These guys are actually writing the code you are running, are you making code commits ... I mean who's really the "armchair expert" here?

Just stop being a dick. You are looking worse and worse every time you open your ignorant mouth to trash the developers.

Most chineese outsource their servers for obvious reasons. Its not the service providers location that counts but rather the location of their contractors. Nice try

I don't think it was clear to readers that the reason the red bolded sentence is particularly worrisome for Bitcoin is because those who remain in the decentralized fork have to fear a declining hashrate and 50% attack.

Side chains are a natural feature that will be added to any crypto-coin in the future, thus the design of crypto-coins has to eliminate the 50% attack.

Again I propose doing that by reducing the power of the consensus center, i.e. applying Tim Berner-Lee's Principle of Least Power.

By the way, are there any reliable exchanges for XBT/XAU trading with margin trade etc.. ?

This presumes that Bitcoin has any chance of becoming the global unit-of-account, which I assert is preposterous (any NWO reserve is going to have to be negotiated politically among a power-sharing between nations in a multi-polar world and any non-NWO attempt will need scaling and decentralization Bitcoin can't do).

We are no where near that. We are still trying to unlock huge markets which Bitcoin can't EVER touch (not without radical redesign that is not only implausible but wouldn't be "Bitcoin" any more).

not a client but $21M worth of investors.

And you think the millennial generation with all their swiping won't embrace a micropayment per second in their activity.

Gavin doesn't think out-of-the-box in this case and builds a strawman.

Are they inefficient because the design forces them to be.

it all depends on how well they understand Money.

It has nothing to do with their understanding of money.

Micropayments are the only way certain business models could function. There is a huge economy that doesn't happen without micropayments. We will never remove the Sybil attacks on Tor without micropayments.

The generative essence is that the maximization of the division-of-labor trend requires increasing granularity of transactions.

This is an inexorable trend. For example, 1000s of years ago one had to carry around a slap of Iron to make a payment. This required payments to be coalesced supporting the Transaction Cost Theory of the Firm (which is antithetical to the maximum division-of-labor and its End-to-end Principle implication).

The argument against micropayments was the cognitive cost places a lower bound on the transaction size, but this cognitive decision process can be automated for the user. For example, I join a dating site and agree to pay 1 cent per message I send, thus I only make this cognitive decision once for all micropayments I do and this eliminates the need for a CAPTCHA or some other intrusive means of preventing spam (a form of Sybil attack).

It is precisely because of this cognitive load that non-micropayments can't scale to maximum division-of-labor. How many experts can you reason about to pay $100-$1000 each for some service? But let's say you can automate by agreeing to pay 1 cent per research paper accessed then you can preview unlimited experts without cognitive load on each transaction.

Micropayments monetize the Gift Economy of the Knowledge Age. This is what Reddit and Doggie Coin were all about. Without that monetization, the Gift Economy devolves into corporate sponsorship of those with reputation which all that centralized evil of the Transaction Cost Theory of the Corporation.