I should have phrased that a bit more clearly: it's perfectly possible for different people(or even the same people, with different bitcoins) to have 'eh, you'll just have to trust us on that; but it sure is fast!' and mathemagic-crypto-money at the same time, it's not as though the presence of one activity irrevocably taints the entire pool of bitcoins for the other; but any specific bitcoin (or subdivision of one) can only have one or the other:

Someone always has to be the one holding the private keys, and they are the only ones for which the elegant math and its assurances apply(and even for them, it only applies to the BTC side of a transaction, not to whatever the other party promised to deliver in exchange for that irreversible payment).

You can layer all sorts of arrangements on top of that, as the exchanges do(where the exchange, not its users, is the one holding the keys; but near-instant clearance, escrow, transaction reversals, etc. are all possible because all 'transactions' are just the exchange shuffling bits internally), or a transaction broker/insurer type model, as you propose, or a conventional escrow service, or any number of other possible contractual arrangements.

Nothing about bitcoins magically prevents the use of any of the zillions of arrangements we've applied to commodities and mediums of exchange throughout history, my point is just that, if you are a participant in those things, the properties attributed to bitcoins are largely irrelevant to you(basically the only one that matters is double-spending prevention, without which inflation would render all of them worthless within a few hundreds of milliseconds), and if you do want to enjoy all the properties of bitcoins, the list of things you can do with them gets a great deal shorter.

That's not some scathing condemnation, every medium of exchange in history has only functioned because some semblance of law, custom, or a mixture of the two kept the surrounding institutions vaguely in check, fraud within sufferable limits, and so on; but bitcoin brings nothing new to the table here, except in the very narrowest range of uses, where its mathematical properties do hold, and if you wander outside of that, it's open season.

Effectively, what you describe is the protocol(which is p2p as well), except that the protocol does not address the issue of matching prospective buyers and prospective sellers (a protocol that does this, without a central market-operator, would be neat; but bodging one into a protocol for transferring virtual coins without double-spending would probably be unwieldy, though clients that implement both would be logical).

Perhaps the more fundamental issue (aside from any empirically hairy and/or provably intractable issues with an authority-less market protocol and select classes of DoS attacks or something) is that the blockchain arrangement that bitcoin uses(while secure, even without an authority, exactly as intended) isn't particularly fast, and obviously is of no value whatsoever for cashing in or out between BTC and another currency.

The 'exchanges', since they (from bitcoin's point of view) are just one entity making internal, irrelevant, decisions about how many of its coins go in box #1 and how many in box #2 and so on can 'transfer' coins at near-arbitrary speed (since the 'transfer' is just an internal number-shuffling, not an actual bitcoin transfer in the architectural sense) and, if suitably set up, can also perform transfers between holders of currency and holders of bitcoins.

Really, I'm inclined to view 'exchanges' (and their generally atrocious track record on getting hacked, being outright scams, etc.) as one of the major symptoms of Bitcoin's fascinating, and slightly tragic, clarification of the virtues and limits of its concept: you can have a currency-like instrument, perfect in its crystalline mathematical security or you can have the features people expect from money; but getting both? That isn't obviously a problem that is in-scope for mathematics, much less solvable...

Well, the Great Depression hadn't happened yet, and none of that commie 'New Deal' nonsense, so if you would really prefer to keep partying like the Gilded Age hasn't quite ended, you might see a trip back to the '20s as progress...

To the degree that it doesn't merely shove people from Company A's product to Company B's product(which would probably be roughly a wash hedonically, though possibly slightly negative if a company were to discover that the marginal value of a dollar spent on advertising is higher than a dollar spent on improving products...), I'd have to assume that the news is more or less 100% bad.

When the punchline is that possessing Product and/or Service X will make you better off; and the target demographic is 'people who currently don't have one; but might be willing to believe that', it's pretty much best-case that the ad will fail, and increasing levels of added dissatisfaction with lack of Product X for the other cases.

You'd pay him that much?

Even after his tragicomic “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief"; but, not to worry, “Whatever regulatory changes are made, they will pale in comparison to the change already evident in today’s markets...Those markets for an indefinite future will be far more restrained than would any currently contemplated new regulatory regime.” performance?

