Lol, World Bank calls bitcoin a naturally occurring ponzi scheme. What hacks. Article can be found on coindesk.

I think their use of the term "Ponzi Scheme" is poor, but all they are really saying is that rampant speculation on something, can create a demand that can't be sustained. It happened in the Stock Market back in the ".COM" days, has happened in housing markets, and could clearly occur with BTC or any other item that is widely speculated on.

Allen Greenspan warned that the Stock Market was experiencing "irrational exuberance" back in the days when every tech company in the world stock was on the rise. Everyone laughed at him. Then the stock market crashed.

Not a "ponzi scheme" in illegal terms, but it is the gist of what the World Bank is saying.

I agree. What they are saying is correct, but it is correct of most things. Housing market, gold, etc. The use of ponzi scheme is just wrong. It's probably intentional too just to create fud, in hopes of steering people clear of bitcoin.

You pretty much see this kind of idiocy with any group of people who basically luck into money very quickly. Lottery winners, pro athletes, musicians - all hit it big then blow it on idiotic investments. There's a ton of dumb money in Bitcoin that just happened to be in the right place at the right time and they will be continually fleeced.

It's amazing that one of the main drivers of Bitcoin is to avoid having to trust others, and that's exactly what these morons do.

if some1 wanted to use Bitcoin as a currency and tried to pay for all their purchases for a month what % of those transactions could happen with Bitcoin right now?

without really trying too hard... much of what i buy online these days is with btc now. but everything in the real world i still use fiat - this means rent, food, gas, bills and stuff from b&m stores...

i have no idea what % of tx that is, but between overstock, tigerdirect, cheapair, newegg and gyft... its really covers a lot of stuff.

so thinking a bit, including all expenses, i am about ~10% btc use in terms of money spent/month. a big boost in $ terms this year was cheapair.

a btc debit card (like xapo's) would be nice but i haven't looked into it seriously. i'm more just waiting for b&m point-of-sale mechanisms to be put in place to really get velocity up.

You can do quite a lot with Gyft.

The possibility of governments forcing businesses not to use Bitcoin also seems low given the guidance that is out there today.

This is embarrassing but can anyone help me with this? I have 2 BTC in a Coinbase account. I want to give them to my niece and nephew who will open up their own wallets (Electrum). I've read everything on both sites and maybe I missed it but I can't figure out how to send the bitcoins to their Electrum accounts.

Thanks so much.

Nobody talking about the NYC regulation proposal that was out today?

Last 30days I estimate I have done 150transaction of which bitcoin was 10 of them. But I have been kind of trying hard... A few more years with 10x growth and it should be more.

There should be a "send" button somewhere in Counbase. Just find it and press it. That should pop up a window that asks for an amount and an address. You will need to get addresses from the recipients and enter it into the box. After you have filled out the address and amount, just press "send".

pretty **** news, really. i am fine with proposed rules for bitcoin exchanges but imposing the same rules on startups is pretty harmful, i think. it stifles bitcoin startups because they have to follow very strict rules, which will turn stifle bitcoin adoption.

There was some talk in the altcoin thread.

Some of the regs seem totally unrealistic for decentralized systems. However, I think that the bigger bitcoin companies will be glad to become regulated and get the legitimacy that brings.

In the medium term, I think there will be a divide between the bigger regulated companies and smaller anonymous services.

Yeah generally agree with both of you guys. We'll see how it plays out.

I want to see more regulation, mainly what I want to see is more accountability for people who run Bitcoin money services (eg exchanges), and more accountability from people selling made up securities (eg moolah). Along with more audits like fiat companies go through and for good reason.

Unfortunately people are going to continually suffer until there is more control on these things, and part of the governments job should be to protect people.

Only had a quick glance at the doc but it seems a bit over reaching from what I gather.

Unfortunately the whole debate looks to be hijacked by libertarians who will resist and form of regulation at all, and are not willing to compromise.

Well, these specific docs are worth getting into a libertarian hissy fit over. There's plenty of room for regulations with bitcoin moving in and off exchanges or whatever, and people should of course be protected from fraud. This just goes so far beyond that narrow scope that it will be ignored by most, followed by the entrenched and enforced against competition.

