All right, then. One more thing, the "Notify via email" checkboxes are displayed in white text on a white background (regardless of whether Javascript is enabled or not), which is kinda hard to read.

The page isn't blank, everything's just invisible thanks to this CSS:
body {
   margin:      0;
   padding:     0;
   font-family: "Segoe UI", "Lucida Grande", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;
   font-size:   15px;
   opacity:     0;
}
which is overridden by Javascript. Since absolutely nothing on that site even requires Javascript as far as I can tell (it seems to work just fine if you disable both Javascript and CSS), I'm going to assume this attempt to force people to enable Javascript is a sign of something sinister and strongly urge everybody not to visit this site until a damn good explanation is provided.

My apologies for not applying Hanlon's razor to the situation. We get a lot of scammers here, as you know.

So, you suspected they would screw up, and you still trusted them with your only recent backups? (And no, it is not unexpected that *all* of them would fail at the same time for the same reason - I  really can't believe you didn't see this coming.) And by the sounds of it, you didn't even check that your single older backup was still working until it too late? That's just hopeless. Hard drives are cheap. Not having a working backup is expensive. It's a no-brainer. But some people have to learn things the hard way.

I call these people "utterly moronic". Stupidity and gross negligence is par for the course in Bitcoinland. That's no excuse. Well, I hope you've learnt something from this incident.

Say what? Anyone who can't afford to lose 80% of their money doesn't have anywhere near enough savings, and is going to get absolutely slaughtered when (not if) the global economy implodes. If you have a full-time job and no massive debts, and that doesn't add up to an ever-growing mountain of cash that you don't know what to do with and wouldn't cause any inconvenience if it suddenly vanished, then you're doing something horribly wrong.

"The" government? I wasn't aware there was only one. Well, that certainly changes things, doesn't it?

There is a chance. But if he is telling the truth, then he has admitted to an astounding level of incompetence that is simply inexcusable when handling other people's money. Whether he returns your money or not, you should never trust him with your money ever again.

No.

Three online backups? All hosted by the same cloud service that's hosting the original files?!? And no offline backup? TimothyA is either a scammer trying to bullshit you or else completely fucking retarded. Nobody's that stupid. And if they are, you certainly shouldn't trust them with your money.

If it's getting closer, it's all good. All you have to do is wait.

No it isn't. Blockexplorer.com hasn't been working right for... I can't even remember how long. Use http://blockchain.info/q/getblockcount instead.

Can't unsee...

That's impossible. Block 194649 is from over 3 months ago. If your client was even close to 100% yesterday it would have already been way past block 194649. Something has clearly gone horribly wrong (especially if blk0002.dat is growing in size despite being stuck on block 194649). I'd suggest you close Bitcoin, wait for it fully shut down, then delete (or move to another folder, if you're worried about deleting things) blk0001.dat, blk0002.dat, and blkindex.dat, and then restart Bitcoin. This will force it to download the blockchain from scratch, which should fix any odd issues.

Also, while you're at it, you should backup your wallet.dat file if you haven't already, especially since you've already sent money to it. If anything happens to that file, your money's gone for good unless you have a backup. So back it up!

100%, but I have a stable income and enough fiat for day-to-day expenses, so I don't have anything to worry about if there's another massive crash and the value of my bitcoin holdings goes down the toilet (instead, I see crashes as an opportunity to buy cheap coins).

That depends entirely on how much you're willing to risk. If your financial situation is very secure, to the point where losing most of your money would not really cause you any great inconvenience, then you might be willing to risk most or all of your money on bitcoins. Otherwise, you need to think very carefully about exactly how much money you can afford to lose without it being a major problem. Do not invest any more than you can afford to lose.

Go read about difficulty and Bitcoin's currency supply, and come back when you understand why the cap won't be reached until the year 2140 (which is slightly more than "2 to 4 months" away).

Impossible. Increasing the cap on the money supply is the very definition of inflation, and a fixed cap is the only way to stop inflation happening, by definition. Limiting inflation is whole reason bitcoin production is capped in the first place.

That's an oxymoron, since not only is hydrogen not renewable, it doesn't even exist in a form usable as an energy source anywhere on Earth. (There are oil wells and natural gas wells and water wells, but there ain't no such thing as a hydrogen well (and even if there were, it's not renewable). And producing hydrogen from any source other than a non-existent hydrogen well requires more energy than you would get by burning the hydrogen.)

