The guy truly is nuts, but he knows what he's talking about.  I think he'd probably go for some kind of open protocol on this that could be built into pretty much anything.  He rolls that way.

The problem with any TOR-like network is who runs the exit nodes.  And why would they?  You have idealists, or crazy people, and they are often the same, who don't mind the gendarmes raiding their home every few months, or somehow are oblivious to the fact this will inevitably happen (i.e. morons), or you have people who don't fear police raids because they ARE the police.  And not only does one group often mimic the other, but occasionally, people travel back and forth between those two groups.

Similarly, who are the people who actually would pay for Internet anonymity?  You have your idealist group, but the much larger group is people who pay for anonymity because it's cheaper than paying for a lawyer and more pleasant than doing time in prison.  I.e., people doing seriously illegal shit.

Truly robust anonymity requires anonymity essentially being a standard, so that there is nothing unusual about it at all and you actually have to go out of your way NOT to be anonymous.  It needs to be built in at the hardware, firmware level so that people don't even notice it.  Once you tailor it as solely a commodity for purchase, the "I have nothing to hide" idiots are going to opt out, and anonymity itself becomes suspicious.

Interesting.  Hope I'm in the first five.

Also I'm OS X and 32 bit, but have other (really low end) computers.

I'm not sure why you feel it necessary to defame everyone in this thread.  I'm not interested in dumb bounties or other bets.  I have not made a single false statement in this thread, and I defy you to produce one.

I love Tomato.  I actually installed it first when I was trying to keep our wireless net up and available to all the tenants in my loft and get rid of the idiot on another floor who was not only sucking up bandwidth but getting me hit with threat letters from porn companies because of his unusual predilections.  Also passwords weren't working because despite stern admonitions, people just gave out the password to anyone in the building.  Bans by MAC address worked, though (someone who was less of an idiot would have worked around that but there were other ways), and redirects to a website on the server itself with Johnny Cash flipping them off and a "PAY FOR YOUR OWN INTERNET YOU THIEF" did the trick.

Also I was able to identify the idiot and redirect the porn-scum lawyers to him personally (as well as get his credit card numbers SSN etc. but I deleted that).

My guess is probably not.  Anyone who has figured out a way to eke out a profit at this isn't going to shoot a hole in the boat they're on by saying how.

Anyone who already has a farm that is producing more than the cost of electricity is going to keep doing it until that equation goes bad, and there are probably people in special situations, such as having free electricity, or at least electricity someone else is paying for, or they have a solar farm, or their farm is doing double duty heating their home or office, essentially the same as free electricity.

I have not recently seen any kind of analysis that shows that ANY of the units being sold new are even near break-even much less profitable.  In pretty casual looking at auction type sales, it does seem there are occasional sales of equipment at really low prices that could conceivably be profitable, but I haven't looked into those enough to know they aren't just scam sales.  "Too good to be true" prices quite often are scams.  But occasionally, someone is forced to liquidate stuff, so some may be legit.

It's a racket I wouldn't advise anyone get into unless they know way more about it than I do, and those who do know more are obviously not going to be giving advice unless they are true altruists.

The success of fiat currencies is, in fact, at least partly that they allow the government to tax you in a way most people are too dumb even to understand.  They're ALREADY stealing from your savings.  Like shearing a sheep, most governments (outside of Zimbabwe or Nazi Germany) are smart enough not to do it to the point they turn their own currencies into toilet paper overnight.  It gets pretty obvious when you have to take a shopping cart full of trillion dollar notes to try to buy a loaf of bread.  Do it nice and slow, though, and people put up with it.

Are you actually serious?  You think cheaters don't do something because there are rules against it?  LOL.

If it's possible to do it, and there is profit to be made by doing it, somebody is doing it.  If you don't understand this, you're stupid.

I wouldn't mind playing a full table that has a bot at it.  The problem is if you have one bot, it's just as easy to have two bots or three.  Or four.  If you have three or four bots, why not have them share their hole cards?  Once you have that, even a mediocre group of bots starts to have an advantage against the field.  So even if you're still beating the field, you're beating it for a lot less, because you are being cheated.

If there were plans to outlaw cryptocurrency in general, FinCEN of all government entities would be well aware of this and would not even bother promulgating regulations.  The criminal complaint in the Ulbricht case itself emphasizes that Bitcoin has entirely legitimate applications, something I can't see them bothering to argue in a charging document unless it actually does reflect policy.

