon is the one with the 2955U (1.4 GHz single-core/2-thread celeron).

From what I can google the chromebox uses an internal M.2 form factor SSD (16GB), which means you can potentially upgrade it to e.g. a 128GB SSD by buying it on newegg (another $100). This will be considerably faster than a SD card.

So this chromebox (with the i3 or i7) would definitely be powerful enough as a desktop.

It just comes down to whether the BIOS will allow third-party OS installs or not and I don't know the answer to that.

-Matt

The Acer c720 works great as a small laptop and will run Linux. It isn't quite a replacement for a workstation, it's not as fast as a desktop cpu but it is certainly much faster than the much-aligned netbooks from a few years ago. The keyboard and touchpad are pretty good considering the form factor.

Booting and setup is a bit hokey due to the minimal BIOS but it works. The c720 has a M.2 form factor SSD internally and it's *easy* to take apart the back (just a lot of screws) and replace it with a bigger one. I bought a 128GB M.2 SSD for mine.

For the Acer c720 my recommendation is to not overwrite the 16GB SSD in the machine. Instead buy a (bigger) replacement and leave chrome on the original. Also find the acer/google restore disk image (you should be able to google, it's officially supplied) which you can throw onto a USB stick. You need your chromebook's serial number. Always good to have a restore image handy in case you flub the instructions.

Read the instructions on how to install linux very carefully and do not skip any steps. Worst case you brick the laptop and have to put the original M.2 16GB SSD back into it to get back on track (which is why I suggest not overwriting the original SSD).

-Matt

I'm not sure of that. It is on my Acer C720 chromebook (laptop). If it's M.2 you may be able to just buy a bigger SSD on e.g. newegg, load linux or a BSD onto it, and throw it in. Google for instructions, not all chromebook BIOS's allow non-chrome OS installs.

-Matt

Actually, iOS *is* more developer friendly. Writing an App for Android's infinite screen dimensions and densities is a nightmare.

-Matt

That's total nonsense. The only monopoly a government has on money is the requirement to pay taxes in a particular currency. Bitcoin doesn't make a dent in that.

There is absolutely nothing stopping you from converting your money to any manner of scrip (aka stocks), commodity-tracking scrip, or a commodity itself and still have it be liquid enough to be usable as a currency. Many of these instruments have great long-term records of inflation protection to boot.

Bitcoiners seem to believe that there is some magic 'currency' instrument which is immune to inflation and all manner of government manipulation which maintains or increases its value magically over time with no effort. No such beast exists anywhere in the world. There is not a single instrument anywhere which can make that guarantee. Certainly not bitcoins. Not gold. Nothing.

People who believe that crap deserve to lose every cent they own.

-Matt

I found an awesome one that is accepted all over the world with a nifty piece of plastic that you just swipe in a little machine. Takes 5 seconds and you don't even have to sign for small transactions. Ultra convenient and I can only lose $50 in the event of fraud. All my transactions are listed conveniently on a monthly statement. And, best of all, they loan me the money for 30 whole days and it costs me absolutely nothing as long as I pay my balance off each month.

It's called a credit card.

-Matt

Think about what you are asking. You might be willing to take on huge risks, but I assure no insurance company is going to follow you down the rabbit hole unless they are idiots (and here I would put 'AIG' in the category of 'idiots', heh). You might be able to 'buy' insurance from another bitcoiner, but it isn't real insurance if the other bitcoiner doesn't have a dime to his name to be able to back the policies he's writing. Don't expect to be paid.

This is an excellent example of fantasy going head to head against the real world and winding up in a crumpled heap.

-Matt

Shorting requires that you borrow the stock/commodity/currency/whatever from someone else who owns it, and then sell it on the open market. The borrowing usually entails interest. That is, someone might be willing to lend you the bitcoin so you can then sell them (the short), but that person is also going to charge you, say, 5% of the bitcoins lent payable in bitcoin or some other stock or currency each year as long as they are borrowed. At some point you have to buy the bitcoin back to pay back the person you borrowed them from.

Another problem is that borrowing any significant quantity of anything, such as bitcoin or a stock or whatever, requires a trusted and/or regulated middle-man who can guarantee that the lender gets paid back and consequences if you are unable to pay-back the middleman. Otherwise only a fool would lend you the bitcoin with only your 'promise' that you'll pay him back. This is how shorting in the real stock market works.

Lots of ways to blow yourself up. Usually the lender can call back his or her stock/bitcoin/whatever with less than a week's notice, which might force you to buy-back the bitcoin you sold at a loss if you can't find someone else to borrow the bitcoin from. The lender and/or middleman (aka your broker in the case of stock) also needs to protect themselves, and so there will be wording that requires you to maintain a balance sufficient to buy back the bitcoin you owe them. So if the price of bitcoin were to double and you don't have sufficient funds to cover the value, they can force you buy back the bitcoin right then and there to pay back the loan. Just two examples.

So I'm sure there would be someone willing to lend you the bitcoins, but if they do they are going to be asking for your first born child and your house if you can't pay them back, and probably charge you 20%+ in interest in the mean time.

-Matt

Sure, I'll insure your bitcoins. And the premium I will charge for insuring your bitcoins will be... the face value of your bitcoins.

Sometimes insurance simply isn't possible. Insurance companies exist to make a profit, not to give all their money away to bad clients and go bankrupt themselves.

-Matt