that's a surprisingly low number.

That statement stands on its own. $10M? For a company (well, a division of EMC, anyway) whose very existence depends on their reputation and ability to keep secrets safe?

As much as I damn both the NSA and corporate greed in general, I find TFA borderline unbelievable. Now, I find it a lot more believable that the NSA "paid" $10M plus a "gentleman's agreement" to allow the children of the entire executive board of EMC to continue taking in oxygen from the atmosphere...

I notice you vaguely said 'medical professional.'

Only because getting specific would make it too easy for my coworkers to ID me, generally not a good idea.

Suffice it to say, she makes twice what I do as a mid-career dev - Know a lot of nurses and respiratory therapists you could say that about?

While valid, you need to understand the magnitude of the continuing education involved.

I live with a medical professional. She needs to do quite a few CEs every year to keep her license, though realistically she would do it anyway to do her job well. But when I say "quite a lot", that means reading a weekly 4-6 page trade journal and spending one afternoon every six months or so at posh "seminars" where they wine and dine her on her employer's dime, oh and it has a quiz at the end to make it officially "educational".

As a programmer, I could literally spend every nonwork hour - Including those I currently use for sleep - Learning about new technologies, new laws that affect my trade, new trends that the PHBs will look for next time I need a job... And still slowly fall behind. We manage to stay relevant only by specializing, though at the same time staying generalist enough to carry on a conversation with our peers in other specialties.

Don't make me laugh by comparing the two. I may have no licensure requirement to keep my skills up, but if I put in the same amount of time as she does, I'd find myself unemployably useless within five years, while she remains at the top of her game.

Since Bitcoin is deflationary, it makes more sense to stockpile (or hoard) it than to spend it. That is also what makes it more like a commodity than a currency.

The biggest problem with the whole "deflationary" argument - And indeed, with any inflationary economy? We have a finite amount of resources on-planet. And while I certainly have high hopes of our species eventually making it off-planet (for real, not this "Billions to get a few guys to the moon for a few days" crap) - it sure as hell won't happen in my lifetime, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise.

So whenever we talk about why such-and-such a system (gold, Bitcoin, even fiat currencies such as the USD currently wavering on the edge of "negative inflation") "can't" succeed because deflation encourages hoarding, keep in mind what you really talk about - Money exists to make it easier to buy "stuff". If more money exists than stuff to buy with it, the stuff becomes more expensive. Inflation of a currency essentially just measures the inverse of the corresponding deflation of reality.

Guess what? Reality always wins. As soon as you have 100 people desperately in need of 99 cheeseburgers, inflation approaches infinity, but you still only have 99 cheeseburgers.

When you talk about people hoarding Bitcoins, you conveniently gloss over the fact that people could just as well hoard gold and ammunition and canned goods and quality hand tools and clothing - And make no mistake, some people do, but most of us would rather just go about our daily business of living. Will some people hoard BTC? Yep. So what? Most won't.

Finally, you also need to consider the rate of deflation, vs the yield on reasonably safe investments. If you can make 8% investing vs deflation of 3%, only an idiot would choose to hold the currency instead of the investment.

"about nothing" - FTFY. The only thing that you can reliably buy with BTC is other currencies.

That seems like an awfully lot of "About nothing" , then. Yes, Bitcoin merchants tend to sell services rather than goods just by virtue of the sort of people who have actually heard of it; but I stopped counting sites listed on that page selling physical product at 300, and that included at least a dozen "general purpose" stores and 25-30 C2C markets (online BTC flea-markets, basically).


Besides, why would you want to spend BTC on a cup of coffee if that same BTC will double in price within a year?

I know you wouldn't believe it from reading the average Slashdot post about Bitcoin, but not everyone using Bitcoin does so as speculation. Some of us just really want to see the success of a currency outside the control of any of the irresponsible jackasses currently in charge of global fiscal policy.

Unsurprisingly, Germany seems like a real hotbed of BTC use - Imagine that, the single most responsible economy on the planet right now, and what do they get for it? "Thanks for bailing out Greece and Cyprus, can you get started on that check for Slovenia?"

I can easily envision three ways in which USD could become worthless:
1) Molecular-level replicators. We will have them in the next few decades.
2) A systematic "stay the course" approach to the current totally-fucking-insane fiscal policy of The US government, eventually making our money about as valuable as Reichsmark or Zimbabwean dollars.
3) Confidence crash. USD has value not so much because it can be spent as it does because of confidence in a group of inbred whackjobs most Americans consider little short of "enemies of the state". But hey, wouldn't want the wrong lizard getting in, now would we?


* Just one specific peeve - You can buy just about anything with BTC today. Really, paying your taxes counts as just about the only thing you can't do with it.

The easy way to avoid the presumption of taint is

...To have a legal system that actually considers us innocence until proven guilty?


That is why those rules exist in the first place and why governments will come down hard on sites which attempt to side step those rules.

