What's the advantage of buying bitcoins and US treasuries through Pantera vs. buying them directly? Or investing in their bitcoin-only offering vs. just buying bitcoins off an exchange?

We already have mail. Why do we need Email??

Same thing.

I would stay with both, of course.

Bitcoin was the original cryptocurrency so it has a clear advantage over the rest. The Bitcoin community is far greater in size and the Bitcoin infrastructure is far more developed than all the other altcoins combined so it would be pretty unwise to abandon it completely but then again, let's face it - anything Satoshi touches is pretty much destined to become gold.


Examples?

Even Ferraris and Lamborghinis only cost about 1/3 of that so it's still pretty expensive.

My first computer ran Windows 95. My second computer ran Windows 98 SE. I currently have a laptop that runs Windows 8, a netbook that runs Windows 7, and a netbook and laptop that runs Windows XP. I also used to own a Vista laptop as well. Out of all of these, I would have to say that XP is by far the best in terms of how well the interface is designed and how fast the whole thing runs. Stability-wise, it is a huge improvement over 9x although Windows 7 and 8 are probably superior security-wise.


Windows 95 wasn't that bad. It was probably one of the most innovative versions of Windows that Microsoft ever released.

And I agree 100% about the start menu thing.


I agree with this too.

What would you do if you were transported to January 2013?

I would:

Buy $2,000 worth of Tesla stock at $30, sell at $250 in March 2014. Profit = $17,000
Buy $2,000 worth of bitcoins at $13, sell at $1200 in November. Profit = $200,000
Buy $2,000 worth of litecoins at $0.07, sell at $48 in November. Profit = $1,400,000!!

Then I would retire.

Instead, being the idiot that I am, I did the following:

Bought 1 year of college education for $6,000, unable to sell. Profit = $0.

The OP asked if it was possible to run a miner at less than 100 percent performance to prevent overheating. Surely if a mining program is set to run at something like 10 or 20 percent of maximum performance, then it shouldn't have any issues with overheating?

Yup. You can't take things like lottery numbers or sports results with you and go back in time and expect everything to occur exactly the same as it did before. You might win the first lottery, but things will diverge more and more and the numbers after that would be pretty much worthless.

I know one married couple who would most likely never have met had one of them never turned their head around at exactly the right moment. Now they have two children together.

omnipotence

Five years ago sounds nice. That way, I'd start mining bitcoins along with the rest of the early adopters in 2009/2010.

A plane traveling from Malaysia to China carrying about 230 passengers disappeared earlier this month. No one really knows what happened to it or where it is, though evidence suggests that it crashed in the South Indian ocean west of Australia.

Bitcoin already has a seedy reputation which it is just beginning to shed. This probably isn't helping...

If Bitcoin ever becomes as big as some people here believe, then all of these "worthless" ASICs will become rare museum pieces. Kind of like how the first Model T's are today.

Would it be possible to have something similar to Bitcoin but instead of having each computer download a public ledger of transactions, each computer would instead download a public record of all the files that was submitted to the network? The 'blockchain' in this case would contain things like leaked documents, novels, music files, etc. Basically anything that people want to upload. Files can be made to expire after a set number of days and removed from the blockchain in order to keep the blockchain from getting bloated*. The length and chronological order of the blockchain, and the contents of the files which comprise the blockchain would be enforced by the network and would be impossible to change except via a fork or a 51 percent attack.

I know it is already technically possible to embed data into the Bitcoin blockchain. But a Bitcoin-esque network that functions primarily as a constantly-evolving store of data rather than a cryptocurrency might be quite interesting.

*Or alternatively, a fork could be released every few months and users would migrate from the old blockchain to a new one but the old blockchain would still be available for everyone to access in read-only format.

Just a thought.

If BTC reaches 1 million USD and assuming that the value of USD doesn't change much from now, then we'd be doing transactions in millibitcoins, microbitcoins, and satoshis. For example, you might buy a loaf of bread for 250 satoshis. Or a stick of gum for 90 satoshis. Or a house for 100 millibitcoins.

A bit off-topic (OK, way off-topic) but I'm not sure if that is true. The Internet is way more accessible nowadays because it's everywhere and more companies have entered the market compared to back in the nineties when it was just AOL. Most people still have no idea what really goes behind the scenes when they use Facebook or Google or watch a YouTube video. Most people have no idea what CSS is, or what PHP is, or HTTPS, or TCP/IP, etc.

As for what wallet/client I use, well I've been using Electrum for a while now and just recently started getting into Blockchain.info. I'm still figuring out how it all works so I don't have any coins there yet.

I wish I got into cryptocurrencies when I was 15.

That was around the time when Satoshi published his Bitcoin whitepaper.

Local bitcoins? Though you will have to pay a bit more. Still not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things. I bought my first $80 worth of bitcoins at $580 when the official price was in the low 500's.

It's been hovering in the 600's for a while now. Last major dip was when the gox papers were leaked and that was only $100-$200 less than today. Kinda getting boring now.

Yup, for example:

"I believe that Bitcoin will still exist in 2050"

"I just bought 500 bitcoins"

EDIT: It seems Cryptsy uses "BitCoin" and "LiteCoin" but Dogecoin is just "Dogecoin" without the capital C. Hmm...