There is a major hurricane headed up the US east coast. I'm moving my miners away from windows and covering them with a tap tarp.

Random thought...

Bob might be working his ass off to improve bitcoin, which in turn raises the price of bitcoin. But Joe sits back and enjoys the fruits of Bob's labor by simple holding on to a bunch of bitcoins he did almost no work to acquire.

If Bob minds his own business, then we don't really have a problem. But if Bob wants to maximize his returns for the work he puts in...

[Reputation]

I'm trying to compile a list of things that people should look/ask for before trusting services which ask for personal information and or bitcoins.

What I have so far:

Reputation - How long have they been around? Have they made a meaningful contributions to the community before? (Posts on forums/reddit, wrote open source code, submitted ideas, etc.)

Publicity - Have they made a public appearance or disclosed their location? - Have they made an appearance on OnlyOneTV? Or anywhere else online? (YouTube channels, podcasts, etc.)

Professionalism - How 'professionally' do they handle themselves? How sincere are they? (Do they go out of their own way to help you?) How professional does their service look? (The more effort and attention they put into the service, the more likely they are to care about it and its users.)

*Side Note* Just because someone does not meet all the criteria does NOT make them illegitimate. Use your own judgement!

Off the top of my head, I can think of 9 people I have introduced to bitcoin.

In the not so distant future when finding block in a somewhat decent time requires several TH/s The creation of a new successful pool will be extremely difficult and ineffective. Do you think we will need a service which can join multiple smaller pools into a single larger pool to help control the variance?

I have yet to see anything at or below 6 blocks an hour... how is the network supposed to create 6 blocks an hour when it seems to average way above that.. did I miss something?

Does anyone have some theories or data to show how many bitcoins are being permanently lost? The other day I lost .02 bitcoins while playing around with different wallets. It's not much, but if it happens to a lot of people, that can be a decent sum of bitcoins vanishing out of existence on a regular basis.

why is it that we have to mine for bitcoins? would it not be easier to just hand them out at regular intervals? when the difficulty goes up, what makes mining for bitcoins harder? I keep hearing people talking about 'processing transactions' but what does that actually mean? what is being processed? how can they make the same transaction more difficult to process?

When I look at all the effort that is being poured into bitcoin, the various services being developed for it, and the crazy ideas that people are throwing around, in my mind at least, the bitcoin revolution has just begun, and the $20/BTC mark that were approaching right now is NOTHING of where it will be several years from now. Lets face it, bitcoin is barely known right now, Lady Gaga is 500 times more popular online (based on google search results)

There is a lot of speculation going around for sure, but I don't think those people have quite considered the implication of bitcoin for the future... IF bitcoin works and becomes mainstream, it... is... going.. to.. be... HUGE! The only place bitcoin is going is up, up, and up (with some corrections along the way)

I have been learning about bitcoin endlessly for the past two weeks now. I feel that I understand bitcoin and it's implications far more than I do the US Dollar (and thus I have more confidence in BTC than the USD), and so I have made the decision to go all in. All my savings are being moved over to bitcoins, all my paychecks will immediately moved over to bitcoins. I will still be keeping a small amount of dollars just so I can buy food/gas/etc without having to wait for the transfers each time I go to the supermarket/gas station.

I understand that there are risk associated with this. What if I wake up tomorrow, and bitcoin has collapsed? What if bitcoins become illegal? What if you loose your wallet file? What if this what if that, you know what? FINE i will take those risks, because its very easy to go back to mediocrity. I may lose everything tomorrow, but that is a risk I'm willing to take for the possibility of a FAR better future that bitcoin is trying to create.

Bitcoin IS the future, END of story. 

[If you say hoarding is bad because it will slow economic growth, I say, good riddens, if the market does not know how to produce something more valuable than some imaginary coins then maybe the economy should not be growing in the first place!]

Why do I keep getting this negative vibe from people as soon as they hear that word? Whats the difference between 'saving' and 'hoarding'? what is the difference between hoarding/saving virtual currency and physical goods? We hoard our entire lives, we collect stamps, buy cars, houses, and all sorts of junk, but for some reason that's OK to do, wasting your money on some meaningless junk is OK, OH REALLY?!

If you say hoarding is bad because it will slow economic growth, I say, good riddens, if the market does not know how to produce something more valuable than some imaginary coins then maybe the economy should not be growing in the first place!

I have been reading around and I must say, I am pretty excited about bitcoins. However, I'm not seeing much talk about the integrity of the coin itself, I understand that there are some risks from the end user perspective such as getting your wallet stolen, but what about the network? There may be a lot of 'advanced' cryptography going on, but doesn't that really mean it will be just a matter of time until someone finds a hole? I'm curious to hear from some the developers as to how confident they feel about this system. (Of course all are welcome to input their opinions)