No, because they will never be confirmed.

By the way, do these get thrown out of the mempool after a while?

Nice one! The Guardian should be commended for their support of Greenwald throughout the Snowden affair, but now that he has his own magazine things should get even better.
Omidyar may prove to be the new anti-Murdoch...

I got about 3% of what I got last week.

Either the difficulty jumped 30 fold this past week, or the dividend guy made another mistake  

As reported in CoinDesk, this stem cell research company is accepting Bitcoin.

I doubt they'll be selling any actual cell-based therapies any time soon, but for now they seem to be offering a few basic tools for researchers, such as PCR kits, protein extraction kits and even HEK cells. This may not mean much to most of you, but for us Bitcoin-loving molecular biologists and biochemists, this is pretty awesome news!

If anyone has ordered something from this company already, please let us know whether their products actually work! I'm thinking of ordering a bit of Taq polymerase for my lab out of my own Bitcoin pocket, just because I can't think of anything cooler than doing a Bitcoin-funded PCR 

Throw some fun keywords into your emails:

http://nsa.motherboard.tv

Absolutely brilliant. I'm going to send this to everyone I know.

CoinSeed and LR are just buying from Dave in large volumes. I'm sure they got a good price, but as long as they're not buying BitFury itself or starting some kind of chip-making collaboration, there is no reason to assume they will get it at cost.

Nifty indeed, but not new. As a biologist, I would like to give credit where credit is due - reverse osmosis was invented by kidneys millions of years ago 


I suppose a combination of solar, wind and current, together with cheap filtration devices for water, could start making seasteading seem more sustainable...

That's a very cool concept boat, but I don't think it's meant for a lot of people to live on for long periods of time... And look at all that surface area covered with PV cells. I bet it still delivers less energy than a normal diesel engine.
Not to mention reliability - what do you do on a cloudy day?

By the way, I wonder if you could get boats to extract energy from waves while they're anchored down?

Actually good PV cells already get to well over 10%. I doubt the efficiency will increase more than 3-fold in the foreseeable future. But maybe that will be enough for basic functions...

I wouldn't count on that, since solar energy requires a lot of surface area, which is possibly the most constrained resource on a boat.

Personally, I think the only real energy source that could make seasteading viable in the long-term is miniaturized D-T fusion reactors. Of course this is always 50 years away, and it would require pretty big boats, which is exactly what OP is trying to avoid.

I do hope you're right. I still doubt seasteading could be viable in the long run, and I certainly doubt it's scalable, but at the very least, it's important as a model.
To achieve the more important goal, ridding ourselves of oppressive government right here on dry land, we need to demonstrate successful models of government-free societies that function well.
Low-level, decentralized seasteading models like the one you're suggesting, could go a long way as a demonstration.

Well yea, but if you want to get rid of specific contaminants, like pathogens or certain unwanted chemicals, that would be counter-productive.
This is why most water-purification schemes involve various forms of filtration rather than boiling.
Boiling is extremely wasteful in terms of energy, and it still requires filtration of the byproduct before re-salination.


Anyway, disregarding this rather odd device - if the general point was that seasteaders can produce drinking water by desalinating sea water, that is certainly true. But like all aspects of seasteading, it would be very expensive.

Yes, they were sacrificed to make a promotional video for GE 

But seriously, drinking a bit of distilled water is fine. Drinking only distilled water will eventually kill you. First you will urinate all your salts, then your blood pressure will drop, and eventually your extracellular solution will become hypotonic and your cells will literally start to explode (but you'll probably die of heart failure long before that happens).

One caveat - I have no idea how this machine works, except for the obvious fact that the "novel" technology it's based on is centuries old.
Maybe it actually does re-salinate the water a bit before dispensing it...

Wow, you can boil water and then re-condense it? That's the invention of the century  

Too bad you can't actually drink distilled water, you have to re-salinate it first...

I'm still sticking with land-steading  

Thanks LR for your hard work and many successes in this ultra-competitive field!


Nevertheless, I'd like to play devil's advocate for a minute and cool the optimism around this announcement.

First, LR has announced a coming BitFury deal for 100-200 TH/s well over a month ago, in mid-December, so this isn't really news.
There are only two aspects to this which are new: the new boards and the collaboration with CoinSeed.
As for the former, the new boards may be somewhat better but I wouldn't call this a game-changer.
As for the latter, I'm still not sure how much we have to gain from economies of scale by working with CoinSeed. What percentage of the planned CoinSeed mine will belong to LRM? If it's a large percentage, than we gain little from economies of scale by collaborating. If it's small, than it might be in our best interest to compete with CoinSeed, by using LR's existing relationship with Dave to try and obtain as much gear as possible before CoinSeed comes online (which would probably be a gradual process). Just hypothesizing...

So, the only question that really matters about this BitFury deal is when will the gear arrive and start hashing. This question has yet to be answered, even though the deal has been tentatively announced over a month ago. Since the difficulty is still rising at a double-exponential rate, and will probably continue doing so in the near future, we are not-too-many-months away from the point at which 156 TH/s will yield just about the same dividends that we're getting now.


By the way, is this what LR meant by "ASIC project"? Or is that a separate thing? Because putting the same 55nm BitFury chips on a new board doesn't fit my definition of an "ASIC project"... Are we going to be involved in making our own chips?

Brilliant idea. Millions of grandmas are wasting away in retirement homes, instead of using their time to provide valuable proof-of-work.


Introducing... GrandmaCoin:

Interesting... But I don't get the point.
Instead of buying lots of BitFury gear and having LR manage our mining operation, we invest in a startup that buys lots of BitFury gear and hires LR to manage their mining operation. Where's the beef?

Neat video. There's definitely something cool about the way these people live. There is an undeniable air of freedom to it.

But as mentioned, they are not free from the state. It's not just that they're in the territorial waters of Malaysia. They are totally dependent on their interaction with land, and strongly affected by local legislation and state action. They are also dirt poor and their life seems really, really tough.

To me, this video embodies what I don't like about the idea of seasteading: it's a cop out. Nation states have all the land, so we should run off and live at sea. Well guess what? That's not even remotely practical, in addition to being ideologically irresponsible. People are naturally dependent on land to survive. And even if we could find a way to survive at sea (at great expense), it would still be running away. Land is ours, and we should fight for it instead of sailing off. We should all stay right here, on dry land, where most people will always live, where we can survive comfortably, where most natural resources are found, and we should fight the state. Right where we are now.

Awesome! This should be the official anthem of mining.