You just need to get better odds on the person on the low side of it. The person on the high side already gets a bigger payout when he wins, so he should be willing to do this.

To the first point, I don't think anyone is realistically talking about princes storing all their money in BTC yet.

To the second point, the most promising market for BTC is imo in petty cash and micro transactions. I am talking about, you go into a convenience store, grocery store, bar, restaurant, whatever and use bitpay. Yes intermediaries can get booked if they put those laws on the books, but unless the US govt acts prophylactically it might be too late, and also many other govts will not act. Even then, apps and products will come out that have consumers effortlessly do this heavy lifting and that can never be made illegal.

Now (and also to the third point) you cite a problem with cashing out such as, people involved in illegal activities routinely pay 15-20% to wash their money. But this is for people that are rich. For most people it is going to be considerably less effort (or none) to wash their money because they don't have very much, just like today if you have say 250k cash under a mattress you are never going to pay taxes on it.


I agree. One nitty point is, when you say volatility though I think a more narrow word has to be used, since volatility goes in both directions. Basically even if people are only putting say $50 onto a bitcoin card for general use, them being in danger of losing $25 is enough to push them away from bitcoin. (Gains don't matter.)

If we expect widespread adoption in general means the price goes from 0 to X, then a lot of the currency being adopted comes from having fewer and less extreme dips. This event recently is going to be somewhat hard to shake off. So this whole process really rests on intermediaries to bridge the gap in the time being (more specifically, to shelter consumers from price swings)

Are you saying that I was being sarcastic or that you were?

The crash didn't happen BECAUSE of MtGox, but it was far much worse, because they are the one who the majority of BTC users, use. When the panic set in, they got flooded and well we saw what happened.

And I don't think anyone said the CIA..if anyone it would be the NSA.

No, I was being sarcastic about MtGox being good because free market etc.

I doubt the crash was much worse because of that. I already mentioned this anecdote once today: after the MtGox hack in 2011 I expected there to be a huge panic sell off but there wasn't.

People keep saying that Bitcoin is superior to the Dollar and mostly point to things that basically make it a money laundering tool. That is not a superior feature when it comes to the real world. Because if your currency gets big enough, it will get negative attention from anti-money laundering forces, like the US/UK government.

One might be tempted to think that US/UK is just US/UK and the rest of the world can use Bitcoins. But this is not necessarily true. There are certain regulations that are required of banks that want to do business with US/UK banks (ie: almost every bank in the world). Non-compliant banks can't even send a wire transfer to US. So certain rules may be for US/UK banks, but those rules extend to any bank that wants to do business with US/UK bank which means that they need to comply with certain US/UK rules as well. Otherwise, all the drug dealers would just deposit in Colombia and wire transfer to USA.

The amount of warning time will not be a big benefit because everyone will learn of the warning at the same time and prices will plummet on the warning. Knowing that US and UK government will pursue crackdown on Bitcoin in US and UK starting in 2016 is not much of a benefit. People will immediately heavily discount for it and it will be musical chairs with people less and less willing to hold Bitcoins, leading to massive devaluation.

For the crackdown to be successful, something doesn't need to be eradicated 100%. Yes, there are people still playing some online poker in the USA today. Was the crackdown a success or failure? It was still a success because it killed off 99% of the market. It doesn't really matter if some people on the fringes still get around the law. It is defacto effective and it is hard to stay under the radar if the money amounts become meaningful. It's easy to avoid taxes on $100. It is very hard to avoid taxes on 1M.

"I'm not sure what your point is with the money laundering and disclosure. If they don't need to track currency then why would they be anti-bitcoin in the first place?"

Tracking physical currency is only one way of tracking currency. But forensic accounting goes much further than that. When you buy a 1M house on 0 income, you are still raising flags. Eventually they work backwards to figure out how you got that 1M. AND when it comes to the IRS and DEA, the onus is on YOU to provide proof that the money was earned legitimately. This is not a criminal court where they have to prove beyond the shadow the doubt that the money came from illegal activities. If you don't provide access to your foreign bank accounts/etc, you are simply held in non-compliance and get in equally big trouble for non-compliance when they investigate you. The onus is on you to provide that the money came from legal activities.

You can compare bitcoin to any P2P non-digital cash transaction. When you give someone $100 for services, the government will never know. It's easy to stay under the radar. But if that person builds up their services and starts to have 100 people per day giving them $100 each, it's becomes very, very hard to hide what is going on from the government.

I totally see what you are saying. Honestly, I think what we have here are a bunch of new users who aren't very investor like minded an who honestly are very easy to panic..

Well, you can accept it as soon as you see a valid transaction and haven't yet seen another transaction on the same coins. This strategy may not actually be being actively exploited at the moment, but there's no way that fact will last, and ultimately if you accept something with 0 or too few confirmations then thieves will be able to double spend you. Other than that you can have a third party that has already accepted the coins and trust that they'll assign them to your account. This obviously doesn't directly use the underlying bitcoin network but it's still a transaction denominated in BTC.