All the more reason to give full support to any currency that makes such unconstitutional powers a moot point.

Sorry, holograms are not encoded in a simple 2D plane.

We have people mistaking TFA as suggesting we live in a Star Trek holodeck. Bogging the explanation down with even more technical details didn't really seem like the best approach to making a simple analogy most folks could understand. :)

In the interest of accuracy, however, I thank you for clarifying that point.

It would be akin to me buying your dye pack stained dollars and giving you clean dollars for a commission and not bothering to keep records or conform to any regulation.

You have made a presumption of taint on the original funds. Although he may have run afoul of AML guidelines, actual money laundering requires the funds derive from criminal activity. You can't "launder" your newly cashed IRS-reported paycheck by playing poker with the boys, even if you had exactly the intent of hiding where your specific bills came from. No crime = no laundering.

That said, I got sloppy here, because FinCEN actually said "transmission", not "laundering" - Though same idea, this goes back to the distinction I made in my second sentence. AML guidelines amount to "what the Treasury wants, the Treasury gets", and have zero basis in logic. For example, in order for that particular offense to stick, the Treasury would need to accept that Bitcoin counts as money (currency specifically accepted by the government); yet somehow I don't think they'll let me pay my taxes for this year in BTC.

we can't get permits from the city to replace our server room UPS

If the city has any say whatsoever in what hardware you can run in your server room - short of, say, a rooftop mounted Howitzer - you seriously need to GTFO out of that city ASAP.

Wow. I really just can't even imagine how they justify that. "No. You don't need to upgrade your UPS. If the power goes out for more than nine minutes, you just have to pay the penalties specified in your SLAs. Suck it, taxpayer!"

So, tell me again why this guy doesn't think what he's doing falls under any kind of regulatory enforcement?

Because if you take my $50 bill and give me two $20s and a $10, we call that "making change", not "money laundering".

Casascius exchanged Bitcoins for other Bitcoins, plus a small fee for the cool novelty token. He didn't exchange BTC for USD, or vice-versa, or anything even remotely similar to that. He made frickin' change (albeit more literally than normal).


That said - I still have one first- and one second-gen Casascius 1BTC coins somewhere around here. They already traded at a good premium over their exchange rate, this news should send their collectable value through the goddamn roof! Thanks, FinCEN - I still hope you all choke to death on a bowl of hyena semen, but this time, you've really done me a solid!

Until everyone does it and the pricing structure changes.

People tend to have a lot of misconceptions about the energy industry. End-suppliers, like your utility company, don't care about the absolute price at which they sell* - They hedge their entire supply, and charge a more-or-less fixed margin on top of that. They don't make more or less when the actual supply price goes up or down.

Now, on the supply side, you have multiple layers of demand loading. You have the dirt-cheap baseline load, then you have some spare capacity in the baseline systems (usually not that much, on the order of 20-25%), then you have easy-to-online spare capacity (often from some form of short-term storage), and finally you have peak load generation (normally-offline gas turbines, in general). Of course in reality you have far more tiers than that, but you get the idea.

All of those cost money to maintain, whether they feed the baseline or the peak. The peak costs more because you essentially have generation capacity sitting idle all but 5% of the time, yet it needs to pay 100% of the bills to own and maintain it. So even there you don't have the suppliers making out like bandits.

Disclaimer - I can only speak for the US market. They may have something radically different in Japan, but overall, I would bet my eyeteeth they still use some form of hedging to maintain relatively fixed margins.


* While technically true, price does tend to affect how much effort end-users put into conservation. So believe it or not, your utility would rather offer you cheaper power, because they make the same margin per KWH whether you use all LED lighting or you heat your patio with a hair-dryer running 24/7.

Wouldn't this just change the hours when peak usage occurs and result in the power company expanding peak hour charges or increasing the charges across the board?

Not really - In fact, it could potentially eliminate having an actual peak period if enough companies did it, by smoothing the demand curve out over a much longer period of time.

Looks like 6 cars can offset about 2% of this office's power usage. Hardly 'powering' the whole office.

You misunderstand - Businesses don't pay for electricity like residential users. They pay by usage per demand timeslot. So they may pay a rate of $0.05/KWH for 80% of the day, $0.12/KWH for another 18%, then for the remaining 2% (around 15 minutes) that shoots up to $0.45/KWH.

This study found that you can run the entire building for those 15 peak demand minutes on six cars. Those 15 minutes amounts to way more than 2% of the business' electric bill (more like 10-15%), however, thus the huge net savings.

Next up: Why not just do this using batteries--never mind the cars?"

Simple answer: It costs a decent amount of money to buy and maintain a large battery array. Anyone in charge of a medium sized corporate server room can attest to that.

By "letting" workers plug in their electric vehicles, the company not only gets to bill it as a perk of the job, but they get to push 100% of the expense of maintaining those batteries onto their workers.

TLDR: Money.