With the official client, yes this is true.

But there are developers tools to do 'coin selection' that is before a transaction is sent you can select which coins (inputs) to be used. It has not made it into the official client but the tools are on the project source code repository site if you know what you are doing.

Just as there are tools to move specific private keys out of 1 wallet file into another.

With coin mixing and coin selection, running your node via tor or just not running it at all except to come on line and send/update a transaction (specifying only 1 connection in bitcoin.conf, to someone trusted on the fallback nodes list only), then immediately shutting down - you can be 100% anonymous.

Obv the official developers are distancing themselves from Silk Road (and playing up the 'all transactions are public' rubbish) as they don't want to be arrested in some shotgun-style crackdown - but the fact is if you take the time to learn anonymity can easily be achieved.

I'm just being realistic. Most people won't go through all that and even the ones that do will slip up at some point. It's pretty easy to make a mistake. I disagree with your assertion that its easy. Possible, yes, easy, no.

I'm just saying that both extremes are wrong - "Ohmygod, all transactions are public" and "it's instantly anonymous". Gavin and Jeff are intentionally misleading media outlets by constantly repeating the former, and I don't blame them. But it's wrong and they know it.

When I have some time I will post a start-to-finish guide for full bitcoin anonymity. It's not that hard but yes takes a little effort.

What´s going on with bitcoin is certainly reminiscent of tulip mania. My instincts say tulips, but it seems logically like this could be truly revolutionary assuming it is actually possible to maintain anonymity. Definitely and interesting market to sweat, there are few so groundbreaking and original in the world.

I for one hope they buy it hook line and sinker.

Looking forward to it.

wtf why is the price doubling every 3 ****ing days

Mt. Gox has made 33k in rake in the last 24 hours.

If competition doesn't start springing up pretty soon, I'm going to assume that every firm with access to lawyers thinks running a bitcoin exchange is a terrible idea.

interesting take. i think its almost certain btc will become illegal in usa and they will go after the exchanges just a matter of time
but there is a lot of competition already, just hardly anyone uses the other exchanges:
http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/

I'm impressed that some of you anarchist/libertarian types are finally doing something to promote your ideals, even if it is mere speculation. A successful distributed platform for anonymous internet/digital cash is at the top of my list of important anarchist/libertarian projects.

With that said, bitcoin is only real cash if it maintains stable value in relation to goods and services that are traded using it. Presently as far as I can tell, nothing is priced in bitcoin - everything is priced in dollars or some other currency, with bitcoin (plus infrastructrue) used merely as an unreliable proxy and a payment processing system. Largely bitcoin is used as a volatile, anonymous way to transport dollars or other currencies - this is distinct from bitcoin itself being used to price things. Then bitcoin, for the moment, is a lot more like a suitcase used to hold cash, than the cash inside of it. I suppose there's some value there, but the only advantage of bitcoin over conventional money transportation mechanism is anonymity. It already costs basically nothing to move large amounts of money instantly across continents. Personally, I'd steer clear of investing in anything that has no legitimate purpose outside of assisting criminal activities or otherwise evading authority but YMMV.

Moreover, I cannot see a way out of it, that is, a way for bitcoin to achieve the level of price stability so that it has use outside of evasion of authority. There are two fundamental problems - 1) its value is largely determined by its popularity (or expected level of it) and 2) there's a huge disparity between the current level of popularity and the expected level of popularity. These are two large sources of volatility. Dependence on popularity and dependence on whimsical expectations. There are other problems with a fixed money supply, but those were largely hashed out here:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/11...regime-397397/

In the long-run, if you believe in some sort of growth constraint, eventually fixed money supply could make sense (meh not really in a digital sense), but it has to take into account growth of the currency use as well as economic growth - you can't fix your money supply, while your currency is still growing, even if there's no economic growth. I understand that a lot of you are excited to see bitcoin move up a great deal in price - this is great if you're a speculator, but this is terrible if you want bitcoin to succeed as a currency. You want people to be able to do accounting in your currency and have the resulting statements to mean something. You want 1 "bitcoin" to have some semantic meaning beyond how many dollars you can get for it at the moment.

Is it still possible to create bitcoin 2 that alleviates these concerns? I can think of some features that would help:

1) Money supply growth that corresponds to usage growth and technological improvements
2) Some kind of obsolescence of old money, either through depreciation, money supply growth or both.
3) Recursive/federated infrastructure - bitcoin networks within bitcoin networks. And each network within the meta network must be allowed to work differently from other networks, while allowing for easy interchangeability.
4) Ability for the money distribution to reflect or correspond to real world distribution of power and value. This means much more value needs to accrue to those who maintain the network and otherwise provide the infrastructure. Money needs to reflect the underlying reality. Bitcoin does this to some degree, but quite poorly and worse and worse as time goes on (charging one-time transaction fees is not enough, because it's those who are hoarding the money that the system is supporting).