There's even issues with it going up (there's an incentive to spend your other money instead and keep the bitcoin). That said I think this volatility is unavoidable as nobody really knows what a bitcoin "should" be priced at. Of course, it going up isn't as bad as it dropping.

So since Mtgox has halted everything (cant even create an account), basically there is no way to get new money into an exchange to buy BTC? Is that right?

EDIT: nvm looks like I can create an account

Still want to buy for Skrill if anyone is interested, seems the market for buying is completely dried up on 2p2

Someone linked a list of other exchanges a few posts back...

http://bitcoinwatch.com/

Honestly, this whole system will be a lot better when Mt. Gox doesn't have such a massive share of the exchange market.

MTGOX shutting down is terrible, expect a massive sell off when it comes back up.

This is like the government closing the stock market or banning short selling in fear of it going down, or even gasp, like Cyprus closing the banks for a week to prevent a run on the money.

Except the stock market can't lag from DDoS attacks or high volumes creating lag. This is smart and necessary by mt gox. It's unfair for users to try and execute trades when they wont go through for minutes and by then price has already fluctuated immensely. Even with this temporary halt, the prices at other exchanges aren't crashing, most are holding steady at about 90. Also you can still get coins on/off mtgox right now, you just cant trade on the market (convert usd/eur to btc or vice versa.)

EDIT: Also it appears mtgox has decided that for 48 hours after resuming trading there will be no trading fees. Smart move by them.

Seen it a thousand times. Basically to the template, the asset class is the only difference.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDpPlrHgquM

I don't agree. I'm not going to make a "superior" to the dollar statement but it does differ from fiat currency in ways that don't have anything to do with money laundering, such as governments not being able to adjust the money supply and me being able to send you BTC right now without us deciding or trusting any particular third party or revealing our identities to each other (this is not money laundering). I do agree that these things don't necessarily mean that bitcoin is "superior" as it lacks some properties of fiat currency and has problems of its own.


Well, they can, but the owner of the US account is going to have to do some explaining. Of course you're right and there may be stipulations but now you're moving from the US/UK trying to fight bitcoin locally to them actively trying to kill it globally.

You're right, the warning time wouldn't be a big benefit, it would be a massive benefit. You forget that you were comparing this to the US crackdown on poker, where they immediately redirected the domain names and seized bank accounts. Even if there was a move towards a US clampdown it would be relatively gradual due to the need to get new laws passed and that happening not being a certainty.

You misunderstand me here, I'm accepting that a USA crackdown could mean a 99% death of the US market, but not of the world market. As such I'm referring to the millions playing online poker globally, not the people still playing in the US.

That's all fine, but again it just seems like you're giving one less reason for a government to clamp down on it in the first place.

Hilarious that people are still coming to this thread asking to buy large quantities, unreal.

mustmuck do you have an idea of good longterm solutions to this problem of non-instant transactions? (Eg. trust networks, third party holding your buffer account, etc.)

anyone got any thoughts on litecoins?

? i gave a range that starts with 0. but also, i think they are still created by transaction fees once all 21 million are mined.

obv im taking inflation in the money supply sense

What's more hilarious is that you still come to this thread without really knowing much about bitcoin, and are completely against it.

I know a lot more about investing than you, and enough about Bitcoin to know that anybody investing in Bitcoin is an ignorant gambler. If you posted this thread in an investing forum, you would be laughed at.

Keep gambling and pretending you're an investor

I am a finance student still so yes its possible for you to know more about investing than me. I also correctly sold all my bitcoins before all of this happened, but that doesn't mean I am not a supporter of bitcoins. That also doesn't mean there aren't opportunities for profit in this marketplace and anyone who doesn't understand that is the ignorant one. The point is every post you make is incredibly biased against bitcoins because you don't care/believe in them so why do you continue to spew bs to us here? Just gtfo already.

i understand that, practically speaking, the encryption is unbreakable. but theoretically, it is. suppose there was a large enough wallet whose private key was lost, and BTC was expensive enough. can anyone do some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations to say how long it would take to crack it using x amont of computing power?

They are not created but redistributed then.

This isn't a problem, though.

I don't claim any particular insight beyond what you'd come up with yourself, but my current guess would be 0 confirmation transactions for tiny transactions (chocolate bar, can of coke - a synchronized stealing of cans of coke seems unlikely to me) and a buffer account for larger ones (basically a successor to Visa/Mastercard, or I guess even the same companies).

Of course there are opportunities to profit from Bitcoins, there's also opportunities to profit from shorting stocks you know nothing about, that doesn't mean it's wise - or that you can profit from them long term. Buying Bitcoins when you think they're undervalued and selling them after they've gone up slightly is pure speculation.

I'm perfectly entitled to post whatever the hell I like in this thread, you don't control the content here, if you don't like my posts... Don't read them.