Well, percent of GDP spent on light has remained steady for 300 years at .72; that was buried rather far in.

The article also mentioned Jevons’ paradox, which is something I didn't know had a name.

False. They do not all have the same structure as Bitcoin. Many of them are explicitly structured as pyramid schemes (premining, instamining, stealth launches, closed source launches).

While very few have unique selling points over Bitcoin, it is dangerous to assume they are 'at least as useful' as Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was extensively pre-mined.

See also the Coral Castle legends in more recent times.

Would be extremely interesting if this worked on a macro scale. They are floating nuts and bolts with a small desktop device.

I'm also curious about power draw/requirements.

Apparently they are using arrays of Langevin type sandwich transducers to generate the ultrasound, of the type used for industrial cleaning applications (example http://www.ipfonline.com/products/index/langevin_type_sandwi...).

What happens if you have an array 2x2 meters? Or 20x20? Does the wave have to completely encompass the object to act on it, without exception? In that case we may need to revisit the lower frequencies and attempt to move balloons, etc. Some relation to the resonant frequency of the object being targeted may be involved.

Most Bitcoin users don't believe this will happen, for what it's worth. The 'armageddon facedown with the government over Bitcoin' is just another doomsday fantasy popular with those who enjoy doomsday fantasies.

The rational types have already seen it taxed as capital gains in several countries. It's not even a question of if they will fight it anymore. They were never going to.

Definitively solving the problem of "closed on Sunday" would seem to constitute more than a little competition for legacy financial institutions.

Like many technology and finance pundits, he seems to be currently in a love/hate relationship with Bitcoin.

See also Business Insider's recent turnaround and subsequent breathless tabloid-style coverage of cryptocurrency news.

Good point - the early "hockey stick" did in fact end recently with the first ever bearish 10/21 EMA crossover in the BTC/USD 12h timeframe.

And the yields from mining have decreased by orders of magnitude over the last several decades as technology increases have made it more possible, while less efficient, to extract additional known deposits.

Flowers trading food for pollination.

This has actually been done. You can now do protein folding and SETI (and a bunch of GMO research) while mining. Gridcoin is working with the full cooperation of the UC Berkeley BOINC project and is compatible with your choice of dozens of research projects: http://gridcoin.us

That's an awesome idea. I looked into the implementation though... it uses the same software to mine litecoins, and you get a credit when running the BOINC program simultaneously. So I see that as easily abused, where you are running fake processing jobs instead.

Ideally, the BOINC processing would somehow be directly integrating into the mining itself. But again, I don't have any idea how that could actually be done. But it would be nice if that is possible.

But not for ASICs mining bitcoin, unless they have a BOINC implementation that somehow uses sha256 as its core.

Correct.