What regulations surrounding the dollar? Perhaps you mean regulations on banks and brokerages. Unfortunately, MtGox was neither a bank nor a brokerage. Plus they are run out of Japan, so they are hardly going to be subject to U.S. law.
Customers who got creamed by MtGox were idiots. I feel sorry for them, but sometimes it takes a hard lesson to punch through blind idealism.
If you are looking for a riskless investment that maintains your buying power over time then no such beast exists anywhere in the world.
I haven't paid a single dime in bank fees in over 30 years. If you are, then you don't have the minimal amount of sense required to avoid it. It isn't rocket science. Or perhaps you are just parroting what the media heads are shoveling into your head?
The stock market in 2008 crashed. And it recovered. Big difference between that and something crashing and not recovering ever. My parent's retirement portfolios dropped 40% in 2008. And 2 years later they had recovered completely.
Hey, that would be great... because, ya know, all the MF Global customers are likely to get all of their money back (if you haven't been keeping track of it). But the victims of MtGox and other exchanges that have gone dark probably never will.
I'd say MF Global is a case that shows just how good regulation can be when the shit hits the fan. Even if they didn't follow the law, there was enough there to make it recoverable for the customers, including the freezing of funds at the target institutions that had already been transfered out of MF Global.
I think you are confusing Intel's under-powered mobile cpu's with the cpu's they are stuffing into the Chromebox and Chromebooks. These cpu's are MUCH faster than anything ARM has on offer.
You can DD the whole disk... but unless you have another machine that can take a M.2 form factor SSD you have no easy way to restore it from the image.
The Acer c720 laptop will boot the Acer/Google recovery image from a USB stick but all it can do is completely wipe the M.2 SSD, so you'd lose whatever you had on there. If you do not follow the BIOS directions properly you might also get into a situation where it refuses to boot from the USB stick while the M.2 drive is installed with the non-conformant OS.
I read a bit more on the ASUS Chromebox. There are three cpu choices. The 2955U, The i3-4010U, or the I7-4600U. The I7-4600U is very similar to the I7-4700MQ that I have in one of my laptops, and that is a very respectable cpu and very suited for desktop use.
The only one I see on Amazon is the one with the 2955U (1.4 GHz single-core/2-thread celeron).
From what I can google the chromebox uses an internal M.2 form factor SSD (16GB), which means you can potentially upgrade it to e.g. a 128GB SSD by buying it on newegg (another $100). This will be considerably faster than a SD card.
So this chromebox (with the i3 or i7) would definitely be powerful enough as a desktop.
It just comes down to whether the BIOS will allow third-party OS installs or not and I don't know the answer to that.
The Acer c720 works great as a small laptop and will run Linux. It isn't quite a replacement for a workstation, it's not as fast as a desktop cpu but it is certainly much faster than the much-aligned netbooks from a few years ago. The keyboard and touchpad are pretty good considering the form factor.
Booting and setup is a bit hokey due to the minimal BIOS but it works. The c720 has a M.2 form factor SSD internally and it's *easy* to take apart the back (just a lot of screws) and replace it with a bigger one. I bought a 128GB M.2 SSD for mine.
For the Acer c720 my recommendation is to not overwrite the 16GB SSD in the machine. Instead buy a (bigger) replacement and leave chrome on the original. Also find the acer/google restore disk image (you should be able to google, it's officially supplied) which you can throw onto a USB stick. You need your chromebook's serial number. Always good to have a restore image handy in case you flub the instructions.
Read the instructions on how to install linux very carefully and do not skip any steps. Worst case you brick the laptop and have to put the original M.2 16GB SSD back into it to get back on track (which is why I suggest not overwriting the original SSD).
I'm not sure of that. It is on my Acer C720 chromebook (laptop). If it's M.2 you may be able to just buy a bigger SSD on e.g. newegg, load linux or a BSD onto it, and throw it in. Google for instructions, not all chromebook BIOS's allow non-chrome OS installs.