Unless, of course, you're talking about a "self reliant renewable energy source" and "machine that uses hydrogen" as two completely different things, though the former is impossible and the latter is not very impressive as we already have several such machines.

Pros: It makes attacks using commodity hardware (eg, botnets, which are one of the more serious threats at the moment) much less efficient, which increases security. By the same token, it provides the same level of security against such attacks while consuming far less energy (the amount of energy used in bitcoin mining is something detractors are constantly complaining about for some reason).

Cons: No prototype has ever been publicly demonstrated, and they may not actually exist yet, despite claims to the contrary. Some have accused the manufacturers of being scammers, though it's entirely possible their suspicious behaviour is a desperate attempt to avoid the fate of the Osborne Computer Corporation (whose premature announcement of a relatively advanced, but not-yet-existent computer system led directly to the company's bankruptcy when customers cancelled their orders for existing products and as a result the company didn't have enough money coming in to actually develop and release the new system).

Investors (the sane ones, at least) plan to cash out when the value of their bitcoin holdings compared to their other assets (and thus the amount they stand to lose if when there's another bitcoin crash) exceeds their tolerance for risks. Eg, if you're willing to risk putting half your money in bitcoins, and then the bitcoin price doubles, you'd suddenly have two-thirds of your money in bitcoins. If you consider two-thirds of your money to be more than you're willing to risk on bitcoins, then you'd want to sell some of your bitcoins at this point (in this case selling a quarter of your bitcoins would bring you back to a 50:50 allocation). Note that you should never sell all of your bitcoins, no matter how high the price goes - you'll be kicking yourself if the price goes up even further.

I do, and so would anyone else with half a brain, if they're selling it for half the cost of the ingredients to make it. And if their answer is "we don't ask questions, and it's better if we don't know", I think I will be purchasing my bread elsewhere. You're either a thief or a scammer, and we'll have no part of either. GTFO.

Wikipedia can.

Basically, if the price is going up, there is accumulation in proportion to the trade volume. If the price is going down, there's distribution in proportion to trade volume. The actual magnitude of the price increase/decrease is inconsequential. Increasing accumulation simply means that there's more volume when prices are rising than when prices are falling. The theory behind the name is that the price increases when there's excess demand (people are trying to accumulate) and decreases when there's excess supply (people are trying to distribute). That's all. It only indicates demand, it doesn't say anything about where that demand is coming from, whether it's from new buyers, or whatever.

Does anyone know what date the StartCom Class 2 Primary Intermediate Server CA certificate allegedly expired on? Because I'm looking at it right now in OpenSSL and it says it's valid from 2007-2017. There's no way it's expired.

Unlikely. The reason red-light cameras take two pictures in quick succession is to tell (by how far your car traveled between the two pictures) whether you were actually running the red light or if you just stopped a little bit over the line. You probably won't get a ticket in the latter case.

...which of course misses the point completely, as the purpose (and indeed, the very definition) of cryptocurrency is that transactions can be cryptographically verified by anyone, eliminating the need to rely on trusted third parties to verify transactions. Anonymity or traceability has absolutely nothing to do with whether something is a cryptocurrency or not.

I am spending my bitcoins. I'm just not spending them right now.  It's called saving. This concept seems to confuse and irritate some people. I don't understand why; it should be obvious that I'm going to spend them eventually - why would I buy bitcoins in the first place if I'm never going to use them? And even if I don't ever spend them, that's my problem, not anybody else's.

Because rich people gotta eat, too, and you can't eat bitcoins. Deflation is only a problem if people starve to death waiting for the price of food to go down. But that's not going to happen: as the fact that people buy computers demonstrates, the promise of cheaper prices tomorrow doesn't mean much if you want something today.

Welcome, Bitmonedo.

Your hope is misplaced. "Technology" won't bring you lots of bitcoins. Working hard and providing something of value to the community will bring you lots of bitcoins. TANSTAAFL.

(Note that "mining" is the business of providing security for the Bitcoin network for profit (not a get-rich-quick scheme or a way to make "free" money), and speculative investment can be regarded as a useful service as it adds your hard-earned money to the Bitcoin economy. Neither of these activities are without cost or risk.)