It's still "wasted" from the sense that capital expenditures to purchase equipment were made to turn the unused solar power into power that could normally be useful if it could be stored or time shifted effectively. I don't think it's entirely wrong to consider this "wasted" to some degree when wastage can in a broad sense be defined as a useful resource that can't effectively be used, or in this case, maybe even an overcapacity problem until other solutions are found since the capacity produces waste electricity.

Are you a shill for the Chinese government? This is not even close to true. What is the imprisonment rate of Muslims in America? Have you even bothered to check the stats? I'll give you a hint: it's extremely low.

Propaganda is misleading in nature, how in the world is this propaganda? It's a large-scale humanitarian crisis.

Just because their government tried to mandate something doesn't mean "venezuela" decided. The people on the ground don't want the government cryptocurrency.

Look into lightning network, or other technologies like payment channels. That can reduce transaction fees from "only pennies" to "fractions of a penny"

No, I'm saying that Bitcoin in some ways is better than the Venezuelan Bolivar, not their cyrptocurrency project.

There are plenty of uses that are better served by Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, or can be with wide adoption and further development of the field.

What? That doesn't make any sense. The US Dollar is far better for crime and used a lot more than Bitcoin for crime. Bitcoin is trivially traceable and hard to spend unlike the dollar.

Bitcoin has a lot of valid legitimate uses, such as cheap cross border payments, a hedge against inflation for countries like Venezuela and Argentina, a means of people without established banking sectors to transact, etc. It's also very useful in cases where there is risk of counter-party payment reversals in traditional systems, which lowers fees for such use cases. Another great potential future use is very small micropayments, possible future implementation for API calls without having to setup complex infrastructure and again, cross-border in countries where traditional banking systems don't operate or use different currencies. One novel current use where traditional systems fail is in rapidly purchasing a LARGE amount of anti-DOS capability in a hurry without counterparty risk. There are many new and novel uses. Here's one other small example: https://cointelegraph.com/news...

They are only saying this as a pretextual excuse to try to convince lawmakers they need even more laws or statutory authority to punish "those evil hackers". Much like the ordeal with the FBI complaining about needing new laws to stop terrorists because Apple was protecting consumer privacy and not providing them backdoors to unlock phones or allowing them mass surveillance tools, when in reality they had all the tech they needed to unlock the phone.

A common exchange rate is somewhere between 0% to 0.25% depending on how the exchange is done (market maker vs taker), and volume. See for example: https://www.gdax.com/fees/BTC-...

With the rise of technologies like lightning network and decentralized exchanges, we might see even better exchange rates if you can swap across different currencies easily.

I think you're right, there's no question there's a level of speculative activity going on in this realm. However, the interesting thing is that with the concept of "programmable money", you can create any cryptocurrency with any economic or monetary model you want. If your goal is to create a "stable value" currency, you could do that. There are some, as a matter of fact, like Tether. Bitcoin is more like gold than a currency as was pointed out, so while traditional gold is less convenient in the modern era, Bitcoin as a digital gold is much more practical, so it sort of straddles a line between a traditional asset (like gold, having a fixed supply rather than a stable value), but also like a currency (ease of spending as a medium of transaction).

If this were to happen, there's always the option to change the proof of work algorithm which would completely nullify the hundreds of millions they'd probably have to spend to do this kind of attack in one instant.

> >The transaction costs are a tiny fraction of what a bank or credit card processor charges to send Monopoly bank money.
> Sure, as long as you're buying a car. Of course, you also have to find someone selling a car for bitcoin... Now tell me what it costs to buy your groceries, go to the movies, or get a cup of coffee?

Bitcoin is still generally cheaper for purchases over $30 to pay in Bitcoin even with rising transaction costs. Transactions are getting more expensive for more limited purchases, that's true, due to the limits. But there is a lot of interesting engineering going on to fix this problem, such as the lightning network, which should be able to reduce the cost of transaction fees and allow micropayments for fractions of a cent of transaction fees. Other tech on the horizon includes sidechains, where you could use Bitcoins on a network with a different security model; the more expensive high security chain is not required for day-to-day small purchases, and could ultimately be rolled up into the main chain through a sidechain-to-main transaction, or even a lightning network bridge.

