Before commenting one should at least be conversant with the topic.  Clearly you are not, and clearly you are fooled.

I would give you some links about what "boosts his ASIC" is, but if you search on "ASICBOOST" and "patent" you might learn something about it in general and then look at the difference between overt and covert usage.  

If you truly want bitcoin mining to be centralized, then please use fiat.

It is always odd when authors write it as "FED" since it is not an acronym.  It is just terrible journalism and takes away from the point they are attempting to make.

If they wish to talk about price stability, the Fed has done a terrible job of it over the decades, so their so-called expertise is severely lacking.

Yes, just delete the wallet.dat file.  That will delete the private keys from Bitcoin Core.

If you retain an off-line backup, you can recover them later.

Agreed.

He has a bachelors in music.  While he may be a good writer who is able to explain things to non-tech people and good musician, his ability to evaluate (not that new) tech is limited.

The issue isn't even memory, but storage - hdd, ssd etc.  (My portable, which isn't new, has a 4TB ssd for reference.)

Danny is right though, this thread should be locked because it is premised on nonsense.

What is your definition of "bigger hubs"?

My cost is essentially zero, so my fees would be low (or zero if I wanted).  My web servers are well connected, good memory, reasonably high CPU power, high bandwidth, low latency, extremely high uptime nodes.  The web sites have been online continuously since 1993 or 1994 (depending on the web site).  Why wouldn't payments be routed through any one I decided to set up?

I don't see "bigger hubs" being a relevant factor - or even a useful description - as to why these "bigger hubs" would be more attractive than one I spun up on a different server.  What would they offer that someone couldn't duplicate quite easily? :-)

I can spin up a lightning daemon on one of my existing web servers quite quickly.  And I could add bitcoind to it easily if it wasn't already on a particular machine.  The barriers to entry are low.  The cost on an existing server is negligible, but it can bring in revenue.  It may be that this increases the number of bitcoin nodes because of this.

Very likely the numbers will be higher than the existing number of mining pools since p2pool hasn't been getting much love.  Centralized mining is a huge concern.

Yes, it can be increased. Larger blocks, SegWit, lightning are methods of doing so.  There are lots of options.

Needed? That is a question you'd get many different answers to, depending on who you ask.

That is an awfully "absolutistic" view.

The 21 million coins is an absolute too.  

...because they are a bunch of anti-liberty, power-hungry control-freak people out to try to rule and rape the population of the world and to do so they have to know what everyone spends their money on? 

Kind of like the reasons they (and others such as India) don't like cash....it is too easy to not report everything you do to the morally bankrupt authorities.

Not surprised.  If they're ignorant about one, they'll be ignorant about two. Or three.

The short answer is yes, the old transactions would be lost.

The longer answer (which I'm sure you figured out) also includes, all backups would have to be lost for them to be lost forever.  Likewise without software modifications new nodes wouldn't be able to start up if that occurred and in all likelihood bitcoin would collapse - that is as the software is now, future changes could be made to mitigate some (maybe all) of these impacts.

If usage growth continues at this pace the fiat price will continue to climb.  Let's hope that a forced hard fork etc doesn't screw it up.

Given it happens on many non-bitcoin exchanges, is this surprising?  But, is it even relevant? Probably not.

Those are exactly right.  Plus I would also add that people are using bitcoin due to the difficulty in making changes to the protocol which protects EVERYONE using it. If it was easy to change, you might as well in in fiat.

On the second one, I only see one application error, not "lots" - just a notification that the database is corrupted:
2017-03-24 17:24:14 Corruption: block checksum mismatch
2017-03-24 17:24:14 *** System error while flushing: Database corrupted


As far as the first one, I haven't tried any recent version of bitcoin on a Mac with less than 8GB and usually 16GB of RAM.  I too suspect that achow101 is correct that it is a memory issue on the first machine. 

Have you tried Apple Hardware Test (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257) on either machine with the extended testing to see if you do indeed have no hardware problems? 

Seems like typical click bait:
"now that a sizeable number of miners are running Bitcoin Unlimited"

I haven't seen any source for that, only that a sizable number are SIGNALING for it, but using Bitcoin Core. 

Hash rate would've dropped significantly if they were during the most recent BU bug.

>"undisclosed update"

This is one key.  Anyone who is supporting BU under these terms, except as an alt, has another agenda.

Long, not worth the read. The author shows their own ignorance.

For anyone who cares about Bitcoin (and OSS in general), this should be enough to write off BU completely. 

If we wanted a centralized, closed-source system, we'd be using banks.