That's total nonsense. The only monopoly a government has on money is the requirement to pay taxes in a particular currency. Bitcoin doesn't make a dent in that.
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from converting your money to any manner of scrip (aka stocks), commodity-tracking scrip, or a commodity itself and still have it be liquid enough to be usable as a currency. Many of these instruments have great long-term records of inflation protection to boot.
Bitcoiners seem to believe that there is some magic 'currency' instrument which is immune to inflation and all manner of government manipulation which maintains or increases its value magically over time with no effort. No such beast exists anywhere in the world. There is not a single instrument anywhere which can make that guarantee. Certainly not bitcoins. Not gold. Nothing.
People who believe that crap deserve to lose every cent they own.
I found an awesome one that is accepted all over the world with a nifty piece of plastic that you just swipe in a little machine. Takes 5 seconds and you don't even have to sign for small transactions. Ultra convenient and I can only lose $50 in the event of fraud. All my transactions are listed conveniently on a monthly statement. And, best of all, they loan me the money for 30 whole days and it costs me absolutely nothing as long as I pay my balance off each month.
Think about what you are asking. You might be willing to take on huge risks, but I assure no insurance company is going to follow you down the rabbit hole unless they are idiots (and here I would put 'AIG' in the category of 'idiots', heh). You might be able to 'buy' insurance from another bitcoiner, but it isn't real insurance if the other bitcoiner doesn't have a dime to his name to be able to back the policies he's writing. Don't expect to be paid.
This is an excellent example of fantasy going head to head against the real world and winding up in a crumpled heap.
Shorting requires that you borrow the stock/commodity/currency/whatever from someone else who owns it, and then sell it on the open market. The borrowing usually entails interest. That is, someone might be willing to lend you the bitcoin so you can then sell them (the short), but that person is also going to charge you, say, 5% of the bitcoins lent payable in bitcoin or some other stock or currency each year as long as they are borrowed. At some point you have to buy the bitcoin back to pay back the person you borrowed them from.
Another problem is that borrowing any significant quantity of anything, such as bitcoin or a stock or whatever, requires a trusted and/or regulated middle-man who can guarantee that the lender gets paid back and consequences if you are unable to pay-back the middleman. Otherwise only a fool would lend you the bitcoin with only your 'promise' that you'll pay him back. This is how shorting in the real stock market works.
Lots of ways to blow yourself up. Usually the lender can call back his or her stock/bitcoin/whatever with less than a week's notice, which might force you to buy-back the bitcoin you sold at a loss if you can't find someone else to borrow the bitcoin from. The lender and/or middleman (aka your broker in the case of stock) also needs to protect themselves, and so there will be wording that requires you to maintain a balance sufficient to buy back the bitcoin you owe them. So if the price of bitcoin were to double and you don't have sufficient funds to cover the value, they can force you buy back the bitcoin right then and there to pay back the loan. Just two examples.
So I'm sure there would be someone willing to lend you the bitcoins, but if they do they are going to be asking for your first born child and your house if you can't pay them back, and probably charge you 20%+ in interest in the mean time.
Sure, I'll insure your bitcoins. And the premium I will charge for insuring your bitcoins will be... the face value of your bitcoins.
Sometimes insurance simply isn't possible. Insurance companies exist to make a profit, not to give all their money away to bad clients and go bankrupt themselves.
Are you kidding? That's like a kindergarten view of the U.S. banking system. How could possibly have that opinion?
There are a huge number of regulations related to bank security. Literally thousands of accounting standard requirements that are NON optional for banks, including requirements for a daily reconciliation of accounts, compartmentalization of assets, automatic circuit breakers to prevent a complete drain. Mandated reporting requirements for larger money transfers as well as best-practices for transfer requests, and thousands of other regulations.
