In theory, as long as someone is willing to accept them, they are worth something.

But that will not make you feel any better when you buyin at $1/coin and then it looses popularity and you can only buy stuff at equivalent of 10c/coin - which can happen very quickly.

Heck, paypal can stop accepting it - and they definitely will the second they realize how much gambling/etc is tied to bitcoin - and then the whole support structure crumbles and the coins are next to worthless cause you can't really cash them out or use it for anything aside from stupid alpaca socks and random junk from a handful of random tiny stores.

I am assuming the site is already taking payment of some form from americans.

For example, if you are Bodog, your biggest problem right now is getting money from players onto your site. If you accepted bitcoin, it becomes possible to avoid the payment processors.

Paypal doesn't accept it now. You can only buy bitcoins via paypal by paying some random dude on the internet. Paypal doesn't have a good way of figuring out that guy is selling bitcoins.

My point is, it may be easy to deposit, and transfer.

But a currency is worthless if you can't spend it however you please, withdrawing to buy a car or paying mortgage, for example. And this handicap backs up to retailers - why would they accept bitcoins if they themselves can not withdraw it and pay their mortgages with it.

Real world retailers and users will not screw around with random dudes on the internet that will make the transaction to real money for real juice. So bitcoins end up being a phantom currency that exists in internet bubble and can only be used for a few useless things... sort of like creating Farmville currency.

Yes, I agree. Bitcoin will remain in a niche until it is easier to exchange.

There is an exchange site right now with minimal juice. There is a bit more juice going into BitCoins, though. Most of the value right now is from speculation. However, all it takes is retailers to accept it and charge a discount for it to be worth having. They would charge a discount for the same reason that some stores give a cash discount over credit cards.

I'm working on an interface to make it super trivial for online retailers to link into accepting bitcoins and instantly get cash. There are a few parts of the puzzle I'm missing, and it's always possible that bitcoin users would just spend cash anyway, but I'm guessing that the limited number of places that accept bitcoins along with the enthusiastic user base would give them enough business they might care. I need to find a few niche sites that the bitcoin user base would be willing to spend money on, and show a prototype to them.

Also, if retailers do accept it as payment, if you do own coins right now, they have a great chance of going up in value by a large amount. The total economy is really small right now and even growing it to a respectable size would mean a 10-100x increase in the value of each bitcoin. There is tremendous upside. If gambling ever got serious into this, and with the payment processing trouble, a pure bitcoin gambling site with serious backing would have a huge market.

But until bitcoins are deemed illegal to sell or buy, there's not much to stop people with what they do with them later. Building up legitimate uses for bitcoins before then is essential, though.

You're confused if you think bitcoins are like creating Farmville currency (I had to look up Farmville). Nobody thinks that bitcoin is a fiat currency. It is clearly not a fiat currency. Everybody knows that a currency is only worth the value people are confident they can get for it, whether it be in another currency or in goods or services. Bitcoin is very new and the fact that it isn't backed by a government means it won't gain acceptance at the same rate, if ever. If you're interested in bitcoin then get a small amount and buy some small things with it. If you aren't then don't. A lot of the bitcoin economy at the moment is speculative. This will change if the economy grows.

The other thing is the market is very thin. You can buy all of the bitcoins up for sale on mtgox for $50,000. 30,000 coins. That would raise the price by almost double just by doing that.

I'm interested in it only for speculation reasons. I wonder if should stick $100 in there and forget about it for a few months to see what happens.

FWIW, I decided to put a small amount on a few days ago. I was going to wire the money to the 'big' exchange site, but while he was getting me info to wire him, I found the bitcoin-otc channel and found someone trying to offload money from that same exchange site for paypal.

So, I just did a personal transfer on PayPal and he sent me the money a few minutes later. I used the exchange site to list a few bids, and I had 600ish BTC in my Bitcoin wallet shortly.

They have an interesting rating system web of trust feature where you rate the transactions you do with other people, and it spits out a number that shows how widely you're trusted in the community (and I think it also ranks on if people you trust trust that person or at least trust the people that trust that person. That way someone can't just use a bunch of fake identities to build a good rep).

