Bubble 2.0 would be amazing we can all hop out at $30 this time

I don't think you "get" Bitcoin yet.

Bitcoin is designed to be deflationary, but it is still in a very inflationary stage, about 0.1% per day.

Bitcoin doesn't have to take over the world's existing currencies to find and occupy a successful niche. Right now it appears, btc is being used for international transfers and underground economy stuff.

Re: security, as far as I know, bitcoin has not been counterfeited once. Sure a few sites have been hacked and bitcoins have been stolen, but there are plenty of examples of this happening with other currencies too.

LOL, people really still believe in this bitcoin crap?

What do you mean "believe"? I am not evangelizing or anything. Bitcoin exists, it's being traded for real money, and it's being used to make actual purchases. You don't believe that these things are actually happening?

d...
i...
a...
g...
f...

Bitcoin is a guaranteed failure because even if it gets super lucky and gains steam, it needs government approval/non-interference to continue to exist in any meaningful way.

But...

USA and other governments will never stand for anonymous currency because of many, many, reasons. (tax evasion, money laundering, illegal transactions, hidden transactions.) World governments take a lot of time and effort to control their currencies AND track financial transactions. In the US, we have several mega-bureaucracies tracking and monitoring all sorts of transactions - pretty much all of the big ones.

If you think that governments don't have a way to control crypto currencies, take a look at the tools US govt is using to monitor and regulate transactions. (IRS, DEA, Customs, etc.) Ultimately, your virtual currency is worthless until you buy real, tangible goods and assets and it's really hard to hide those from the Feds.

NSA has been monitoring BitCoin from Day One...
Lead BitCoin programmers have testified before the CIA...
And this is for a $50 million toy currency.

Future cryptocurrencies will be FBI sting operations.

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

In Russia it's illegal to encrypt your hard drive...
Theoretically, any BitCoin activity can land you in Gulag...
But then in Russia it's always who you know.

One needs to separate digital currencies...
From the criminal underground that drives BitCoin...
And the fantasy anarchist Cults.

The Adult Future is innovations like Dwolla...
Which was technically illegal for 2 years...
Before finding a way to hook up with financial system.

If some dude from Iowa can do this...
America is still one ****ing great country.

http://articles.businessinsider.com/...ge-fees-paypal

Just like the govt shut down bitorrent, IRC, and Tor/Silk Road amirite.

Bitcoin traffic can be masked to use any port and be indistinguishable from any other normal web traffic. Good luck shutting it down.

As far as tracking on the exchange to fiat, sure the large exchangers can be pressured/shut down, but it's impossible to stop p2p trading and all the sites that will direct people to local exchangers.

To shut it down, it's not as hard as you think. Just make a few examples of high profile users and make them disappear as "terrorists". EZ game.

I thought bitcoin could be controlled if any one user ever got more then 50% of the processing power. And to do that (back a few months ago) that was about $10 million in computer equipment.

I'd bet a lot of money that the government has more then enough "computing power" to take over 51% of bitcoin. It'd be a pain in the ass and take a lot of man power to set up. But if they "really" wanted to do it, it could be done (imo).

the only thing that can happen while an attacker has large piece of the network is they have a chance to double spend bitcoins from their addresses, they can't just start raiding accounts. while this would be very bad press for bitcoin, almost all users will not be affected just the currency exchanges (and retailers who ship very quickly) until they notice the attack and shut down.

in the face of continuous attack, i would guess within 24-48 hrs there is a patch released by the bitcoin developers (or popular unofficial fork) implementing some way to ignore/deprioritize the attacker's block chain by users following/prioritizing blocks signed by trusted exchanges/mining pools/developers of their choice.

That's a pretty ugly situation, trusting people to be able/willing/trustworthy to determine which are legit when the attacker can make their fork look all different ways that are hard to detect automatically.

The answer is that before they ever care about bitcoin it will be much more difficult to get 50% power (it's not 50% of current power actually, they have to fully match the current network, making them 50% of the new larger amount).

Difficulty consistently climbs with price, but has not been falling in proportion. This is because people are getting more and more efficient at mining and that will continue. It might cost the gov 10x or more to accomplish the same hashing power. Our hardware already sits in warm, safe rooms with a live in technician. They have to pay for all that stuff.

The real way they destroy the network is by going back to the root node, and solving from there until they can get a larger chain, and not publish anything for a long time. Then keep generating from that point on. Publish, and they destroyed everything else. Although what I suspect would happen is that somewhere the "accepted" blockchain is stored off somewhere, people patch their clients to reject the other blockchain, and continue on. I'm a bit sketchy on the details. It certainly would cause havoc for a while, though.

There are already check-pointed blocks. Not sure how frequently and how far past, but the standard client won't accept chains without them.

I don't love it really, but it stops what you describe.

There are other reasons that starting from the beginning is hard, if you go fast you'll run your difficulty way up. Hmm, longest means most difficulty so maybe that doesn't hurt you, you just put in as much work as the whole network has for all time and it won't matter if it's fewer blocks. But if you had 3 times the whole network it would still take you over a year to catch up and that's assuming you stay 3x faster than the network as it grows.

Going back just a week will cause almost as much havoc for a lot less cost.

recalculating the chain from the beginning or any significant time back is nearly impossible, it might be pushing into $100Ms in cost. plus the bigger the fork the more easily for it to be identified as an attack and ignored. immediate patches with farther up checkpoints. if the checkpoint is moved to the block number where the attack fork began, all work on attack would have to start over, nothing could be reused.

Harassing users and exchange operators would be more effective I think.

I guess I'll never live that one down but people keep forgetting to mention that they disagreed with my sentiment when I posted it and bought a ton of bitcoins when they were cheap. I'll go first.

price hit 6 today and now at 5.86.

Did not expect to see it this high until maybe middle of 2012.

this

time to get involved / buy some ?

now @ 7

gonna be interesting to see what happens in the next month since the big commercial for bitcoin is coming up soon.

inventing an online currency is now illegal? oh hollywood.

Say I wanted to buy $500 worth of bitcoins. Is there some simple main website I could go to and just purchase them instantly with a credit card?

no. A wire would probably be fine.

Anything that can be charged back or disputed or cancelled is obviously not accepted, as there is no way to get bitcoins back once they have been transferred.

u can use a bank acct and get them instantly for 5% fee at https://www.bitinstant.com/

its much cheaper to sign up for dwolla then buy some at mt gox, but that will prob take a week to get started.

It isn't that simple no.

You want to go to Paxum.com and deposit with your CC
Make an account at TradeHill.com
Send Paxum dollars to TradeHill
Buy bitcoins for dollars