So your phone company will front you bitcoin? Why not just take it from your bitcoin account?

The transfers are almost free. If the early adopters manage to get the economy big enough that it starts to appear stable to the outsider then you could see more traditional merchants add bitcoin payment options. Perhaps some would pass on a part of the saving in order to promote its use (for their own benefit). The illegal part may be too harsh, people may want to use it for things that embarrass them such as porn or supporting an organisation they'd rather not be traceable to.

So you just trust some site to handle all of your transactions and security for you? I think this would necessarily do away with the anonymous nature. If the site doesn't know who you are then they have no reason to allow or disallow a transfer, just the same as a password encrypted file on your local drive. It also by definition removes your direct control of your finances in return for the security expertise of the e-wallet, presumably less a fee.

steelhouse, why do you want money supply growth? Why, or better yet HOW, do you want to link it to silver? I think you're missing key concepts that are differentiating bitcoin from something like e-gold.

If I buy $100 of bitcoins, and this thing say doubles in usage over the next 6 months, how much would I be able to sell my $100 for?

Can somebody send me a pittance on 1KD5XJy1RVrokUWQ4AR7mh5Nw1MZDeekdt ?

After perusing some info about bitcoin I wasn't able to discern whether or not the "number crunching" is itself valuable or for a particular purpose.

Why not use the number crunching two find the next undiscovered prime or some other useful task?

You have to initially fund your bitcoin account somehow. This wouldn't be the phone company fronting it, but an app that automatically trades on a market for you. If you have money in your bitcoin account, it uses that of course.

The anonymous nature is only a feature for a small percentage of the potential users and only a small percentage of the time. Do you go into a store wearing a mask/disguise and buying with cash every time you want to buy something? I know I don't.

Yes, the e-wallet would be a convenience factor. But the client could improve as well. But right now, someone needs to put forth work toward making it easier to use, and profit motive is the best one.

My current understanding is that it's a bit of both. The number crunching has no value outside of the bitcoin system, but the system has been designed to use the output of the number crunching (so now it does have a use).

If they'd wanted to use undiscovered primes they would have to have come up with a totally different system (obviously) and they wouldn't have had as much control on the speed of dispersal. There would also be the possibility that somebody had previously calculated a lot of "undiscovered" primes without publishing them.

As far as I understand it the number crunching done to generate a coin is unique to each miner (or at least each address that will receive the 50 BTC bounty). Each miner is trying to solve the current "problem" in a way that will assign its address with 50 BTC. Other miners are trying to assign their own addresses with the 50 BTC. The network sets the difficulty of the problem based on the amount of computational power of the entire system (estimated based on the actual rate of problem solving?). As far as I understand it this is all to get a good dispersal of bitcoins by basing it on "work" so that their is some burden on candidate bitcoin receivers. For instance, if they distributed them randomly every hour what would stop me registering 5 billion bitcoin addresses to load the dice in my favour. You could argue that favouring those with computational power isn't fair either, but it isn't supposed to be fair so much as just work.

I'm only starting to learn about this so you'll have to judge the above information for yourself.

Ah, okay. You did actually say phone bill. Have you tried Mt Gox or one of the other markets? It's not as easy as it could be/will be but it does appear to be at least straight forward.



I absolutely agree. I would say, though, that I support the anonymous nature without actually having any use for it myself. Although, now that I think of it when I buy poker software such as Holdem Manager I would just as soon not reveal my name and address to them. Same goes for any paid poker service. Of course, I'm not the general public.

The client needs to be way better. Profit seems to be an excellent motive, particularly where UIs are involved.

I'm totally out of the loop on smart phone technology. I was under the impression Apps could put charges on your phone bill (I remember some Smurf game that put a ton on). So you have a "BuyBitCoins" app that just trades it for you, and then you have a different app to transfer.


Sure, the anonymous part is a necessary feature, although it's not something I think most people don't see that as a good thing (and many see it as even a bad thing.... the turrurists/drug dealers are able to use it!)

Pretty much a given that this will be said. It'll be true too. It also seems obvious that governments are going to hate this. The question is whether they can effectively kill it or not.

I seriously can't think of any way they could kill it

The decentralization is enough to keep it from being killed. The real question is if you can thrive with it. Will it ever become semi-mainstream? Governments have two threats from it. The first is just it makes it too easy for crime to happen. The second is it would displace them. They are two separate reasons to keep people from using it. A lot of people will be afraid from associating with it if it's just seen as a tool for criminals. Businesses won't accept it, and it will only be used in transactions where paying a high premium is perfectly acceptable for the benefits of it.

I see it thriving in the first "modern" country that has it's paper money get crushed. It could be huge in somewhere like Zimbabwe, but it's not like they have internet connections or whatever. It needs to be a more modern place, like Greece or Argentina.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if it got any serious competition.

That's the most serious flaw. There is no reason why this couldn't be cloned or improved and you lose the scarcity of it.

It definitely could be improved upon (are 1.0 products ever perfect?), so it seems inevitable that a new one is created at some point.

Market price.