USD market is so sprawling and cash so easy to lose, nobody's able to really account for that kind of stuff. Idunno which company holds the largest USD reserves, but I'd be surprised if it didn't make Satoshi's stash in USD FMV look like peanuts... and they can dump that on the market whenever they want...!

Going by trend, it's due to go on sale in 1-2 months, but Valve may try waiting until ~Christmas. Starting to accumulate a sizable Steam Wallet balance from just discovering I have a bunch of cards and TF2 crap and only just realizing there was a community marketplace... waiting for it to go on sale.

Fwiw, SGBTC has it at a discount over retail, but still >.02BTC. http://steamgamesbtc.com/index.php?page=item&id=131

Maybe give BTC price a day or two.

High humidity can increase rate of corrosion (esp. if your area tends to have rain with high acidity). This probably isn't much of an issue since mining equipment isn't expected to last more than 2-4 years, anyway. Relative humidity >95% is likely to cause a short circuit IF your electronics are off and you turn it on in high-humidity environment. If it's hot inside the case (and it's likely much more hot), relative humidity will be significantly different inside the case than outside since hot air can carry more water vapor. I don't mean to say it's safe, though... I ain't never been much of a science-man, myself.

Anything but a centralized platform. It's just disaster after disaster going that route.

Difficult to reconcile indirectly funding company I deeply hate. ... .... but the location's relatively convenient for me for somewhere far away, has all SE people I never get to see normally, and the ticket price is fantastic. Plus it's Sean, so maybe the evil & good roughly balance out. I'm expecting to get boned on alcohol, so reserved $75 per day for a few beers.

Fwiw, they posted the speaker schedule recently (have to do a bit of browsing to find it): http://bitcoindisney.sched.org/

Mined bitcoin, now mined for bitchcoin.

Casino will eventually have a total of 4 games. Three are single-player, one is multi-player.

First game is WGSE and unlocks 14 days after p2p lending is unlocked. You bet 1-1000 BTC and simply click "confirm." You can receive 0x-50x payout + $0-1000 in cash. The service can semi-randomly be "hacked." The larger its losses (based on USD value of winnings), the more likely it is for the operator to disappear. Luck affects "hack" chance, while reputation ("karma") will impact whether you win or lose. House edge will be somewhere around 5-15% excluding hacks. This'll be released in 000425.

Second game is blackjack, unlocking two months after p2p lending is unlocked, with "basic" rules (can double-down, no insurance or splits, dealer with 21 doesn't immediately end game), but card generation is unfair and favors the house. Reputation ("karma") also has a minor impact. House edge will be somewhere around 2-10% given a sane player. Bet amount is 1-100BTC. This'll be released in 0005-0006.

Third game is yet to be determined (maybe some kind of "physical" mining game similar to Dig Dug), but will be original and skill-based, EV+ given a skilled player but should "average" to be roughly EV neutral. Bet amount will be static... unsure at what amount. This'll be released with 001.

Fourth game is competitive + co-op multiplayer "original." You'll start out with a Spades-similar game. If #tricks claimed <= #tricks taken, you'll receive cards to hold in a Hold'Em-similar game in an amount equal to the number of tricks you claimed. Winner of the Hold'Em-similar round goes on to play physics-based Plinko-similar. Losers have the totally-not-humiliating option of blowing on the puck. Where puck lands determines multiplier of pot taken by winner as well as whether or not losers will receive a % of their lost stake. This is significantly EV+ for sane users, but I probably won't have this ready for alpha (001) in ~4-6 months. Buy-in will be set static at something high... unsure of amount.


At some point in the far future, a "provably fair" game may be introduced.

ETA: I'm not sure why you'd want to, but you can visit the site using https now. It's self-signed so you'll get the "blah blah blah, a centralized authority didn't bless this" warning. Certificate's also controlled by web host, so you should assume they could decrypt whatever, too. Everything's stored in the server covered by self-signed cert except for fonts, which are loaded on-demand from Google's font API via insecure connection, so the government may know which fonts you're requesting. If you're worried about that, the game should still be playable offline, so if you'd like, you can download a copy to play while forcing no http (so insecure content - fonts - won't be requested) and fonts will default to something like Ariel and probably look wrong. -Or just quit being so god-damned paranoid.

"The total estimated budget for getting the first four humans to Mars is $6 billion. Lansdorp would not disclose how much money has been secured from partners and sponsors but said donations currently total more than $200,000."

Dare to dream, I guess.

Ventrilo and TS are used pretty much exclusively for gaming. Skype's a bit more cumbersome, but is the clear winner for chatter of any significance. I don't do voice chat while gaming anymore (never in the mood for some 12-year-old yelling obscenities and talking about how cool he is in my ear), and many games have their own voice capabilities baked in, now, so TS and Vent are largely obsolete as far as I can tell.

It's so broad and vague of a term, it has little utility. Generally, any currency you can send online is a virtual currency. USD and other national currencies could be called virtual currencies under certain circumstances, where virtual currency (digital data) is used to represent actual money which may or may not physically exist.

The European Banking Association defines virtual currency as "a digital representation of value that is neither issued by a central bank or a public authority, nor necessarily attached to a fiat currency, but is accepted by natural or legal persons as a means of payment and can be transferred, stored or traded electronically." Every authority which has tried to define "virtual currency" has come up with something quite different from others so far. Using the actual meaning of "virtual," any currency which doesn't physically exist could be called virtual currency -- to separate BTC from USD and other national fiat currencies, it would have to be called virtual-exclusive currency, I'd think.

