>How many legitimate real world services and products currently accept Bitcoins? I understand it is only the Chinese search engine.
The hundreds (thousands now?) of (mostly) small businesses accepting bitcoin for goods and services include gift card vendors. [1]
You can spend your bitcoins on gift cards (a form of virtual currency in itself) which you can use at some of the world's largest retailers, for example Amazon[2] or Walmart [3].
It's a two-step process, but you can use your bitcoins at Amazon or Walmart, today.
You may have heard that a proton is made from three quarks. Indeed here are several pages that say so. This is a lie — a white lie, but a big one. In fact there are zillions of gluons, antiquarks, and quarks in a proton. The standard shorthand, “the proton is made from two up quarks and one down quark”, is really a statement that the proton has two more up quarks than up antiquarks, and one more down quark than down antiquarks. To make the glib shorthand correct you need to add the phrase “plus zillions of gluons and zillions of quark-antiquark pairs.” Without this phrase, one’s view of the proton is so simplistic that it is not possible to understand the LHC at all.
>Q: How can you represent it as a sound? Sound is supposed to be a wave that travels through air, and there was no air in the early stages of the Big Bang?
>A: The Big Bang Sound in the simulation is derived from the sound propagating as compression waves through the plasma/hydrogen medium of the early universe some 100 to 700 thousand years after the initial Big Bang. The density of this medium was changing as the universe expanded, but should have been considerably more dense than air on our little planet. One does NOT need air to have sound, only some medium in which compression/rarefaction waves can propagate. The sound waves were very low in frequency and had wavelengths comparable to some fraction of the size of the universe. For the convenience of humans, who could not hear such low frequencies, I have increased them to the audio range of the human ear.
Or... One could simply say it's a rendering of J.R.R. Tolkien's Ainulindalë. ;)
I believe the EFF donated their coins to the original "Bitcoin Faucet", a service by Bitcoin lead developer Gavin Andresen that would give away fractions of a coin for free, so the newbies would have some to experiment with. (The Bitcoin Faucet happens to be where I got my first 0.05 BTC, a few years ago.)
"To me, and I hope to other UR readers, the logical leap from step 1 (BTC exchangers are indicted) to step 2 (BTC price goes to 0) is obvious. But here at UR, we are operating under our own special theory of money, which I have modestly dubbed MoMT (Moldbug Monetary Theory). If you know and believe MoMT, the leap is obvious. In the conventional wisdom, it's not obvious at all."
"Imagine that the BTC/USD market is perfectly liquid with no exchange overhead. Imagine also that there are two types of BTC users: Jews, who speculate (holding BTC long-term with the expectation that it will appreciate against USD); and Aryans, who only trade (and sweep all BTC balances into USD at the end of every day). These are simplifications, of course - but edifying ones."
"If I have one lesson to impart (...) it is this: [The US Government] is what it is. It is not what you want it to be. It is not what you hope it will become. It is certainly not what it claims to be. No - it is what it is. Respect that reality, and you will neither run afoul of Leviathan, nor live "free" as his spiritual servant. In short: think for yourself and obey the strong."
Long before Wikileaks, Assange worked on a project called "Rubberhose".
(A hidden encrypted filesystem designed to offer protection against cryptanalysis by torture.)
Wired in 2008: "Among other achievements, he [Assange] co-invented Rubberhose deniable encryption,
which would let a dissident being tortured reveal one key to unlock a hard drive,
while not giving away that there was a second or third password-locked folder of information."
^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime
Now what?