Completely - this is a very new commodity market upon which lots of people are speculating. I intend to speculate on it and so do (are) many people in the tech and now wider communities.
Worth remembering that at least bitcoin is backed by some value of work, what is USD backed by again? Debt :-D
That debt is backed by the collective work of the citizens of the US. In total, and discounted by the tax rate, this is far, far more work, and of course far more useful work, than Bitcoin mining.
A debt that can never be repaid, so we'll just print an ever increasing amount of cash and sell gold to make sure no-one realises the dollar is worthless?
1. Bitcoin is not backed by anything. The work that goes into creating Bitcoin via the mining process has no bearing whatsoever on the value or utility of Bitcoin.
2. USD is backed by the law -- laws concerning debts, laws concerning taxes, laws concerning torts, etc. The law is what makes USD useful, which is why USD has value.
You are wrong about point number 1. The purpose of mining is to process and secure bitcoin transactions. The work that goes into mining is what provides the utility of bitcoin. The 25 btc mining reward is just an incentive.
It is a snarky form of the statement, but basically the idea is that fiat currency is similar to corporate bonds.
If you think General Motors is going to tank, you don't want their bonds, nobody does, they are junk. If Google were to issue a corporate bond series, everyone would eat them up like candy though.
Because the USA is the only remaining military superpower in the world, it's fiat currency is going to be #1 in the world. The Eurozone is #2 militarily, and it isn't a coincidence that the Euro currency is also #2. And places like Zimbabwe have jokes for militaries and jokes for currencies. A few years ago someone gave me a 100,000,000 Zimbabwe note as a gag gift.
I don't doubt the EFF, but I am automatically skeptical of anyone who tries to get me to take action without bothering to post the bill or even relevant excerpts.
Well, you could use a site like this:
https://localbitcoins.com/
but then again doing hundreds of these cash transactions in person seems like it would be stressful.
Seems to me that the most useful point of the LocalBitcoins service is to find traders willing to exchange via postal service. Face-to-face interaction seems like a bad move, especially since the money you're sending could be tracked to a "theft" and the service or trader might decide to snoop on you. And again, as the criminal complaint against Nod showed, using USPS is only safe if you act with sufficient randomness and change profiles. Otherwise they may detect a large pattern you generate.
It's also safer because it seems the government isn't likely to setup a major investigation for the case of BTC "theft".
(I say "theft" because it is possible, but unlikely, that the owner of the wallet transferred the money to someone intentionally, to pay them or something.)
HIPAA means a little more than that. I spent years as a pharmacy technician and can attest to all the shredding, blacking out of names, etc. Disclosing PHI (Personal Health Information) without a reasonable need for it was a very serious offense. HIPAA also forces providers to give you access to all of the PHI related to you that they maintain. Obviously HIPAA doesn't solve patient privacy entirely, as in your fax tray example, but I like to think it does help.
I think the HIPAA comment is likely referring to users being able to talk to healthcare professionals. I very much doubt that line was talking about surgeons, etc. asking for advice.
I usually enjoy Schneier's postings but this is a little bit silly. There's no evidence that "government monitoring" had anything to do with this incident. Someone noticed the tweets and informed Hayden. We don't seem to have any further information so jumping to conclusions seems silly.
There is no way this is common and if it is, must only be common to iPhones.
I remember reading a thread on r/Android about smartphone use in Korea and someone mentioned people tend to carry around an extra battery when their main battery runs out. I presume Samsung dominates the market over there and their phones have removable batteries.
It seems likely that the seized funds were taken from SR's escrow accounts. It matches up roughly with the amount of money said in the FBI complaint to be stored in escrow. I can only assume that they have no idea where his personal Bitcoin stash is, otherwise they would have hyped up seizing ~80mil.
