Forget about mining for a moment and think about the lottery. As you know (or ought to know), it is statistically almost impossible for any given individual to win the lottery, however, with millions of people playing, it is statistically almost certain that somebody will win. Mining works the same way. Even though if the chances of you solving a block are extremely slim, with a huge number of people mining, some of them are are sure to solve some number of blocks before anyone else, which slightly decreases the average time between blocks, which in turn slightly increases the difficulty, increasing the amount of work needed to attack the network.

Or, to look at it another way, each small-time miner is a piece of straw on the back of the attacker's camel.

Nope. Linux was originally designed to run on a 12 MHz i386DX, and the current version still does (though most modern distros with a GUI require a little bit more than that, typically a Pentium II with 128 MB of RAM). Pretty much every device that was ever supported in Linux is either still supported or has an old driver available that still works. One of the (many) reasons I use Linux is that I actually have some old hardware that is no longer supported by other operating systems.

As for program updates requiring a newer version of the OS, that does sometimes happen, though it isn't a problem to keep the OS up to date, even on old hardware.

Please delete or add one image to this séance, and/or lick everyone else in this orgy.

Delete or add one word to this séance, and/or don't post anything else in this thread.

Nothing. They're almost completely inert and can coexist just fine, though it's likely that only one will ever be really valuable. They also can't be bound to protein molecules, a fact which some people can't seem to grasp. Cryptium is only known to react with elements of the Scamide group (of which Ponzium is the most reactive).

I'm afraid Ken Thompson has some bad news for you.

This is a lowercase beta: β
This is a lowercase eszett: ß
This is an uppercase bee: B
This is the numeral eight: 8

These characters all look similar, but are completely different. Try not to get them confused. The character is question is a lowercase eszett, not a lowercase beta.

I'm not sure, but I think suturing wounded limbs is only helpful if the limbs in question are still attached to the patient. I had the same problem with those CPR dummies that consist of nothing but a head and torso. I'm pretty sure if a guy has no pulse and isn't breathing after being totally dismembered, any resuscitation efforts are unlikely to be fruitful. Strangely, nobody else in the class seemed to see the logic of my objection. But in the end, I was right. The dismembered dummy never regained consciousness.

The connection is secured, but the SSL certificate expired yesterday and StrongCoin has yet to renew it, which is... highly improper, but not at all unusual. Many financial institutions allow their SSL certificates to expire, and their users in most cases simply ignore their browser's warnings. I don't know which is more stupid. Either way, I would advise against using StrongCoin until they renew their certificate.

He has a valid point, though.

The only situation in which this is not true is if people are stealing their electricity, which is not a problem that Bitcoin can address. People who mine when it is not profitable do so because they consider helping the network to be more valuable than their electricity, or they think Bitcoins are undervalued (which are really just two ways of looking at the same thing).

It's not (at least, not directly), and it's not supposed to be. It's helpful to Bitcoin, and that's all that matters. You seem to be extremely confused about what Bitcoin is or should be. It is not, nor is it intended to be, some kind of system to harvest computer power to save the world, or for any other arbitrary purpose. Bitcoin is a currency and a payment system for that currency, and the resources it consumes serve the specific purpose of securing the payment system from various attacks and preventing the currency from being counterfeited. That's it. No other purpose is, or ever will be, served by the mining process.

You might as well ask for bank vault doors that create cancer drugs. Even if it were possible, it doesn't even remotely make sense for bank vault doors to be designed that way. That's simply not their intended function.

The purpose of mining is to protect the network, and to reward people who provide security for the network. Nothing else. Bitcoin would be completely useless without the security provided by mining. None of the energy involved in mining is "wasted", as it accomplishes useful work (providing security), and people will only do if the work accomplished is more valuable than the energy consumed. In any case, miners have a direct financial incentive to come up with ways of mining that use as little energy as possible.

It solves the Byzantine Generals' Problem using a cryptographic proof-of-work system. This is a useful problem to solve, since it allows Bitcoin nodes to know for certain that the majority of other Bitcoin nodes agree on which transactions took place and in what order, allowing it to determine whether a given transaction is fraudulent or not without requiring a trusted third party (which is the whole point of Bitcoin).

Other problems are in no way useful for providing security and are therefore completely useless to Bitcoin.

Proof of work is the only thing required or useful to secure the Bitcoin network. Doing anything else would be wasteful and inefficient.

No they don't. It's just that whenever your computer tries to display a character that is not present in the selected font, it'll try to substitue a font that does have the character (if you actually have such a font installed). Note that a substitute font is only needed for the combining double vertical stroke, so the B will still be displayed in the original font, though the two characters might not align correctly in that case.

WTF are you guys talking about? I'm not seeing any paywall anywhere, and the donate page has a Bitcoin address, same as it always did.

You're a funny guy, "SEC agent". You know that?

Quantum computers are not magical, and their capabilities are well understood. Only certain kinds of public-key cryptography (such as ECDSA as used in Bitcoin) are threatened by quantum computing, however quantum-proof public-key algorithms already exist and Bitcoin could switch over to one of them should the need arise (the only reason they're not being used right now is because they're nowhere near as well-tested as conventional algorithms and so may have other flaws). Symmetric algorithms (such as AES) and hashing algorithms (such as SHA256) are not threatened by quantum computing, and current algorithms will be safe forever unless a flaw is found in the algorithm.

The developers don't have a choice. Bitcoin uses strong cryptography, which, for reasons which don't really make sense, is legally classified as a military weapon under the Wassenaar Arrangement, and therefore illegal to export to "certain" countries. Simply making the source code available for download worldwide is legally equivilant to selling bombs to Iran. As fucked up as the law is, it must be obeyed if you want to avoid being jailed for arms trafficking.

No it doesn't, for the reasons I already explained. It's not even a disclaimer in any case: where does it even say that anyone is disclaiming liability of anything? It's just a warning and a reminder that brain use is required. Normally such warnings would not be required, but since we're potentially dealing with the same people who apparently can't drink coffee without burning themselves and then suing everyone who didn't warn them that hot things can cause burns, it pays to play it safe and just include stupid warnings for stupid people.

Warning people about potential scams makes one a conspirator in the eyes of the law? What crazy law are you talking about here? And you've got a long way to go if you think that simply refusing to censor lawful communications based on unproven accusations of unlawfulness counts as racketeering.

Exactly which politicians are pushing for Bitcoin to "open up its data", and do they realise how silly they look when not only is all the data (both the code and the transaction database) already completely open to "close government scrutiny", but being so open to scrutiny is precisely the entire point of Bitcoin (since that's how it prevents fraud without relying on trusted third parties)?

No. He's talking about the MyBitcoin fiasco. Though, he's got a lot of other things confused: