In the off chance that I win, my first phone call will be to Gilbert Levin, the Principal Investigator on the Viking Labeled Release (LR) experiment that gave ambiguous results.

LR was developed by Levin as a way to assay sewage treatment plant effluent without having to wait days for streaked culture plates to show anything. By using a radioactive tracer, organisms can be detected at exceedingly low levels and very quickly by the radio-traced metabolism products.

Levin has been claiming that the Viking LR indeed detected life on Mars, and he has been pleading and scheming to get a "Chiral LR" life-sciences payload onto the surface of Mars to follow up. With NASA, it is nothing doing on this score since the Viking controversy -- they simply don't want to touch another life detection experiment for some reason. I thought the largely British Polar Lander was supposed to have a Levin experiment on it, but it crashed.

On the off chance that I win at Powerball, on the chance that this is enough money to fund a Mars mission, especially after the gummint gets its tax payments, and the chance the rocket works and the payload lands softly on Mars and everything else, and maybe on the remote chance that there is life on Mars and that Gil Levin's improved Labeled LR convinces people, Gilbert Levin will be awarded a Nobel Prize and become and immortal historical figure.

As for me, maybe I will go down in history as the chump who gave up his Powerball winnings?

I'd bet dollars to donuts that Canadian cops are a bit more on the up & up than Bostonian cops.

... & here I am playing the world smallest violin for these poor, put-upon police officers.

The NSA designed almost all existant crypto to be breakable by them, and from the looks of what The Guardian has been reporting, that includes SSL/TLS. The reports also make plain that they can waltz into any Windows or Mac without effort.

That means all online (or remotely accessible) wallets, online mining pools, bitcoin exchanges and bitcoin-accepting vendors are vulnerable, possibly already compromised. All bitcoin transactions via the Freedom Servers, regardless of destination, were certainly recorded and all bitcoins involved are potentially hijackable at any time.

Because the NSA weakened all crypto standards (ps: Do NOT use SHA 3 in the weaker forms, I am extremely suspicious of remarks made on the official SHA 3 mailing list regarding strength, though the stronger forms are probably ok), it is entirely within the realms of possibility that the NSA already has a complete list of all possible bitcoins. The currency depends on the maths being hard, but if it isn't, then you've nothing. They may also be capable of injecting false transactions - never trust enthusiastic supporters in US security agencies, they aren't in the business for your health.

First, not really. Bitcoin is only usable because those IOUs exist. (Well, they're not really IOUs, since the sum value of hard currency will always equal the sum value of what they're pegged against. A floating currency is pegged against the nation. Print all the hard currency you like, the value per unit will drop until equilibrium is reached. They are shares, just like any other, and are priced by the market just like any other.)

Because the sum of the hard currency ALWAYS equals the sum of the goods and services available, a virtual currency for goods and services cannot have value if the hard currency has no value, since they value precisely the same thing.

Can bitcoin actually buy goods and services, though? One pizza place is a start, but not a very exciting one. Mondo started with the entire town of Swansea and still didn't get enough momentum going. The only way to currently use bitcoins for anything* is to convert them at places like MtGox for hard currency.

*Anything not pizza. Or drugs. I suppose I should include that, since there are bound to be people wanting to recreate the Excel flight simulator effect.

Have to say you make excellent points. It's why I avoided even looking at bitcoin for the longest time. (Early on, the value was less than the cost of the electricity and as the computations were only going to get harder, the likelihood of benefits was nil. It didn't help that something for nothing often ends badly for the people who think they're paying nothing.)

Really, for a good virtual currency, you need it pre-generated and beyond the ability of computers in the next 30-40 years to potentially break. 150-200 years would be ideal. That isn't bitcoin. Don't get me wrong, bitcoin looks less vulnerable to counterfeiting than regular currencies, but I remain unconvinced that it will prove strong over the lifetime of currencies. When currency lifetimes are measured in centuries, knowing something was strong last week isn't really good enough.

(I can't say the US decision thrills me, knowing that the same people applauding bitcoin have interfered with crypto development.)

