No. Volatility is a measure of value increasing and people cashing out (wishing they didnt). As for your weak crypto argument, thats the same as saying "why don't people just photocopy money... then it will be worthless". ie.. security will always keep evolving... (as it does with fiat money... like security strips, special paper, colors, pictures etc to make it as difficult as possible) as it does everywhere because people are shitheels that want to steel stuff. That being said, your Social Security number is a fixed much shorter number than any of the crypto secrets available. That number is also very likely freely available today because of Equifaxs failure. So.... with that and some other public information anyone can engineer their way into your bank account. Did that make your money worthless somehow? (better convert it to crypto quick!) Or how about your credit card number... where all the numbers even start with the same set of digits. Surely those being massively compromised and all over the Internet means they are worthless too right? So.... just to be completely clear.... your current faith in an utterly broken, and owned financial system trumps one that hasn't been broken and is based on strong encryption how exactly again? Oh yeah, and on the "risks that gold doesn't"... you at no point made clear any actual value of gold other than "more stable"... so were Steam Engines up until they weren't. Sorry, but right now as far as I'm concerned my roll of copper 12/2 is far more valuable than your ring of shiny metal (see useless... well other than for collecting half your income for years).

What specifically does Gold bring to the table? Are you using it to conduct electricity? (Its not the best conductor btw) Or are you using it in your nail polish? (its great you think its pretty... until its not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) Perhaps you mean its ARTIFICIAL scarcity? (Great news, Bitcoin is limited and scarce by design) Or how about cash... what specifically does the cash provide you other than an assumed unit of value? (good napkin? Great way to perform "off the books" transactions....)

Apparently CNN doesn't like to cover news like Argentinians using Bitcoin to protect themselves from their own countries Fiat Tanking:
https://cointelegraph.com/news...

Or Zimbabwes Fiat tanking:
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.co...

Cryptocurrencies have value from at least 4 specific areas:
1) Distributed Work Trust – Transactions are validated through a system of Distributed “Miners” that create a linked chain of parent child relationships leveraging consensus and Entropy of scale to build in protections against Fraud and Forgery.

2) Transactional Integrity – Transactions are signed in such a way as to make them quickly verifiable both in internal integrity to each block, as well as each blocks’ place in the chain to create an immutable sequence and protect against Fraud and Forgery.

3) An Immutable Data Store – Referred to as a “Distributed Ledger,” values can be added to the signed and verified transaction chain becoming part of the distributed, and immutable record.

4) Distributed Logic Processing – Ethereum provides the benefit of executing functions in a Turing complete language across the distributed node and mining network. These functions (commonly referred to as contracts) are added to the chain (or Ledger) as Libraries which will exist so long as the chain does. For reference, “Contracts” are also available in Bitcoin though under a non-Turing complete implementation. Either way these are executable "contract" code libs built into the chain... does your dollar do that?

Why is gold even a competitor? Its like comparing Apples and Teslas.

Its frustrating seeing so many people falling for the lines of a bunch of crooks and fraudsters that are just trying to manipulate markets so they can continue to profit from ignorance.

Some more resources for those that are having a hard time Googling Bitcoin Value and want to learn more:
https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin...
http://www.google.com/

Hadoop starts with a vastly distributable, and resilient file system (HDFS) which enables, as a base, technologies that include things like HBase (columnar stores), Impala (Parquet example), Titan (graphs), Spark (lord everything.. its the emacs of data frameworks), or the latest projects which completely change the paradigm of how you are looking at data at unbelievable speeds. (who the hell runs mapreduce and expects real time performance?... its a full disk scan across distributed stores... and fairly sane from that perspective)

If you don't have problems that relate to these paradigms... dont use it. Seriously. Just because its new doesnt mean it fits every situation. Its not mysql/mariadb/postgresql... if you think its even remotely close to that simple you should run for the hills. If you have a significantly large (not talking hundreds of megs or even a couple gigs... you need to be thinking in Billions of rows here) configuration management problem then its a great base to layer other projects on top of to solve your problem.