The FDIC is the umbrella for consumer protection of a bank account but that has nothing to do with why banks and (real) brokerages tend to be relatively secure from theft. Not perfect, obviously, but several orders of magnitude more secure than an unregulated bitcoin exchange could ever be.
Similarly, there are consumer protections on brokerage accounts and credit cards. Brokerages also have to deal with a large pile of regulation (though not as large as a major bank has to deal with).
None of these regulations or standards exist for any bitcoin exchange. How anyone could possibly trust their cash or bitcoins or whatever to ANY bitcoin exchange is beyond me. Its like there is this blind distrust of the government and large institutions, but at the same time that person has complete trust (for reasons in unknown) in a small outfit run by half a dozen people with no regulation or oversight whatsoever and nothing protecting the customer's assets. Insane.
Many telco plans (possibly even most) no longer charge for texts. They already been squeezed out of the market by social media. These days data is all that matters and that's what telco's primarily charge for.
My bank account is 'safe' because if money gets stolen out of it, I'll eventually get it back from the bank, and if the bank goes south, I'll get it back up to the $250K FDIC limit. (And if I have more than $250K it sure as hell won't be sitting in a bank account anyway). My credit card is 'safe' for the same reason.
If your bitcoin wallet gets stolen (for example, by a virus), you have no recourse. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoins have been stolen in the last 2 years. Almost a billion dollars, in fact, when include the MtGox heist.
I'll stick with a real bank, a real brokerage, and a real credit card, thank you.
Not to mention the one in China that disappeared overnight and took all of its customer's bitcoins with it.
Methinks the so-called deflationary aspects of the bitcoin protocol is being more than offset by the massive 100% loss of capital many individual bitcoin users have suffered over the last few years. Ultimately this makes bitcoin worthless as either a store of value or a currency.
In light of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly.
Best regards, MtGox Team"
Insane. And insofar as acquisitions go... obviously a red herring. Nobody running this sort of business just locks their customers out without notice in order to perform a sale of the company.
Either MtGox have enough bitcoins and cash under their control to reconcile against their customer's accounts, or they don't. It's that simple. And they have refused to answer that one question.
This *IS* MtGox's fault. For not even following basic accounting principles to reconcile their accounts with their hot and cold bitcoin storage. If the rumor is true, then the situation became this serious precisely because MtGox lacked even the most basic awareness of the state of their own business.
All software has vulnerabilities. Only a complete fool trusts software so completely that their business will blow up if there's a bug.
About all I do is mark my dead hard drives with a big D-E-A-D and an 'X' with a ballpoint pen before throwing them into my dead-hard-drive pile (I use them to test disk driver error handling code paths so they don't get thrown away). Actual hardware... no point labeling it, really, it's just a waste of time.
Oh wait, I do use those cool Intel and AMD cpu stickers on the cases, helps me keep track of which cpu is in which computer:-)
What I do find useful is collecting together all the extra tidbits that come with a product (motherboards in particular) and throwing them into a small labeled box. Ultimately when it comes time to recycle the HW after it has gotten too old, I throw the box away at the same time or, if a friend can use the old HW, I dig into it to refurbish as much as possible and then hand it and the box over.
Yah, I got that precise one, since the 16G NGFF card it comes with is too small for my comfort. However, 128GB is not enough when I'm filling up 64G camera cards each day. For off-camera backups I have a 512G 2.5" SSD.
At the moment my plan is to upgrade the internals to the 128GB NGFF card for the base OS and then use my 512G SATA SSD and one of those Apricorn USB->SATA adapters (powered by the USB port so really only works well with SATA SSDs) to connect it up to the chromebook when needed.
I had originally purchased a System76 to take with me into the field but it turned out to be a bit too bulky and the clamshell is a bit too fragile (beyond that, though the System76 is a really nice regular-sized laptop). I'm sick and tired of the small Atom tablet I had before... so hopefully the chromebook w/its haswell cpu will be a good replacement despite not having a full 2.5" SSD SATA port built-in.
