There are many, many reasons why these silly "digital currencies" won't translate to real life.

Do tell.

I can burn less than 10 calories to add 10 times as many Bitcoin to the world.

How many calories do I have to burn to divide a piece of gold into 10?

No, I believe that people who are not good at what they do should lose their job.

I actually do have a sense of perspective, as blockchain growth is a frequent discussion topic among protocolists such as myself. It's a legitimate problem and it's something that is slowly working toward being solved with the advent of SPV clients and decentralized clients.

To say that Bitcoin will never be able to cope with the velocity and volume of transactions is to underestimate the technical ability of the entirety of the open source community, because Bitcoin is open to contributions from everyone, not some secluded banking group or government agency with selfish motives.

You also fail to account for Garzik's Theory, which states that a modification to the set of base facts (limits, hash algorithms, etc.) that comprise an alternative coin, such as Litecoin, Namecoin, and Primecoin, that causes that currency to challenge the value of Bitcoin can and likely will be adopted by every other currency. I mention Primecoin because it is doing something "externally useful" with its hashing, and that is to find prime numbers. If that work proves useful, then Bitcoin is free to adopt it, as well, of course only with the vote of 51% of the miners.

Moreover, it's not wasteful when someone is extracting value from it.

Hoarding a currency is natural when its purchasing power is increasing and there's nothing worth spending it on. Deflation makes people wiser spenders. Businesses and governments don't like this because they need cash flowing, and would rather devalue the currency to incent spending than produce products that people really want enough to spend their money.

We may have a philosophical difference here, so there's not a whole lot of point in going on at length.

It's divisible to 8 places. There are 10 million satoshis in a single "bitcoin". Several Bitcoin monitoring sites now use mBTC, or 1/1000 of a Bitcoin, because it's a little easier to stomach to say that 1 mBTC = USD $1.

I read the article days ago. I reread it before posting. I know Charles Stross is a writer, and this article makes me think considerably less of him.

This article has been flying around for the past couple of days, and it's so riddled with misconceptions and pure falsehoods about Bitcoin that this guy should be laughed out of his job.

You know what has a carbon footprint from hell? The whole payments industry, and industry that could go away overnight if retailers, service industry, and wholesalers switched to digital currency.

Anti-malware software simply hasn't caught up yet, but sucking someone's power for pure financial profit sure is better than sucking someone's power to barrage others with email. Sure, there's still evil here, but Bitcoin itself is not the problem: there will always been viruses doing something.

Bitcoin's lack of regulation is not a Bitcoin deficiency, but rather a legal one. Blame government for treating Bitcoin as a commodity instead of as a currency, subject to the same laws as cash. Oh, wait, it basically is subject to the same laws as cash, except it's a whole lot easier to carry and the government can't create more of it out of thin air (which is a good thing, if you want your money to have the same or better purchasing power tomorrow as it did today).

At least he didn't give the argument "There isn't enough Bitcoin to go around." I'm sick and tired of defending that. There's 21 quadrillion units of Bitcoin (That's enough for 3000 satoshis per person on the planet), and it would be very easy to convince miners to further subdivide it.

This author reads like the worst kind of Keynesian: the kind that misleads and lies about alternatives, rather than attacking the principles and stability of the system itself.

Zerlan hasn't often been accurate in his estimates of things.

I'm not going to bother to link to these because a quick Google search can turn up the evidence.

Nakamoto registered the bitcoin.org domain on a somewhat obscure Japanese site. His communication in English had all kinds of clues that his native language was Japanese (sentence structure, word choice, etc.). He was active during daylight and evening hours in Japan.

I really wish people would stop speculating who he is. It only matters to those who can't read the code and understand that it ultimately doesn't matter, except the possibility that he may one day "come back" and have several hundred thousand Bitcoin to himself. As benevolent as he acted, it's unlikely that he'll pull a Biff Tannen and rule the world. However, miners have the power to stop him if he tries.

There's a site that's apparently growing for bounties on open source stuff, too: http://bountysource.com./

I could easily pay for a supported version of icewm, but I can't personally pay someone enough to keep it alive.

Sure you can. Find someone to work on it and get them to sign up for Gittip, while you do the same. You can "tip" them a few cents to several bucks per week for their efforts and they can get paid by you and other supporters.

You can fund developers individually via Gittip.

WHAT IS GITTIP?

Gittip is a way to give small weekly cash gifts to people you love and are inspired by.
Gifts are weekly. The intention is for people to depend on money received through Gittip in order to pay their bills, and bills are recurring.
Gifts come with no strings attached. You don't know exactly where your gifts come from, and the maximum gift from one person to another is $100 per week.
Gifts are public. The total amount you give and the total amount you receive is public. Participants on both sides of the equation are rewarded publicly for their participation. (You can opt out of publicly displaying your total giving.)
Give by answering Who inspires you? on our homepage, and following the steps.

Thailand did not rule Bitcoin illegal. The head of the central bank of Thailand issued a preliminary ruling expressing that Bitcoin may be illegal because there are no laws that allow its use.

Think about that for a moment.

Read: http://qz.com/110164/thailands-infamous-bitcoin-crackdown-is-not-quite-what-it-seems/

All this "is it real" crap could have been avoided with a single, PGP-signed message.