The debit card is definitely the weak link, I should get into a habit of minimising its balance. The internet banking is a lot better, they do guarantee it and have two factor authentication.
Good to hear you using Bitcoins for something other than dark markets, we should try to brainstorm other niches where Bitcoin has an edge. I think taxi drivers might warm to it, they definitely hate credit cards.
Most of the mining is now done in large data centres packed with ASIC miners. Ban it, seize the equipment and the government can immediately begin a 51% attack. Shut down the exchanges leaving only peer to peer exchanges, but now your local exchanger has the legal status of a drug dealer and all the sketchyness that comes with it.
No doubt there will be protocol changes to blacklist the government miners, a cat and mouse game will ensure. Bitcoin will survive, but it will be a tiny fraction of its previous size.
I've been working on a Bitcoin card over the past twelve months so I have had a lot of time to think about the benefits and drawbacks of using Bitcoins for everyday transactions and I completely agree with you, no compelling advantage.
Besides the obvious problem of the volatile exchange rate there is just no trust in any of the Bitcoin institutions, if I can't trust anyone else to manage my Bitcoins I need to do it myself. I can do that, but it takes time and effort to maintain secure systems. The real kicker is if something goes wrong, its my problem. If someone hacks my netbanking details the bank will cover my losses.
So what does Bitcoin offer? it opens up transactions that would have otherwise been too risky. Irreversible electronic transactions are Bitcoins niche. However that fact makes it very difficult to acquire Bitcoins with reversible payment methods. This slows down the process of entering and exiting the Bitcoin market leaving you vulnerable to the volatile exchange rate.
I really want Bitcoin to succeed but at this stage there is no way I would use Bitcoin for a transaction unless it was the only option.
Software! Every time I poke around the code of any sufficiently complex piece of software I find myself overwhelmed with the endless levels of abstraction. One benefit of plateauing hardware performance will be the slowing of the hardware churn. As innovation slows we will hopefully converge on optimal units of computation and interfaces.
As diversity decreases it will be much easier to write libraries that talk directly to the metal, protocols that write directly to the interfaces and applications that run completely isolated at native speed.
Without the towers of abstraction it is much easier to reason about the data structures of your input and output and design optimal algorithms. If we ever do come to this point there will be a renaissance in the field of computer science field.
I have had no issues with them, was about 48 hours after signing up to get my first Bitcoins. Supports 24 hour bank transfers or 1 hour cash deposits if you need them fast.
Using Apples definition of Retina 140dpi is Retina quality when viewing from approximately 60cm. That is about how far I sit from my screen, 140 would definitely be great.
Around Singapore surprised me as well. Reading a few reports they mostly robbing the crews valuables, I guess you wouldn't really have anywhere to take a hijacked ship in that area.
BitPlastic[1] is a about as close as you can get right now. I have been working for the past year on a prototype Bitcoin smart-card compatible with existing contact less terminals, I've gone this route because I am not particularly comfortable with storing my private key on my phone.
Prototype works, but lets just say it needs a lot more work. Not sure whether to continue with, for anything like this to have any adoption by retailers the entire Bitcoin community needs to get behind one standard. That is the Bitcoin Payment Protocol[2] which is incompatible with my approach. The Bitcoin Payment Protocol will with the new Android 4.4 changes.
Back then almost all UI rendering was software based. The graphics card just needed a large enough frame buffer.
The lack of fancy compositing and animation effects gave these high resolutions devices comparable performance to their standard resolution counterparts.
It's not the comparison that's sad, letting it define your worth is.
It's something I struggle with, almost 30 still struggling through my degree and working on minor projects. But personally when I look back a few years painfully grinding through life addicted to meth it makes today's small successes feel like a billion dollars.
The Silk Road and similar protect the seller. There is just no way to protect the buyer, you are buying a physical product and at some point have to take physical possession of it there is no way to avoid this.
Just as with buying drugs face to face you have to trust that the dealer is not malicious, is there a risk? definitely. But just as in the real world law enforcement have little interest in wasting their time on buyers.
The Silk Road has been notoriously unreliable. Constantly "Down for maintenance" and often just unresponsive for hours at a time. Besides the government it has also come under a number of malicious attacks from disgruntled users.
I imagine the DPR was logging in via VPN just to get some kind of consistent access to the site, even with I'm sure there were many times where the servers were unresponsive even to him.
I think of regulation as a constant negotiation between the regulators and the regulated industry. By putting measures in place to bar those with industry experience from working at the regulators you are decreasing the information available to the regulators.
The decrease in information directly decreases the regulators negotiating power, leading to greater regulatory capture.
Would this be more than regulatory capture caused by the revolving door? I don't know - but it does swing both ways.
I wouldn't say Google desperately wants you to have one. I use three separate Google accounts and switch between them with ease. YouTube is the only one that hassles me to merge, but given the quality of YouTube comments I can understand them wanting to tie your account to your real name.