I just ordered one of these precisely for its small form factor and haswell guts. Haven't gotten it yet but I had been looking for something along those lines for over a year now. The only downside is that the internal storage uses a NGFF (M.2) SSD slot rather than a full-blown SATA port, so the amount of storage you can throw into it is limited.
That said, I expect I can just upgrade the internals to ~64G and then connect up an external SSD via USB for higher capacity to backup my camera cards.
There seems to be a general misunderstanding by many folks on who inflation hurts the most... I guess because a lot of people want to blame inflation for all their troubles. But inflation is not the cause of your troubles, folks.
Inflation hurts people with more money the most, because inflation only affects people who actually hold money for long periods of time. People with very little money (for example, who live pay-check to pay-check or have only a few thousand or a few tens of thousands of dollars in the bank) simply do not carry the cash long enough for inflation to have any effect.
Even at modest levels of inflation a person working pay-check to pay-check is spending the cash almost immediately after receiving it. Most people... most of the population, spends the cash within a year (or sooner). Losses from inflation are minimal in those situations. But for anyone with real savings inflation is a problem that can only be solved by investing the cash and receiving a better return... outpacing the inflation.
How does inflation transfer more money to the government? People seem confused about this too. The answer is also simple: Through taxes on gains. If I own stock in company X and it is worth $100, and 25 years later through inflation the company is valued at $200 and I cash it out, I owe taxes on the $100 difference even though the intrinsic value of my stock has not changed. This also tends to have a lower effect on the less affluent because the less affluent tend to be in a lower tax bracket. Taxes due to inflation wind up being a huge component for the affluent, and near zero if you are poor.
Inflation is the bane of the rich, not of the poor, and always has been.
What people misunderstand the most is the relationship between wages and inflation, particularly when the average worker is losing ground due to wages not keeping up. Wages not keeping up is not really a function of inflation, but more a function of supply and demand. The supply of jobs and the number of people looking for jobs, in various categories. As inflation occurs and wages become insufficient, workers demand raises. This is why we see strikes here and there in different industries all the time.
It is true that inflation makes it easier for employers to allow worker wages to stagnate. It would be hard to argue against that, but employers can only stretch the mechanic so far. The bigger problem for the average worker is that the skill requirements for jobs change and older workers tend to not keep up with the changing environment, becoming marginalized. For example, working a metal cutting tool in the old days required significant labor but little education. In modern times it requires having factory programming skills and enough knowledge to ensure that you do not accidentally destroy a $50,000 piece of machinery or kill yourself.
All this talk about bitcoin somehow magically being a way to work around inflation is just hogwash. There are many things which work around inflation with FAR less volatility and risk than bitcoin... bonds, stocks, and so forth. None of these things are riskless, and many work on the similar principle of having a fairly limited supply (a blue-chip stock, for example), and thus for a stable business tends to be immune from inflation in the long-run (except for taxes later on when you sell, but bitcoin won't save you from taxes either).
The idea that one can simply conjure money out of thin air with no risk and no investment has NEVER worked in the past and won't work for bitcoin either, but I guess there's a siren's song involved here similar to the siren's song that attracts so many people to casino gambling (despite 'gambling' in the stock market being more lucrative than 'gambling' in a casino).
The lack of education prevalent in this age of boundless information just astounds me. People are literally blind to proven facts that they don't happen to agree with.
Heh. Talk is cheap. I hear stories like that all the time on financial forums, but rarely is it actually true. Still, at least some of the stories are going to be true... the problem is that most of them are not, and the far larger numbers of people who got cleaned out on the other side of the trade instead don't boast about their losses so...
Hope you paid your taxes when you cashed them out!
Slashdot Mirror
What regulations surrounding the dollar? Perhaps you mean regulations on banks and brokerages. Unfortunately, MtGox was neither a bank nor a brokerage. Plus they are run out of Japan, so they are hardly going to be subject to U.S. law.
