I think bitcoin is already weakly backed, every vendor is in fact backing bitcoin. Inflation has two meanings. There is price inflation and monetary inflation. The backer needs a way out in case bitcoin is shutdown or someone hacks it. The total amount of wealth that can be sold into bitcoin is the present value of bitcoin.

That's what I just said. I wasn't confusing the two, you were.
But the backer does not need a way out in these cases as the speculator will take that risk and the general public won't back it until they no longer believe those things to be a risk.

So.. trading bitcoins? This is pretty interesting and fun imo

I saw some one mentioned money velocity which may be able to be tracked given every transaction is recorded. Any other metrics we should be monitoring?

Also, markets to trade with lowest commissions if you happen to know already?

Not really they are making 10% on all the bitcoin exchanges. If bitcoin is $.70 right now the would not set the peg a $.70 they would set the peg at something lower like 1/100th ounce of silver as it also protects their business too. The profit they earn from the exchange would go to could be used to build the kitty for the backing. Like the people found out in 1933, the gold is not always there. There are many games that have coins like 2nd Life. But what are they worth, nothing. It is very like MTOX the largest bitcoin/$ service is already in fact backing bitcoin. They make money in bitcoin so they protect its value. It is these services that will back bitcoin as is. They have to get their coins from somewhere and they get those coins from buying low and selling high with fees. bitcoins value chart above looks to be going down in almost manipulated fashion. But what if everybody sold, would bitcoin go to zero?

I shipped you 0.01 BitCoin. Please ship back to sending address. The transaction was confirmed sent.

How does one set up access to an account? For example, say I wanted to access a Bitcoin account from another computer? There is no password (that I could figure out?)

Total Bitcoins
http://blockexplorer.com/q/totalbc

Money supply Inflation is 44% right now.

I think if you copy all the keys you can take your coin with you, my as well put linux on a usb drive and then just boot to that. Someone will probably make a bitcoin distro someday if it catches on.

Cheers Grasshopp3r,

Okay, I have two transactions one for 0.1 and one for 0.01

If I go to the "transaction details" in the client it says "from: unknown". This was one of the things I was wondering about.

I'm going to return them to the addresses listed here: http://blockexplorer.com/address/1KD...mh5Nw1MZDeekdt

Tell me if that's a problem.

WRT adding an account to another computer, I'm not 100% sure in practice. I think everything is stored in the wallet.dat file (found in %APPDATA%\Bitcoin ). There is no password, an account is just a public/private key pairing. The public key is the address of the account, the private key is the part that only the holder knows. It may not be easy to do what you want at the moment. Perhaps you have to create a new address in the target wallet and send everything from the old wallet to it. If that's the case it will just be because what you want hasn't been implemented in the client yet.

Yeah, I don't think separate accounts are in the client yet, although usage of accounts is laid out in the bitcoin API.

No, that is your address that ends with the dt

This is my address: 187qt91qqAGivon1hbL91mQjZp13TkxstA

I do not see the dat file. Is that my private key?

You will likely have a lot of different addresses at this stage. The client is constantly creating new addresses for you. All of these address/private key pairs will be stored in the wallet.dat file, but note that this is a binary file. You won't be able to edit it.

http://blockexplorer.com/address/1KD...mh5Nw1MZDeekdt

The addresses I was referring to on the above page are the ones listed under From/To. I believe that they will be some of your addresses? (or you and whoever sent the 0.01 if that wasn't you).

I'm going to send the 0.1 to the 1KC address anyway. I have another 0.1 I'll send you if this doesn't work.

Also, how did you add "twoplustwo" to the transaction? It won't let me do that when sending to an address.

Even if the peg is low, it doesn't matter. If it's super low, it's meaningless other than a small amount of insurance for bitcoin users. If the price ever drops below that peg, there will be a run on the silver, and either the business loses a ton of money on giving away silver for worthless bitcoins, it runs out of silver, or it goes out of business.

2nd life is crushed because it has an arbitrary inflation. They still are not worth nothing, though.

The services like mtgox does not buy and sell coins. It takes a fee on transactions.

If everyone sold, there would probably be committed people who would buy for pennies or dimes if needed. There will be some level of speculators unless it's completely hopeless or if its compromised.

The whole point of this is to avoid the negatives of gold and silver. While very good for currency, they have flaws. It's hard to trade far distances. Someone can seize it. People can counterfeit it and you might get ripped off with fake coins. It's tough to break gold down for small transactions. Transaction costs are expensive. Adding a central place that houses gold backing it up defeats the point. Now you add back in the transaction costs, and add all of the risk back into the system (someone could seize it, ban it, etc, ...). You still need to trust that someone actually has the gold, they won't go out of business or just rip you off. Why? Just use gold if you want something that's backed.

Never mind, I labelled the incoming address. I forgot I did that.

Consider FTP.com. Full Tilt pegs the FTdollar to the USD. FT offers the service to even trade FTdollars, but I think it is against rules to use it as a means to trade merchandise. But, everyone trusts FullTilt because we can see the quality in the site and everyone has been paid so far. But what if FTP didn't peg the FTPdollar to the $.

A baseball card trading might be considered bitcoin or collectible coins. They aren't making anymore, but each unit of btc has no work behind it. Someone will create a new digital currency if they feel they are out of the loop. gold silver and cooper are rare and have real uses in your everyday life. Silver will be extinct within a few hundred years.

with fiat despite all the corruption in who controls the it and its quantity. you have a gun behind it forcing its value. But, even it can fall, take Weimer Germany or the hundreds of other collapses.

Anyways it will be an interesting experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Second_Life

After seeing this maybe bitcoin will work.

