No, this would not be possible. It would be much too difficult to police businesses at this level. It would also be too easy to move money around, away from the crypto part of a business.

Some exchanges do use their own money to trade bitcoin; it is rumored that chinese exchanges do this a lot. He is however correct to say that exchanges to primarily make their money from trading fees.

When they steal large amounts it is possible to track the theft through the blockchain as mixers are not setup to handle extremely large amounts. Additionally the vast majority of exchanges have some level of information about their owners public so if they were to steal then they would already be doxed.

I had specified that mild regulation would be necessary. Additionally regulation and taxation are two separate issues. In the US at least it would be very difficult to impose any taxes on bitcoin that do not have the same type of tax for a fiat based transaction. If this would be imposed then the taxing authority would run into equal protection constitutionality issues.

I think there is a good reason why the value of LTC has decreased so much recently in terms of BTC. One reason is because so many other alts have been created recently that are very similar to LTC with minor differences. This allows people to see how little value altcoins really have (they are really no different then BTC). I think another reason is the advent of scrypt based ASICs. If people make huge investments into these ASICs then they will likely want to convert at least a portion of what they mined to fiat in an attempt to ROI when previously they would mine with existing equipment they already had (or would buy GPUs that depreciate less then ASICs - they have other uses).

I said crack not crash. As in the screen getting cracked when you drop it (this is very easy to happen and happens all the time). I think it is a fair point that you would likely keep your phone in a safer environment then a phone you would not use for cold storage, but the risk is still there.

It is true that it takes time for mining companies to mine these elements, however the cost of transporting them from the astroid back to earth would be large so they would want to make as few trips as possible, so they would likely send the mined elements back in large batches. Once the elements are back on earth they would have no reason not to attempt to sell all of what they have. You are right in that there is a chance that demand for these elements would increase but I would personally doubt they would increase by an equal amount that the supply would increase by.

I really don't see why he would do that either. There are many users of bitcoin that have never even heard of this forum, and a lot of users do not have a BTC address on their profile. If he were to give away his BTC then it would be much more likely that it would be to a good cause that he supports (the coins would likely be given over time).

I don't think that companies will necessarily keep bitcon as an investment (most companies do not tend to speculate on things unrelated to their business) but rather as a way to potentially pay their employees, suppliers and vendors in the future. Paying the above people this way would likely be cheaper then paying in fiat in many cases.

If another altcoin were to have come before bitcoin then it would likely have value as well. I think the majority of the coins that have some level of value have value because of speculators.

I think the point is that consumers do not usually pay the hospital/doctor directly, but rather they are paid by the insurance company. If a hospital were to accept bitcoin for payment and all their patients paid the entire amount they owe in bitcoin the hospital's revenue will still be primarily be fiat from the insurance company.

It sounds a lot like you are making the argument to stay with apple. If android phones are insecure then why use them? Your BTC is only one of many things that could get stolen if an attacker were to gain access to your phone (sensitive information on your phone like text messages, banking information, pictures, your geo-location, potentially your identity).

I think the best solution to this is to store a backup of your wallet in a cloud based storage service that is not associated with your identity (just make sure to properly encrypt the file and to make the process to decrypt the file one that can be done with a password that you can memorize). You would likely want to make sure that your storage service is paid for at least 2x the max amount of time you would expect to be gone for.

If you store your keys in any other way, then you face the possibility that your keys will be seized if/when you are arrested. Even if law enforcement cannot use the keys to send funds (they are properly encrypted) they can still keep them from you, making it a moot point that they can't spend the coins.

If you give your keys to a trusted group of people (via multisig or otherwise) you would face the possibility that law enforcement could seize the keys from them (or they could give them up voluntarily if threatened by law enforcement).  

If you properly diversify your loans then this will likely work great (you also need to use common sense to weed probably scammers). BTCJam works very similar to prosper in that they both offer loans funded in very similar ways; they do have differences in how loan collection is done and the legal structure of the loans. Prosper has published research saying that if you invest in at least 100 prosper loans that historically speaking you would have had positive returns (note - this is done by credit ratings, not individual loans).

Bitcoin really does give you a sufficient amount of privacy for the "average joe" it is just that every transaction is public (this is the OP's concern). For most people, it is very difficult to link your identity to any specific transaction, and any one of your transactions to another one of your transactions (if you use change addresses properly).

ASICs will always be much more efficient then any quantum computer will be. Since quantum computers can likely do many tasks it will be less efficient then a machine that can do one task only.

I would disagree that "everyone" knows that the buyer/sender pays the fee. With most fiat baed payment systems it works the opposite. If you know a little bit about bitcoin then you know the sender pays the fee, but everyone who has bitcoin may not know very much about bitcoin, nor how it works. When you buy something on a website that uses coinbase then coinbase will make it very clear the buyer is responsible for the fee.

I am not saying that the receiver should always "eat" the TX fee, I am saying that if a customer deducts the fee from what they send then receiving $0.06 less then you otherwise would is a very small price to pay to keep the sale moving. If this is something a buyer does multiple times then it would be appropriate to say something to the buyer.

It was defiantly an account that was controlled by satoshi prior to bitcointalk.org coming into existence. In theory it could have been hacked but I would find it very unlikely that the account gets hacked the day newsweek goes with their story. Even more unlikely that it would be hacked and not used until then.

I think it would have been pretty cool to see Satoshi donate some of his bitcoin to the fund that was going to newsweek's satoshi.

I think this would be unlikely. If someone wanted to leave PD they could have done so before this campaign filled up. Someone could have given up their earnings from the PD campaign that they earned so far that month in exchange for a higher potential payment per post.

I think that prior to TOR it was very difficult if not impossible to have privacy from a large attacker on the internet. As of when TOR was created the internet was still very new, and a lot of the privacy services did not exist then. You also had many less options to connect to the internet; you were not able to connect via public wifi, at most public places, in a hotel or even via cell phone.