What we have right now is hyperinflation due to rampant speculation. A few will get rich quick, a lot will get poor even quicker when the bubble bursts. We've seen, what, 800%, 900% inflation this year? Competing with Zimbabwe? This isn't remotely sustainable, especially as everyone and their pet dog can run a bitcoin miner and cash out via one of the ATMs or an exchange service.

We've also now seen cases of virtual bank robberies, with owners of online wallet services cutting and running. Yes, that happens with physical banks too, but all that tells me is that a lot of old problems remain, a lot of new problems are added, and still no sign of actual benefits.

I want a virtual currency that works. Mondo experimented with electronic cash in the late 80s, early 90s, where you had smart cards you could actually use in real stores to make payments without going via any bank. It was an interesting system, it used a real currency rather than a virtual one but that's immaterial as it could have used anything. The fact is, they had a working system for utilizing electronic money without involving central systems. It should be very easy to do better today and have more places adopt it.

Combine that with a currency that isn't scattered at random on some mathematical version of a sidewalk (pavement in the UK), and you'll have something that really does impress for all the right reasons.

I mean if some random shit "security blog" posts a trumped up story to try and get traffic, it is Slashdot's DUTY to repeat it here, with no checking or verification! After all, better everyone is scared of their own shadow than informed about security.

Seriously this is just pathetic. As I said: This is some random ass site that is trying to get people to come and read, and it worked. By making a scare story about how Netlfix users on Windows are vulnerable they managed to get some Linux fanboy to submit the story to Slashdot. The editors then did what they do, which is to say NOT EDIT and just posted it. Great success for shit site, they now got a bunch of undeserved traffic.

What is sadder is how uninformed this makes all involved look. the statement of "You'd think something like Silverlight would automatically upgrade itself." Yes, it DOES you fucking moron. One thing you have to give MS is that Windows update will patch all their stuff for you. Let it do its thing and you get security updates, as they are released. You don't need to pay attention or anything, it'll just happen. This includes things not installed by default like Silverlight, or older versions of the .NET runtimes.

This is just a massive pile of fail. It is not news, not even really old news. There was a bug, they patched it. This would be "how shit works", or at least how it should.

Not only is it mostly speculation, but even the times when people claim it is being used for trade, like the Silk Road, it really isn't, it is being used to launder money. It wasn't actually being used because it is an amazing currency, but rather because people believed it was a way to anonymously buy illicit goods, ie launder money to pay for them.

They only legit trade uses I've seen quoted have been totally worthless: Sites that will exchange bitcoins for gift cards at places like Amazon, with a 10% or more markup (when those same sites sell gift cards with a 0% markup using standard currency).

As you say, the speculation has to go from the market if it is ever to be considered a currency. While currencies do fluctuate, they don't move as much in a year as bitcoin does in a day.

The problem with Bitcoin now is that it's being used mostly for speculation, not for trade. You can't price anything in Bitcoins when the price changes 30% in one day. If you accept Bitcoins for anything that doesn't have a huge markup, you can get clobbered by the price fluctuation before you get the payment converted.

Worse, the "exchanges" are very, very flaky. Over half of the Bitcoin exchanges have gone bust. Mt. Gox hasn't paid out US dollars since August, large euro payments seem to be randomly delayed, and some days customers can't get Bitcoins out. Coinbase, which is a dealer, not an exchange (you're buying and selling to and from them) will sometimes drop out of the market because they can't buy or sell Bitcoins (and actually get the funds delivered) on some other exchange. Not one Bitcoin exchange is publicly audited or insured, yet they hold customer funds.

Tradehill was going to be the "legitimate Bitcoin exchange". They went bust. Another exchange in China just disappeared last week, with the customer money. A solid exchange, registered as a broker/dealer in some reasonably legit country, would be a big step forward.

The snapchat founders have been able to monetize their situation such that they've already got at least 10 million in the bank. That's enough "FU money" to press their luck and ride this thing all the way to the end, glory or otherwise.