In fairness it's pretty good for a low cost enterprise and has the added bonus of being totally predictable. What you're talking about is way more costly and you're at the mercy of the arbiter's decision making process. I assume you're talking about something along the lines of Paypal? Although they're well known for always siding with the buyer. It's really easy to screw over a seller on Paypal from what I've read.

Competition is definitely a good thing but ClearCoin is by the guy who does the Bitcoin Faucet and as such has already earned a lot of trust in the community.

Actual customer protection is expensive. It's going to be interesting as it's a small community now, so reputation can actually be useful. But a more formal reputation system could also come out, and be much less expensive than what is currently on the market. That was supposed to be the point of ebay, with their ratings of people. I guess it was too easy to game the system.

My only point is...
If transaction and regulatory costs are zero...
There is zero cost to manipulating the currency.

If you put aside crypto-technology for a moment...
What's happened is some hackers have "invented money"...
And now they will need a "banking system" on top...
Or their "money" is useless for anything serious.

I understand cults because I was in one for 3 years...
And studied the methodology and propaganda techniques.

Only young people think something "new" ever happens.

If you want a good idea of the future of Bitcoin...
Study 100s of private currencies issued 19th century USA.

Hey, it may go to $10.00 or $50.00...
Before it crashes like pets.com...
And if you like to gamble this is a good one.

Lead designer Gavin Andresen...
Has already been contacted by the CIA...
And has been "invited" to give a complete presentation...
Just search BitCoin Forum on "CIA".

It's the kind of thing where you can make your first $10K...
Like low stakes online poker...
But if you are at the $1 million or $10 million level...
There are much better things to do with your capital.

I like the idea of bitcoin because anyone can open up a shop without using ebay or paypal. You could have a legitimate shop up and running in 24 hours. Unfortunately it could be used for money laundering and for playing poker, gambling. I think I read a post where it may be illegal by Gavin to open up a shop that does not accept only us dollars though.

There are some problems, the blocks are growing about 1 gb a year now. That means in 6 months the casual user is going to have to download 1 gb to use the system. Some say they will solve this by using only blocks headers for light clients?

There have been DOS attacks at MTGOX the largest exchange. Who is doing them. Coin pal was shut down by paypal. Some miners have been hacked. Right now it is not easy to do $/BTC exchanges. Probably easy to do $ to BTC exchanges if you know what I mean. Same headaches online poker has.

Just install a high end AMD graphics card and mine while you are using the computer. Considering the cost is free since you are using the computer anyway.

It is not a cult but lot of people own a lot of BTC and will do anything to keep the price rising. Gavin gave a speech at the CIA since they requested and paid him a fee and he told everyone he was going to do it.

As for customer protection, the bitcoins could go to a middleman where the both the buyer and seller have a lock on it. Then after the goods are received the buyer takes the lock off. It could be built in the client. There would be no reason for the buyer not to release his lock if he received the goods.

A new bitcoin system, would be better if it used little electricity. Destroyed bitcoin not used for 12 months (to keep the blocks small or provide more for mining), got approval, ...

Every transaction must be put in the blocks. You never delete old blocks. If the economy grows in size you are talking 10 gb a year very quickly.

Pretty sure whoever posted this:

this:

and this:

must have been a member of the "cult".

I didn't look carefully, I don't know why someone would bother with all that, but to suggest that since people didn't discuss it that it must be a cult is silly.

The client seems to give you a new address automatically lots of times. There was a big 200K buyer about a week ago and who received a lot of BTC in 1000 BTC chunks. Everytime the snake sent 1000 BTC, the client probably automatically gave him a new address. Not too many people have 1000 BTC. Yes it could have been pump as in stock pump and dump. The buyer probably bought in 1000 BTC chunks to get a better price. the seller was always the same. Supposely someone sent 200k BTC at one time to an address that were in 1000 BTC chunks. The buyer probably just wanted a clean wallet with one entry. But, it does pose another problem asset hiding. You could buy 200K in BTC and no would know. No one could take it in a lawsuit. This all assumes BTC does not crash in 2 weeks.

I'm with you on that. RedManPlus is saying this means you can manipulate the currency easily, I'd say that it just means that using transaction volume to measure the currency is useless so don't do it.

The cult thing ... I looked up the word when he first made the accusation. In a lot of ways it certainly fit but I don't agree with its usage. The problem is that if you're going by the basic dictionary definition then a lot of things could be a cult, which just means that the word is less useful.

There are a lot of "true believers" on the forum there. A lot are "we are unstoppable, government cannot stop us!" coming from 16 year olds in mom's basement. Very few of them have any business sense at all. There are more mature and skeptical people there, and fortunately I think Gavin is one of the biggest ones so that helps.

