Exchanging in and out of the currency any time you use it pretty much defeats the point of having the currency. If everyone thought this way, it wouldn't exist. (You'd probably be better off if vendors just dealt with the costs of accepting payments in metals.)

I don't know what you think the similarity is. A 3rd party holder of your bitcoins (or of anything) CAN go rogue. (You can also be reasonably confident they won't, i.e. if their profit motive outweighs what they could run off with.) The point with a centralized currency provider is that they're necessarily bound to.

I'm not trading you my gun for gold in a war. (I might if I have 2 guns, but I'd just as easily trade it for bitcoins.)

Can't agree with it. You get paid in backed currency not in metal. If you wanna save/store wealth you can convert it and what's so complicated with it? The overhead is minimal. Easily to solve technically.


Not as easily. Gold doesn't require electricity/pc to operate. So you always have more options with physical gold which makes it simply better.

Nothing's complicated about it. Nothing's complicated about running with lead in your shoes, but it's not gonna prove to be the best way.

OK, if we're in a war zone and electricity goes out, gold works better than bitcoins. Point for gold. Currency of the future imo.

My point was really that neither would be valuable. I'd trade my gun for food or things like that long before gold.

and you saying exchanging it in and out defeats the purpose of currency doesn't make the statement all of a sudden true and it doesn't prove anything other than you can't find logical reason that it can't work that way and is not the best way overall.

My point was gold would be still more valuable. Thx for admitting that.
So to summarize. Gold was better in the past, is better now and will be better in the end.
Bitcoin on the other hand has it's time now but it'll come to the end someday in future because it's not as good . I wish you all bitcoiners to get off the train on time.

My saying it doesn't make it true, indeed.

Cool, in the future when we're all trading gold into currency notes every time we want to buy something (a currency note that magically exists and is universally accepted despite everyone treating it like hot a potato), I'll remember that you knew it all along.

Cool, I'll think of you when your bitcoin dream comes true too. Odds are against you, but even then you have non 0 chance of it happening. Playing EV- sometimes work shortterm. Longterm it's different though.

No gold is not granular enough and it's the reason why banks exist in the first place. When people first started trading in gold, it was extremely inefficient. They had to actually carry the gold around with them, and when they reached the market they had to weight it out precisely.

So in comes the "money changers" who would hold the gold for you and issue you a piece of paper representing an amount of gold owed in lieu of the actual gold. Merchants began to accept these IOU's as payment, hence paper currency was born.

Even though gold is not used as a direct index for the cost of funds, it is still the worldwide unit of currency. The dollar is still a representation of an amount of gold, it's just that removing the "gold standard" just allows local currencies to float against the value of gold rather than being directly tied to it. So all world currencies are actually indirectly underpinned by gold.

It does not matter what you use as a currency, it's thought that the first currency was actually seashells. But the best currencies are ones that are indestructible and finite, and to date the best material is gold. A Bitcoin is also indestructible and finite, but it is better as a currency because it can be divided further than gold and you don't have to carry it around with you. This means you do not need a third party to hold your bitcoins and issue an IOU that represents the stored value.

Seems simple and even trivial but the ramifications are stunning and possibly revolutionary.

I concede, gold is not granular enough but that's why there was a workaround with paper notes backed by gold which worked great.
Obviously it matters what u use as a currency, otherwise ppl wouldn't look for something else than seashells. Like u said it has to be among other things indestructible and finite. Currency backed by gold is exactly like that. It's essentially a gold at the core but improved so there is no problem with granularity.
Bitcoin lacks indestructible part unless you're saying somehow u can't easily delete it or somehow hardware u store it on is indestructible and never fails. It's not the case at all. It can be VERY easily destroyed and that's the problem with it.

stop using nonsense conclusions, there is no such term like "indirectly underpinned" (actually it is a contradiction)

yeah but i'd have to go into a long diatribe about fiat currency and the need to create money out of thin air and it gets too complicated...trying to keep it simple

notice too that there is no need for a third party (bank, money changer, western union, stock broker, etc.) to hold the gold for you and guarantee the transaction vs fraud, and hence no need for a fourth party (government) to police the third party.

What can you tell me about the MPEX exchange?

I would not worry about that as far as a long term investment, because bitcoin will act mainly as a store of value at least until the next halving. If you are investing I would look for very small fluctuations and arbitrages to gain a long term advantage. The halving of the rate of production will let your investment grow periodically. I think this bitcoin will remain primarily a store of value for a long time.

This will change radically if online gambling is legalized. Gambling sites stand to benefit the most in the short term, so if you are bullish on online gambling, it's a good idea to exploit small margins. Buy a little bit at a time and try to catch a low point. And hold on!

IMO mining will almost always be a breakeven proposition, but the miners will end up with the enterprise level machines, be able to charge transaction fees, and will end up being the bank. Mining is a long term investment. It may not pay off at all until more currency is traded than held. In fact I think there will be a long period of time where the value of a BTC will do a random walk around the cost to produce.