(I guess, horribly enough, the fact that the events of the day did move him to concede that the 'free markets just full of rational actors!' model...might have a few weak spots... actually makes him a better empiricist than more than a few other economists in that camp.)

Unfortunately, what you avoid in union management you gain in contracting company executives and shareholders...

Even if you derive so much pleasure from stepping on workers that it's illegal in 14 southern states, that's an expensive way to get rid of some unions...(and that's the best-case scenario, the cost-benefit looks worse if you don't.)

Alibaba is mostly (possibly entirely, I don't know how much if anything they sell on their own account) the middleman. I'd be fairly surprised if they don't make it past 'consumer protection' (such as it is) pretty much entirely unscathed. Maybe they'll even add an abusive mandatory binding arbitration clause!

So Ebay, but with lower transaction fees?

The satcom device does not have to have been on the aircraft.

There's also the matter of your expected retrieval case: tapes almost certainly beat HDDs in the archival timeframe, so suck it up and pay up; and they (if reasonably modern) can be alarmingly fast at the linear reads and writes associated with doing full restores or fast backups of data that have been suitably lined up to be shoved onto tape.

On the other hand, they are almost perversely non-random-access(doubly so if you are talking about a multi-tape set with library swapping, more than doubly so if you are talking about a multi-tape set larger than your library can handle with junior-admin swapping), so the 'somebody fucked up, they need File X to be like it was three months ago' scenario sucks.

Nearline or consumer SATA on undistinguished controllers aren't quite as zippy; but they might as well be a RAMdisk compared to tape if you are doing small-scale restores, though probably not as fast if de-icing a much larger dataset for wholesale restoration of multiple systems.

On phones that use Samsung's RIL; but either custom firmware or substantially-modifiable rooted firmware, the SELinux capabilities that they (fairly recently, was it 4.2?) could presumably be used to nuke most of the risk. Assuming it uses the filesystem commands at all, the legitimate day-to-day uses are presumably a few specific 'we were too cheap for NVRAM' locations that (if not documented, should at least be empirically determinable) you could then restrict it to.

Now, if you just need a few megs of cheap storage and don't want to bump the BoM, building an arbitrary filesystem access mechanism seems so sloppy and unconcerned with actual security as to make me wonder what else they fucked up; but SELinux is pretty powerful, if a pain, at granular lockdown of lousy or dangerous software.

You can name whatever you like whatever you want. No muss, no fuss, no red tape, no nothing.

Achieving a name recognized by somebody other than you is a somewhat more complex problem, usually requiring a certain amount of give-and-take in terms of "I'll accept your stupid idea if you endure mine" type arrangements.

For all the histrionics about it, Nobody was somehow magically anointed the Super Name Czar by some magically authoritative process. Some organizations have their shit together, and any names in a given domain not endorsed by them are pretty much just private nicknames, some don't; but that's it.

Tape actually works pretty well, it's just that if you are running a small enough system that "Well, obviously, just get another 20TB array and store it at one of your other sites, idiot... On second though, get two extras and put each one at a different offsite location" isn't the answer that springs to mind almost reflexively, you probably can't afford the cost of entry.

An actually contemporary tape drive(and a machine capable of keeping it fed when it is running full bore) is Not Cheap; but the fleabay shit that is cheap tends to offer painfully mediocre capacity and unknown reliability. Disks, by contrast, have a cost of entry that basically starts at zero and scales more or less linearly with the number of disks, unless you absolutely must have them all online at the same time(and even here, you hardly need screamin' hardware RAID for your backup volume, and bulk SATA ports of undistinguished performance are cheap).

I haven't checked; but while Backblaze definitely doesn't back up UNC-pathed SMB shares or (ugh, mapped drive letters), is it smart enough to check whether a disk is 'real' or just an iSCSI initiator pointed at a suitable target? Even the cheap-ass versions of Windows come with a bundled initiator, though the target is server only...

A low-altitude controlled flight into terrain(especially the 'clip multiple bits of it' kind, rather than the 'squish. into the mountainside' kind) is a hell of a lot more survivable than just about anything at cruising altitude and almost definitely over water.

It's a pity that they apparently didn't have the tools to distinguish the wreckage of a white aircraft from snowcap at that time (or in that place); but their odds of having something worth finding were a lot better.