Measuring transactions is useless for figuring anything out. I had ideas of this taking over for poker or something big and getting huge, but the more I look at it, the harder it will be. Getting $ in and out is pretty damn difficult to the casual user now. It's almost certainly going to end up some niche thing most of the time. There's a small chance the thing takes off huge if gambling takes it. But more likely than not it bubbles up as speculators buy a bunch hoping it takes off, but it eventually fizzles as people lose interest. There are only so many alpaca socks one needs. The benefits disappear quickly if you have to ever convert currency, so it's useful only in a closed-type economy. After that, the users are absolutely horrible at commerce and business, as it seems to attracted exclusively geeks (who are mostly terrible businessmen), so they aren't going to be putting up shops. Or even spending. So it's a real limited market.

Governments will shut down any widespread use pretty easily. Banking laws are a pain in the ass and no one who can actually get through them all will bother with something this small.

On the other hand, it's still small enough the bubble could grow tremendously. Perhaps it growing is enough to get past critical mass and keep things going out rather than a collapse.

Just like they shut down Bitorrent? And trust me, the music/movie companies have spent bilions trying - buying lawmakers, laws, seizing domains, etc.

After all your posts you seem not to understand the concept, or the code/math behind it. Bitcoin can easily be modified to use other ports if required, mask itself in http requests, the blockchain can be hidden and published on Tor if required - there is a mitigation strategy for pretty much anything.

The fact is you cannot un-ring a bell. The math behind providing open-source, decentralized international transfers with no third party involvement, with an assurance of no double-spending is now out of the bag and the benefits to not just gamblers or drug buyers or nerds will become clearer and clearer.

He understands all of that. He didn't say that the government would shut down Bitcoin, just that they'd stop its widespread use.

Finance is a bit different. You can't shut it down completely, but you can segregate it and drive it underground.

If it's just an internal economy between those who can mine enough to get started or sell services or goods to get started, sure. But that's not really happening much.

I think it will have a place as a niche thing, but it will be way too easy to stop from the general public from using. Because they need to get Bitcoins to start. And doing that is already a huge pain in the ass, and as soon as the government decides they want it to be a huger pain in the ass, they can handle that. The only thing they won't be able to stop is in-person transactions with randoms you find off the internet. The expense of that is huge and the benefits are just not there to constantly be doing that.

The problem is to actually do anything, you actually need to get BitCoins. that's super easy to slow down/stop/make very expensive.

You are pretty safe as a seller. You get the coins then you ship the stuff.

Charge-back systems like PP could use BTC just like they use USD if they want. The USD doesn't have any built in fraud prevention either. All that stuff is (and should be) offered by competing third parties.

We agree to disagree then. I doubt much can be done from a government level, except to people stupid enough to run public exchanges in the US (without following kyc, FinCEN, and sanctions rules to the letter)

I'm not saying it will take over the world, but even as a 'niche currency' - it has near global reach, provides efficiencies no other currency can - and i'd expect the market cap/GDP of that economy to be well over 100MM USD.

But hey, I guess I'll keep quoting the .70 guy

Looking to buy 50-200BTC for paypal/mb/neteller. Tried the IRC, but nobody wants to trade with randoms (understandable).

PM if interested, can provide people who vouch for me from 2+2 etc.

The hoops you have to jump through is what is going to keep it from going there. GDP and market cap are two very different animals. GDP is probably <$200k right now. Market cap is high due to speculation, though. $100MM for market cap is probably realistic (need the price to go up to $16M). I'll probably buy lotto-ticket amounts in the near future, money that I won't care if I lose it all. I really like the currency, but it's going to be tough to get over the hump. It either needs critical mass acceptance or it needs to be really easy to move in and out of. Perhaps if it draws enough attention, someone who can follow the law can get a good exchange service going. Hopefully it's not branded as "funding for terrorists and child pornographers", though.

I'm not for/against BTC... just running thought experiments.

When engineers are charged they will be facing 20 year terms...
This will be much more serious than running poker sites...
****ing with a country's Monetary System is MAX serious.

And encryption is already illegal in places like Russia...
The Web Money market there is controlled by Russian mafia...
Your biggest concern would be 2 shots in the head.

Also, let's assume BitCoin reaches a $100 million market cap...
The Pro Forex Manipulators will move in long before that...
With zero costs they will extract more wealth by cheating...
Than the entire amount of "commercial activity" in BitCoin.

Soros manipulated and crushed the British Pound...
But this never even occurred to the BTC designers.

Because BTC will be a publicity-driven Bubble for a while...
People do not realize that, eventually, the BTC exchange market...
Will be comparable to a poker site where collusion is OK.

But then, most fish don't understand why collusion is bad.

Any serious approach to trading BTC = collusion strategies...
The current players like Mt Gox are not Eagle Scouts.

Argument that BTC will be supported in 3rd World is weak...
Everything about BTC is designed to appeal to young Western geeks...
90% of nodes are in the USA + EU.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=https:...ts/bitcoin.kml

I'm waiting for the next crypto-currency to pop up...
There will probably be dozens 1-2 years from now.

The first crypto-currency...
That allows a man to buy a loaf of bread at local bazaar...
Is the one to watch explode...
Survival vs Convenience.

wow..nice formatting.