Customers who got creamed by MtGox were idiots. I feel sorry for them, but sometimes it takes a hard lesson to punch through blind idealism.
-Matt
If you are looking for a riskless investment that maintains your buying power over time then no such beast exists anywhere in the world.
I haven't paid a single dime in bank fees in over 30 years. If you are, then you don't have the minimal amount of sense required to avoid it. It isn't rocket science. Or perhaps you are just parroting what the media heads are shoveling into your head?
The stock market in 2008 crashed. And it recovered. Big difference between that and something crashing and not recovering ever. My parent's retirement portfolios dropped 40% in 2008. And 2 years later they had recovered completely.
-Matt
Hey, that would be great... because, ya know, all the MF Global customers are likely to get all of their money back (if you haven't been keeping track of it). But the victims of MtGox and other exchanges that have gone dark probably never will.
I'd say MF Global is a case that shows just how good regulation can be when the shit hits the fan. Even if they didn't follow the law, there was enough there to make it recoverable for the customers, including the freezing of funds at the target institutions that had already been transfered out of MF Global.
-Matt
I think you are confusing Intel's under-powered mobile cpu's with the cpu's they are stuffing into the Chromebox and Chromebooks. These cpu's are MUCH faster than anything ARM has on offer.
-Matt
You can DD the whole disk... but unless you have another machine that can take a M.2 form factor SSD you have no easy way to restore it from the image.
The Acer c720 laptop will boot the Acer/Google recovery image from a USB stick but all it can do is completely wipe the M.2 SSD, so you'd lose whatever you had on there. If you do not follow the BIOS directions properly you might also get into a situation where it refuses to boot from the USB stick while the M.2 drive is installed with the non-conformant OS.
-Matt
I read a bit more on the ASUS Chromebox. There are three cpu choices. The 2955U, The i3-4010U, or the I7-4600U. The I7-4600U is very similar to the I7-4700MQ that I have in one of my laptops, and that is a very respectable cpu and very suited for desktop use.
The only one I see on Amazon is the one with the 2955U (1.4 GHz single-core/2-thread celeron).
From what I can google the chromebox uses an internal M.2 form factor SSD (16GB), which means you can potentially upgrade it to e.g. a 128GB SSD by buying it on newegg (another $100). This will be considerably faster than a SD card.
So this chromebox (with the i3 or i7) would definitely be powerful enough as a desktop.
It just comes down to whether the BIOS will allow third-party OS installs or not and I don't know the answer to that.
-Matt
The Acer c720 works great as a small laptop and will run Linux. It isn't quite a replacement for a workstation, it's not as fast as a desktop cpu but it is certainly much faster than the much-aligned netbooks from a few years ago. The keyboard and touchpad are pretty good considering the form factor.
Booting and setup is a bit hokey due to the minimal BIOS but it works. The c720 has a M.2 form factor SSD internally and it's *easy* to take apart the back (just a lot of screws) and replace it with a bigger one. I bought a 128GB M.2 SSD for mine.
For the Acer c720 my recommendation is to not overwrite the 16GB SSD in the machine. Instead buy a (bigger) replacement and leave chrome on the original. Also find the acer/google restore disk image (you should be able to google, it's officially supplied) which you can throw onto a USB stick. You need your chromebook's serial number. Always good to have a restore image handy in case you flub the instructions.
Read the instructions on how to install linux very carefully and do not skip any steps. Worst case you brick the laptop and have to put the original M.2 16GB SSD back into it to get back on track (which is why I suggest not overwriting the original SSD).
-Matt
I'm not sure of that. It is on my Acer C720 chromebook (laptop). If it's M.2 you may be able to just buy a bigger SSD on e.g. newegg, load linux or a BSD onto it, and throw it in. Google for instructions, not all chromebook BIOS's allow non-chrome OS installs.
-Matt
Actually, iOS *is* more developer friendly. Writing an App for Android's infinite screen dimensions and densities is a nightmare.