The reason I was willing to send first for the transfer I did was that I saw the guy had a high number, and I recognized his name from the browsing I did in their forum. I probably wouldn't be willing to do that though if I hadn't been familiar with trading poker funds with people I had never met before in much the same fashion; so, we again come to the problem that an easier way to buy bitcoins needs to be found before widespread acceptance.

Yes, I am also planning to speculate on this. In my opinion there is much more upside than down I think. Over the last week there seems to have been a large buyer operating on MtGox.

http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=5613.0

Keep in mind that right now 7000 new coins are being created through mining each day. A lot of those guys are probably cashing the coins in to pay for their mining investments. Until last week, the average volume on MtGox probably wasn't much higher than 7000 coins. There is still a lot of down side risks because of the daily new coins.

However, I am betting that bitcoin adoption will accelerate. The currency seems ideally suited to several types of transactions. If one of these takes hold in a particular niche, you could see a step function in increased usage and value. The biggest hurdles for a new currency like this to overcome are recognition that is has value, and relatively easy to trade with other currencies. Bitcoin has jumped both of those. Now it just has to find a place where it can outcompete existing methods.

It is pretty easy to buy coins through coinpal though. The fees are high there. Who did you trade with on otc?

It's super easy to buy through CoinPal; I did a few small transactions there over the past few weeks just to play around a little.

I will pm you who I traded with.

The problem with coinpal not only is the fees, but the limits. 20 BTC limit at first.

That too. The fee wouldn't be a big deal (I think it's a flat $3 fee?) if I could have just bought $1k worth at a time, but the limits were brutal.

It's still the easiest and most automatic way (that I saw) to get any bitcoins period though, a good way to get your feet wet. Now there just needs to be a solution that goes one step further and does the same thing for larger transactions and/or a lower fee.

I think the main thing preventing that is the threat of chargebacks with no physical delivery of any goods.

It's sort of a catch-22. Bitcoins areas of superiority is the low transaction costs, but to get bitcoins you need to spend money using the high transaction costs.

Another option if you are willing to wait is to mail cash to someone. He'll also mail you cash back too.

Yes, bitcoin's advantage of no transaction costs are negated when you have to move into and out of USD for a transaction. There are still areas where bitcoins can win.
Micro transactions - most micro transactions have very high fees. Sending $1 through paypal or by FB credits can cost 30%. Using bitcoin even with the 7% coinpal fee makes this attractive.

Wire transfers - You have to send a lot of money before wire transfers are more attractive than bitcoin. My bank charges $35, and I have to deal with the hassle of faxing the paperwork.

Markets where buyers are often sellers - online game funds, collectibles markets, domain name markets, etc... Instead of moving in and out of USD all the time, participants could use bitcoin and save a bundle on transaction fees.

Markets that are currently barter - I don't have any examples, but I am sure there are places where people currently trade goods and services inefficiently amongst each other. Perhaps bitcoins would be useful in lubricating these markets.

I think the guy who runs that site has to do a lot of trading to make it work. He is likely hamstrung by the same problem we have buying in volume or cheaply. He has to charge a high fee to overcome paypal charges and the amount he might have to pay above market. The limit is there so he doesn't run out.

I think the lack of chargebacks is a feature.

In the context of Bitcoin, it is absolutely a feature.

I was talking about the threat of chargebacks when processing credit cards or paypal sales when people are trying to buy bitcoins in the first place. Just that it disincentivizes merchants from popping up to sell bitcoins to the general public because all of the ways that make it easy to buy things online are also ways that are subject to the threat of chargebacks.

Oh I see. Yes you are right. This is why those methods will cost more, like coinpal.

So today it was looking like volumes would get back to normal, but then in the last hours, 10k BTC have been moved through MtGox.

If my single large buyer theory is correct, then we should see the price fall once he decides to back off for a while. 7000 new coins per day is tough to absorb given the size of the market for goods right now.

Some recent quotes from HSNL **** thread.

got a low stakes going now on betco.in if you want to try it out

You playin now? Got a 5 handed game going now.

And the entire site crashes when I was all in, lol.