Sure, you can wait for the next one, which will take the best of bitcoin and include even more encryption/tor by default, other features, etc.

Or you can use bitcoin now.

Engineers getting 20 years ? Haha. No major exchange is in the USA. They are in places where virtual currencies are accepted. You can pay for many things with virtual currencies in Japan and Korea. Yes, the network is mainly US and Euro, but people can easily use VPNs/Proxies. And yes, it may fail.

But, the genius of distributed, anonymous, frictionless transactions not involving a bank or third party will not go away. It's revolutionary. Books may be banned, but nobody is going back to handwriting individual copies of things. If one country bans cars, that does not mean that everyone worldwide goes back to riding horses. You simply cannot un-ring a bell.

Speculating only provides more liquidity, this is a good thing. Collusion attempts will be a sign of success.

Go ahead and stay on the sidelines with all the now-bitter people who have missed a 20-bagger in less than 6 months, and going to miss another likely 5-bagger in the next few months. I'll be back to re-quote your nonsense.

It's got to start somewhere. I can't imagine a better way for a crypto currency to start. In two years, something which shouldn't be valuable at all, and has a number of difficulties in use, actually has value and people are using it.

I think the currency has reached enough of a critical mass that it will find at least a useful niche. It may not maintain it's current value or outcompete any other currency, but I think it is useful for somethings and will carve out it's place.

I think quoting this every .70 it goes up is worthy of some lulz. More and more people are using it everyday (see: Google Trends).

The effort to get these coins has rocketed higher as the network power has grown significantly. A cycle of price rise --> difficulty rise --> price rise is pretty clear. And with expanding external demand, who would blame sellers for holding out for more?

Mt Gox says currently trading at $5 per BC, am I reading that right? It's value has shot up massively.

Bet you felt smart with your Pets.com stock at <insert high price>. What's your exit strategy?

What makes you think difficulty drives price and not the other way around?

This is definitely a speculative bubble. There is plenty of room to go bigger or collapse eventually. The speculation is all built on them being actually useful to a larger number of people. Will that happen?

Reached a high of 4.99 and dropped back to 4.53. It's value has gone up quite a lot. So much is being hoarded away that it's so easy to move the price. There are 6 million BTC in the economy right now, but I'd wager a huge number of them just stay put and aren't being used for anything. Lots of true believers who think they might hit $1M/BTC or something absurd. Those coins might as well not exist. So let's say 2M BTC are actually being used and not hoarded (probably even a high estimate there). If that's the case, then we are looking at a market cap of <$10M. Pretty easy to move it up.

If the hoarders ever get tired of hoarding or want to exit, you are going to see a nasty crash as they all fight to sell first. It might not happen for a while, but once it does, it's going to be a bloodbath. The guy with 370K of them who had a net worth of >$1.5M is going to want buyers. The early adopters who had tons of coins for low cost will want something to show for it. It will be a panic unlike anything ever seen. There's not enough capital in mtgox to support any drastic fall in price.

However, there's a ton of room for it to go up before that day happens. Perhaps the true believers are committed enough to ride this thing all the way to the basement. It wouldn't surprise me if that happened as well.

There's only so many alpaca socks and internet orderable LSD that one needs.

1 bitcoin worth more than gallon of gas

Congrats, this could be the worst analogy in the thread:

1) Pets.com stock had no utility, it did not allow for transaction efficiency vs. existing systems.
2) Pets.com stock could be and was diluted by the IPO and secondary offerings - Underwriter overallotments, etc. Bitcoin cannot be.
3) The potential demand for Pets.com stock was limited to people who owned brokerage accounts in the USA. The potential demand for Bitcoins is anyone on the planet that can get on the internet.

And yes, I actually use them for transactions...hosting space, sports betting, etc.

As for exit strategy, I have sold some along the way to cover initial investment/costs - but I mentioned earlier in the thread, the economy will likely pass 100 Mil USD soon, will not be selling more until then. Even then, a likely tipping point will be a WSJ article that will blow it past 100 Mil.

There was recently an article about Bitcoins in the Hindu, the 2nd largest English language newspaper in India. Exposure to millions of people. Some of them will find it interesting enough to try it out - something that cannot have happened with Pets.com stock. Do you understand the size of this potential market?

So keep on with your mantra of 'bubble, bubble' - really enjoy the posts.

1) Bitcoin has very little usefulness (besides buying Alpaca socks)
2) Bitcoin can be diluted by forking the source code and creating Bitcoin2, Bitcoin3, etc...
3) Yes, because all you need is the internet! I'll give you an experiment. I'll give some people $10,000. Tell them to buy me $5,000 worth of BTC and $5,000 worth of a publicly traded stock. I'll ask them which one was easier to buy. If they choose the stock, I win, if they choose BTC, you win.

I definitely agree this bubble has a long time to go up. Then in about 99% of the time, "POP!". 1% maybe it takes off, though. Hopefully you are getting 100-1 on your gamble.