You're incorrect about Betco, I think it is really good about collusion. Did you email the owner about it? He will check the hand histories and it's pretty easy to tell. I know of at least one incident in the past where collusion was occurring, the player affected emailed the admin and the admin was able to seize the colluders accounts with the hand histories as evidence, and compensate the affected player.

Once again, betco is by far the oldest and most trustworthy site, they have had large hackings and have always compensated players 100%. I am fully satisfied with their service, as a customer.

How is this not normal?

Any commodity who's price is not set by utility can have its value dramatically reduced by large holders deciding to sell, or similarly increased by individuals 'hoarding'. Diamonds and De Beers are a perfect example of both of these practices as they would not only hoard but also flood the market of diamonds similar to certain competitors to plummet the price and kill the opposition. And if for some reason the US government decided to empty out Fort Knox tomorrow, the price of gold would also plummet. In a world where the US government couldn't endlessly produce pretend money and call it real, that would have likely already happened. Would you then call gold a ponzi scheme as well?

So for all this "fight the power" mentality, you're perfectly ok with the fact that bitcoin is another of exactly the same thing? It could have been designed differently, but instead the developers chose to make themselves insanely bitrich with no possibility of anyone usurping that power. And then labeled it as "deflationary" to give the 2nd 3rd and 4th rungs ammo to argue for it with.

Have you been to the board lately? It's mostly SELL SELL SELL now over there.

Also I don't think anyone has said there is no downside to buying bitcoins. The second you buy bitcoins you lose all the dollars and only have bitcoins. So the worst case scenario happens for sure right when you buy, good bye dollars. I frankly don't miss mine.

He's saying it follows the same laws of supply and demand as any other free thing, not the same as the magically appearing dollars.

Except the market could be "magically" flooded with bitcoins whenever someone with a lot of them so chooses. It is not different at all. Except that instead of putting faith in government, you're putting faith in the incognito designer who hasn't made an appearance in 2 years. I thought bitcoin was supposed to get away from an entity controlling the money supply, but it epically fails at that. And it is patently obvious to anyone who goes a little more in-depth than the wiki.

the market could be magically flooded with gold if the USgov or another central bank decided to sell all of theirs.
this would cause the gold price short term to crash hard
does this make gold a scam or ponzi?

Okay "magic" isn't so well defined. In both Bitcoin and the dollar there is a procedure for getting new units. The differences that make Bitcoin's rule better imo are:

No reference to anyone, no one is preferred.
Strictly limited and known total number of units.

Yes, some people have more power to flood the market. Whenever they do this they relinquish their power in proportion to their effect. This is not true of the FED. Early bitcoiners have only a finite influence and they have incentive to conserve it. On top of that they happen to be pretty much exclusively people who have high expectations for bitcoin and want it to work well.

does this make bitcoin some kind of better alternative to gold or cash as its proponents try to argue?

Even so:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_...ion_Depository

The United States Bullion Depository holds 4,577 metric tons (5046 tons) of gold bullion (147.2 million oz. troy). This is roughly 2.5% of all the gold ever refined throughout human history. Even so, the depository is second in the United States to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's underground vault in Manhattan, which holds 7,000 metric tons (7716 tons) of gold bullion (225.1 million oz. troy), some of it in trust for foreign nations, central banks and official international organizations.



So we're looking at about 7%, whereas Satoshi himself and maybe 1-3 others own about 2 million of the 7 million BTC minted, or 29%.

This is totally untrue. Since bitcoin is deflationary and has a completely fixed pool of coins, the power wielded by Satoshi is insurmountable. No amount of BTC can ever be mined past 21 million. Satoshi will *always* own an incredibly sizable portion of that amount. There will never be enough volume of trading to extinguish it. If it were to get popular enough, he could support his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren with it without batting an eyelash. *25k* was enough to destroy the market and he owns potentially 2 million or more.

Explain to us again why you think you can have a say over what another individual can do with the value that they've produced?

This is just silly. Almost twice that was sold today and the price went up. 25kBTC never destroyed anything.