One way to start this would be to create a meta-bitcoin network that would treat the current instance of the bitcoin network as a single node within it, and create other networks with different attributes, rules, etc, and experiment, while allowing for some sort of federated interoperability. It's a lot easier said than done, but possible. Depending on my level of free time, this also has a small chance of being my next big project.

25.00
sky is falling

I cant believe how much people are paying for btc on eBay. one auction recently ended selling 2 btc for $90. crazy

isn't btc going to eventually have the exact same problem as online poker? it'll be "illegal" in usa, which wont do anything to get rid of it, but it'll be harder to buy/sell btc in online markets

Price starts going up quickly. So people stop selling coins hoping to ride the wave up. Which causes price to rise quicker since there are fewer people selling. Which causes more people to stop selling. Then finally people decide they don't want to risk waiting anymore ($32 today), then they sell off, and we return to sanity.

But you do see a lot of the overall movement up due to increased exposure. Look at Google search trends and map that on the price. It's very correlated. More people interested in Bitcoin -> prices go up.

i can't believe people are accepting paypal for bitcoins... Even a 50% premium isn't enough for the kind of chargebacks you're opening yourself up to.

Paypal will not side with you, they will lock your account for trading bitcoins.

online poker is nearly completely banned in usa, and working and growing in every other country in the world. it would be great to see bitcoin get to that point

I've seen one guy sell gift certificates for Bitcoins, which he mails to your house. I think that might actually work, although I'm not about to try.

This is inevitable I think. Already people are experimenting with alternative currencies based on bitcoin.

For example there's namecoin, a fork of bitcoin with transactions for managing an alternate domain name service to work around the domain seizure problem. There is a block explorer, pool and an exchange for converting to/from bitcoins. There is work being done to share proof of work processing across chains. Depending on prices it can be more profitable to mine namecoins and sell them for bitcoins than to mine bitcoins themselves. I'm sure the same will happen with other e-currencies.

The bitcoin forums also list other bitcoin like currencies. I can see a future of many of these for specific niches with different rules and exchanges to convert between them.

I don`t get this.

So my questions:

How did this thing get such a huge momentum? I mean it all started with one guy having the idea to creat a currency? How did it get any value? What happens if mining isn`t profitable anymore because the difficulty is to high?

People will stop mining, the difficulty will drop and it will become profitable again. Miners can also up the transaction fees they want to process transactions in an attempt to stay profitable.

Anyone in Aus found a way to trade bitcoins? From my limited research it doesn't look like there is any way to withdraw from MtGox to Aus?

There's an australian exchange called bitpiggy.

It started out as not very valuable. There is nothing else like it out there, though. One guy bought 2 pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. More people started accepting it and more people wanted to get them. Supply and demand. As price started rising, more people wanted to hold onto their coins to let them rise, and this made the price rise faster.

It's valuable because it's both useful now and because it has the potential to be even more useful in the future. The first case drives people who are actually using it, the second case drives investment. You are seeing an increase in both types of users right now.

This guy will probably never eat pizza in his life again, rofl.

I think SilkRoad spring boarded this to where it is today.

Before that, it was a small group of nerds and ppl who really believed in the concept behind BC.


SilkRoad directly drove up the price, but more importantly, it turned Bitcoin into a sexy story. Anonymous currency that you can somewhat safely buy illegal things with - wow!


All of the recent press attracted people with money who want in, and they want in soon before it blows up even more.


I think the vast majority of the price increase lately (1$>30$) has been because this story is going to attract poker players and traders who have the cash and are willing to take a risk to be a part of this.

You have to take a leap of faith to buy in at all. There really isnt a method to determine whether bitcoin are overpriced at 1$ or at 30$. By the time a new investor has reached the point where he can actually make a buy, he has already taken that leap of faith. So if its 1$ or 500$ per bitcoin, he's ready to pay to be a part of the idea.


I think the price will be extremely volatile until there is a consistent list of non-black-market vendors.

Awesome to see it jump so quickly though.

i disagree that its silkroad or online poker as the primary driver, it started gaining steam in april in the economics blogosphere, and it got a ton of press hits for weeks at prominent sites like forbes without any of them mentioning silk road, which is very hard to get to and use without an extensive knowledge of computers.

we've discussed this before, the guy who bought the pizzas probably has about 80,000 BTC left over- i don't think he's too torn up about it. if you went through the effort to mine 10k bitcoins would you give them all away for a few pizzas? c'mon

crazy swongs today, along for the ride