-Matt
That's total nonsense. The only monopoly a government has on money is the requirement to pay taxes in a particular currency. Bitcoin doesn't make a dent in that.
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from converting your money to any manner of scrip (aka stocks), commodity-tracking scrip, or a commodity itself and still have it be liquid enough to be usable as a currency. Many of these instruments have great long-term records of inflation protection to boot.
Bitcoiners seem to believe that there is some magic 'currency' instrument which is immune to inflation and all manner of government manipulation which maintains or increases its value magically over time with no effort. No such beast exists anywhere in the world. There is not a single instrument anywhere which can make that guarantee. Certainly not bitcoins. Not gold. Nothing.
People who believe that crap deserve to lose every cent they own.
-Matt
I found an awesome one that is accepted all over the world with a nifty piece of plastic that you just swipe in a little machine. Takes 5 seconds and you don't even have to sign for small transactions. Ultra convenient and I can only lose $50 in the event of fraud. All my transactions are listed conveniently on a monthly statement. And, best of all, they loan me the money for 30 whole days and it costs me absolutely nothing as long as I pay my balance off each month.
It's called a credit card.
-Matt
Think about what you are asking. You might be willing to take on huge risks, but I assure no insurance company is going to follow you down the rabbit hole unless they are idiots (and here I would put 'AIG' in the category of 'idiots', heh). You might be able to 'buy' insurance from another bitcoiner, but it isn't real insurance if the other bitcoiner doesn't have a dime to his name to be able to back the policies he's writing. Don't expect to be paid.
This is an excellent example of fantasy going head to head against the real world and winding up in a crumpled heap.
-Matt
Shorting requires that you borrow the stock/commodity/currency/whatever from someone else who owns it, and then sell it on the open market. The borrowing usually entails interest. That is, someone might be willing to lend you the bitcoin so you can then sell them (the short), but that person is also going to charge you, say, 5% of the bitcoins lent payable in bitcoin or some other stock or currency each year as long as they are borrowed. At some point you have to buy the bitcoin back to pay back the person you borrowed them from.
Another problem is that borrowing any significant quantity of anything, such as bitcoin or a stock or whatever, requires a trusted and/or regulated middle-man who can guarantee that the lender gets paid back and consequences if you are unable to pay-back the middleman. Otherwise only a fool would lend you the bitcoin with only your 'promise' that you'll pay him back. This is how shorting in the real stock market works.
Lots of ways to blow yourself up. Usually the lender can call back his or her stock/bitcoin/whatever with less than a week's notice, which might force you to buy-back the bitcoin you sold at a loss if you can't find someone else to borrow the bitcoin from. The lender and/or middleman (aka your broker in the case of stock) also needs to protect themselves, and so there will be wording that requires you to maintain a balance sufficient to buy back the bitcoin you owe them. So if the price of bitcoin were to double and you don't have sufficient funds to cover the value, they can force you buy back the bitcoin right then and there to pay back the loan. Just two examples.
So I'm sure there would be someone willing to lend you the bitcoins, but if they do they are going to be asking for your first born child and your house if you can't pay them back, and probably charge you 20%+ in interest in the mean time.
-Matt
Sure, I'll insure your bitcoins. And the premium I will charge for insuring your bitcoins will be... the face value of your bitcoins.
Sometimes insurance simply isn't possible. Insurance companies exist to make a profit, not to give all their money away to bad clients and go bankrupt themselves.
-Matt
Are you kidding? That's like a kindergarten view of the U.S. banking system. How could possibly have that opinion?
There are a huge number of regulations related to bank security. Literally thousands of accounting standard requirements that are NON optional for banks, including requirements for a daily reconciliation of accounts, compartmentalization of assets, automatic circuit breakers to prevent a complete drain. Mandated reporting requirements for larger money transfers as well as best-practices for transfer requests, and thousands of other regulations.