Yes because gold is still victim to occasional supply shocks and cash can be inflated away, plus Bitcoin has lots of practical advantages like sending any amount anywhere instantly practically free

I'm curious about this.

Did they just give themselves a bunch of bitcoins?

I have no idea how this works, but seems like a terrible idea to have a currency with no backing where the creators gave themselves a large portion of the supply and are hoarding.

I know little about economics, but seems to me their hoarding would continuously inflate price until they put those units back into the market.

Its still too many steps on too many shady looking websites to get fish to buy/play. Maybe if site operators had a way to automatically set you up a bitcoin wallet, charge a payment method, give you bitcoins, and guarantee the value to stay in a range for a time period. For cashing out, maybe sites could pool together like a stock exchange, and instantly convert bitcoins to cash for people. Every step required to be done by a fish eliminates a large percentage of them.

Broham, trade volume is not the same as a 25k sell off. Please have some minimal idea of how a market exchange works before commenting.

The system is designed to award 300 BTC an hour on average. Back when BitCoin first started, only 2-4 people were mining through the first 1.6 million coins. Perhaps less than 10 through the next 1-1.5 million. Now 50-60k people fight for the same 300 BTC an hour. Soon, BTC will drop to 150 an hour, and then eventually to near 0. Because like it's totally deflationary, lol.

Why do you care so much what people do with their money? Seriously, you seem really concerned about warning people about a potential scam. You realize there are other scams out there, lets see hmmmm can you think of one? It's called full tilt...why aren't you off posting in threads warning people to not keep their money on full tilt if you're so good at predicting what's gonna be a scam?

Impartial observers, ignore his points. Bitcoin had to be that way to get it started. It is a perpetual motion machine in the form of a currency, once you get it started, but getting it started is the hardddddddesttttttttttt partttttttttttttt.

What are those things?

Basically bit coins are created by having your computer solve certain complex problems. Through time these problems became more complex and the number of people trying to solve them increased exponentially. So the early adopters did not simply give themselves coins, but were able to generate many more coins than can be feasibly generated by an individual or small group today. To date around 7 million bitcoins have been created. There is a strictly finite amount that can be created. Their total amount will never exceed 21 million.

It seems like a reasonable way to allocate the coins to me. If I tried to start an electronic currency tomorrow and told you to run this program that will use all your computer's processing power available 24/7 to generate some of my currency, would you do it? Of course not, nobody would. Now that the currency is actually catching on though, everybody wants a piece of it.

i dont think the current system is terrible, but i still think i gradual leveling off followed by a fixed steady increase of 2-3% per year would have been better than capping at 21mil. over time the early adopter advantage would gradually fade out

It seems like a really fascinating issue. I am not even close to coming to an opinion on it. Here are the first few things that come to mind.

pro deflation: One thing I think the current finite number of bitcoins has going for it is that it has likely helped with the popularity of bitcoins which in turn naturally furthers its legitimacy which is where 99% of the fight is for any new currency.

con inflation: I think an argument against an inflationary system would be that, as in any endeavor, 1% of people will end up with 90% of all newly generated bitcoins. That's especially true with how the coins are generated. You get rid of the early adopter edge only to replace it with a perpetual edge for those who have the most access to supercomputers / servers farms / distributed computing.

pro deflation: I also don't see how enormous deflation is possible with bitcoins. Bit coins will always be an alternative currency for the foreseeable future. I suspect most vendors would simply stop accepting bitcoins rather than continuing to change their prices if bitcoin deflation became a huge issue. And if that started happening I imagine it'd stop people hoarding in no time. This is even more true since those with any amount worth hoarding have the biggest incentive to keep the economy healthy.

Hmmmm, that looks slightly biased towards favoring a deflationary system I suppose. But I still don't have an opinion, lots more reading needed before that.

Even if it stays alternative it could be 10x bigger and still very small.

What is the easiest way to but BTC right now?

Placing/accepting orders on the markets is annoying.

whats annoying about it? it takes 1 second to buy bitcoins once u have money on the exchange. sign up for dwolla then deposit on mt gox and buy if u want the cheapest way to get bitcoins.