Bitcoins

fizzit

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There's a lotta wild speculation going around this new currency. I spent half an hour tonight just trying to wrap my head around how it works.

http://motherboard.tv/2011/5/27/how-to-get-rich-on-bitcoin-by-a-system-administrator-who-s-secretly-growing-them-on-his-school-s-computers

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

http://www.weusecoins.com/

What do you guys think about this? I think it has the potential to either get shut down quickly by the government, or change the world :shock:
 
Its a fluid form of barter, and believe me the IRS knows about it. There is no doubt in my mind that they are wrestling behind closed doors about how to address the issue of web-based barter where no taxes are paid on services and products.

There is also the issue of money laundering from illegally gotten profits, and the web being used to make criminal activity easier to be paid. I wanted to buy a car a while back, and I went ot the bank to get $5000 in cash from my savings. They wouldn't give me that much cash. BUT IT WAS MY MONEY!

They wouldn't give me a clear answer why. They would instantly wire-transfer any amount in my account to another account. I could even get a Cashiers Check, but cash? I already knew that if I wanted to travel outside the US with more than $10,000 in cash, I have to register and declare it.

A friend once said if he came into a huge sum of cash, he would deposit it in a Caribbean account (British Virgin Islands?) and travel with a Global bank credit card (Barclays?) that is auto-paid from his Carib account. (reminds me of the movie "A simple plan")
 
barter, is the way. as long as there is no text or written contracts with your numbers or name on them 8)
 
I'd argue that barter is more trackable due to the fact that you have to trade a physical object which can have your DNA on it. It's harder to use over international borders and more expensive not in person because of shipping, unless you're bartering a service of some sort. It's true, bitcoins make illegal activity very easy :shock:
 
Bitcoin is an idea whose time has come. It's just fiat money minus paper, with a cryptographic guarantee that they wont be "printed" like crazy or counterfeit by malicious entities. The bitcoin network is already easially the most powerful distributed computer in existence at ~12,000 gigahash per second.

Millions move through bitcoin exchanges every day. Merchants stand to double profits by cutting out credit card exchange fees, so we may very well see widespread adoption on that fact alone. The list of vendors that accept bitcoin has grown everyday and is getting pretty extensive. You can buy domains, hosting, hardware, even food. And don't forget about silkroad

There is no office to raid. No company or employees of bitcoin. It's all open source, peer to peer, much like bittorrent. The government would have to go after exchanges, and the biggest is overseas in japan anyhow. It would be very difficult to shut down the bitcoin network, and even then, only in the USA. The rest of the world would go on using bitcoin without a hitch....including Americans with offshore VPS and encrypted connections
 
What has attracted a lot of heat to BitCoins, is that it is being used as the currency for the website "Silkroad", which is effectively an Ebay for illicit drugs. It runs on the TOR network, and because all the journos started running stories on it, they had to shutdown to new members. Bitcoins is the perfect currency for such an exchange, because whilst not totally anonymous, it is close to it. And in my opinion, the ability for Bitcoins to facilitate such markets is what the government will use as an argument to shut it down (along with money laundering, and the good ol' fall back excuse of "terrorists"). It is widely appreciated that the Patriot Act was drafted years before it was enacted (funnily enough they didn't draft thousands of pages of legislation in the weeks following 911 before it was enacted), and the government was just waiting for an excuse to enact it. Dick Clarke recently revealed that they also have an equivalent to the Patriot Act in IT terms re the internet, and they are just waiting for a major E-Attack of some kind to justify enacting it, which will have widespread implications for freedom on the internet that they would struggle to get enacted now.

But as you say, it might be harder for them to shutdown than they think. Apparantly the value of the Bitcoin currency fluctuated dramatically when the whole Silkroad thing was publicised.
 
http://blog.turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/bitcoins-the-taxless-currency/07182011-7115

TurboTax seems to be endorsing bitcoins as a legal means of tax avoidance.
 
fizzit said:
There's a lotta wild speculation going around this new currency. I spent half an hour tonight just trying to wrap my head around how it works.

http://motherboard.tv/2011/5/27/how-to-get-rich-on-bitcoin-by-a-system-administrator-who-s-secretly-growing-them-on-his-school-s-computers

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

http://www.weusecoins.com/

What do you guys think about this? I think it has the potential to either get shut down quickly by the government, or change the world :shock:

I stumbled across bitcoin about 2 weeks ago. I did a lot of reading and remember a few points. 1st was the claim that if you have bought $1000 worth of bitcoins at the inception, you would now have $1Million. Second, at one point there was an incredible devaluation of bitcoin. Enough for me to not be interested.

