Yeah but in practice no browser does this. There is no system call on Linux or Windows to push data as part of the SYN packet. You would have to craft TCP/IP packets and their headers with a raw socket...
Linux does support this for "TCP Fast Open" - the system call used is sendto() or sendmsg() with the MSG_FASTOPEN flag set, in place of the usual connect().
Your suggestion is not equivalent. It is not realistic to ask the user to memorize the x.x.x.x IP address. The point of mrb's solution is that it fully takes care of problem of "typing <domainname> in the address bar and getting the content as quickly as possible without having to memorize IP addresses".
"converting between bitcoin and fiat currency, on either end"
Perhaps you missed that part where the grand-parent explained you don't even need to convert bitcoins to dollars as merchants begin to accept them (DELL, Dish Network, etc). This is true at the other end too: you can just sell something for bitcoins - no need to use an exchange service.
Well numbers prove you wrong. A year ago 1 bitcoin was worth $125 and is now worth $480. A year ago 1 ARS was worth $0.17 but is now worth $0.12. One currency appreciated, the other lost value. Clearly an Argentinian would have been better off putting an investment in Bitcoin than in the Argentine peso.
Bitcoin certainly is volatile (down from $1000+), but on the long term, if you hold it for at LEAST 1 year, it seems to at least keep value, if not gain value.
I don't know if "10 years" falls in your definition of "next few years".
For a viable rogue CA attack, you need a chosen-prefix attack. Current best research (https://marc-stevens.nl/research/papers/EC13-S.pdf) shows it should take 2^77.1 SHA-1 compression calls to do a chosen-prefix attack. Say this is improved to 2^65 within the next 10 years. Right now a good GPU (AMD R9 290) can do 3 billion SHA-1 compression calls per second. Say Moore's Law continues for the next 10 years and that 10 years from now a GPU can do 20 billion SHA-1 per second. So 10 year from now, 100 high-end GPUs should be able to produce a rogue CA with colliding SHA-1 signature in 7 month of compute time.
Change one little assumption and assume the best attack ends up being 2^60 instead of 2^65. In this case, a viable attack could certainly be carried out in the next 3-4 years.
You can't cross your fingers and hopes such an attack will not be discovered. The time to abandon SHA-1 is now.
Barely 0.01% of the world population uses Bitcoin and we already see a technology on the market that is expected to significantly improve security, and this was the result of 1+ year of engineering effort from teams of engineers: hardware wallets like http://www.bitcointrezor.com So security isn't great overall right now, but clearly it is improving way ahead of time with respect to a potential mainstream adoption of Bitcoin.
Does anybody really use live wallpaper? They waste battery. On the other hand, you are rarely at the home screen, most often in an app where the wallpaper is in the background.
