Satoshi Nakamoto, the guy who invented Bitcoin, was a Windows user. Bitcoin was released for Windows before it was released for Linux and Mac.

Fire Brigades originated after the Great Fire of London as privately-run services provided by insurance companies. This gave them a very strong incentive to put out the fire as quickly as possible, to avoid the insurance payout. Only if you did not have fire insurance would you need to pay per fire.

To show that your building was insured and to facilitate the quickest response, you would attach to your building a fire mark provided by the insurance company.

You may hear it said that when there was a fire, several insurance companies would attend to see whose customer it was, then all but one would leave. However, this was obviously inefficient and the individual insurance companies adopted reciprocal arrangements, then later merged their firefighting operations into the London Fire Engine Establishment.

The government (specifically, London's Metropolitan Board of Works) took over the fire brigade in 1866.

Fortunately for Bitcoin, double-precision floating point represents integers exactly up to 9,007,199,254,740,992 which is above the number of bitcoin base units i.e. 2,100,000,000,000,000.

Extra addresses are harmless clutter, so don't worry about them.

What kind of feedback are you looking for?

Just count the number of downloads. What counts is how many happy readers you have, not how much feedback they give. If the number of downloads trends upwards over time, you have a winner.

Don't worry about that. There is one user of Bitcoin who is pushing that system of measurements and nomenclature. No-one other than that user will ever use "BitCoin-bong" as a serious unit.

I don't think distilling the water will help. They're still the same water molecules that passed through Oliver Cromwell's bladder. We still need to depend on the fact that homeopathy isn't true.

Eeew. There would be some of those molecules in every glass of water.

How many bitcoins for a supply of pristine million-year-old Antarctic ice?

No, seriously, feel free to carve your private keys into a monolith.

Yes, I sent you a "youtipit" a few hours ago. That's feedback.

We're not suggesting that Satoshi will reveal himself. It would be trivial to verify that the block being auctioned is the first one ever generated, no matter who is the proxy putting the item up for auction.

How much do you think Satoshi could auction off the first block for? (Transferred outside of the block chain so as not to destroy its pristine quality.)

I think someone would pay over a thousand bitcoins for it.

And in the far, far, future they'll be saying "Every Bitcoin transaction you make can be traced back to the original 21 million coins minted in the 21st century".

Yep, every person's body has plenty of ex-dinosaur atoms. It's just as well that there's no truth in homeopathy, otherwise think of all the influences we'd be subject to.

By my calculations, every breath that you take contains about six molecules from the dying breath of Julius Caesar.

An average breath ("tidal volume of the human lung") is 0.5 liters.

Total volume of the earth's atmosphere equals 4.2 billion cubic kilometers, which equals 2.1x10²¹ breaths. Molecules in one breath equals 1.34x10²². Therefore 134/21 of the molecules from any breath of a historical person will be in any breath that you inhale.

I'm ignoring the interchange of gas between the atmosphere, the oceans, and plants, because I don't have any good figures for that.

PS: And every atom in our bodies has previously been part of a star (probably multiple stars).

I don't know any country where the cost of university fees are higher than the opportunity cost of not being in the workforce. That's the real cost.

I worked about 25 hours per week to finance my education.

I was totally inconsistent at University. I got High Distinctions in the subjects that interested me and were well-taught, and Fail in the others. Not much in-between.

It took me 7 years to get a 3-year BSc, but in addition to the degree I got a great education so if I had my time over, i would do it the same way again.

There's a big difference between education and formal qualifications.

I'm generalizing for sure, but formal qualifications tend to show that you've been through a sausage machine and emerged as a quality-controlled sausage. An education, on the other hand, can give you the tools you need to achieve great things. Sometimes you can get a great education as a side-effect of getting a formal qualification; sometimes you get a great education in other ways.

Of possible interest:
Do grades really matter? A growing body of evidence suggests grades don't predict success -- C+ students are the ones who end up running the world.

Also I have seen somewhere statistics of the S&P500 showing that companies headed by an MBA did worse than average.

That's absolutely true, and I don't see anything that conflicts with my previous post when read carefully. But you need to consider the whole cycle. Not just "people who hold on to their bitcoins do not contribute to trade" but "people who hold on to their bitcoins do not contribute to trade yet".

I'm getting 323MH/s on my 5870 with SDK 2.1, without messing with the clocking or voltage.