http://nerdr.com/bitcoin-exchange-scam-bitcoins-are-worthless/
 
Interesting concept. I'd heard of it before, but never really looked into it much at all. Sounds like an idea with a lot of merit and potential, even if it's not exactly the most stable market at the moment. :p

Gordo said:
I stumbled across bitcoin about 2 weeks ago. I did a lot of reading and remember a few points. 1st was the claim that if you have bought $1000 worth of bitcoins at the inception, you would now have $1Million. Second, at one point there was an incredible devaluation of bitcoin. Enough for me to not be interested.

http://nerdr.com/bitcoin-exchange-scam-bitcoins-are-worthless/
First, a disclaimer. As I stated above, I have no prior history with bitcoin and have no vested interest in it, financially or otherwise. Everything I'm about to say is from my own research on bitcoin today.
Now that that's out of the way...

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but at the risk that either you're not remembering the details of the two points you mentioned, or someone comes across your post at face value, let me elaborate on said details (which I only know because I ran across both of them in my reading over the last hour or so).

Point 1:
"if you bought $1,000 worth of bitcoins at the inception, you would now have $1 million"

This is entirely because of the market value. Like any stock, commodity, or currency market, the value varies over time. Given that this is a relatively new, unproven market, it makes sense that the value would vary more average. From what I read, when bitcoin launched, 1 BTC (bitcoin currency) was worth ~$0.01. The current value of 1 BTC is more like $7-$8, down from a few months ago when it apparently was sitting around $15 for quite a while. So yes, for a while there was a 1,000x relative deflation from launch. As with anything else, it's worth exactly what someone will pay you for it and nothing more.

Point 2:
"at one point there was an incredible devaluation of bitcoin"

Assuming you're talking about the incident I read about there's a bit more to it than that. Instead of rewording, I'll just quote Wikipedia for this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Significant_events
On 19 June 2011, Bitcoin prices against the USD remained high, despite a security breach of the Mt. Gox Bitcoin Exchange, which notably caused the leaking of usernames, emails and MD5 hashed passwords of over 60,000 users onto the Web. A majority of those passwords were also salted. Passwords that were not salted had not been used recently. The price of a Bitcoin briefly dropped to $0.01 on the Mt. Gox exchange (but remained unaffected on other exchanges) after a hacker using credentials from a Mt. Gox auditor's compromised computer illegally transferred a large number of Bitcoins to himself and sold them all, creating a massive "ask" order at any price. Within minutes the price rebounded to over $15 before Mt. Gox shut down their exchange and canceled all trades that happened during the hacking period. The exchange rate of BitCoins quickly returned to near pre-crash values. This incident sparked a new breed of Bitcoin trading websites claiming better security.


So, yeah, it's not exactly a stable, bullet-proof, market at the moment. Will it ever be? No clue. But I do think it or something like it is a great idea.

I read all three articles on NERDr (one of which Gordo linked), and from what I can tell he seems to be operating from what, I think, is a fundamentally flawed assumption. In fact, he was so kind as to lay it out in one of his articles:
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; their are 3 main users of Bitcoin:
-The Money cleaners/tax evaders.
-Those involved in non-legal activities.
-The Greedy.
Basically, that the only people who might have some interest in using it are those who would use it for illegal or legally questionable activities, and for whom the relative anonymity is the sole reason to use it. All three of his articles are based around this core belief, and the belief that because of that, if the anonymity were to be compromised at all it would disappear. Also, the belief that it is a pyramid scheme and an evil thing that should be purged from existence as quickly as possible.

I'll be straight here....I can't see where the evidence for any of those assumptions and beliefs are, and tbh some of his ideas for getting rid or it are downright disturbing from a basic human rights level.
For example:
Laws can quickly be introduced banning the use of Bitcoins and other artificial electronic currency as payment of goods or service.
I'm sorry, the thought of my government trying to tell me that I cannot accept something as payment for goods or services (unless that something is in and of itself illegal for completely separate reasons) is absolutely absurd....and the fact that there are people actively endorsing such legislation is just appalling.

Is bitcoin being used for illegal activity right now? Yeah, of course it is. So is every other currency on the planet.

Like I said, I think bitcoin, or something like it, has real potential to be a solid, long-lasting, thing. There are some technical and social problems that will have to be overcome, but I think 10 years in the future, looking back on this, we'll laugh at articles such as this one, calling bitcoin such things as "the most dangerous open-source project ever created", or, my favorite for the commentary it gives on the person who wrote the article, "the most dangerous technological project since the internet itself".
 
x88x said:
Interesting concept. I'd heard of it before, but never really looked into it much at all. Sounds like an idea with a lot of merit and potential, even if it's not exactly the most stable market at the moment. :p
+1 watt he said...

