Your living expenses are most likely pegged to fiat, so for the time being try to get an income that is also pegged to fiat.

That way when the price goes lower it just means you accumulate more bitcoins and add to your savings.

If the price goes up, then your savings have more purchasing power although you're adding to them more slowly.

Then you fundamentally don't care which way the price moves.

It means the trolls should get better FUD, or at least something new.

Are you aware that Bitcoin addresses do not exist on the blockchain or in the protocol?

All these n00bs that don't remember 2011...

I don't believe that BitPay gets all, or maybe even most, of their dollars from exchanges.

They probably have underwriters who want to accumulate bitcoins without going through the exchanges who buy them from BitPay.

They've had this kind of arrangement in the past - according to rumours some people became Bitcoin millionaires via this route - but I don't know if they still do it.

A major part, or even the majority of, Bitcoin's utility is the fact that you can save in it without having your savings confiscated by a third party or devalued by arbitrarily large amount of new issuances.

Smear campaigns against savers are underhanded tactics employed by people who want to obtain Bitcoins at lower prices.

Giving away something for free is not a good way to establish that it's valuable.

Exactly.

Ethereum's long term viability rests on the assumption that there is enough of these applications that servicing them will be profitable, i.e. the price that users of such applications will be willing to pay in transaction fees will be sufficient to cover the costs of operating the Ethereum network.

When was the last time you heard somebody involved with Ethereum spend any time at all explaining the long term value proposition of the Ethereum network?

I'm satisfied that they can fix infinite loops by paying per cycle.

What's more concerning is that nobody has bothered to do many actual use case evaluations and cost/benefit analysis.

Etherum is supposed to be, fundamentally, a blockchain-based computer.

Because it's a global blockchain, the cycle times need to be somewhere on the order of minutes to ensure synchronization.

Cycle times in the minutes means a clock frequency in the millihertz range.

The processor in your smartphone operates in the gigahertz range.

That's not quite a fair comparison - each tick of the Ethereum computer can do more useful work than a single tick in an transitional CPU. How much more work? Maybe about a million times more work.

This means Ethereum is a computer with an effective clock speed in the kilohertz range. (The Intel 8086 processor released in 1976 had a minimum 5 megahertz clock speed)

Sure, it's Turing-complete, but the kinds of applications you're going to run on a computer with kilohertz-scale cycle times and access latencies measured in minutes are going to resemble the kind of programs that used to be written on punch cards more than they'll resemble Windows 8.

Oh, and how about the cost?

Let's assume there really are applications that are appropriate for the Ethereum computer. Not only are there applications, but the market demand for these applications is great enough that the transaction fees will pay for the operation of the Ethereum network (no network can pay for itself via currency printing for ever, after all).

Computations performed on the CPU in your PC only need to involve the transistors in a single chip, and are generally only performed once.

Computations performed on Ethereum need to be duplicated by CPUs all over the world and broadcast all over the globe.

Running your applications on Ethereum (absent any currency-printing subsidy) is going to be millions of times more expensive than running it on a local CPU.

Certainly there will be some applications that absolutely require what Ethereum does and will be willing to pay six orders of magnitude more than other alternatives in order to get it, but will there be enough of those applications to pay for the operation of the Ethereum network?

When you're observing reactions consider that I haven't made any comments at all directed at any specific post or forum member's behaviour.

How much iron ore do you personally refine on any given day?

"Economist Simon Johnson says governments will feel the urge to suppress the crypto-currency Bitcoin."

OMG, really?

I always thought they'd welcome Bitcoin with open arms. What a surprise!

In part one of that article series he bragged about suing his business competitors in federal court for getting away with things he didn't.

Any further douchebaggery on his part after that revelation falls into the "not even a little bit surprising" category.

If that's the plan, I have a hard time believing that anyone involved has done the slightest bit of due diligence regarding the regulations involved.

Realcoin would most likely fit into those regulations as a stored value instrument, and I don't see how the kinds of restrictions which apply to them would be at all acceptable to the intended users of Realcoin.

Ripple is the US banking system's attempt to avoid being destroyed by Bitcoin.

They think that if they make USD transactions easier then they'll be able to avoid losing the USD as a unit of account.

Note that Ripple's consensus system is a closed, invite-only network. Exactly what you'd want if you were trying to preserve a banking cartel's position in the world.

Quoted for lolz.

...and they probably will.

If it wasn't for the religion of gold throwing so many smokescreens up around the issue, it would be generally considered as obvious as the fact that the internal combustion engine beat horses as a transportation provider.