Yeah, my 'angle' turned out to be stupid. I was thinking he was acting as frontman for a guy who made an actual escrowed bet vs pirate himself. I thought maybe that guy wanted to be rid of the winnings since they were 'taken' directly from victims. But yeah, it was dumb. It was just that the original amount and the timing matched up pretty good.

Because those systems aren't loaded up with the horse power (i.e. power video cards) required for mining.

I am a bitcoin expert. I've been in the game for a hot NY minute now. I can answer all bitcoin questions.

I'll start first off by saying not to get too caught up in mining - there may be +EV strategies but the technology is evolving fast and there are many really dedicated miners and more and more hashing power coming online every day.

Bitcoin is a very good solution to online poker. No organization can touch your money, as they have so many times for so many dumb reasons.

If you're an expert please just give us your opinion on where you see bitcoins going. The new opportunities, integration with old industries, the price action, etc.

What do you mean by expert? Technical expert? or trading? something else?

Expert as in studied Bitcoin since the beginning. I understand all aspects of the system, including mining, the growing distributed database, the public-private key system at the heart of bitcoin, and I can understand how organizations may try and flaw the system.

I understand the economy. Silk Road, the drug site, likely accounts for 25-50% of all bitcoin-to-dollar transactions on the exchanges. Luckily many other bitcoin sites started doing business to dilute that. It is bad for business to have your main attraction to the currency be drugs.

The 5-year outlook for bitcoin is polarized. they will either be very valuable 5 years from now or the entire system has failed or was corrupted in some way and they are zero. I don't think it is easy to put an accurate percentage on what chance each has or how high the upper bound of the price is.

But it's safe to say the price is extremely polarized 5 years from now.

If the world adopts this, many, many things start to change in this world. Wikileaks no longer has a banking blockade. Poker players get to play without government interference. It's possible world wide online poker, and world wide insta-commerce will develop. Seems like a longshot, but possible with this new amazing technology.

I don't think the present system can handle that much more growth or volume.

There is a new scam circulating. The guy running butterfly labs by might in violation of the law and a felon.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110805.0

Blockchain size 2 gb.
http://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size

Wow, 2gb, that's like a Hi-def movie right?

And that's only required for running 100% independently, there are already 0 trust solutions that don't need that.

Also, wow, people using a money for a scam again. Next they'll be telling lies using English.

Anyway, steeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelhoussssssssssssssse

Based on what?

The 2GB blockchain size is certainly alarming, in that every transaction ever must be contained within it, so it will only grow. But every user of bitcoin doesn't need updated access to the blockchain.

Imagine a large trusted organization (don't say the B-word just yet) that does have the computing power to handle the blockchain in 10 years. It would likely sell access to customers for a small fee. Ok sort of like a bank.

There are many solutions to the problems that will arise out of Bitcoin. Many dedicated individuals are constantly working on the technical aspects.

Also humans scamming using bitcoin is just humans scamming. The currency used is irrelevant IMO.

Butterfly Labs is the largest FPGA manufacturer and has taken in massive pre-orders for ASIC mining. The scam was lottery ticket scam ripping off millions from people.

"They are working on it", is not a solution. If traffic increases 100X. The block chain will increase 1 TB a year. If you start relying on farms it becomes centralized. The FBI could take control of the development team and it would be over, if they have not done so already.

Traffic won't/can't increase 100x if this problem is real. In reality as has just been explained, there are easy solutions.

You know how wikipedia is big? But you don't need it all at once? So you get little pieces when you need them? And you don't think about it? And it isn't a problem? It's like that.

The dev team is a group of volunteers from around the world, whose numbers are constantly increasing. the FBI cannot "take control" of a massively distributed project - in fact, that's the point of it. Can they "take control" of bittorrent? they sure as **** tried very hard but cannot. ************ still exists and thrives.

Relying on farms making hashing power centralized is not accurate either. Take a look at this graph of the network hashing power:

http://blockchain.info/pools

If the FBI took control of lets say Slush and Deepbit, then the miners connecting to those pools would almost instantly disconnect and choose another pooling service. The point is, the individual miners are smart and savvy.

Mining in general makes little sense to me. IMO why waste tons of GPU cycles? instead why not have miners be charged with holding the ever-growing distributed database? i.e work that needs to be done to maintain the network, and recieve a network reward for keeping it up to date and serving it to other clients.

As the blockchain explodes in size, I expect most users not to have a bitcoin wallet with the entire blockchain on their personal computers. Instead we will see trusted services come online that will operate enterprise level machines charged solely with holding the blockchain and processing customer transactions. An individual will choose which service to trust with their coins much like how they choose a bank. Interest will be offered, some will turn out to be scams, some will be legit and last a long time.

There is no value in serving a few gb, thousands of people are already doing it for free, maybe later having the full chain will be rare enough to pay a small subscription fee for, but I doubt even that. People have been giving away gb or esoteric porn for years for free and for no reason.

I agree that not everyone will keep the full chain in the future, we can be pretty sure of that since not everyone who actively uses bitcoin keeps the chain now. MtGox->Seals->instawallet->bitzino->Seals whatever. If you want your own private keys and no chain there is blockchain.info and electrum etc.

There is no way to let anyone in the world (without even IDing them let alone background checking) write to an important financial ledger without making it provably costly to do so (and a waste to try to do it fraudulently without enormous power backing the attempt). The mining power is an extremely important part of bitcoin.

If you haven't, check out bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Is there anything like Bitcoin but in its infancy but showing promise?

Probably not what you are looking for but... Bitcoin is in it's infancy and is exactly like Bitcoin.

Big Sept announcement = Bitcoin Foundation. Looks promising, and I think it addresses a great need in the community. Check out bitcoinfoundation.org for more info.

What's the best sports betting site for bitcoin right now?

Have you tried this one?

http://btcsportsmatch.com/

Not much action though

Action at site is deceptively high compared to appearances (tho still v low compared to "real" books). Matched bets clear immediately and often are the highest amts booked. Never had a problem getting booked on most events. I see a few ppl booking 100+ btc on popular games.

Reaction to SEC?

I have bet / won / withdrew [and of course bet / lost / re-deposited] with both anonibet and btcsportsbet, which looks very similar to btcsportsmatch, which someone told me that both sites were run by someone on 2+2 and in the poker community but I have not verified this.

calling it right now. bitcoin or something like it will be by far the most popular currency in 20 years. the fact that its free from government manipulation alone almost guarentees this

If it was that big a threat, governments would easily destroy it. It would only cost a few million dollars to destroy it now by overtaking the network.

And outlawing its use will greatly hinder adoption. If you can't use it at any real business it doesn't matter how great of an idea it is.