Think of it like the early daze of the modern ebike :)

Very good forum here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php

LFP found a thread about KnightMB there that's a pretty amazing story:
http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=30632

I already got 0.001 BTC for free, and nobuddy has hacked my wallet yet! :lol:

The tech is evolving *very* fast. Seriously thinking of buying a used GPU mining rig and trying a little pooling...

Lock
 
Lock said:
x88x said:
Interesting concept. I'd heard of it before, but never really looked into it much at all. Sounds like an idea with a lot of merit and potential, even if it's not exactly the most stable market at the moment. :p
+1 watt he said...

Think of it like the early daze of the modern ebike :)

Very good forum here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php

LFP found a thread about KnightMB there that's a pretty amazing story:
http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=30632

I already got 0.001 BTC for free, and nobuddy has hacked my wallet yet! :lol:

The tech is evolving *very* fast. Seriously thinking of buying a used GPU mining rig and trying a little pooling...

I find speculating a "regulated" environment dangerous enough. Gold, Silver and Stocks provide me with all the risk I can handle. If I need more risk I can always play FOREX. To become part of the totally unregulated bitcoin world, where the value of your currency can fluctuate so wildly, plus finding someone who will accept your bitcoins for products you need, does not make sense to me. The concept is great. The reality is not there for me. I just don't understand, but then I don't understand how the US government can increase the number of paper dollars equal to the annual GDP in one year does not make the US $ worth 50 cents? With Gold at $1714 today, it is 70 cents, when Gold was $1200 Aug 8, 2010. Maybe it will be 50 cents by the end of the year and my puzzle will be explained.

Lock
 
Lock said:
The tech is evolving *very* fast. Seriously thinking of buying a used GPU mining rig and trying a little pooling...

Lock

Seriously. The question is whether it's too late to be one of the earlier adopters, because in this scheme, the early adopters make huge $ (assuming they sell at the right time)
 
Bitcoin implodes, falls more than 90 percent from June peak
By Timothy B. Lee | Published about 6 hours ago

bitcoin_implodes-4e9da25-intro-thumb-640xauto-26683.png


Bitcoin, the world's first peer-to-peer digital currency, fell below $3 on Monday. That represents a 90 percent fall since the currency hit its peak in early June.

Supporters argue that Bitcoin has fundamental advantages over conventional currencies. The system is designed to transfer funds without a central authority, freeing Bitcoin users from bank fees and government regulations. The Bitcoin protocol offers robust anonymity, and the protocol guarantees that there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoins in existence, which supporters have argued would give the currency a stable value.

Unfortunately, the currency's value hasn't proven stable in practice. Several waves of media coverage between April and June pushed the currency's value up from less than $1 to more than $30. Soon after it reached a peak, the currency had a series of PR disasters. One Bitcoin user claimed that a half-million dollars worth of Bitcoins were stolen from his PC; he may have fallen victim to Bitcoin-stealing malware. A few days later, the most popular Bitcoin exchange was hacked, forcing a multiday suspension of trading and generating another wave of bad press.

Trading resumed in late June at around $17, and the currency's value has been steadily declining ever since. In August, one of the most popular Bitcoin "banks" claimed it had been hacked, and had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoins, triggering a fall in value to under $7. Bitcoin fell below $5 in September, and it is now worth less than $3.

So is Bitcoin doomed? The value of Bitcoins is (like any fiat currency) ultimately driven by supply and demand. With dollars, the supply is controlled by the Federal Reserve, and the demand is driven by the size of the US economy. The supply of Bitcoins grows automatically, asymptotically approaching 21 million, and the demand for Bitcoins is driven by the volume of Bitcoin-denominated transactions.

And that's Bitcoin's fundamental challenge: as far as we can tell, the volume of Bitcoin-denominated transactions is tiny. True, there are a few hundred merchants who say they accept Bitcoin, but most of them appear to be small concerns, and almost all of them also accept dollars, euros, or another national currency. They may do only a small fraction of their business in Bitcoins.

And that's not surprising. While Bitcoin doesn't have any formal transaction fees, transacting in Bitcoins carries risks that dealing in dollars or euros does not. If users store Bitcoins on their PCs, there's a risk that malware will gain access to their wallets and steal their funds. Conversely, if they put their Bitcoins in an "e-wallet" service online like MyBitcoin, there's a risk that that service will have a security breach, or that the owners of the service will themselves turn out to be crooks.

