I thought that the Internet was originally created for/by the US military for redundancy in unstable areas such as war zones.  I might be wrong though.

In any case, OP is an idiot.

I've shorted BTC in the past using BTc-e's metatrader platform. 

Has anyone calculated the most you could possibly earn from all those faucets in a 24 hour period?

Great work!

I didn't say that having only two nodes would be a good thing.  Of course it's nice to have a lot of nodes.  While the number of nodes might have reduced, it's nowhere near a level to be concerned about.

The network does not "require many functioning nodes".  It requires two.

Even with only two honest nodes, it is possible to combat double spends 100%.

The only attack vector that could be of minor concern is if one node is connected to many or only dishonest/bad nodes.  As you say though, the connections are random by default so an attacker cannot target a specific node and would have to be really lucky to effectively impact an honest node. This still would not affect the network as a whole however.

Of course there is a cost to producing (mining) Bitcoin.  I read an article a month or two back when the price was hovering around $480 that calculated the actual cost of producing one Bitcoin at $480.  The calculation took into consideration the cost of energy and the depreciation of hardware.

It seems that either there are some miners out there that have since lowered their costs significantly, or people are selling at a loss.

In reality there definitely are other factors though and not only miners control the price.

Decentralization of the Bitcoin network mainly refers to the distribution of hashing power, not the number of nodes.  The Bitcoin network becomes no more or less secure with the increase or decrease in number of nodes.  

As long as two honest nodes exist, the network will function.  However, this would also most likely indicate that there are only two miners securing the network and that could be a concern.

Come for the weed, stay for the hash-ing :p

Anyone getting their DRK withdrawals processed?  I requested mine two days ago but nothing yet.  

Back in the day I would throw away 100's of BTC at satoshidice.  Nowadays I no longer gamble but use Bitcoin to pay for mostly everything online.  I always search for vendors that accept Bitcoin.  Last Bitcoin payment yesterday was for about 0.08 btc which was for my vps.

All of my favorite things!

Great to hear you're doing this.  Do you not think a $5 entry fee might put people off though?  Of course you have costs that need to be covered, but I wonder if the general public would be interested enough in Bitcoin to pay the entrance charge when they possibly don't really know anything about it.

Honestly I think this is something the Bitcoin Foundation should consider supporting. 

Or maybe the $5 entry fee could include a voucher with a private key to $5 worth of Bitcoin.

I don't see how there being fewer full nodes has any negative impact on decentralization.  The only benefit of running a full node is that other users may be able to use you as an additional peer when downloading the blockchain, and then only if you have your port forwarded properly.

Mining is the only significant way to support the network.  Having an idle node on your vps has almost no positive effect.

Not a great idea either if you're relying on a virus scanner to keep you safe.  Malicious scripts can be run by opening non-executable files as well such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDF's, etc.  Virus scanners will sometimes catch these so should not be omitted from scans.

Virus scanners are pretty bad anyways.  Making a virus undetectable to any scanner is trivial.  I don't even bother installing a virus scanner at all, but rather I monitor my system's services, processes, network connections, etc.  If I feel that there is even a remote chance that an application or file is infected, it never leaves its own VM.

I'm in China and the forum works for me.

Congrats!

What's a Hero Member account selling for these days? 

A lot of big retailers have started accepting Bitcoin but at the same time not many new avenues for purchasing Bitcoin have appeared.  I think there's currently an imbalance and new easy ways to acquire Bitcoin should probably be a good thing.

Probably something like this.  Also, I imagine both the buyer and the seller would have to have verified Paypal accounts, so no anonymity.

In any case, if the process of purchasing Bitcoin via Paypal is made simple, it will knock down some barriers to entry for millions of people.

Sounds like bad risers, except that all four appear to be defective.  Did you try installing just one video card at a time using a riser and trying all four risers?

This is obvious, but make sure you're not forgetting to attach the power cables to your GPU's after installing the risers.  Forgetting them could cause your system to not boot.

Anderi, how are you using GPU's?  I thought hashcat doesn't support Bitcoin yet.

I think if you're a user that only needs to make a few payments per month, you're not going to be running the core client every day.  Syncing only whenever you need to make a payment can take a long time.  That can be a problem for some users I'd think.

The current average block size is roughly 0.22MB.  A year ago the average was around 0.12MB.  The average block size is growing at an exponential rate.  However, even extrapolating the growth rate linearly, we get to 500GB by the year 2025 and would hit the 1MB block size limit by the year 2022.  

So if you do actually live past 2025, you might need to dish out for some extra storage.  However, I think by the year 2025 500GB of storage will be pennies.