[Filligree]

Independent. There are, oh, I think I once saw a lost of about fifteen major known causes of ageing.

Some are worse than others; this is one of the really serious ones, but not #1. Others of note are... - Intracellular debris - Intercellular debris - Gradual macroscopic degeneration from incomplete healing/scarring - Progressive DNA damage, with any number of consequences (e.g. cancer) - Asymptotic loss of some brain functions (e.g. learning)

I could go on. For evolutionary reasons all of these hit at roughly the same time, which means uploading remains the most promising approach for completely eliminating ageing.

Well, almost completely. Upload someone, and you eliminate degeneration below the firmware/software layer, but you still need to cope with a brain that didn't evolve to last for centuries.

[kbenson]

uploading remains the most promising approach for completely eliminating ageing

If so, in the future the equivalent of CryptoLocker will be a terrorist weapon that takes hostages.

[hmsimha]

I also see a strong future for bitcoin in this scenario. Virtual minds are going to have a hard time paying for things with cash. They'll probably want some form of currency to pay for their Amazon EC2 instances to offload various components of their sentience, essentially slowing down their perception of the passage of time so they can get more accomplished faster.

[Filligree]

Right.

Because there's no way, today, to pay for an EC2 instance without involving physical cash.