Yet-another-attempt-to-paint-STEM-fields-as-women-excluding, even though there is plenty of proof otherwise. Makes me wonder when they'll run out of things to complain about. Nobody keeps women from participating in Bitcoin, any imagined exclusion is in the mind of the author.

But, it has become fashionable lately to pull the victim card and write another "woe is women" piece on something involving technology. The door is open, anyone can walk through it.

All this back-and-forth reminds me of the old joke about how you can tell programmers from normal people when it comes to sex.

The normal guy will jump in the bed and actually do the deed.

The programmer will sit on the edge of the bed and explain to his increasingly frustrated girlfriend how great the sex they are going to have is going to be...

It takes a lot of money to put things into space.

What are you suggesting, that Jeff build his own homebrew launching system and get one up there before asking for money? Are you really that obtuse?

Just the usual newbie mistake of thinking that any of the Chinese Casinos, er, I mean Exchanges report volume in a truthful manner. For the most part, exchanges like OkCoin are ping-ponging trades across a few bots every 'n' seconds, and since there are zero trading fees, they don't have to pay for that privilege. This leads people to believe that they have real volume, where the order books aren't that thick to begin with.

I've been watching the rise of the Chinese exchanges since BTCChina, and have actually talked to Bobby Lee, but as we can see its easy for the chinese to fool the westerners into thinking they have dominance. All they really have is the gall to self-promote through simulated volume.

The top exchanges are actually Bitfinex, followed closely by Bitstamp and BTC-e. OKCoin is just dual-reporting everything and doesn't make any damn sense whatsoever.

Congrats to Jeff, this is an important step in ensuring the decentralized nature of Bitcoin. I'm glad he sees the true threat, where the internet can be co-opted and throttled, but at least in orbit its a bit harder to restrict the transmission of the blockchain. I feel this will serve as "insurance" against any terrestrial disaster, either man-made or natural.

Really glad that he's working on this, and I can't wait to pick up the first satellite 'ping' once they manage to launch them.

People should be solo-mining, or using P2P pool, but naturally since everyone is a greedy piece of shit, they'll just keep flocking to centralizing pools.

DDoS is just a natural extension attacking this behavior. Maybe it will cause an exodous to more decentralized options, one can only hope.

Esssentially this is going to be an alt-coin "tumbler" to wash stolen coins and push them out as unassociated Bitcoins. I'm sure they're thinking it will be used as a exchange only, but if the only thing you're dealing with is BTC and alt-coins, guess what kind of traffic you're going to get.

Also, being Swiss-based means little, as the moment they're suspected of anything, such as say - allowing certain parties to launder funds through their site, then the long arm of the USA will reach across the sea and give them a slap. You'd think he would've learned from his other fiasco, where he was fined by the SEC - but I guess if there's a "profitunity" Erik just can't help himself.

Just watch, this exchange is going to light up the radar at DHS, FBI, SEC, etc... because of how it is structured.

I understand the Bitcoin enthusiasm, but seriously.... posting an article about a sideways listless market?

Seems a bit of a reach, eh? Like writing an article on how water is wet, or something.

This comes up every time there's an auction.

Only a complete moron would under-bid. Auctions are inherently designed to extract the maximum price possible. I wouldn't be surprised if it were like the prior auction, where most bid above "spot" rates to secure one of the lots.

But, as always, people keep thinking that everyone will bid low -- but this isn't a supermarket clearance bin.

Good try, Josh.

As usual, a fly-by-night "e-journalist" has trouble understanding what a futures market is.

Their argument is hinged on "speculators" cornering the market for Bitcoin, in addition to the usual conspiracy-theory of "pump-and-dumps". Naturally, if you had done your research before writing such an article, you'd know that not all futures contracts settle in the underlying commodity.

The S&P 500, traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, is settled in cash -- you don't get 500 stock certificates if you choose to hold until expiration of the futures contract. With no underlying to "squeeze", there is no "corner" possibility, just contracts that are settled at the appropriate date and time.

It is a mish-mash "article" full of the usual paranoia and ill-informed opinions of a marketplace, written by a fool who couldn't be bothered to use fucking spell-check in his first paragraph.

I'd refrain from posting any more "articles" from this source, as it seems to be of D-Grade "blogger" quality, with not much to back it in the way of research.

Any thought about fixing your badly formatted "submission"?

Have some pride, for fucksake, eh?

Bank hacks.

That's all you have? How about the proper date formatting and the source in the topic? I'm sure I've seen this story before as well, so what's the point in posting your one-liner?

Fucking newbies.

Just look at the author: Henry Farrell

"Henry Farrell is associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University."

He's an academic who has a sheltered existence as a professor with a comfortable wage. He is vested in the current system, so anything new is scary and threatening to him. Its painfully obvious.

Remember, business-speak for "level playing field" really means "cripple the shit out of our competitor before it kills our business model."

This is why the Bitcoin Foundation and any attempt to engage government on regulation is a mistake. They're all on the payroll, and know precisely what they'd like for x-mas, a nice big lobbying "donation" or perhaps a few "perks" for voting a certain way.

This crap is all corrupt to the core, and pretending that government gives a shit about you and me is a complete joke.

Because its embarrassing when the Mastercoin critics are right. Now, they can control the spin-factor at their own blog, claiming all the wonderful things that will fall from the sky if only people will just "hang in there" for a bit longer, making sure that JR can live in comfort while spinning his wheels.

At least sidechains will put this miserable collection of bodged software out of its misery.

Guilt by association. Any exchange that solicits or permits US customers to transact business, which you in turn facilitate, means you're on the hook too, even if you don't think you are.

But what the hell am I doing, debating some virtual "service provider" about how they're about to get the hammer. Go ahead, keep doing what you're doing, I'll laugh at the headlines later.

Cool, then they'll be the ones that the SEC goes after to get all that juicy account information. Naturally, they have zero response, because they know that being based in Panama isn't going to save them. The SEC got Erik Voorhees there, and it will find this company as well.

This particular "chicken little" is also part of a consultancy that specializes in helping distressed nations out of their banker-caused woes. Naturally he doesn't want Bitcoin to mean anything, because he'd have to compete with something that can't supply him with more business.

He goes down the usual list of ignorance, the mining centralization issue, the "it isn't backed by anything" rallying cry, and manages to conflate the failure of alt-coins as an indicator that the Bitcoin network itself will fail.

Sure thing, buddy. Try not to make it too transparent who you work for next time.

Thanks for writing this, it really hits to the core of what some of the floated changes to Bitcoin would mean. I recommend people forward this to whoever has a say in Bitcoin development. This needs to be read by every core developer out there.