There are also risks due to volatility. For example, Bitcoins lost about 15 percent of their value on Monday between 8am and noon on the East Coast. Someone who bought Bitcoins on Monday morning expecting to spend them on Monday afternoon might find that Bitcoin-denominated prices had suddenly risen by 15 percent. The 2 percent transaction fee on credit cards might seem downright reasonable in comparison.

The current value of Bitcoin—just under $3—is still significantly above the April price of around $1. It's theoretically possible that the volume of Bitcoin commerce will grow enough to halt the slide in the currency's value. But the value of a currency is built on its reputation, and five months of bad news and depreciation have done serious damage. Indeed, the mood on Bitcoin forums has turned grim, with Bitcoin fans giving one another pep talks and debating how low the price can fall before the currency is declared dead. It'll be difficult to pull out of that kind of tailspin.



http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/bitcoin-implodes-down-more-than-90-percent-from-june-peak.ars
 
Like I said above in this thread, in my opinion what will give this currency stable or increasing value is if the use of it in relation to things like silkroad (ie ebay for illicit drugs) or money laundering takes off. I remember reading a few years ago when the Euro was created, the US was genuinely concerned about the Euro coming out in a 500 Euro note, because they were worried that international drug dealers and organised criminals might move their choice of cash currency from the dollar to the Euro, and have an unknown weakening effect on the dollar.
 
x88x said:
Interesting concept. I'd heard of it before, but never really looked into it much at all. Sounds like an idea with a lot of merit and potential, even if it's not exactly the most stable market at the moment. :p

Gordo said:
I stumbled across bitcoin about 2 weeks ago. I did a lot of reading and remember a few points. 1st was the claim that if you have bought $1000 worth of bitcoins at the inception, you would now have $1Million. Second, at one point there was an incredible devaluation of bitcoin. Enough for me to not be interested.

http://nerdr.com/bitcoin-exchange-scam-bitcoins-are-worthless/
First, a disclaimer. As I stated above, I have no prior history with bitcoin and have no vested interest in it, financially or otherwise. Everything I'm about to say is from my own research on bitcoin today.
Now that that's out of the way...

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but at the risk that either you're not remembering the details of the two points you mentioned, or someone comes across your post at face value, let me elaborate on said details (which I only know because I ran across both of them in my reading over the last hour or so).

x88x,
I hope you are back "doing a little research on bit coin today?" :lol: :lol: :lol: :mrgreen:
bitcoin.JPG
 
From one week ago, October 18:
Lock said:
"Investing" $100Cdn from beer budget to bitcoin now!
LocK
Per VirtEx
https://www.cavirtex.com/orderbook

BeerCoins(TM) bought Oct.8 at 2.20000 bought today at 2.65000. Beer Fund(TM) has increased in value about $20 over the week...
8)
LoCk
 
Lock said:
From one week ago, October 18:
Lock said:
"Investing" $100Cdn from beer budget to bitcoin now!
LocK
Per VirtEx
https://www.cavirtex.com/orderbook

BeerCoins(TM) bought Oct.8 at 2.20000 bought today at 2.65000. Beer Fund(TM) has increased in value about $20 over the week...
8)
LoCk

You bought Oct 8 and posted Oct 18 "investing now!" I don't follow the story? :shock:
 
Sorry. Oct 8 was the last reported buy/value before the 18th. It's a virtual fund for buying virtual beer.
:)

Lock
 
Hmmmmm. The biggest problem is... Does it save to your computer? Or online? Its all hackable..... With cash or gold I can sleep with it under my pillow next to my .50 cal :wink:
 
Lock said:
Sorry. Oct 8 was the last reported buy/value before the 18th. It's a virtual fund for buying virtual beer.
:)
Lock

Do you have virtual drunk without he virtual hangover?

I am curious as to how this "market" works? In conventional markets we see a bid/ask and a trade price. With this market, on October 25 for instance, we see a buy price of $2.65, while all the sell prices are $2.90+. We recognize you bought at $2.65. Did anyone sell at $2.90 on that day and if so where is the buy at $2.90 recorded?
Thanks
 
I made a few hundred dollars with bitcoin by leaving my gaming graphics card HD5850 on for a few weeks crunching numbers....sold at peak of bubble.

If it was used properly it could be a solution to all this interest based invented fiat money crap that is the cause of all this crap. Bitcoin's can't be duplicated and are finite after a certain amount have been mined.

They can be broken down into thousand's of bits but you can't invent more of the original amount like today's bullshit.
 
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