actually, panning/digging for gold is still popular and common (mostly in Africa) all over the world.  and i'd argue their overhead is cheaper, aka, only dependent on labor, not power.

Muscle Power.   = Antminers  

I don't quite get why you say "there is no excess electricity". Another example (apart from the one I brought up) is excess electricity generated by wind that cannot be delivered for various reasons, mainly lack of demand at the time and/or lack of power line capacity. Electricity cannot be stored very efficiently, so production has to basically match demand minus dissipation.

I'm just arguing that maybe crypto mining can fill the lack of demand once mining hardware is cheap enough to be able to switch it off at times when energy is too expensive. It would provide sort of a guaranteed base demand for electricity that can be decentralized as needed as long as there's a network connection. I used to laugh at this idea, but I changed my mind and now think it's a possible outcome with commoditized cheap asics.

Heh... And he probably didn't even make sure the other guys had backed up their private keys prior to executing the transactions, either.

decent article by Krawisz:

http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/bitcoins-rugged-individualism/

Here's an interesting thought experiment:

Imagine that everybody has visibility of all of their money on a smartphone app.  For simplicity, consider that only dollars and bitcoins exist.  The app has two features:

1.  It displays the market value of each user's money, expressed in whatever currency is currently "dominant," along with the exchange rate between the two currencies.  

2.  There is a slider bar that allows each user to dynamically adjust their personal exposure to anywhere between 0% bitcoins and 100% bitcoins:
                
    0% BTC 100% USD   <-----|||SLIDERBAR|||----------------------------------->   100% BTC 0% USD

Assume there is no fee for trading and no slippage.  If it was this easy for everyone, what would people do?  

Bitcoin adoption is all about slowly coaxing the world to move that imaginary slider bar a little further to the right!
  

Brock Pierce is a traitor:

http://rdd.me/8dzhpxaq

Is he that guy that sits on that foundation who has the sole mandate to promote Bitcoin?

This altcoin of his illustrates a lack of understanding on how Bitcoin works moreover it looks like a conflict of interests considering the foundations goal.

(emphasis mine)

Imaginary?

You might have discovered bitcoins killer app right there.

Yeah, no kidding.