Things like illegal drugs are routinely destroyed, when not recycled for the purpose of controlled buys or other sting operations.

So far, the only public statement by the feds has been that they intend to liquidate the Bitcoin somehow.  Even the snarky way they transferred the funds (324 FBI) seems to indicate whoever is handling them has at least some clue and a measurable sense of humor (usually lacking in feds).

I'm still sticking by my prediction that they'll get rid of the coins in a stodgy, old-fashioned way, like selling it all at once in an auction.  They get as many weird objects by forfeiture as you see on one of those pawn shop reality shows, and that's how they usually do it.  There are a number of smarter ways they could do it, but I'd bet they use their old standby.

The federal Wire Act is often interpreted as covering specifically sportsbooks, regardless of the currency or other considerations.  It is thought that it does not cover other forms of gambling.

The other well-known federal act covering gambling is the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act.  Its most well-known provisions prohibit the use of financial institutions to process payments for an undefined activity, unlawful Internet gambling.  Despite the fact there is no clear prohibition against games such as poker and a lack of any federal law directly targeting online gambling, the feds have shut down the U.S. activities of Internet poker sites and even indicted the principals of corporations spreading raked poker games.

There is no clear law at the federal level outlawing Internet gambling, though it seems sportsbooks are unambiguously prohibited at least under the prevailing interpretations of existing laws such as the Wire Act.

Some people stop there and simply assume that means Internet gambling is legal, but that's making a huge mistake, because the vast majority of law enforcement activity in the United States occurs at the state level, and state laws on gambling, Internet or otherwise, are a crazy quilt of contradictory laws.  Any online site offering wagering of any sort risks violating the laws of any state where it takes customers, and state prisons can keep you just as locked up as federal prisons.

If you mean is it legal for YOU to gamble online?  Maybe not, but I've never heard of anyone (even in police raids of underground poker rooms) getting arrested for PLAYING a game of chance.  You do risk losing any money you deposit at a site, but you're already risking that.  I personally don't worry about being prosecuted for gambling online, but your tolerance for risk may vary.

That's actually an argument made by people who understand money, to some degree, but don't understand Bitcoin.  It actually has a good deal of truth with relation to government-backed currencies, but the fact that Bitcoin does not have this characteristic is a feature, not a bug, and was designed into it entirely intentionally.

It's also an irrelevant criticism of cryptocurrencies in general, because if a critical mass of people did consider it a problem, it's just as possible to design a cryptocurrency that did have inflation.  So far, nobody has wanted one enough to make one catch on (I'm not counting Freicoin).

Well, smarty-pants, I hope you still think it's as clever to say that when the Men in Black are beating you in the kidneys with iron rods, yelling "What's the frequency, Kenneth?"

So what you're saying is that buying Bitcoin at a government auction is like buying anything else at a government auction.  Okay.  And?  If that's a concern for you, you wouldn't be buying something at a government auction in the first place, Bitcoin or anything else.

Those two things are not mutually exclusive.  

Also, he's not talking about the Internet necessarily, but a local network that may or may not have a gateway to the larger global Internet, or may connect to other networks in some sort of an internet, or both.  Mesh networking has been an idea for a while, and should have strong encryption built in at the hardware or firmware level.  What's lacking is a ubiquitous, popular box that is so common that it won't stand out to be transmitting such signals in public (or that disguises itself as more mundane traffic).

The FBI is as capable of looking at the blockchain as anyone else.  Why would it be any worse with Bitcoin than with buying any other seized asset?

Why the fuck would they need a program to "decrypt" hole cards on the server, when they'd be stored in memory in the clear on the server?  Would you rigtards at least think a second or two before coming up with dumb stories?

It's as a warning to any other victims of the BFL scam, that if they dare to criticize the shit-flinging Inaba monkey, they too will be outed.

Trust ratings are important, but I'm not convinced the ones on BCT are worth anything.  The "scammer" tag seems reserved only for people who rip off the people who run the site.  You can rip off anyone else with impunity, as I've found, and no matter how blatant the scam (basically a MoneyPak trader who NEVER delivered and was a pure ripoff), they don't get a scammer tag.

Of course, unlike paper currency, you actually can back up a private key, so that even if your wallet is destroyed, you can restore it.  That is, if you have the sense of a gerbil.