The FDIC is the umbrella for consumer protection of a bank account but that has nothing to do with why banks and (real) brokerages tend to be relatively secure from theft. Not perfect, obviously, but several orders of magnitude more secure than an unregulated bitcoin exchange could ever be.
Similarly, there are consumer protections on brokerage accounts and credit cards. Brokerages also have to deal with a large pile of regulation (though not as large as a major bank has to deal with).
None of these regulations or standards exist for any bitcoin exchange. How anyone could possibly trust their cash or bitcoins or whatever to ANY bitcoin exchange is beyond me. Its like there is this blind distrust of the government and large institutions, but at the same time that person has complete trust (for reasons in unknown) in a small outfit run by half a dozen people with no regulation or oversight whatsoever and nothing protecting the customer's assets. Insane.
-Matt
Many telco plans (possibly even most) no longer charge for texts. They already been squeezed out of the market by social media. These days data is all that matters and that's what telco's primarily charge for.
-Matt
My bank account is 'safe' because if money gets stolen out of it, I'll eventually get it back from the bank, and if the bank goes south, I'll get it back up to the $250K FDIC limit. (And if I have more than $250K it sure as hell won't be sitting in a bank account anyway). My credit card is 'safe' for the same reason.
If your bitcoin wallet gets stolen (for example, by a virus), you have no recourse. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoins have been stolen in the last 2 years. Almost a billion dollars, in fact, when include the MtGox heist.
I'll stick with a real bank, a real brokerage, and a real credit card, thank you.
-Matt
Not to mention the one in China that disappeared overnight and took all of its customer's bitcoins with it.
Methinks the so-called deflationary aspects of the bitcoin protocol is being more than offset by the massive 100% loss of capital many individual bitcoin users have suffered over the last few years. Ultimately this makes bitcoin worthless as either a store of value or a currency.
-Matt
Wait, now it says:
"Dear MtGox Customers,
In light of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly.
Best regards,
MtGox Team"
Insane. And insofar as acquisitions go... obviously a red herring. Nobody running this sort of business just locks their customers out without notice in order to perform a sale of the company.
Either MtGox have enough bitcoins and cash under their control to reconcile against their customer's accounts, or they don't. It's that simple. And they have refused to answer that one question.
-Matt
This *IS* MtGox's fault. For not even following basic accounting principles to reconcile their accounts with their hot and cold bitcoin storage. If the rumor is true, then the situation became this serious precisely because MtGox lacked even the most basic awareness of the state of their own business.
All software has vulnerabilities. Only a complete fool trusts software so completely that their business will blow up if there's a bug.
-Matt
About all I do is mark my dead hard drives with a big D-E-A-D and an 'X' with a ballpoint pen before throwing them into my dead-hard-drive pile (I use them to test disk driver error handling code paths so they don't get thrown away). Actual hardware... no point labeling it, really, it's just a waste of time.
Oh wait, I do use those cool Intel and AMD cpu stickers on the cases, helps me keep track of which cpu is in which computer :-)
What I do find useful is collecting together all the extra tidbits that come with a product (motherboards in particular) and throwing them into a small labeled box. Ultimately when it comes time to recycle the HW after it has gotten too old, I throw the box away at the same time or, if a friend can use the old HW, I dig into it to refurbish as much as possible and then hand it and the box over.
-Matt
Yah, I got that precise one, since the 16G NGFF card it comes with is too small for my comfort. However, 128GB is not enough when I'm filling up 64G camera cards each day. For off-camera backups I have a 512G 2.5" SSD.
At the moment my plan is to upgrade the internals to the 128GB NGFF card for the base OS and then use my 512G SATA SSD and one of those Apricorn USB->SATA adapters (powered by the USB port so really only works well with SATA SSDs) to connect it up to the chromebook when needed.
