Bitcoin is on the CIA radar.

Gavin Anderson to give presentation to the CIA on bitcoins in June: http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=6652.0

a+

If gold owners panic and the price drops to whatever it's industrial sure is there is pretty much nothing there anymore either...

well gold has something of a longer track record in holding value

also it's a rock, it isnt vulnerable to bugs in computer code or crypto algorithms that most of its users dont understand.

might already have been said but for it to become big don't people need a significant incentive to learning two prices/dealing with two currencies?


ideally you want it to become check price in bitcoin -> pay in bitcoin rather than check price in bitcoin -> mentally convert to $ -> pay in bitcoin, coz in the second situation only people that have a big reason to use bitcoins will (anonimity, fancyness, ...) right? how is it ever going to get used by more people than the technology lovers/anarchists/criminals? how is it going to get out of that niche?

i guess that incentive is going to be there if government money goes into crisis (like i imagine most people in zimbabwe know the price of stuff in both zimbabwe $ and us$ or whatever they use there), but is there any other way for it to really take off? can't think of one atm

similar things were said about linux 12 years ago. it was called a hacker's operating system with no real legitimate uses and was hard to use.

i guess it mostly became mainstream (to the extent that it is) because some of that changed and some of that just didnt matter to the ppl who decided to use it - and due to a lot of corporate sponsorship (mostly ibm)

I would imagine that in the beginning sites with a lot of products will just grab an exchange rate from an external source and price items based on their dollar/euro price, possibly less a % for credit card fees and fraud. It'll be a fair bit down the road before things are actually priced in BTC, if ever.

I've already made something that converts prices, even accounts for fees of doing so. If you say "I want $100", I'll tell you instantly how many BTC to send me to get that much. I can even automated it to sell Bitcoins on the exchange immediately and get that money. I eat a .65% transaction fee in the process, oh noes.

Very nice. Have the exchanges released APIs or are you just operating their html forms?

Bitcoin is still too volatile at the moment though. Have you put in a "not less than $x/BTC" option?

mtgox has an API.

If I had enough funds sitting on mtgox, I could trade instantly, although I dont have anything set up for finding unconfirmed transactions, or communicating with bitcoin clients. I have a shared hosting, so I can't put the bitcoin client on it.

The market moves fast and I suppose you could get burned by quoting someone a price, then the market moves. Someone could free roll you by offering to buy at a price, seeing if it goes up, then buying then, or something like that. Probably want to build in a decent exchange fee to ensure you dont get screwed.

It wasn't anything official, just a proof of concept. I'm more concerned about legal issues to pursue it any further right now, but the code is super easy and I'm sure anyone who cares could do the same thing really easily.

I just scan mtgox to see what asks and bids are available. I can figure out any of the following:

I have $X, how much bitcoins can I buy.
I want $X, how many bitcoins do I have to sell?
I have X BTC, how many dollars do I get?
I want X BTC, how many dollars do I need?

My idea was to make arrangements with websites. They could use some kind of widget or API from me to ask for $X. I then convert to how much BTC I require for that. I can make the trade on mtgox after I receive the coins, make an ACH payment to the merchant, and all is well. No different than using a credit card. Not sure how many merchants would go for that.

http://mullvad.net/en/subscription_management.php

Click on "Bitcoin" see the bitcoin price.

Some things make a lot of sense to sell for bitcoins.

I was talking about a site with a lot of items rather than one small value item, but even still at the moment that price is based directly on the dollar value. What kaby was referring to would require much more stability in the value of BTC to the point where people charge X BTC for similar reasons that they're charging Y dollars now. Exchange rates would come into it, but other factors would come in to it too (in the same way that a site charging $9.99 isn't doing it because that's €7 although the $ to € exchange rate may be one factor among many).

Sorry if these are dumb questions but I have an office with about 15 computers and the utilities are free (part of my rent). Does it make sense to mine or whatever it is called during off hours, weekends,etc? I understand the electricity use may cause my rent to go up when my lease is up - but is this a good way to earn when no one is working? Does it matter that the whole office is on a very slow network (DSL) ?

This whole thing kind of confuses me and boggles my mind at the same time.

Yes, it makes sense as there's almost no downside (apart from management time by you) but CPU mining is almost useless so if they don't have reasonable GPUs then the output will be very low.

If you mine using the CPU only you won't get a lot. You're best approach would be to join a mining pool and get a few bitcents per day per computer. Given you're not paying for electricity it's free money. Someone a while back posted on the bitcoin forums a windows screensaver that mined when it was on. That sounds useful for you.

Figure out what kind of video cards you have. If you have anything decent, you should do OK. I have a 4 year old laptop and can get 5-10 bitcents per night mining.

Any chance bitcoin could be ruled an "unregistered security" by the SEC?

Possibly, but it would not matter. The largest exchange is outside the US. There are other exchanges as well outside of the US.

As you saw when Goldman Sachs wanted to distribute part of their investment in (non registered obv) shares of facebook - and the SEC said no - they did it in London.

The fact is the only classification so far for something like this is FinCen 'stored value' items, which mean US dealers would need to register as a money exchange service if transferring > $1000/day to a single US person. Nobody is going to bother, let the exchanges run from outside the US, much safer.

Is there any chance of a bubble being created and bursting because of bitcoins volatility?

I've heard of a few US dealers either changing policy or leaving the US due to FinCen.

Obviously it's related to the dollar price. Has there ever been anything sold where the price in different currencies was inversely related or unrelated? Seems silly.

But afaik they've never increased their Bitcoin price even when the value drops.

bitcoinsextoys.com changes it's price second by second. They have like 150 items. There are other sites like this.

I think so, the market for actually spending bitcions at this point is limited, so buyers and miners are pretty much all just speculating that they will be able to use them for something other selling to a 'greater fool'

however a previous poster's arguments about the usefulness of bitcoin in gambling, porn, and black markets are compelling. Currently, there are already many underground markets online which trade in a variety of alternative currencies. Many still use 'real' gold as backing - e-gold, pecunix, and others.

of course if bitcoins become popular enough I suppose you won't need to be able to spend them, they will serve a function that gold serves in todays fiat currency world - an alternative store of wealth which has value only because it IS an alternative store of wealth

The speculation that is going on helps solve a problem.

For example, It doesn't make much sense to build a nice Bitcoin poker room unless there are valuable coins for players to use in it, but the coins aren't valuable until there is something to do with them.Speculators can bridge the time gap and show people the potential.

Obviously people building Bitcoin sites are likely the same ones speculating sometimes, but they don't have to be.

This sounds a lot like Neilsio's argument against BitCoins, using the "bigger fool" line.

The guy who invested in PCs in 1981 or whenever they were new and there was no market, I guess he was just waiting for a bigger fool to sell his investment to.

Sure, there could be a ponzi scheme where you have to keep bringing in newer investors. But if you actually have something that could be really useful, but just is underutilized or not ready for prime time, it's certainly not the case.

If you believe that BitCoin will surely fail and buy a bunch, then you are going to be looking for a bigger fool.