it's heroes like Carmen Segarra that make me want to buy Bitcoin like hell.

that's true when you cherry pick.

i can do that too; look at the 5 yr chart

Ok, go back 3y then

Obviously Bitcoin has more potential than Gold and performed better last few years but Bitcoin is more risky and Gold can benefit of the upcoming fall of the USD and western financial system too so it's a great asset to have for us who know what is coming

When you said Gold is getting smacked and Bitcoin is up it is indeed ery relative to the time frame And you know that cypherdoc (cool name BTW)

In my mind it's most likely that distributed crypto-currencies will benefit from a lose of confidence in fiat systems much more than gold.  The simple reason for this is that they are new and starting from a lower position relative to gold and silver.

I see gold, and to a larger degree, silver, as being something to have should a loss of confidence in fiat systems result in war, famine, totalitarianism, etc.  Such outcomes are not unusual in times of economic collapse and I don't think that any country is immune from them.  It would be much easier for authoritarians to limit realistic normal use of something like Bitcoin which requires a reasonably well-working and free global internet and in times of strife I find it almost inconceivable that such a thing would go unchallenged.  It would still be worth having some private keys with assigned value, but mostly to hold on to for better times and/or to use in operations which are already quite risky anyway.

Took four words and a symbol to total fail:

  "Bash – the Unix shell – came out ..."

If anything is 'the unix shell' it is bourne shell.  I've had to devise systems occasionally which allow some user input to a shell or other program but it is rare and I aggressively limited the input.  In fairness, however, it would be possible for a regex engine (which does the discrimination)  to harbor some hidden bug as well, but relatively unlikely;  many of these ancient systems are quite small and simple and have been extensively analyzed over the past decades.  The changes are small so a lot of eyes will be looking at the deltas.

IMHO, the best way to achieve security is to build on very simple solutions and try to make one's own system very limited.  Even more critically, don't be lazy when it comes to installation (esp, which user executes which operations.)

All this makes me want to weep:

    In her ruling on Wednesday, Abrams also rejected a move by Stengle for greater disclosure by the judge about her husband's relationship with Goldman Sachs. Abrams disclosed on April 3 that she had just learned that her husband, Greg Andres, a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell, was representing Goldman in an advisory capacity.
    Stengle said at the time she would not seek Abrams' recusal, the judge said, and went ahead the next day with scheduled oral arguments on the defendants' bid to dismiss the case.
    But on April 11, Stengle made a written request for a "more complete disclosure" of Andres' relationship with Goldman, and Abrams' own working relationship with another defense lawyer.
    Abrams said that was too late, given that Segarra by then would have had a chance to "sample the temper of the court" and perhaps anticipate she would lose unless Abrams recused herself. "The timing of plaintiff's requests suggests that she is engaging in precisely the type of 'judge-shopping' the 2nd Circuit has cautioned against," Abrams wrote, referring to the federal appeals court in New York. "Such an attempt to engage in judicial game-playing strikes at the core of our legal system."

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-09-26/how-goldman-controls-new-york-fed-475-hours-secret-goldman-sachs-tapes-explain

I'm satisfied that they can fix infinite loops by paying per cycle.

What's more concerning is that nobody has bothered to do many actual use case evaluations and cost/benefit analysis.

Etherum is supposed to be, fundamentally, a blockchain-based computer.

Because it's a global blockchain, the cycle times need to be somewhere on the order of minutes to ensure synchronization.

Cycle times in the minutes means a clock frequency in the millihertz range.

The processor in your smartphone operates in the gigahertz range.

That's not quite a fair comparison - each tick of the Ethereum computer can do more useful work than a single tick in an transitional CPU. How much more work? Maybe about a million times more work.

This means Ethereum is a computer with an effective clock speed in the kilohertz range. (The Intel 8086 processor released in 1976 had a minimum 5 megahertz clock speed)

Sure, it's Turing-complete, but the kinds of applications you're going to run on a computer with kilohertz-scale cycle times and access latencies measured in minutes are going to resemble the kind of programs that used to be written on punch cards more than they'll resemble Windows 8.

Oh, and how about the cost?

Let's assume there really are applications that are appropriate for the Ethereum computer. Not only are there applications, but the market demand for these applications is great enough that the transaction fees will pay for the operation of the Ethereum network (no network can pay for itself via currency printing for ever, after all).

Computations performed on the CPU in your PC only need to involve the transistors in a single chip, and are generally only performed once.

Computations performed on Ethereum need to be duplicated by CPUs all over the world and broadcast all over the globe.

Running your applications on Ethereum (absent any currency-printing subsidy) is going to be millions of times more expensive than running it on a local CPU.

Certainly there will be some applications that absolutely require what Ethereum does and will be willing to pay six orders of magnitude more than other alternatives in order to get it, but will there be enough of those applications to pay for the operation of the Ethereum network?

interesting theory.  could be.  we'll see what happens Monday.  the pick up in volatility would suggest otherwise.

either way, bad for gold and silver.  i still think Bitcoin disconnects from the pm's and heads back up from here.