Always feel leery about buying something from eBay, but there are larger batteries specifically made for Parrot drones, fwiw. http://www.ebay.com/itm/PARROT-AR-DRONE-2-0-UPGRADE-BATTERY-GiFi-Power-Li-Po-/121329881566?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&var=&hash=item1c3fd311de (there's probably a non-eBay seller somewhere)

All of the above + digital/virtual/crypto commodity depending on who you talk to. People seem to generally refer to it as cryptocurrency (to differentiate it from, say, Google Wallet, WoW Gold, or PPUSD) while governments seem more keen on calling it virtual currency (which is much more broad).

ETA: Wait. You have 3k posts.

Have 1/4 of family migrating down South for Winter, other 1/4 sold house and need help moving (and w/garage sale), 1/4 encountered some water damage and need help putting in a replacement door and subflooring, and final 1/4 just came in from Virginia for a visit. I won't have much free time until after driving all the way back up from Florida after Coins in the Kingdom event. If there's a critical bug (worse than how little the loan amounts are as BTC price rises), I should be able to fix it some time before the end of the month if alerted to it. Otherwise - see y'all again in early-mid October.

You're a bold fellow. Leveraged long is becoming tempting position, though. Still on the sidelines holding.

Yeah. -But this is said every crash. Once/"if" upward momentum hits the books, people become over-confident again. Wider-spread familiarity may increasingly counter it. I imagine we're gaining new users faster than current and/or previous users are dying off, even during low points.

Just because something's illegal doesn't make an organization trying to further its cause is illegal as they aren't necessarily engaging in illegal activities. In most places where piracy is illegal, Pirate Parties are still tolerated. -And the same goes for Gay Rights organizations or certain drug decriminalization organizations. ... Assuming Bangladesh isn't banning pro-crypto speech and associations - I don't know too much about how they operate...

I guess they could just report that purchasing power is increasing... Either way, QE∞ + "deflation" isn't a good sign, I imagine. There's an enormous elephant invisible to me if the economy's recovering, the housing market is resuming bubble status, monetary supply is increasing rapidly, and CPI is somehow stagnating, occasionally being negative. I doubt it's that the money supply isn't actually increasing, and house prices seem to clearly be nearing pre-crash peak to me...

Is it even legal to have stated intent to financially "motivate law enforcement?"

Our population accepts the enemy of enemy is friend doctrine unequivocally, and I'd guess this is the greatest factor in every part of our politics, too. Look at Obama, there's a picture of him with a hateful preacher. Look at Ron Paul, there's a picture of him with a racist leader. No time for nuanced views, which I'm tempted to think is valid. We read history books in school, then maybe fluffy news reports - Russia maybe has a paragraph about its acts in high school textbooks' chapter on WW2... Cold War still isn't really covered outside dates -- very sterilized. Nothing to form an opinion on anything related to Russia one way or the other, except our books make them out to be incompetent while Ronald Reagan may's well have been some kind of laser-shooting pterodactyl in space, backed by the wrath of our Almighty Lord. It's extremely difficult to intimately understand a place, people, or government without being fully involved with them, and that isn't even something we attempt to do, here, and maybe it's like this in many places or not - I wouldn't know. This makes being an adequately informed US citizen almost impossible. Our government becomes involved in acts of war with new groups of people faster than we could possibly understand what's in play, so soldiers go over completely lost except for what they're told to do, unless they learn too much, but the government's grown wise to this and insists on providing as many luxury distractions as possible. Idunno - it seems like playing Battlefield 9000 or whatever would trigger some moment where someone has a sudden realization... maybe you suddenly notice you feel a little more fire playing the NATO/EU/US team than when shooting Americans. Spec Ops: The Line was a fascinating and controversial game in the US... it would be interesting to send over in care packages, though maybe we could make even more succinct narratives - or maybe it's just taken as a game where you shoot people and avoid being shot.

Who am I shooting? Why am I shooting them? Why can't these people conduct commerce unmolested? Am I here to stop capitalism and democracy? Why do these people act like this? Don't they understand I'm trying to help - that they're backwards - repressed - and their lost relatives are a necessary evil for the greater good? Does the person who orders me understand the implications of what he's doing? You're to go over without adequate information, to do great things, but it takes a long time to decide whether you did a great good or great evil... but it's almost necessarily after the fact.

There's not much to do but rely on those in power, which is impossible for skeptics, but no single person could truly understand every person and group's motivations everywhere, so.... We can understand Canada and Mexico, maybe a few countries in Central or South America, and maybe an important country in the Caribbean - but it's irresponsible to have Americans doing anything anywhere else outside free commerce, certainly not acts of war and espionage. We don't *know* North Korea, ISIS, Russia, or other countries -- most of us only barely understand Cuba -- some type of weird, freedom-hating, backwards people on an island where they drive cars from the first half of the 20th century and make cigars (with rather strict unspoken rules on cigar-smoking, and I have made a habit of white-labeling all my cigars as soon as I get my hands on any) while refusing to come out of a lesser past. Funding all these different militias and providing weapons to governments few Americans could even pronounce and almost certainly haven't heard of is insane. -So then we get to this point where nobody's allowed to judge the people of a country, where a country can be at total war, with the head of state at high approval ratings, but we accept that actual individuals are generally ignorant and not responsible for what their government does, even if they voted for it... it's just all so disconnected, confusing, and impersonal. *shrug* I don't even know what I'm rambling about anymore, though.