Want $10k worth of bitcoin. Have skrill, stars, whatever. 5% vig.

I think it's more a comparison of human psychology and the crazy ways how bubbles exist.

No direct commonality, it only reminded me of the tulip bubble because it was so bizarre and captured so many people's attention. I think its interesting when people start speculating a new commodity with little knowledge or utility for it. I get the sense its a bubble when random people are suddenly interested in investing only because of the price run up and were completely uninterested the last few years bitcoins were cheaper.

(not saying tulips have the same utility as bitcoins)

AFAIK you now get that message anytime you login to CB. You can still buy but you can't lock in a price. Now you place an order for a particular amount of money and they will tell you exactly when the transaction will occur. You don't know what the price will be and you can cancel the order up until the time they put the coins in your account. You can cancel the order up until the time the coins are received. Now the time they tell you the coins will be available for purchase just happens to be the same amount of time it used to take the old way, between placing an order while locking in the price and then receiving your coins. It seems they have changed their policy while trying to make it look like they didn't or admitting that they did. I imagine they did this because they were getting burned. If they were having difficulty getting coins why when you order coins on Monday would they tell you that you will receive them on Friday at 6:51 PM?

You'll know bitcoins has arrived when regular people talk about how easy it is to use for x, y, and z. Instead of all this talk about increasing price and you too can make money!!

There was a bitcoin article on reddit today and in the comments section a number of people were talking about it being overly complicated to acquire coins. Then you still have to be fairly confident that you're computer isn't compromised with some worm that might steal your coins. As bitcoins take off I'm sure hackers are going to increasingly target mass infected computers, sure it might take a trillion years to brute force your encrypted wallet, but a keylogger would do the trick.

I used bitspend to order something from Newegg yesterday. It's pretty cool, any item you on the net you want to purchase can be ordered by copy and pasting the URL onto the order form. They charged me a $3 fee for a ~$200 order. I buy a ton of stuff online, so for me, bitcoin is as easy to purchase with as paypal or CC, etc.

Let's say you're a poker player traveling to australia for a tournament and want to bring 100k worth of bitcoins for a sidegame roll, but how can you turn 100k bitcoins to cash in australia in a relatively short period of time. (Outside of finding another player willing to depart with 100k cash for bitcoins on the spot, as you can't guarantee someone will want to give up that kind of liquidity without a big vig).

Except with the CC instead of paying a $3 fee you get 1% cashback and no fee and also have an easy way to dispute the charge if something happens.

Perhaps one day we'll be able to play live poker with bitcoins.

True.

Bitspend also offers anonymous orders, and they delete all your info as soon as it's confirmed that you received the package. So there's that.

For me, the single greatest thing about btc is the ability to play poker from the US with easy, same day cashouts. If I wasn't a poker player I probably wouldn't have ever had any inclination to purchase btc.

Bitcoins are a good start, the main advantage being that the authority is decentralized -- but I feel that they are ultimately not the best implementation of the form.

It's beyond the scope of this post to talk about all the flaws of bitcoin, and it seems kind of blasphemous to talk about the "flaws of bitcoin" in relation to the lol currency we use today. But objectively speaking, I see Bitcoin as more of a proof of concept, and hopefully a better cryptocurrency remedies some of these flaws and takes over.

However there is a giant first mover advantage, and once bitcoin gets big enough it may be too hard for another cryptocurrency to topple it.

Bitcoin also represents a giant threat to the many corporate interests behind government, so it will be interesting to see how the powers that be deal with this.

lol wtf i still have like 50 from the 6$ days.

Insanity

I would recommend NOT using Skrill to buy/sell Bitcoins. there have been incidents in the past where Skrill locked the accounts for doing so - spare yourself the trouble and use a pokersites p2p transfer option

This is an interesting question. You would have the same problem if you brought 100k euro or 100k gold (which is incidentally, 5 cubic inches). To convert gold or Euros would probably cost 3-5% at an exchange there, but it could be done fast.

I'm pretty sure it would not be too hard to find a buyer in vegas in the summer, especially if you posted in advance. But to do it in Australia would be hard. The thing is that you can't open a bank account and use a bitcoin exchange, or it would be better to just wire money. What you really want is to convert it p2p to avoid any financial regulation. In order for p2p to work, you need a lot of people doing it, and that's why it works so well in vegas in the summer.

Bitcoin will shift remittance payments to p2p eventually by cutting out middlemen like western union, so when that becomes popular, then there may be enough liquidity and large volume individual trading or grey market trading in order to fly around with your poker money in bitcoin and exchange it at the destination.

I think you need reputable traders in the business of exchanging cash/bitcoin in order to do this. It would be dangerous to post on localbitcoins and meet up with a random guy with 100k cash.

I agree that places like SA and other emerging markets have a real opportunity here. The challenge there is getting people to be able to get BTC (not sure how huge it is, but I'd imagine it is more painful than even the US). But I would expect to see it in places where there is not as much competition or financial instruments being as common as a place where it's established like the US. Emerging markets and places where governments are just plain awful (compared to US where there is still trust) are where it's going to explode first.

Start of bubble bursting now?

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoi...103848677.html

if the digital currency is based in "trust" per previous business week article, this might be a right hook right to the temple.

The story continues...............

They weren't hacked, they were DDoS'd.

Nothing to see here.

Also, Gox's website is not the basis of the 'trust'.

The fact the network can verify it's own transactions without a third party is the key factor, as well as the fact that the rate of coin creation is fixed.

I'm in the U.S. and want to buy a few of these, but I could use a crash course in buying/storing these things

what are my best options for buying these, and then storing them. Google is sending me all over the place, I read coinbase was a good way to buy them for a low processing fee, I started to fill out all of my info so I could do a bank wire, but then the site requires me to give my login information to my bank account, and that sketches me out a little. can someone please help a noob out.

I really appreciate any help

I used coinbase to purchase and I verified my bank account with them. It takes 4-5 days to complete your order, but you get the low fees.

Bitfloor is another good option, probably better, and if I buy more coins in the future I will be using them.

You'll want to store your coins in your own personal desktop client wallet (instead of in an online wallet), here's a review of your options. I personally went with Electrum.

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/bitcoin-wallet-options/

did you give coinbase your login/password to your bank account, that seemed odd to me

I'll look into bitfloor, thanks for you help

Yes I did because I was in a hurry to buy.

I had to do the same thing on paypal, too, so I wasn't too worried.

But, this is also a bank account that I use strictly for cashing poker checks, so I dont keep much in there after they clear. FWIW nothing shady has happened.

I think you may be right.. however.. on top of that get them at market price a few days later message, I get this message when I actually try and place the order:

"Sorry, the maximum number of purchases on Coinbase has been reached. This is a 24 hour rolling limit with no specific start time. Please try again later. We'll continue raising this limit over time."

So you can't even put the order in for getting them later.

no. theres like 10000 people waiting to get verified on MtGox. Coinbase is selling out every day.

That Gox number is going to be the key to watch. When that starts dropping, you are most definitely going to see the end of the huge price increases. My prediction once that number drops down is you see the price peter out and stay stable-ish for a week or so before a slight drop over the next week, followed by a lot of mini-dips with buyers trying to buy on dips followed by at least one major dip of 40% in 1 day (possibly a few hours even), slight recovery, then gradual drop back to a value that's more sane (say something like 40 or 50).

What if the number drops because Gox doubles their employees again and powers through the queue?