There seems to be this belief that Bitcoin's blockchain technology is somehow better/more likely to be adopted by "wallstreet" than Bitcoin the currency, which is going to be forgotten, not used, or ignored. ¹

Along these same lines, there seems to be this belief that, since Satoshi invented a way to send value across the Internet without a third party verifier, banks will issue their own digital currencies to take advantage of this technology.

I was going to post this as a thread; but it was made abundantly clear in the rules image or whatever that concerns should be brought to the mods and not to the subreddit in general.

Due to the extremely controversial nature of this subreddit; I think that's wise and fair.. so I will start here and hope that I can either be approved to make a submission (or ideas here can be passed on by the mods themselves or some other trp approved submitter).

The US spends $12,608 per student per year on public education, and this does not include state/city spending.

The public school model was designed at a time when access to information was expensive and cumbersome. The existing ecosystem allows for autodidactism and a range of specialization, even in teenagers, well beyond anything our ancestors could have planned for.

Darkcoin, a few weeks ago, was a fledgling altcoin with a novel feature of having a mixing service built into the wallet. The feature as I understand it, is using a coinjoin-style mixing feature (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0) that they call darksend. This is effectively an 'anonymous' transaction that obfuscates the transaction graph.

Full complaint:

http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/UlbrichtCriminalCo...

TL;DR;

Dread Pirate Roberts, AKA DPR, AKA Ross W Ulbricht ran the silk road, a bitcoin only, tor-only anonymous market place.

Agents tracked his identity by somehow locating his servers and working with the ISP to get a snapshot. (This is not described in the complaint and basically proves that Tor is insecure)

What is Money, Anyway?

One of the first questions people have around bitcoin is, "is it money?". Well, what is money?

Sometimes you hear that "since there isn't a government backing it" bitcoin isn't money or has no basis; but, it should be clear from basic observation that 1) backing by a government is not a sole prerequisite for money to be useful (evidence: every hyper-inflated fiat currency) and 2) backing by a government is not a prerequisite for being useful as money (evidence: original banknotes and cigarettes in jail).

I write this while bitcoin is near its all time high again for nearly a week straight. Almost two years ago I wrote about about bitcoin, talking about how the fundamentals were more at least as important as any technical analysis being done.

Bitcoin is bound for success.

A year ago I wrote about bitcoin fundamentals vs technical analysis; and how, regardless of the technical aspects, the fundamentals are such a strong force on the overall value of the bitcoin economy; that either bitcoin is going to fail spectacularly or, enjoy incredible success.

I am going to argue that at this point, bitcoin is essentially bound to succeed.

Why?

Bitcoin will either reach widespread adoption, fail completely (i.e. become worthless), or retain niche/geek value (like in game currencies).

tl;dr: Kindle + Instapaper's "Send to Kindle" bookmarklet means I never have to read things on my eye-burning screen again and it makes me very happy.

I love my Kindle.

It has been said many times (ie: http://joncalhoun.posterous.com/email-sucks-this-is-how-we-fix-it) by many people that email is lagging behind the times with the way it is often used.

What was intended to be a way to simply send messages back and forth and communicate like civilized humans; email has evolved into the centralized place where many people get actionable items.