Wow... Talk about stupidity from Bangladesh's government. One of the countries that could most gain with Bitcoin remittances, says it's ilegal to use it. I wonder if someone within Bangladesh's central bank has a high stake in the remittances businesses.

Reddit is open source - if you have an idea, just fork it and implement it.

OK, FUD patrol checking in.

"Control four chip manufacturers then you could control 90% of [ASIC chip] production". 90% of ADDITIONAL production, maybe. You still would need to produce > 50% of all hashing capacity that already exists. And you need to hope no other chip designs/manufacturers emerge (since SHA2 hashing isn't a terribly difficult task, that requires a leap of faith. Good luck blowing your $400 million on that gamble.

"By controlling two mining pools you could get more than 50% of the network" Mining pools with 50% can censor transaction but they cannot double spend unless they first take that mining capacity offline (to mine a private fork of the blockchain). Do a Google search for

"Downplaying statistically possible double-spending risks" (http://www.ofnumbers.com/2014/08/18/downplaying-statistically-possible-double-spending-risks/) for more on why pools with > 50% are not the same as having your own equipment that exceeds 50% .

"Control one dozen or two dozen mining centers you could get 50%" Again ... that's a $200 million (or more) investment. If the intention is to have just censorship power then maybe that's feasible. Otherwise what is needed for this hashing capacity to be used to double spend is to take it offline and begin mining a private fork. Just like with pools, taking this action would be something noticeable before the damage is done (six confirmations on a much slower fork have passed) seriously lessening the chances of a double spending attack using this method causing serious harm to the big players (who presumable are monitoring the rate of block solving or have hotwallets or other withdrawal limits that woudl protect from such an attack).

Cool story though.

If the public doesn't participate in black markets, then who does?

Then where are my mutha-flippin' hoverboards?!

I think this is good news but it may be better to provide the 100 dollars to each student in a staggered format. Instead of 100 lump sum maybe 2 payments of $50, 1 at the beginning of the semester and 1 at the middle or at the start of next semester. Or 4 payments of $25. This would also protect students from getting hit hard by a large drop in price by dollar cost averaging it for them.

but "The insurance covers losses due to breaches in physical or cyber security and employee theft."

I heard bitcoins give you herpes.