Is this a serious question, or are you trolling here?

I was thinking that much of what is going on in the world, I've been thinking about energy security for my family.  I could, and probably will, buy a couple sealed cans of kerosene; but I know that I can do better than that.  I was thinking about heating my home.  In my area, natural gas is the cheapest method of home heat, and the most common.  It's also second only to electricity in it's dependency on infrastructure for it's ongoing availablity.  There is also much in the way of propane and firewood heating in my area, but storing up propane requires buying or leasing tanks.  Wood is ideal, being both locally available and renewable.  It does have one downside though, as it would eventually rot should nothing of consequence occur in the near term.  Kentucky coal is an option, but it's of the bitumous variety, and thus it's incrediblely smokey and messy.  So I'm considering buying a truck-bed full of anthracite coal, because I can just dump that out by the toolshed and it would literally never degrade.  Perhaps I'd buy a pallet load of 40 lb bags instead.

The problem is that anthracite is only mined in upstate Pennsylvania, which is quite a shipping cost.  It's also the only reason that anthracite isn't a common heating fuel in Kentucky, as the shipping costs make anthracite economicly unviable compared to natural gas around here.  In order to compete with natural gas from the local power company, a full ton of coal would have to cost about $180 delivered.  I wouldn't expect anything like that, but Lehman's would charge me twice that before shipping costs. (https://www.lehmans.com/p-2316-anthracite-coal.aspx)

I'm wondering if there are any bitcoiners from upstate Pennsylvania who might be planning a trip South this summer, who might be willing to stop in Louisville, Kentucky with as many 40 lb bags of anthracite as they were able to bring with them.

I'm not seeing anything out of the ordinary, care to expound?

Then either start as a hobby business, and simply sell what you can sell; or just add bitcoin payments to another existing business model.  Maybe bitcoins will become  a significant part of the business, maybe they won't.  Doesn't really matter, if the goal is to aquire bitcoins for your own purposes cost effectively.

Yes, you've missed the point.  How easy is it for you to buy US $ in the UK?  It is an easy transaction currency once you have some.  Try starting an online business of some sort, and accept bitcoins.  That's what is needed more than a better ways to trade government fiat for bitcoins.

Sadly, I loaned him 60 BTC.

I don't believe Ian's intent was to default.  Hopefully he will return on his own and attempt to make amends. 

Even that wouldn't actually break the network.  It'd just pick up where it left off once the internet was back up, or an alternative connection could be established.  The Internet would have to go down, stay down, and no one be able to rebuild a network with more than 1 meg per minute transfer rates between nodes.  Basicly nothing short of a nuclear EMP, in which case most of us are going to have greater problems than our bitcoin balances.

I can't see the article.

EDIT: Nevermind.

Not one of the attacks is a threat.  This guy doesn't know what he is talking about.  Even the 51% attack that he references wouldn't give the attacker arbitrary access to any coins that he didn't recently possess.  These aren't hacks, they are, at best, attempts at defrauding a limited set of users via a convoluted set of double-spending.   While double spending isn't entirely impossible with bitcoin, it's damn difficult due to timing requirements.  The 51% attack basicly gives the attacker more time to do the double spend attack, so long as he is willing and able to maintain the 51% attack.  Considering that the current hashrate of the honest network is roughly 30 times faster than the world's fastest supercomputer, that's not chump change anymore.  There isn't a whole lot that nation-state resources could do to bitcoin at this point, IMHO, since the rate of increases outpaces the normal construction time for such supercomputers.

Probably not.

I've never even heard of it.  Are you sure that it was for real?

Good lord!  That clip was awful!

What is with these talking head shows?  Not only can they not find detractor that knows what he's talking about, they don't seem terriblely interested in finding a proponant that doesn't seem like he's never made it out of the newbie section here.

It's not normal, but nor is it uncommon to have delays.  Did you pay a transaction fee?

I've bought many things online with some, but most of them I sold recently because I thought that the price was in a bubble.  I then 'shorted' the bitcoin price with the $ value in the account, but lost it all when the price of bitcoins hit my stop-loss number.  I lost a small fortune, but I can honestly say that I actually had one for a short time, even though it never did me any good.

Live and learn.

The really sad part is that is probably not true.

I bought many at 6.5 cents each.  I've lost or spent almost all of them since, though.

This should serve a lesson to even members who have not lost due to Ian.  A public thread on this forum is no certainty of proof of debt.  He can't delete PM's. 

where's that global warming when you need it?!

Sorry to hear about your hives.

I loaned him 60 BTC myself.  I definately didn't get a payment either.