Yeah, I thought of that problem with checks. But at least it is a felony to give someone a check in bad faith.

You bring up a good point about depositing cash into a bank account... That is how I did it in the past. I am not sure why I totally forgot, but that is definitely the way to go. Thanks. Can't believe I didn't think of that considering that is what I did last time haha

bunch of reasons, this article has a number of plausible explanations: http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/262...e-2012-results

It's nice to see the sophisticated pro/con discussions in this thread. I'm no expert on currency but I've done some informal surfing of bitcoin websites in the last few days. Looks to me like the distribution of bitcoins is definitely widening over the last 6 months.

The two great generators of bitcoin usage may turn out to be gambling and porn. The Satochi dice website seems real popular. Other similar sites are starting. I would think that any simple lottery site is is going to eventually attract a lot of people. There now also some crude webcam pornsites payable with bitcoins cropping up as well. Gambling and porn may not be the most respected businesses but they are always in demand. Of course, the users of those sites tend to want anonymity and bitcoins do that. So I see bitcoin usage growing well for the next six months at least.

The downside of all this is that gambling and porn are two businesses that attract governmental attention. Governments may already be concerned about the usage of bitcoins to fund serious criminal activity. I imagine that a public announcement by the Western governments that they intend to crack down on bitcoin usage would send the market value of the bitcoin downward even if bitcoins are resilient to elimination.

Someone cloned SatoshiDice, called it BTCDice and it has lower fees and it motivated SD to lower fees too. MyriadCoins is similar but you don't have to use your own Bitcoin software since you specify the receiving address.

Porn is slow going it seems, but there are the subreddits r/girlsgonebitcon and r/decrypto and cam4btc.

Government 'doing' something in this case will just lend it legitimacy as a viable thing and also probably spur work on making it even more resilient, secretive and anonymous. The main drawback would be the loss or delay of larger businesses adopting it, but that's just in the country of the particular governments who condemn it. That will make other jurisdictions more attractive for running businesses that use bitcoin. Also it is already true to a small scale that you can't stop businesses from accepting coins indirectly. If you sell giftcards someone will buy them and sell to someone for bitcoins.

I've noticed a few small scale bitcoin exchanges (get-bitcoin.com for example) that just take small processing fees and don't actually hold on to user's bitcoins. What type of start up fees and legal complications could you expect with starting a business like this? Is most of your risk just in holding large amounts of bitcoins to process orders?

Depends on the country. Most of these exchanges are located outside of the US for a reason.

lol'd

Some sites:

btcsportsmatch.com - wager in bitcoins with other 2p2-ers. Action picking up heading into NFL.

abugames.com - large MTG store that store accepts bitcoins.

bitzino.com - working on provably fair casino games in HTML5. Blackjack going now with video poker on the way. Great on mobile.

Blockchain.info/wallet - slick alternative to running the standard bitcoin-qt client locally.

****************** - poker with bitcoins. Be wary of the collusion possibility when not playing HU.

bit-pay.com - merchant services.

bitinstant.com - easy cash-to-bitcoin service available at Wal-Mart, other locations.

I'm hooked. Hope this experiment continues to succeed and grow. Speed and security of large int'l money transfers with bitcoin is unprecedented on an individual level.

Be warned, if you are used to stars or ftp, the sealswithclubs software is horrific. But there aren't a lot of games to multi-table anyway.

Still it's a good start.

+1 on btcsportsmatch/btcsportsbet, been around a long time.

Just broke the $10 mark.

Also, ASICs for bitcoin mining are on the way. Butterfly Labs is taking preorders for the following
$150 usb-powered = 3.5GH/s
$1299 device = 40GH/s
$29999 device = 1TH/s

These will all be very low power draw as well. Game is changing, if they can actually deliver these...

Don't expect those ASICs anytime soon. Going to be a long, long time before they deliver.

Feels like a rally leading up to the December block reward cut, congrats to everyone who has been holding.

If they deliver a single asic by q1 2013 I'll be impressed. Pretty huge leap forward when someone is spending $5M+ and 6-12 mo+ in development on a product that has almost 0 value if btc dies

Closing in on a 1 year high if it hits $12.

This bitcoin savings and trust ponzi is pretty amazing. 7% interest each week... what could go wrong? Seems to be millions in that ponzi + its derivatives.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=94900.0;all

Lol
"If I told you how I can pay 7% a week then I couldn't do it anymore"

Haha, it's true though.