Also so far the scams have just been people scamming others. In the future these people will be easy to detect and will go to jail. The system itself is infallable as long as the network stays alive.

Run by a female. her name is Moe or MOEP or something. The vocal members of the bitcoin community believe her to be in porn distribution. Possibly underage stuff, but I have no knowledge of any of that. I have poked around the site over the last few months. When SatoshiDice floated on there I investigated it. Seems like it's a similar bitcoin stock exchange like GLBSE. Wouldn't touch either with a 10 foot pole. The SEC is going to be all over it. Stay away like it's the plague IMO - not because they will steal, but because you don't want to be involved in unlicensed securities in any way.


The scams are a social issue, not technical or bitcoin related. This is clear to most.

Mining is the engine that runs the system. The reward system will determine how much hardware is devoted to it. The current 50 coin reward will soon drop to 25, and eventually to zero once all coins are mined. The transaction fees will then reward the miners.

A hardware race has already begun. The face of mining will constantly change. I don't think anyone can accurately comment on how the mining landscape will look in 5 years.

At this point I feel bitcoin supporters should keep buy mining rigs and keep increasing the hashing power of the network to keep making it harder and harder for one entity to overpower it.

Calculations on hashing power you could buy vs. daily Network rewards can show you what to expect to make vs. what the hardware costs, and from my exploration into this it seems like you could grind out a profit doing it, but not enough to make it worth your while. Each hour roughly 300 new coins are generated or about $3,600 US. Daily that's about $86k. So lets run the numbers:

http://blockchain.info/stats

Difficulty 2,864,140.51
Hash Rate 20,217.56 GH/s
Electricity Consumption 315.39 megawatt hours
Electricity Cost $47,309.09

here's a complete ebay listing for 2.4 GH mining rig for $1700:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/FOUR-3xRadeo...item3a79f84929

do you could buy that and get 2.4/20217 of the $86k per day or about $4/day, and that's before your electricity cost.

If you can find free electricity and free hardware or have a giant botnet then mining may be for you. It's not for me.

I've been reading a ton about bitcoins lately and find them very interesting.

I'm a bit concerned with the computing resources and energy that are required long term to keep the network secure. I've been reading about Proof-of-Stake systems to secure the block chain without using computing power, which looks promising. It doesn't seem like something that can be patched into bitcoins tho, unfortunately. There's an alternate coin that uses POS, PPCoins, but a few people on the bitcoin forums have raised concerns about that particular implementation (not sure if they're warranted though) and its name is terrible (spoken pee pee coins).

Anyway, I'm trying to buy a few bitcoins to play poker with and to have a tiny bit of exposure to the market. I was naive and already got scammed trying to trade on Bitcoinary, only for a few bucks tho. I'm trying to get set up with Dwolla so I can buy btc on MtGox, but that takes a few days. In the meantime, if anyone reputable here wants to sell me a few btc at MtGox price, I can do p2p transfers to a checking account through ING Direct.

great article on economist.com about Bitcoins

Not true eventually they will be mined out and people are way ahead of you here. Requires super computers to mine at a effective rate.

I can trade you if you're still looking for it, PM me.

Such an epic win that this is the first reply to this thread. He may ultimately be correct upon a major technological failure of the system but as of now bitcoin trades around $11.80 each.

My purpose for this post was to link to this extremely well-written article about the 3-year history of bitcoin that originally appeared in Scientific American and additionally this interesting bitcoin side note article from Jon Matonis from the tech section of Forbes about how Iran isn't even allowed to download the bitcoin client because of USA cryptography export laws.

Can't Iranians just download it from a European mirror or torrent?

GLBSE is now closed. The interesting thing here is that no hacking has even been claimed. Did the authorities shut it down?

What ever could have happened to the unlicensed securities retailer?

Throughout the BTC community the question was "when" rather than "if" on this matter.

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume the United States authorities are behind this latest closure. Some in the community believe this to be SEC turning one of the principles in the blatantly illegal operation in return for leniency. At the very least, the shutdown can be characterized as abrupt and curious.

gox and btctalk are both down. that cant be good

It happens, usually briefly. Gox donates hosting for the forum.

Yah thanks. My bigger fail not buying then, was downloading the client a million years ago when bitcoin wasn't even traded, unsuccessfully tried to mine on my celeron CPU and promptly gave up.

Bitcoin is still hard to figure. I mean half my brain says FAIL, and the other half says ZOMG. As pure speculation its a fun thing to follow hoping for a HR.

Traction is forming all the time. Apparently US facing site going to take bitcoins soon. We will see. http://pokerfuse.com/features/in-dep...e-poker-16-10/

Obvious scams and hacks are actually not negative, people steal things with value, and new technologies are often advanced by our "dark side".