http://www.baltimoremagazine.net/people/2011/07/beautiful-freaks
To be fair, Otakon is a con that used to be older and is now trending down. Most anime cons in America trends much younger; glorified proms for college age kids sometimes.
I think AX is a little older, if just by the price of admission.
Nothing to knock bitcoin, but without government regulation, this kind of currency will run against, well, problems. For those of you unfamiliar, Bitcoin is set out to be a digital currency in which you can use it in lieu of USD, JPY, EUR, or whatever you use. Merchants can get an API to hook into their shopping system. Online bank-type things (think more Paypal than an actual bank) can trade in it just like anything else. There are exchanges (as in, stock market buy-sell orders) for it in which you can put buy and sell bids at various price points.
You get Bitcoin from the thin air at first from donating CPU cycles to the organizers of Bitcoin (BTC herein), and there’s some algorithm that determines how many coins gets dolled out over time. Unlike a total hoax, you can already trade BTC for actual dollars. People have paid in to speculate BTC as well as made some real money from it.
So what’s wrong?
For starters, it is difficult if not extremely so to counterfeit it. It’s not going to be a real issue at this point.
But I think it’s going to be a prime form of money laundering. Right now it isn’t, simply because the volume is so low. If you want to swish out $100,000, you would have to take your time since the volume is at just thousands of dollars a day. If you slap down $10000 at a time, you are going to disrupt the market. But in the future, if BTC is still around, that could be a serious mean of money laundering.
It already is just yet another digital currency that could be stolen via traditional methods: someone hacking your PC can get your BTC “banking” information. To leave out the nitpicky details, let’s just say that some key BTC info is stored in the main BTC client locally, which controls BTC authentication, account storage and send/receive functionality.
The system also have some major bugs, could be horrific if you run into them.
In practice, BTC is more like a “pay-for” cloud computing solution. You trade CPU cycles for speculative money. The CPU cycles goes to encode BTC transaction encryption, which help to run the system and make it more secure. The disclaimer here is that I do this with my home PC, I leave it running when I’m out to crunch cycles at a “mining pool.” It feels all too much like, say, EVE Online, where the potential to profit is alluring, but there are many risks. But if all you’re wagering is a couple KW/h, it’s not much of a gamble.
From the depths of PA forums, we find a cross-mix.
I find this particular one very striking and generally worth your time. Remixed webcomics are common, but few are this funny even to casuals. Unfortunately it bears marks similar to others in requiring understanding the context behind this and that.
My old cheap shared hosting died in a fire, they never got back to me after the first email, so now I’ve moved to a better host. I suppose that is just how it is if you’re a small-fry customer paying $30/yr. But hey, a customer is a customer and I’ve been for like 5 years with made2own. If I’m motivated I will follow up and try to get some data recovered, but it looks unlikely.
This site is now live via Hawk Host. I did a bit of research (webhosting talk forums) and they check out. Service is superior as well. But this is not even 24 hours into the annual contract I paid on. They have a 50% off first year coupon, so I am paying $20 for this year.
Soon, omonomono blog proper will try to get its butt restored. That may be a weekend project, we’ll see.
In the process of moving my domain names, I went back to the MFB guild stuff and realized that the guild is only an orbital satellite with another newly merged guild over at Silvermoon. The co-op is still alive and well but it is still a co-op… A trip down memory lane remembering the old guildies I spent those late weekend hours with. It’s only then that you truly realize that the game has no more power over you, when you think fondly of the memories and of the people you hung out with, but there is barely any desire to return to it.