L$ 260 for each $1 plus a $0.30 fee 2nd Life money is pegged. Baseball cards are not pegged but a product.

Mostly agree with all your posts.

At this point you have classic Market Making activity...
Driven by Pro Traders and Speculators like all Forex...
USD/BTC spread is $0.825-$0.850 or $0.025...
This will get MUCH tighter as MM move from Forex to BTC.

BTC is still very sensitive to market forces...
Like this thread may have driven the price $0.05 higher.

The biggest threat is "BTC clones" using the open source...
Which can have enhancements...
There is nothing stopping anyone from launching ByteCoin...
Using the exact same software...
A $6 million head start is no a big deal...
And there is no "loyalty to BTC"... loyalty is to wealth...
BTC early adopters will pile into the next good one.

So there is no real "cap" on BTC...
If competing currencies will pop up and live or die.

That said, it doesn't matter...
You have to view this as the "crypto-currency space"...
Where you will have multiple, solid currencies...
They will all be supported by Market makers...
This space is gonna rock hard.

And that Russian guy running the BTC rake-free site...
He's not all that competent and will not last...
So BTC poker is completely open, it's 1999 again...
But the real trick is launching a P2P crypto-poker-network...
Low stakes only, say <= NL25...
You need an off-the-charts genius to do that...
For example, HEM took a genius level person to code...
But this is a level of difficulty higher.

steel, you're concentrating too much on what Bitcoin isn't rather than what it is. Things like FTP and L$ aren't real currencies. They're "pegged" to the US$ because the companies took US$ in exchange for them. There is no central Bitcoin mint to do this. Bitcoin is expressly designed NOT to have this central mint or central authority.

If Bitcoin ends up working it will be down to it people eventually having confidence in its value. State-backed currencies have an extra reason for public confidence, but also reasons to be less confident (the endless tinkering of the state). And, as you mentioned, they fail anyway.

FTP has a reserve (at least they are supposed to) of every dollar that comes in. A dollar comes in, it goes to the reserve. It comes out, it comes out of the reserve.

A random business doing this for BitCoin could not do this. They would have to have 5 million units of silver just sitting around if they wanted full reserve. It would only hurt them to pay it out (if no one wanted Bitcoins anymore, they would just take the silver, and if they took silver for bitcoins, they would be forced to buy a ton of BitCoins for silver).

It just makes no sense. Just buy silver certificates if that's what you want.

I'm not sure it's that difficult. Poker is a pretty easy game. The distributed part of it is a bit tricky, though. You need to make sure people aren't cheating by knowing what cards are coming or what everyone else has.

Rake-free isn't the way to do it, but you could have people contributing to the server getting paid a portion of rake, and just have lower rake. I think there is a better model than rake, though. You could use a subscription model, which is basically rake with a cap. Rake people normally, then after they have paid $20 or $50 a month or whatever you see fit as reasonable, you refund their rake. People like rakeback more than they hate rake, even though they are getting less back. Same reason why people think getting a tax refund is awesome. People are dumb like that. So keep raking them, then have automatic rakeback (or even rakeback 75% at that point). Then take a 15% tax of anyone who wins money when they cash out. Only the winners pay, it's a reasonable amount, and the losers keep their money for longer to attract more players. You could even use that 15% tax to partially subsidize losers.

Poker sites now have huge expenses in marketing, support, and transaction fees. Credit card fees are huge. Going through all the 3rd parties to get funds in and out is expensive. Chargebacks are expensive. Using Bitcoins avoids all of this. A first class operation could have an option for people to use cash and cash out bitcoins through a 3rd party.

Poker is a bit of a dying fad, though. People are getting burned out or bored by it. It's not 2003 anymore. The key is figuring out the next poker, not trying to go back in time.

You've simplified it too much. The p2p network would have to be able to take transfers, deal an honest game and then transfer the BTC back to the relevant accounts after the game. Going by the BTC model this would be done via a democracy of processing power, hoping the majority is running honest code, but there are plenty of concepts in there that aren't dealt with in the BTC model.

Decentralizing definitely makes it harder, but I'm not sure it's actually necessary.

Pegged Currency: 2x = 4y, y=2
Unpegged Currency: 2x = 4y, y is the goods and services merchants will accept divided by number of bitcoins willing to buy M0.

I use to think bitcoin was going to $0.01 in 20 years,it still might. However, it could go to $50000 per BTC if it is not hacked or crashed. However, the number of transactions might crash, they could be 100000x more than now. As new merchants are added they will benefit from no rules, no taxes, no transaction fees, and no government regardless of the current price of bitcoin. In fact they will hurt themselves if they go to a new bitcoin network, as new coins will be distributed unfairly. Hoarding will not hurt bitcoin, it will only increase its value. Selling will lower its value but merchants will just lower their prices.

someone mentioned sportsbetting...

Of course it already exists: btcsportsbet dot com has been around a while and had positive reviews. Accounts are anonymous, fast in/out - all automated.

Just one of the many business perfectly suited for bitcoins with all the problems with legality in the US and funding offshore books today.

Pegged Currency: 2x = 4y, y=2
Unpegged Currency: 2x = 4y, y is the goods and services merchants will accept divided by number of bitcoins.

I use to think bitcoin was going to $0.01 in 20 years. However, it could go to $50000 per BTC if it is not hacked or crashed. However, the number of transactions might crash, they could be 100000x more than now. As new merchants are added they will benefit from no rules, no taxes, no transaction fees, and no government regardless of the current price of bitcoin. In fact they will hurt themselves if they go to a new bitcoin network, as new coins will be distributed unfairly.

Send a few bones to:

1uobKrAjFvDRcoZk6PSDZSBwBkswzvZi7

for this info.

I'm not too sure what centralized p2p poker is?