"Up to 6% per week?"   Sounds very fishy.

With that kind of return you'll make 20 time your money each year. Why do you need investors? In 2 years a 10,000 investment will be 4 million.

This is just fud and has been discussed to death. 

I think many would disagree with the premise of the statement that using a central server is an improvement, whether it be for time or anything else.  Likewise, most enjoy discussing well thought-out proposals that could be used.

Centralization opens up more attack vectors and is the antithesis of the protocol design, so I think you'll see a lot of resistance to anything that centralizes things and many people wouldn't switch to a fork that includes centralization by design.

:-)

Not as many as "China Bans Bitcion, OMG, the sky is falling".  But getting closer.

 

Bitcoin is extremely safe.  Computers, less so and that varies by OS and the operator.  

If I hand my cash to a known criminal, the odds are he'll take it.  This has to do with people, not bitcoin.

Don't leave your bitcoin online.  Don't download software to the computer you use for bitcoin.  Don't give anyone your private keys. 

:-)

Exactly.  They were key logging him or had hijacked the computer and then transferred the money out.  It is doubtful it was a MITM attack while using TOR when the easier method is to just have owned his computer.  (Of course it is possible, just very unlikely).

If you are asking if an IP address is stored in the blockchain, the answer is no. Nodes will just see a transaction was relayed by X which may be your IP address or not.

Paid VPN can be useful as a part of a strategy. Alone, no.  It also depends on what attack vectors you are trying to protect against, how you are paying for the VPN etc.

And then there are the 8TB and 10TB drives from WD (and others).   http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/western-digital-readies-first-10tb-hard-drive-ships-new-8tb-drive/

6TB is about $250 and about 270 times the current block chain.  Even growing at 20 GB/year, that is a long time before it is full.  Even IF it grew at 100GB/year (~10 times last year) that is still many, many years to fill it.  And then there are the 8TB and 10TB drives and that is just what is available now.

It won't. Services just need to handle unconfirmed transactions properly.

Here it seems they do not handle it correctly. OP is right to be upset with the service itself.  And unconfirmed transaction should not block you account.

"Ecuador to Launch the World's First Digital Currency"

I don't think they know the meaning of the word "first".

If that is the right BTC-e address, then they may just have a big that didn't credit it.

This isn't really the right section. You might move it to the tech support area, but it looks like it has about 4171 confirms:

http://btc.blockr.io/tx/info/8eb268d15be450fd0dc80636afe88a007de5389f43c9dfeb146e0eceedec645b

Where did you see it delayed? If on BTC-e, you should talk to them.

The question is whether the current ongoing costs to run the miners are higher than the value of the bitcoin mined, not necessarily the sunk cost of purchasing it.  That ongoing cost is actually quite low, so it seems unlikely that the fiat value of bitcoin would drop sufficiently to cause them to shut down the miners.  It could drop enough so that new mining hardware's ROI isn't merely somewhat negative, but hugely negative in which case the manufacturers would have to drop their prices or be stuck with a lot of inventory.

Likewise, if one assumed that the miners did shut down their hardware because even the ongoing costs were too high and dumped it at a loss, you (or someone else) might be able to purchase the miner at 5 cents on the dollar and for you a purchase at  that price would be profitable and the miner would be back supporting the network.

Just like no one would buy an Avalon 1 at its initial cost during the fall of 2013 because it would not have a positive ROI, but might if someone sold it for a penny.  Then it might have covered its cost and been slightly profitable (or pick some other ASIC that fits that scenario, I didn't run the exact numbers for it.)

A bitcoin "backed" by a commodity means there is a central party you must trust and who can be coerced.  This is the opposite of a distributed currency.  It is then subject to audits (like there have been calls for with Ft Knox in the US) etc. 

Talk about the author not understanding a basic component of bitcoin.

And when you need to flee dictators like those in Venezuela etc, you can easily flee with a private key.  Platinum, gold or silver, not so easily unless it is pre-positioned outside their grasp.  And authoritarians are lengthening their grasps daily around the world.

:-)

Glad that helped.

I believe it can be programmatically disabled.  I will look into that.

Edit:
I went to look at the code and it appears someone added some os x specific code in the plist to disable app nap a few days ago. So perhaps this will resolve it in a future update.

As an academic exercise this is an interesting discussion.  From a coding perspective too. I did some code for a hyper-cube (and some other highly parallel machines) in grad school and love the area.

shorena made all the points I'd have made - just want to emphasize what he says above.  Backup the wallet.dat file in several places.  And make sure that you can unlock it there before you do anything.  It is better to be safe.

(Of course if you have 0.00001 BTC in there, it probably doesn't matter).

If you do use some cloud storage service make sure that you have it password protected and perhaps even that wallet in a password protected encrypted image. (But better to just not do it.)