I mean, the USG could have just regulated NetTeller or online poker, instead they crushed them with laws written by people who don't understand the issues they are writing about or the industries they are supposed to be regulating.

I find www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin the best place for such discussion.

Agree with thread here. Regulation, if done properly is a good thing for bitcoin. There's lots of scared money out there because it's an unregulated wild west system. Exchanges definitely need to be regulated. Payment processors such as bitpay should also be regulated. As it stands though the regulations are overreaching and burdensome on basically everyone else.

For example, any company that secures, stores, or holds crytpocurrency on behalf of others is subject to regulation.

What does holding cryptocurrency mean? If you have a private key? So an email server, dropbox, or website where a private key could be input needs regulation?
Here's a private key: 5HpHagT65TZzG1PH3CSu63k8DbpvD8s5ip4nEBCwTq4jhow5Lj n

It's now held by 2p2. Are they subject to regulation?

edit: really weird it put a space between the j and n at the end of the key. when i try to edit it, the space is not there.

If that's what they did, instead of write this huge turd, then people would be less upset. Focus on the conversion to and from fiat to protect banking. Have the rule for places that hold on behalf of customers to have full reserve. Fine, all that makes sense. When you start getting into regulations that cannot realistically be enforced or ones that are globally applied just because you might have a customer that might reside in the CCCNY, then you have an issue. Basically, New York is going to become home of only the big and already established players (hello Second Market, Winklevii), and everyone else who is just starting up is going to stay the hell away, AND ban NY customers.

LOL, bull****.

In the world of people wearing big-boy-pants, its main sparkle is as an accepted, potentially mainstream store of value and ubiquitous transactional medium that becomes widely accepted, its ability to be fractionalized down to whatever denomination is needed and a relatively fixed supply of units. Without the ability to convert it back to cash, the whole profile changes.

While the BTC Academics, delusional Libertarian ideologues and other sundry 'theorists' insist that it's going to change the world to the point that its acceptance is everywhere so conversion is unneeded, that's head-up-ass like in terms of the actual utility any given BTC user is after and the real world we're living in, now.

I want to be able to put my money in BTC, travel to Istanbul and withdraw Lira back out when I get there without having to subject myself to fingerprinting and anal probing. Get BTC to that point, it wins. Otherwise, the wait for ubiquity in merchant acceptance- to obsolesce the need for conversion- is generations away, if it even ever comes.

Is it just me or do these regulations go beyond what startup companies that only accept fiat have to do?

If there is demand for this, there should be room for a private company to do these audits. Revenues for this company could come from multiple sources. Services who want to enhance their reputation can pay to be audited (Underwriters Laboratories model). A subscription product can be produced for those with frequent dealings in the bitcoin world, and those who need more in depth information (Consumer Reports model). Finally, advertising can be sold on the company website, for those who infrequently need to do quick checks on company solvency and trust rating (CNET model).

Such a company would need to build trust by not doing anything which gives the appearance of serving the companies they are regulating, rather than the consumers themselves.

I think audits on financial companies should be mandatory. If they go wrong, people's lives get ruined.

If you create a private profit seeking audit company, when times are hard they might become corrupted. Or, if you have a CEO of this company who is a total scum bag (not uncommon) they could act corruptively. You also have conflicts of interest.

Much better to have an open government who run a financial services auditing department who's existence isn't relied on by profit. The cost of this can be taxed from the financial industry so they all contribute to these safety measures proportionately.

Dell accepting bitcoin is pretty big:
http://en.community.dell.com/dell-bl...-dell-com.aspx

10% discount on alienware if you pay with bitcoins and (unrelated) 10% discount at newegg for everything. With these kinds of savings shouldn't many people want to start paying with bitcoins? How is bitcoin not undervalued right now?

Took just 14 days for Dell to integrate bitcoin payment support.

Thanks. So they would first set up an Electrum account which would provide the addresses, and then I just send to those addresses?