Looks like yet another cloud mining ponzi scam. I was always wary of these guys from the start, and I seem to remember seeing some posts warning about them a while back.

OKCoin looks like yet another scam waiting to happen. There's been a lot of bad press about them lately.

I would avoid Coinbase, as there have been various complaints from users about arbitrarily cancelled orders. There are various alternative exchanges from where you can buy coins. Personally, I use Bitstamp most of the time.

You can get the current price using any API that's provided by btc-e, blockchain.info, BitPay, or any other number of exchanges. You just have to search and pick whichever one works for you.

You can use the Bitnodes API to get information about nodes similar to what's shown on the globe.

This is great. I should be spinning some XT nodes soon. I read that the blocks won't start growing larger immediately. Any idea when the larger blocks will go into effect?

Well, bitcoin is more widely accepted and actively developed, so it's obviously better since it's got more support and a larger community using it.

Sold.

I suppose if the reputation loans cannot be withdrawn, then it is definitely a safe investment, and there's nothing wrong with investing in it.

Cryptsy has been a very dodgy exchange since the beginning. Best to avoid them altogether.

It's recommended you pay the taxes.

If you absolutely want to avoid paying the taxes, you can set up an offshore company in one of the jurisdictions where you're not taxed, open an offshore bank account and transfer the funds to the bank account. Then you can spend directly, or make periodic withdrawals (as a salary or similar) to your local bank account from the offshore bank account.

I pretty much use a lot of Google services at this point. I wonder what would happen to someone who gets banned from using Google.

Definitely an interesting project. I've always been fascinated with space exploration.

Also, anyone notice a trend with recent Hollywood movies?
Gravity - 2013
Interstellar - 2014
The Martian - 2015

And there are still more coming.

Wow. The US net debt is a really huge number. How on earth did it get up to that?

Seems interesting. Will be looking forward to the results of the stress test.

It'll be worth it when the barrier for entry is low or virtually non-existent and retailers are accepting bitcoin en masse. There is currently no incentive to convert to bitcoin and spend, except for the discounts which are rarer.

You can make your transaction have a higher priority by setting a higher transaction fee. However, you cannot reduce the confirmation time. That depends on the time the next block is found.

You would still require a server-side language to be able to access a database. AngularJS is a frontend library. I don't understand the "PHP is old" complaint. Obviously, you should use the best tool for the job. Other server-side options available include Ruby, Python or Node.js. Node.js is relatively new so that may be right up your alley.

Does this use an API to access the Kraken account?

You can also write scripts to read the blockchain using bitcoin RPC to easily parse and store the data in whatever format you want.

Who is Amir Taaki and why should we care about his stance on the fork?