bitcoin makers know this, they just want someone, somewhere to believe the superficial claims and honour the currency, then they can effortlessly cheat and live rich.

There is a sucker born every second.

Flash is using some of the card's resources.

I think the idea is that anyone could probably start up their own processing centre, since it should still be distributed, but would need large amounts of bandwidth and cpu/gpu time to do the hard work.

Micro-payments.

I still can't get Bitcoin built. I've given up on resolving the Wxwidgets dependencies for now and am just trying to build the daemon, bitcoind. However, it's looking for some openssl file that isn't installed by Fedora's packages and also isn't installed by openssl's Makefile (I tried installing from source). #bitcoin told me to edit the Makefile to point to openssl's include directory directly, which seems ridiculous... Why wouldn't it be installed? Sigh... Seems very shifty. All the more reason to not trust the binaries.

Now it's complaining about not finding -lboost_thread-mt. It's right there in /usr/lib: /usr/lib/libboost_thread-mt.so! I think they're trying to statically link... In Linux.

I just downloaded and started bitcoin on my server. Works fine.

append: Just for the heck of it I've installed cpuminer and one of the gpu miners, and setup all three of my quadcores to work on bitcoin. I've only got about 34Mhash/s though. Not a whole heck of a lot.

Could you then explain why things cost nearly 10 times what they did when I was a kid? I remember buying a bowl of chili in a restaurant for 15 cents, Snicker bars for a nickel, and licorice whips etc. for a penny. The only reason I can think of is that the governments counterfeitedprinted 10 times as much money, actually more since the population has risen. The politicians ultimately use this funny money to buy votes.

[EDIT]

I also remember when they started making counterfeit silver coins (dimes and quarters) by using a copper layer in the center circa 1964. Our Weekly Readers (kid newspaper) explained how this "saved precious metals" but I was doubtful about it even then. In 1986 I was shown how US cents aren't solid copper alloy anymore either. That's the only way to allow this funny money to be tied to a fixed resource.

Canadian Pennies haven't been pure copper since about 97 or so. After that they started copper plating zinc, then moved on to steel sandwiched between copper plated nickle. Theres less than 1% copper in our pennies these days.

Most of the silver coins are also made out of steel these days instead of nickle (they were all made out of nickle for as long as I can remember, even the dime, quarter and obviously nickle).

Actually the coins meant for daily circulation were never made of the pure metal, they'd wear out way too quickly. You could probably bend them with your fingers. OTOH, it'd be a fun way to troll a politician at a rally, if he promises to fix the economy, ask him when they'll "make the coins right again". Of course you'd quickly be removed from the scene.

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Canadian dimes and quarters were pure silver up until 1967. Then in 1968 they were only partially silver and then nickle after that. I used to look for silver dimes and quarters 1967 or earlier and sell them for quite a bit when the price of silver was really high. You could make quite a bit selling these to people who then melted them down. Probably not as many of them around from that era any more due to all that got melted down. That's why the Nickle was always larger than the dime, yet worth less, because the dime used to be pure silver.

Edit: Here's a history of Canadian silver coins (about 80% silver up until 1967)

Canadian Silver Coins 1858-1968

I've got the bitcoin client running now. After letting it sit for quite some time, it has downloaded 107,000 blocks. According to this site the current total is 118287 blocks. So apparently I've almost downloaded enough blocks to actually start using it.

The thing is, relatively recently there were far few blocks: "As of October 30th 2009, there are about 26000 blocks." If it already takes ages to download all this junk, and it's going to grow much bigger, then this system is really going to be pain to use.

(while typing this, my download has stalled somewhat. It's still at roughly 107k.)