Also, I found a large number of problems to solve using timestamped individual data cells that CANNOT be done using traditional sql methodologies. Lexicographic configuration models, analytics (obv), massive backup history just to name a few. If the management and installation of the cluster are scary... well...not everything in CS is easy... especially when it gets to handling the worlds largest datasets.... so, this probably isn't really your problem... call the sysadmins and ask them (politely) to help. Believe it or not the main companies have wizards which can help get you going across clusters... and even manage them visually (not that I ever would... UI's are for people who can't type).

When people (or just this CEO) says it doesn't deliver on its promise. You are likely trying to solve a problem wholy inappropriately. I have personally used it to solve problems like making real time recommendations in under 200ms across several gigs of personal data daily (totalling easily into terabytes). (No you don't use mapreduce... think harder... but you DO use HDFS).

So what promise were you told?

Other than real time (as illustrated above), you can do archiving, ETL of course, and things like enabling SQL lookups, or RRDs... using a number of toolkits or spark. Seriously, this is one of the best things since sliced bread when it comes to processing and managing real big data problems. Check out the Lambda processing model when you get a chance... you might be impressed, or be utterly confused. Lambda (and not talking about programming Lambda, nor AWS Lambda) applies multiple apache technologies to solve historical with real time problems in a sane manner. Also managing massively distributed backups is much simpler with HDFS

Honestly, outside of Teradata implementations, there is no where in the world you can get this kind of data resiliency, efficiency, nor management. Granted it doesn't have the 20+ years of chops in HUGE datasets Teradata does, nor the support... but its open source and won't cost you much to try.

Long long story short. What the hell! I feel like programmers today are constantly ... whining... about complexity. It seems like a trend to say "well I couldn't use it for my project so that means no one really does.. they are just trying to look cool." Which I would have to reply... you're an idiot. Yes its complex... if you understand storage / manipulation / migration / replication / indexing... you should be impressed to say the very very least. If you dont, please go read the changelog, Readme, and any note based install guides. or do some research on the commercial companies using this technology successfully.... instead of making of figures and claiming its gospel.

Any commercial solution will cost you ... well... millions just to get started solving the problems Hadoop nailed out of the gate.

If Hadoop seems large and frightening just wait until you start adding on columnar or graph databases, try to track the change history of users... or the myriad of analytics that let you turn massive data into usable information.

So, if you haven't read the docs on how it actually works, identified what problems are actively being solved... In all reality you probably don't have a big data problem, stick to sql.

Oh and one more thing... Kafka is not a replacement... its like saying you should get rid of your car and get a nice carburator, (its a distributed / replicated Queue....) or just a set of tires instead. *Boggle*

Oh... and one more more thing... I love how the article is written specifically by a CEO of a relational database company... *Shock* *Suprise* *Boredom*

So its clearly cool for armor, but it sounds like something that might be very useful for say a space station? Both for shielding against incoming projectiles (granted slow ones) and potentiall for its radiation protection... not sure what the spectrum is on that danger though... How expensive is it... insulation properties? Seems like it could be used for a number of things from tornado proofing homes to gun barrels.

No idea what your trying to do... art, fast file system, error recovery, special new virus etc... but I'd start in one of two places. If you are trying to write your own filesystem because everyone else is "doing it wrong" then check out Oracles "unbreakable" installation.... a bit dated and I don't know if they still do it this way, but the gist is you mount the drives with "rawfs" and they have their own file system stack that runs on top. Pretty effective way to trim down the layers of stuff before reads and writes and speed up raw access. .... again, depends on your implementation if this would be useful to you. If you actually want to write ones and zeros I'd check the source for fdisk and see what its doing.... might be a gem there since it clearly is aware of geometry and has some access to writing in places you normally wouldn't. Good luck!

So if the batteries in the prius are 330V at 6.5 amps, it sounds like it could run my house pretty well... So instead of recycling it, perhaps it should end up in my backyard shack plugged up to hydro/solar/wind power to charge it and get me off the grid? 200 bucks seems pretty incredibly cheap for a power supply of this magnitude. Or does it lose its juice too fast?