Yes. Despite my constant pointing out the silliness of many conspiracy theories I am actually fairly radical. I just don't go in for theories when there are plenty of documented facts about the government's misuse of authority. For example I saw no mention here of the "American Freedom Act" that past yesterday. Even with a name straight out of a George Orwell book, it sailed through with no public outcry. Only Rand Paul held, and was abandoned by his own party.

My Dad served in the FBI and from what I have seen I believe they would only get involved if:
(A)There were a bunch of complaints about specific people or a business.
(B) The specter of terrorists or pedophiles is brought up. That get's everyone going. 
(C) It was part of a larger operation. Like say a money laundering scheme.

Honestly, at the institutional level I think they know very little about bitcoin. Which is not a good thing. Misunderstanding bitcoin is what leads to stupid draconian laws and a perception of BTC as criminal in nature.


   

Good suggestions guys. One thing I heard from an investor was "I try to tell if they are selling me on giving them money, or selling the idea they want funded". That sounds right. If they believe in their idea then it's all they talk about. If they are just focused on money and soft on the idea then perhaps your money IS the business plan. 

Also the idea of directly investing in a commodity like gold makes some sense. I really only do physical gold. Paper gold has some drawbacks to consider. In any case I think it's a good hedge against catastrophic stock market decline.  There is also real estate. Land is the king of wealth, IMO. Like BTC, there is only so much of it and all other wealth comes from the land.

I was listening to Al-Abidi(ISF) talk about an attack a few days ago that killed 45 soldiers.  He was very concerned about how sophisticated the VBIED(car bomb) had become. The enemy now uses heavenly reinforced dump trucks and even captured MRAPs. The explosions are like "mini atomic bombs" that take out whole city blocks. He went on to say that "they can't stop them".

Think about how hard a target that is. A military vehicle, like the one below, coming at you at  50MPH. Bullets won't stop it, even a lucky shot from an RPG likely won't stop it. Such vehicles can also shoot back with a withering stream of bullets. Gate duty must suck in Iraq.

My neighbor is a financial manager. I told him about bitcoin years ago and he was like, Wha..?

Last week he told me that they are starting to hear from clients who want to hold a little bitcoin. He was still like, Huh?

Apparently Ben Lawsky is now offering consulting to help businesses navigate his 44 pages of rules. This is highly unethical and a better law would not allow this. Unfortunately the BF fell apart as efforts were underway to rein in some of this regulation. Without a lobby group I think we may see this pattern repeated state after state.

Lawmakers makes up laws > Lawmaker quits and receives payment for explaining the law.

Some use cases for this include:
Proving your identity.
If you associate a wallet with your identity you can sign a message with that wallet. It proves that you have access to that wallet and so you must/should be the owner.

Proof of ability to pay. 
Let's say your auctioning off a house at a closed auction. You only want to invite people who could actually pay if they won. In this case you could require the bidders to sign an address with at least 885BTC, the minimum price.

Op, you can quote this for future reference. If bigfoot is found I will give you one bitcoin.
Now I don't mean found as in a blurry photo, I mean found dead or alive and studied.

People seem to think there is an unexplored wilderness in the U.S. In reality scientists have documented every salamander, vole, or other creature. Sure there are some insects that could be categorized, but a giant primate? No way. There has never been a single hair, bone, or dropping found as evidence. It's really quite preposterous.

If I'm proven wrong it will be perhaps the greatest scientific discovery of my lifetime. Well worth 1BTC!

I speak and read some Japanese and that translation is not correct.

聡中本 is a normal name in Japan. The first word "Satoshi" is something like "wisdom". A bit like "Sophia" in Greek. But the second name is made from two characters that imply "inside origin or inside beginning". The first Character is 中. This is a mouth with a line going inside. The second (moto) 本 depicts a tree with it's roots highlighted. Just as in English the roots imply origin of or the start of something.
It is a bit subject to interpretation as it is not an alphabetic language. But mostly it is a name like Dale Winston. Not the most common name, but not uncommon.

You can also see this in the name ( 東京日本). The first caracter shows a tree with the sun rising behind it. So you must be looking "East" the second is an imperial lantern that means "Capitol". So the first word is Tokyo or eastern capitol. The next word is Japan. There is the square "sun" again but this time followed by "Origin". So Japan means origin of the sun. Or land of the rising sun.  

Oh he's outed you bro. Your in the BSA! Admit it, your a boy scout. 

I hope you guys are teaching your children to speak Arabic. The real war will be kicking off when Baghdad and/or Damascus falls. Then comes decades of fighting and the scale will require drafting of soldiers. We could not really even keep up with recruiting during the little war Iraq has been so far. You ain't seen nothing yet.

 

Wow that's crazy. Maybe they were tricking her into laundering money?

You are not the one missing the point. 

The argument is the same as arguing that potcoin or dogcoin will centralize bitcoin. These are just forks that have not been adopted as much. When the fork comes to BTC some will go one way others another. But there is no centralization in the system, Only choices. And the number of nodes means very little. It is clearly a reflection of the community increasingly using online wallets and not running a full node. 

I predict that the real $#!T storm will happen when the users who panic switch to a silly alt wake up to find that the value has drained out of their holdings. Spoiler alert! Its going to be the fault of Gavin and his shadowy government handlers. lol

Hi. Ignored. 

As someone who grew up in a family of actual government operatives, I assure you this is comedy gold to them.

Gavin is a CIA agent.  Buwahahahah

I'm voting yes. A poll. OMG hahahah.

related to WTF?

ISIS bans pigeon breeding.

When I saw this reported first in the Jerusalem times it was all about DAESH being offended by "seeing the genitals of birds". I'm not sure I believe that. You actually can't see a birds junk. In fact some birds need to be probed to find out if they are male or female. It seems more likely that pigeons are being banned for espionage reasons. As archaic as it looks, birds are still used for covert messages. They are able to go anywhere without raising any suspicion and are very hard to detect, follow or stop. 



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3107027/ISIS-bans-pigeon-breeding-punishable-public-flogging-seeing-birds-genitals-overhead-offends-Islam.html

What Liberty said!
They have no idea who is holding what. They are going to systematically go through EVERYTHING and look for prosecutable crimes. Then they are going to find out who is who and where they live, work, favorite color. when the subpenas come out they will know the answers to most of the questions at the interrogation.
If you are not a crook then it will just be an invasion of privacy. If you are a crook your life may be ruined by this. Jail time, fines, never getting a real job again; it will suck to be you.

I'm not saying that bitcoin can't be improved. I just don't like trying to fix things that are not broken. The Tx limit is something that needs to be addressed. Many of the arguments I hear against this step (not yours) have nothing to do with that problem and are uninformed concerns that Gavin is centralizing bitcoin. Things like Tx speed are not a problem, IMO.
There have been millions and millions of dollars poured into bitcoin because it works. It is a serious project and the backers of those efforts are not going to be interested in a copy of bitcoin based on some kid's love of dogs.
I do think it is worth discussing and you have a good post, but I'm sticking with BTC for the moment.

I should amend my earlier post to include LiteCoin. It has demonstrated it's staying power and ability to expand into markets. 

I would agree with your choice if Tx speed were the only factor. But most alt coins aren't worth the paper they aren't printed on. However if you guys want to "vote against the status quo", I'll be there to buy your discount coins!