Basically correct. To make it legal in the US the coins should have been sent to a separate entity, a custodian or prime broker who will hold them on behalf of the customer, instead being held under the control of  Bitfinex.

I think so. I strongly believe that is it being used for illegal activities.  And more importantly, being the simpleton retard that I am, I think we should just ask the government to ban it! 

To protect our children ...

What do you think?

As of now, I still have a paid order that has been marked as expired for over 12 hours. I am surprised they haven't fixed it during their claimed office hours of 9am-6pm Beijing time.

OP should look at the Bitcoin core version dialog, not the Qt version. Qt it the (crappy IMHO) cross-platform application framework that the UI component is written in.

BTW core v0.12.1 is using Qt version 5.5.0 so this appears to be an older version.

ECSDA is the weakest link in the chain that is susceptible to quantum computer attacks. The other cryptographic components used in Bitcoin are more resistant to attack. This has been talked about for years. Please do try to keep up.

As long as you don't use some broken random number generator to generate your private keys. Or even worse, manually pick a private key value of say 0x1.

You need to trust the company running the online wallet and managing your private keys. Just because you need 2FA and PINs to get to your coins does not mean that some system admin cannot just copy your private key or coins directly from their servers.

Edit: by "online wallet" I take it that you mean a web-based wallet and not a wallet running on your local computer that is online, e.g. Bitcoin core. A local wallet is safer but still susceptible to trojans and keyloggers.

This may well be the least controversial approach, especially if there are several competing QC implementations owned by different parties and if these coins cannot be "stolen" all at once but rather "re-mined" over a period of time.

Actually that particular node is hosted in an Azure VM in their Japan East datacenter and costs me $120-$180 a month to run, depending mostly on how much bandwidth I use that month.

Eligius is a small pool with high variance. Nevertheless, I point a lot of my miners there because of one redeeming feature - you get paid mostly in virgin coins. Sometimes the block rewards go to a payout queue first and you end up getting paid with non-virgin coins and I don't like it when that happens.

You also don't need to register to use the pool and therefore can mine anonymously, if that feature is important to you.

I am satoshin@gmx.com and I DEMAND respak!  

No you don't just download the chain and be done with it. A full node does not only download blocks - it also receives and relays unconfirmed transactions and sends out blocks to other SPV clients.

Your node could easily send out terabytes of data in 1 month if you don't restrict it.

This node has been up for only 6 days and has already sent out 144 GB.

At this point in time it no longer matters who Satoshi is and what his original vision might have been. The code is open source and he has decided to bow out of the picture. Others have taken up the torch and we have progressed to what we are today.

I thought that Liberty Reserve (the subject of the article) and Liberty Dollar were 2 different things? One is digital and the other is physical. The only commonality is that somebody went to jail for printing Liberty Dollars as well.

LR was a centralized digital currency - nothing wrong with the title. "Liberty Reserve" is also mentioned right in the first sentence of the article.

I believe he is a piece of shit.

I think as long as there is enough buffer in the 1ChANGeATMH... address the pool should be able to pay back for such mistakes. Currently there is a 78 BTC buffer in that address, which seems a little too much for the current pool hash rate.

I sure hope the next block we solve does not go into that address  .

Not necessarily. For example, proof-of-stake systems don't need this computing power to secure the blockchain.

Sometimes all they are trying to solve is transactional integrity over an unreliable network. In my real job I deal with messages used in financial transactions. Some of these messages need to be routed through multiple parties back and forth for some giant meta-transaction to complete. Blockchain technology would be ideal to ensure that these messages are processed in the correct sequence without duplication.

The concept of millions of miners mining small amounts at a loss has some merit. I wouldn't mind plugging something into the wall that costs $5/month in electricity and generates $1/month worth of BTC if millions of other people were doing it in order to keep mining distributed. No need for a fancy chip in my phone or car. Devices like the AntRouter but one that can mine on any pool would be ideal.