That tiny island is probably more solvent than the United States. Our balance sheets only look better because of a complete lack of transparency and honest accounting.

Those depositors were generally not "people in Cyprus" but rather "people in Russia with money in Cyprus".

No, the Russians were all tipped off ahead of time, and were able to withdraw their money via overseas branches that remained open during the freeze in Cyprus. The only people who were affected were regular people and small businesses.

I'm sure the customers of Laiki Bank were highly satisfied with their government-provided deposit insurance too, right up until they lost all access to their funds for a few weeks, and lost the majority of their balances. I'm sure the people who aren't getting paid because the company they work had payroll funds frozen are singing the praises of deposit insurance right this minute.

Probably something hugely overblown if it's got such little verifiable about it.

Quoted for posterity. Thanks for the comedy.

though from what I hear, the NSA just isn't on that scale these days (they once had a significant portion of the world's computing power).

Nobody is on the scale of Bitcoin these days. Titan is approaching two orders of magnitude behind and Bitcoin shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.

USD inflation is at 2%. Is that a crazy amount of inflation? It doesn't seem so to me.

How many of the things that you regularly pay for, such as food, energy, housing, and medical care, are only 2% more expensive now than they were a year ago?

The USG owns 50% of USG debt? What does that even mean?

It means the Dollar is a ponzi scheme and the political promises of the US government to pay out entitlements benefits are worth exactly as much as the same political promises the USSR made.

While I love the idea of the NSA mining all remaining unmined bitcoins, their time would probably be more profitably spent in hacking the exchanges to simply acquire all the bitcoins in circulation.

How does hacking the exchanges give the NSA control over coins that are not held on an exchange?

Bitcoin is up over 800% against gold during the last 12 months.

and who'd have thought that the greatest bank robberies in history would be *by* the banks, not *of* the banks?

Anyone who hasn't been in a coma since 2008.

You are seriously out of the loop in this area.

The processing power devoted to Bitcoin mining is approaching two orders of magnitude more than Titan.

The institutions you are talking about have already been left in the dust before they even realized something was happening. Even if any of them decided to compete in this area Bitcoin would pull ahead another order of magnitude before they could even finish the contracting process.

Bitcoin mining is about useless hashing, not about transaction processing.

It's about making it prohibitively expensive for an attacker to rewrite history.

the security property of a digital cash system that matters here is the protection against double spending.

That's exactly what I was talking about.

Again you demonstrate that you don't actually understand how Bitcoin works.

That is probably the most annoying part about Bitcoin: not only is it insecure, but we've known how to solve the same problem in a secure way for decades.

What's stopping you from releasing your own, superior, cryptocurrency? It's what all cool kids are doing right now and plenty of people who think they can do better than Bitcoin are actively trying to prove it.

1. The blockchain size is increasing exponentially at the moment because the number of Bitcoin users is also increasing exponentially.

Because the number of Bitcoin users is increasing exponentially, and also because known optimizations which will greatly reduce the amount of data needed to be preserved have not yet been implemented, because the need to do so does not yet exist.

A bitcoin is a number that has a SHA-1 hash of a particular form.

By design, you do not need to know what the number is to recognize someone's claim to have it; similarly, you do not need to know what someone's private key is to know that they know it. Bitcoins are not the only numbers like this.

Incorrect.

There are no discrete bitcoins. There are only transaction outputs which have spent by having been included as an input to a new transaction and transactions which have not yet been spent.

Every valid unspent output is verifiably traceable back to a valid coinbase via a hash chain.

Nobody can create valid UTxOs out of thin air.