Why do we know all this? If he had such a perfect plan why does the whole world know where he's headed? Or maybe he's just really bad at keeping secrets.
This is the prisoner's dilemma. If you slow down and drive smoothly, and everyone else does too, then everyone benefits greatly. But if you cut in front of one of the smooth drivers, which you can since he's leaving lots of space, you benefit personally by gaining a car length while inconveniencing everyone else in that particular lane. Well, at least until the guy behind you has smoothed out the difference. Human nature makes smoothing out traffic an improbable solution.
They say the bank processes a queue and there's nothing they can do to speed it up. Every couple of days a support guy leaves a message on my support ticket stating that they're still waiting for the bank to process stuff. MtGox is very obviously in over their head.
I wonder if the author ever emails one of the two friends about the other. It's unfair if only one side of the private emails gets opened, but the other stays hidden. Also, given that presumably you're still friends after this incident, who cares? A single email is a ridiculously small facet of a person to base an opinion off of.
And if you weren't friends but just colleagues, who cares? You've just learned an important bit of information: your colleagues don't approve of your expenditures. This will help you plan your future. Take it and learn. More information is hardly ever bad.
Since the public key is public, any eavesdroppers will also be able to read the email. There is no point in the extension if you use the recipient's public key. It must be a mutually agreed secret.
I agree, but I have to disagree. I'd gladly use a more secure email service, but the problem is: 99% of everyone I know uses gmail or Google Apps. It doesn't matter if I encrypt my email if everyone I communicate with is vulnerable. The trick is getting the layman to accept something simple like a browser extension. If even 20% of the people I communicate with would consider using the extension I would be very happy.
I'm highly doubtful that anyone in Japan could/would use such flawless English, especially online and in code comments. The Englishisms might be a sign of a paranoid American trying to obfuscate his writing, but I'd put my money on Satoshi being English, attributing any Americanisms to the fact that the internet is largely dominated by American English, so it's easy for anyone to pick it up without even realizing.
No. First, learn the internals of your system. Learn SQL. Learn NoSQL. Understand why your software is slow. Then, once you've optimized the worst case away with decent SQL and/or a good object-oriented architecture. Then and only then should you start with caching. Too many developers these days are just brainless monkeys who dump everything in memcache.
The AB test example where everything was kept the same except the color of the button should be taken with a grain of salt. Many elements on the page are green and there's almost no trace of red, so obviously changing the button color to red would instantly make it stand out more. That's an issue of contrast, not color preference.
This is stupid and it proves nothing. It's the equivalent of living on Rupees for a week. Sure, you might find some Indian people who will take your money, but nobody's trying to replace the USD with either the Rupee or the Bitcoin. Pure sitespam, this.
I'm not sure there's $1.2M worth of ASIC hardware made yet. Also, for that amount of money you could do a lot of malicious things, even to traditional banks.
Why would I want this? I can use CrashPlan to backup my files to the 'cloud' safely. I don't care where it's stored, as long as it's safe. For fast access and high availability I could just buy a hard drive instead of a device that acts like a hard drive but instead stores other people's files on it.
A much better and less biased article than the 'Bitcon' one. It shows once more that no one really knows what Bitcoin is and what's going to happen to it.
If you must compare Bitcoin to gold, consider the current price of gold, imagine that we didn't know it existed until yesterday and then suddenly it appeared. Bitcoin currently fulfills a niche in the same way that gold did in the past (and still does).
To add to that, it also illustrates the over-dependence of the bitcoin community on a single exchange site. What I was trying to show is that, despite those pretty major problems, Bitcoin is still massively popular. Hopefully it can come out on top in the end.
MtGox requires a fair bit of verification, but they've also been around pretty much the longest, and have already had to deal with all the security issues that other bitcoin sites are only beginning to discover. I trust them.
(That is to say, I trust them long enough to do the exchange, and then I transfer the bitcoins to my private offline wallet as soon as possible. And you should too.)