I had originally purchased a System76 to take with me into the field but it turned out to be a bit too bulky and the clamshell is a bit too fragile (beyond that, though the System76 is a really nice regular-sized laptop). I'm sick and tired of the small Atom tablet I had before... so hopefully the chromebook w/its haswell cpu will be a good replacement despite not having a full 2.5" SSD SATA port built-in.
-Matt
I just ordered one of these precisely for its small form factor and haswell guts. Haven't gotten it yet but I had been looking for something along those lines for over a year now. The only downside is that the internal storage uses a NGFF (M.2) SSD slot rather than a full-blown SATA port, so the amount of storage you can throw into it is limited.
That said, I expect I can just upgrade the internals to ~64G and then connect up an external SSD via USB for higher capacity to backup my camera cards.
-Matt
There seems to be a general misunderstanding by many folks on who inflation hurts the most... I guess because a lot of people want to blame inflation for all their troubles. But inflation is not the cause of your troubles, folks.
Inflation hurts people with more money the most, because inflation only affects people who actually hold money for long periods of time. People with very little money (for example, who live pay-check to pay-check or have only a few thousand or a few tens of thousands of dollars in the bank) simply do not carry the cash long enough for inflation to have any effect.
Even at modest levels of inflation a person working pay-check to pay-check is spending the cash almost immediately after receiving it. Most people... most of the population, spends the cash within a year (or sooner). Losses from inflation are minimal in those situations. But for anyone with real savings inflation is a problem that can only be solved by investing the cash and receiving a better return... outpacing the inflation.
How does inflation transfer more money to the government? People seem confused about this too. The answer is also simple: Through taxes on gains. If I own stock in company X and it is worth $100, and 25 years later through inflation the company is valued at $200 and I cash it out, I owe taxes on the $100 difference even though the intrinsic value of my stock has not changed. This also tends to have a lower effect on the less affluent because the less affluent tend to be in a lower tax bracket. Taxes due to inflation wind up being a huge component for the affluent, and near zero if you are poor.
Inflation is the bane of the rich, not of the poor, and always has been.
What people misunderstand the most is the relationship between wages and inflation, particularly when the average worker is losing ground due to wages not keeping up. Wages not keeping up is not really a function of inflation, but more a function of supply and demand. The supply of jobs and the number of people looking for jobs, in various categories. As inflation occurs and wages become insufficient, workers demand raises. This is why we see strikes here and there in different industries all the time.
It is true that inflation makes it easier for employers to allow worker wages to stagnate. It would be hard to argue against that, but employers can only stretch the mechanic so far. The bigger problem for the average worker is that the skill requirements for jobs change and older workers tend to not keep up with the changing environment, becoming marginalized. For example, working a metal cutting tool in the old days required significant labor but little education. In modern times it requires having factory programming skills and enough knowledge to ensure that you do not accidentally destroy a $50,000 piece of machinery or kill yourself.
All this talk about bitcoin somehow magically being a way to work around inflation is just hogwash. There are many things which work around inflation with FAR less volatility and risk than bitcoin... bonds, stocks, and so forth. None of these things are riskless, and many work on the similar principle of having a fairly limited supply (a blue-chip stock, for example), and thus for a stable business tends to be immune from inflation in the long-run (except for taxes later on when you sell, but bitcoin won't save you from taxes either).
The idea that one can simply conjure money out of thin air with no risk and no investment has NEVER worked in the past and won't work for bitcoin either, but I guess there's a siren's song involved here similar to the siren's song that attracts so many people to casino gambling (despite 'gambling' in the stock market being more lucrative than 'gambling' in a casino).
The lack of education prevalent in this age of boundless information just astounds me. People are literally blind to proven facts that they don't happen to agree with.
-Matt
Heh. Talk is cheap. I hear stories like that all the time on financial forums, but rarely is it actually true. Still, at least some of the stories are going to be true... the problem is that most of them are not, and the far larger numbers of people who got cleaned out on the other side of the trade instead don't boast about their losses so...
Hope you paid your taxes when you cashed them out!
-Matt