>And you keep your coins in cold storage.
>> Uh-huh. And your average person keeps their keys where? On a computer, because nobody's going to write their access keys down on paper and lock them in a fire safe. In fact, they'll keep their keys in a wallet on their smartphone, where they'll be stolen by hackers. Or they'll use a web wallet, where - in the event they're not defrauded by the wallet provider - a keylogger steals their access codes. Hence the very popular Bitcoin phrase "Sorry for your loss".

There are dedicated hardware devices now that make cold storage very easy and highly protected such as the Ledger and the Trezor. If Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies get more popular, there's not reason why this type of technology couldn't be implemented safely directly into phones as an independent chip isolated from the rest of the operating system. That would give the benefits of very high security with simple user interfaces for users. There could even be schemes for recovery with multi-factor authentication, key sharding schemes, etc. These are still fairly technical, but it's easy to imagine a world where this is a lot simpler for end users. The current hardware wallets are already light years an improvement over your "write on paper" suggestion.

>>It's a technologically better form of money, far more efficient for moving large sums across borders.
>If you find someone willing to accept it on the far side.

Adoption is continuing to increase. It's small now, but growing relatively quickly.

>>imagine what it will be like in a few years when millions more people grok the tech.
>If millions more ADOPTED bitcoin, it'd crash instantly, since it's totally unscalable.

There are a ton of improvements that have been made and are continuing to be made to increase the scale as the demand is growing. For example, the latest release of Bitcoin Core that came out just yesterday includes a 40%-50% speed-up for sync, significantly reduces memory requirements, and disk space. Another recent improvement, Segwit, increased transaction capacity by at least double while also providing the ability for more future upgrades. Many improvements are on the way as already mentioned for the volume of transactions as well, such as the lightning network, sidechains, etc. There is also a lot of experimental engineering being done that could help scale such as proposals like Mimblewimble.

There are interesting things going on with using bloom filters, and the recently released FIBRE network that is some extremely cool computer science engineering to pass Bitcoin blocks at nearly the speed of light to reduce orphans. There is so much interesting computer science and cryptographic research going on that it's astounding. A lot of this revolves around improving scale. So on a tech site like Slashdot, you probably should keep an open mind about it, read about some of the really neat developments in the pipeline, and not just dismiss it.

Why would you pay 1.5% on each end? That's not part of Bitcoin. Are you talking about transaction fees? You could easily move any arbitrary amount of money for a dollar or less in transaction fees, that's a lot less than 1.5%.

The government has a lot of draconian rules when it comes to regulated financial companies like Coinbase. In order to stay in business, Coinbase has to stay away from anything even remotely connected to something that looks criminal.

The irony of this is that the FBI itself has no good answer to ransomware and has even themselves recommended that people pay the ransoms: http://www.businessinsider.com...

Yet the same government regulations make it nearly impossible for Coinbase to let people use their Bitcoin like that, ironically forcing people to unregulated or dark markets to buy Bitcoin.

Don't forget though that the market tends to highly reward the contrarian thinkers if they can prove that attacking a problem from a non-conventional way or against conventional wisdom actually turns out to provide something that gives a lot of value to people. And you can always find contrarian investors as well who are willing to take a risk on something that bucks conventional wisdom.

Uhh... the OP said "They owns us financially thanks to our over spending (both parties are culpable)". He didn't say just Obama had done it. Obama has preserved the status quo on spending, which is in fact over-spending by a large degree and running up large debts just as prior administrations have done. As far as bills go, yes there are large spending bills, just look at each year's annual budget bill and compare that to annual tax revenue. It's not for no reason that we have large annual deficits every year.