It's not that high, but the vast majority do get a significant portion of their income from public sources (governments or their agencies, such as the Fed) either directly (professor at a public university) or indirectly (speaking/consultation fees from such agencies).  It's very difficult to get a person to understand something when her salary is dependent upon her not understanding it.

I said, in general.  There are statist Americans and there are classicly liberal Europeans.  In the present state of things, however, Europeans tend to trust their governments.  That's just the cycle of things.  60 years ago Americans tended to have the trust of government intentions and Europeans didn't.  This is reasonable considering that the US had just recently won a World War that was started by European governments screwing with each other.

I didn't see a question, only a statement.  Most of us old salts don't think that bitcoin is similar to gold except that it is designed to mimic gold if it could be used in a digital realm.

Right?  Well, at least there was a question mark, but there still isn't a specific concern that can be addressed.

People say no all the time.  That's the default response even in the fiat currency world.  If you were really coming from an economic background, you would know that the market doesn't function anything like the above scenario.
Prices go up, prices go down.  That is the way of the world.  Bitcoin isn't different in this respect, except by a matter of scale at present.
Perhaps they will.  That wouldn't detract from it's usefulness as the currency of the Internet.
Bitcoin is no worse in this respect than any fiat currency that you can name.  And bitcoin has the advantage that no one is passing laws to compel you to use bitcoin.
No, we don't.  Who have you been listening to?
The army stops accepting wages in ZIM because the government has printed so much that it's market value trends towards zero.  The death of a fiat currency is always a political event.
Technically, yes.  Go ahead a try it.  Let's see how successful you are at playing catchup to Bitcoin.  It's taken Bitcoin two years to reach this point.
That is a risk, but is dependent upon the 'accepter of last resort' having enough credibility to make the case that their version is actually better than Bitcoin.

Why, indeed.  Why would these institutions start their own currency to compete with Bitcoin?  That's not a trivial question, motivation is important.
Not everyone.  Not me.  Applecoins would be centralized, and when the government comes to get their cut, applecoins will drop in value relative to Bitcoins.
That depends on whether or not the public actually agrees that Applecoins are the safer option.  I would not.
Wait, you actually still expect the Euro to exist in another decade?

Europeans, particularly Western Europeans, have a trust of government and government regulated institutions that Americans do not tend to share.  I think that this faith in such social constructs is going to be tested over the next several years.  And although you may not be directly charged for these transfers, there is a cost.  Someone is paying for it.  If it's not you, then it's likely the online vender; which is the Paypal/Credit Card model.  If not, it's your government paying the costs; which means it's still you indirectly.  But what is the catch?  You may feel that your private business is still private because the government doesn't share it, but it's not private from your government.  There may yet come a day when you regret that.


The inflation issue is a red herring.  Bitcoin inflates, and currently does so at a rather high rate.  The only reason that the relative value of a bitcoin continues to rise is because the size of the economy is rising at a substantially higher rate.

Honestly, I couldn't care less if Europeans use Bitcoin or not.  If Bitcoin needs my advocacy to succeed, then it's already doomed to failure.  There are always going to be those who disagree on anything.

Hell, for that matter did she bother to even look at the fundamentals that underpin Bitcoin?

You might want to consider another path towards an economics education.

Go for it.  Good luck!

I have no idea.  I have no intention of converting my coins to cash.  I just spend them.

I read the article.  I can't say I was impressed by his grasp of the concepts.

Really?  What other method of online exchange system are you are off that can transfer an arbitrary amount of value for seven cents?

Unless you are using a "shy" client, one modified to not use IRC and be otherwise cautious about accepting new connections, then yes; the vanillia client will attempt to announce it's own IP address on the IRC channel so that other peers can easily find it.  I'm pretty sure that a "shy" client has already been developed that functions in a "darknet" fashion, only accepting connections or attempting connections with nodes that have previously been approved by the user manually.  These are not likely to show up on any graph or poll of the nodes, and certainly some exist behind Tor or I2P anyway.  The point of the shy clients is to have one or more nodes that has the full blockchain on the p2p network that is intentionally difficult for a malicious node to locate.  Thereby protecting the blockchain, and the shy client's owner, from direct attacks online or in meatspace.

Read the whole thread.

It's always wise not to put all your eggs in one basket.  I don't own any gold, mostly because I don't have a personal use for it beyond it's trade value.  But I do own silver, because even if society were to completely collapse to the point that even silver had no trade value because no one can eat it or shoot with it, I can still use it for it's anti-bacterial properties by dropping it into my raw milk and keep it from spoiling.

I also have a not-small stock of the things one can eat and shoot with, I call that "insurance".

This thread has made me realize something new.  My employer has begun to block bitcoin trade sites, including bitcoin4cash.com.

No.  At worst, the loss of the IRC channel would delay the bootstrapping of a new client, but not prevent it.  Any client that has already bootstrapped successfully would not need access to IRC in any case.  I've personally tested this, because when I am at work, IRC is blocked by my employer's firewall.  The IRC channel provides quick access to peer discovery, but there is a built in default list of persistant clients to attempt a connection to if IRC isn't accessible, and once a client is bootstrapped it keeps a record of past connections and can search through those for viable peers upon restart.  Also, if IRC is blocked and the entire built-in list of peers is blocked or hacked, the client can be started with a switch to connect to any other peer that the IP address is known.  Which would permit existing users to post IP addresses for bootstrapping on any Internet forum such as this one, and create a set of moving targets for the attackers to pursue.

It's entirely possible that neither side is fradulent, but that a failure of the government managed postal system is to blame.

General price stabability will come with a mature market size.  Once enough of the public has already discovered Bitcoin that new discoveries become increasingly uncommon, or simply a smaller share of the economy due to a very large user base being relatively unaffected by new users coming in, then the value of a bitcoin will achieve a relative stabability to that of any other "small" currency traded on Forex.

If a major pool is ever hacked, it's much more likely to be hacked quietly with the intent of the attacker redirecting the pool's earnings to himself.

This thread topic is exactly why I never thought that open pools were a good idea.  That said, the ability to create more pools will lead to a proliferation of said pools competing for contributers.  So it's unlikely that any one pool could ever collect the 50% minimum in order to attack the blockchain even for a short while, as the more pools there continue to be, the less of a percentage that each is ever likely to be able to accumulate.

Once again, open source competitiveness comes to the rescue.

No.