I used scripts available from https://www.bitaddress.org/ to make paper backups of some of my bitcoins (offline). And I made sure that the private key wasn't stored anywhere else. This way, I have some of my bitcoins stored on an exchange, some stored on devices I own and some stored just like paper money. It's unlikely that all 3 of these are going to have a catastrophic failure in 2020, so even if everyone else's bitcoins "run out" I will likely still have some of mine. I'll sell them to you for the right price. And if there's enough demand, I can split 2 bitcoins (the smallest amount I have stored in one of these mechanisms) into enough pieces for everybody in the world to have multiple Satoshis. And it's up to the market to decide how much a Satoshi is worth.

One way I can imagine all 3 mechanisms would fail is if bitcoin's cryptographic security is compromised in a way that an updated client would not be able to resolve. (If the very foundations of cryptography are broken, such as might occur with quantum computing.) How big a concern is that, generally? I think there will be a lot more than just bitcoins to worry about if and when that happens.

But it sounds to me like you are implying that you need only to look to the cost of the computation time in order to compute the proper value of a bitcoin. I'm saying that it's not so "simple" because the cause-effect relationship would seem to me to go in the other direction. The cost of the computation time doesn't drive the value of a bitcoin, but rather the value of a bitcoin drives how many people are spending time trying to mine bitcoins, thus affecting the cost of mining a bitcoin (because they drive up the complexity of mining).

Value (noun) - The regard that something is held to deserve; the importance or preciousness of something: "your support is of great value".
- Google

The value of a bitcoin is not "pre-defined" by how much work was done to acquire it any more than the value of a dollar is determined by the resources used to print it. Both have a relatively low "value" in those terms. But those terms are what I would refer to as "cost" because that's how much it costs to produce the item. The term "value", on the other hand, in my mind, is how much it's worth *after* I buy or produce it. And that is determined by how much someone would be willing to pay for it. It's a frustratingly soft definition which implies that you can never get a certain value for something, but that's the nature of money and value in general. All money is only a representation of debt, and only has a value related to another person's willingness to accept it in exchange for something they have given you or will give you. As far as I can tell, all currency is "borrowed" because the federal reserve doesn't give money to people. It allows banks to borrow it (who in turn allow people to borrow it) and tracks that as a debt, not as a transferred "value".

I think you're neglecting to consider how bitcoins aren't like a normal mine-able resource. More mining does not produce more bitcoins, it just happens as a result of bitcoins rising in value. As more people want bitcoins, more people will pay for them or try to mine them, causing them to be more difficult for any particular miner to obtain (because of the competition for the same batch of coins). This causes the computation power required to likely obtain a bitcoin to increase, which causes your "real value" to increase.

A factor of 5 does not justify the use of the metaphor "drop in the ocean". I wish people would reserve the use of metaphors for where they belong. "Metaphor inflation" just makes it harder to express yourself when using metaphors appropriately because nobody can trust that you mean what you say. The metaphor I would use for a factor of 5 is "dwarfs" or "pales in comparison". Drop in the ocean should be used when one is infinitesimally insignificant next to the other, which is not the case here.

You seem to have totally forgotten the "for nerds" part of Slashdot's directive.

My understanding is:
1) A bitcoin is 100 million Satoshis. A satoshi is the smallest amount of value that can be exchanged on the bitcoin network. Each transaction on the bitcoin network transfers some number of Satoshis from one address to another. The number of bitcoins a wallet/person owns is the sum of the number of all the Satoshis that have been transferred to addresses in wallets they own minus the number of Satoshis sent *from* addresses in wallets they own, all divided by 100 million.
2) 100 million units per bitcoin.
3) Can't be answered in a brief summary like this, but suffice it to say that the important thing to understand is that each wallet or address is associated with a private key and a public key. You need to public key to transfer value to the address, and you need the private key to be able to send value from the address to another address.

I'm confused about which variables are linked to what here. It seems to me that the way you have linked the price of electricity, the price of bitcoins and the value of money is a little more complicated than a simpler demand and supply model could explain. I'm not sure that the price of electricity controls anything but how many people choose to mine instead of buy bitcoins. And I wouldn't think that the price of electricity would be involved much in determining the value of bitcoins themselves (because increased mining does not produce increased number of bitcoins as it does with other types of mining). Maybe you're not saying that it does, but I'm confused why it is mentioned then.

In my mind, yes, the constant availability of new bitcoins pushes the price down, but the new demand for bitcoins obviously pushes prices up. So long as the demand is increasing faster than the supply, prices would continue to increase, would they not? The value of a bitcoin is simply a quotient of how much money is invested in bitcoins divided by the total number of bitcoins on the market. And your statement about needing a certain number of dollars added to the market each day to support that seems to agree with that.

So in rating the value of bitcoins in terms of dollars, isn't it more about the number of dollars in the economy versus the number of bitcoins in the economy? So long as the number of dollars is increasing (dollar inflation) faster than the number of bitcoins (bitcoin inflation) as a percentage of the whole, bitcoins will continue to be a better investment than dollars.

But as I've probably made painfully obvious somewhere, I'm no economist, so what am I missing?

Why isn't the burden of encryption on the user? After all, it's the user who would decide what's worth encrypting, and people could (and probably should, and in many cases are) already be encrypting IP traffic they consider sensitive.

I thought that was the point. There's a legal system and people are complaining that it's being used. What are the complainer's asking for here? That's my interpretation of the question being asked.

I think you're being over-critical of the commenter's diligence. There is some room for interpretation or confusion. Yes, application specific passwords are intended to provide single-step authentication to applications that don't participate in 2-step authentication. And yes, it's easy to gloss over the distinction between using an ASP to access application functions versus security aministration functions, and that's where the bug lies. Its easy to gloss over because ASPs were intended to replace 2-step authentication, and its a somewhat subtle point that this access should exclude administrative functions - subtle because that was never mentioned in the design/purpose of ASPs.

So I think the commenter's confusion/question is fair to some extent: Google representatives themselves probably glossed over the distinction between limiting ASP access to app-level functionality versus ASP access to admin-level functionality leading to their initial response that it was working as intended. Now you say that the commenter should have made that distinction, and that's true with the help of this article, but there's still a gray area that I think the commenter is trying to point out. Not only is there a distinction between app-level access and admin-level access that ASPs should have been conscious of. There's also a distinction between app-level access and app-specific access. In other words, an application could be limited to access only data relevant to its specific operation (just email content, for example), or it could be limited to access only data relevant to *any* application-level operation (exclude all admin functionality, but allow access to all other data), or it functions just like a mechanism to bypass 2-step authentication, accessing all functionality (which Google now agrees is "buggy").

The commenter acknowledges that yes, it would have been nice to have ASPs limited to app-specific functions, but notes that this level of refinement was never intended to be incorporated into ASPs. And I think the commenter is right on that point. My (and your) response to that however is the next level of distinction. This is not the level of distinction being called out in the article. I think the distinction is between app-level access versus admin-level access, not a reference to app-specific access. No application should have admin-level access when using an ASP. That's less of an enhancement and more of a security flaw when you get to that level of security hole.

Ah, I should have emphasized the word internal.

Doesn't applying the Broken Window Fallacy ignore my point that we are currently paying other countries money that could be spent within this country. My understanding is that acknowledging the Broken Window Fallacy only acknowledges that money spent on repairing damage could just as well have been spent on something constructive, but that the overall spending within the system is the same. But we are spending on something external to the country when it could be more internal.

I had not encountered the Broken Window Fallacy before, so feel free to correct my understanding, but my interpretation of its point is that there's no point in causing damage in order to benefit the business of those who repair damage. But adding more Ethanol to gasoline is not any kind of damage. It actually encourages increased production.

Could the additional internal cash flow improve the country's general economy?