Everyone should put steelhouse on ignore. Anything he says is monkey jabber.

I always thought steelhouse was an elaborate troll. But recently i met someone in real life who was as stupid as him acting like he knew it all. These people actually exist lol. its like they are different species.

Steelhouse reminds me of this guy from the sopranos, using 'clever wording' to cover up his ******ness:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJggSqCftgA

SethSeth thanks for all the info you post. As a relative newbie it helps a lot. I got some Ripples in the recent give away, was thinking of buying some more. Will probably hold off on that one.

btw love the steelhouse comment.

Seems like the crypto currency technology could be a good framework for a new political voting system someday.

Thoughts on this? I thought it was interesting and hadn't read much from this angle itt http://www.americanbanker.com/bankth...1059608-1.html

How come many people claim bitcoin is anonymous and then others say that technically it isn't fully anonymous. Which is it?

Here's a article recently from wired saying it isn't.

If you want to use btc anonymously you have to work at it. Just shipping coins from A to B is not anonymous but if you

1. Send coins to a mixing service like coinfog
2. Use Tor to access the coins once they are washed
3. Never access the coins through a normal browser

then you should be good.

To steal Jon Matonis' term, Bitcoin has "user-defined" levels of privacy. The way most people use it, it is not anything close to anonymous, but if you want to be anonymous, you can be, and this is why silk road exists.

Typical media journalists cannot be expected to understand something complex like bitcoin, so learning about bitcoin via the press is a good way to get confused.

Which angle? Irreversibility or anonymity and crime investigation?

Irreversibility is core to the bitcoin protocol and ideals IMO. It has its pitfalls but it also has benefits. I don't think this will be a big problem. Escrows can solve a lot of the problems. Civil lawsuits can solve some others.

Anonymity is unfortunately likely to cause the US Government to make it illegal for businesses to accept bitcoins if they ever get very popular. They are too used to using financial transactions to find and track crime and they won't want to give that up.

i use and recommend Multibit. lightweight SPV client. it is excellent also, imo

thoughts?

Never thought irreversibility would be an issue. I can understand why anonymity is something governments don't like and want to stop. But bitcoin can still work if coin mixing is made illegal and all transactions between bitcoin and fiat follow AML and other banking rules. But making bitcoin transactions reversible does not make sense at all. It is not like I can force someone to give me my cash back after a transaction without going to court. Why would bitcoin have to behave differently?

I'm just speculating on xrp. I'm not buying what I cannot afford. I have a small amount, nothing big.

http://www.coindesk.com/apple-to-cre...rrency-imoney/

apple wants to get in the game. i wonder what they're up to... something like amazoncoin? or ripple? maybe even btc (mac miners omfg)???

scary if they pull it off. cos its game over.

imoney will just be a stupid USD-backed proprietary thing like amazoncoin. Apple doesn't innovate anymore and is getting raped very hard, clearly due in large part to being able to play poker in the US on an Android

Thinking about investing ~$15k USD into Bitcoin to hold for 3-5 years. Not an expert by any means but here's my view on it:

- A good high risk high reward bet
- Competition can come along, but I think for currency such as this the first to market advantage is huge
- As long as people continue to use it to buy drugs it's going to hold some underlying value
- Government making it illegal or just talking about it will legitimise it as a currency
- Even if it was made illegal for whatever reason it's unenforcable and any efforts to make it illegal will be doomed to fail
- Community behind BTC is extremely driven to popularise the currency
- Shortcomings of the currency will eventually be filled by startups

Are these points rational?

I'd say it's a good high risk, high reward bet.

i say go for it! ... but maybe wait a week or two or three

Data is a big old but....

3rd graph is the important one IMO. Not 1st or 2nd!!!

Only point I disagree with which is why I am holding bitcoins. The other points are strong enough to make it a good high risk high reward bet. Still don't understand how people on this site make that claim. It is the same claim everyone made about online poker in the US. And not only is online poker in the US almost non existent anymore it is starting to struggle in the rest of the world. Bitcoin will really struggle if you can't legally exchange bitcoin and fiat money.

bitcoin price is going down. may just be a start of a down trend. good time to go short.

FWIW I have an old bitcointalk account and got 6,000 ripples as part of their initial give away. I was able to turn those into ~$110 on bitstamp, so at least some money's coming out.

@rant: I should have specified that apple is getting raped at market share; they are still making huge money from the donks buying iphones. I'm not sure if they think it is sustainable to keep losing that much market share, but their piece of the pie can only shrink so far before it starts hurting their profits, because a majority of app developers will start building for Android first. I have bought 5 iphones, but I switched teams when Android became better a couple years ago.

@tokeweed: So your strategy is to sell when the market drops 10% and buy when it goes up 10%? Now that is a good way to get raped.... Doing the opposite will make you some money though....

@jaminbird: You might like to know how many old bitcointalk forum accounts I had.... The key was posting in the thread while they were still giving away 50k ripples per post.....

i think seth nails it with his AAPL analysis, Tim Cook is an out of touch aging ball and chain who would be better served running an investment bank or utility rather than apple...

Seth, in terms of bit coin, what potential government actions worry you the most? It seems to me that only a cyber attack at the system that prevents trading would kill the currency, however, any individual country sanction or law that does not stop trading in other countries would allow for it to survive and possibly thrive..

What aspects of replacements(i.e. new forms of digital currency) worry you the most, if at all? If or when they are implemented/launched, do you feel it would result in a sharp decline for bitcoin?

Just a bitcoin noob really interested in monetary policy and this type of currency and its implications etc, thanks for all your time ITT sorting it out for us, seems like you have been in the community for a long time.

A cyber attack on the exchanges wouldn't kill bitcoin, although it would probably result in a temporary price drop. Those have happened plenty, and exchanges have been hacked for huge amounts or shut down completely.

Adding more btcs at this price.. Hope it drops more.