Bitcoin Forum

The Bitcoin Network is pretty safe now, but what would happen if some government decided to shutdown the exchanges. If banks were cut off from exchanges or the major exchanges were all simultaneously DDOS'd how would anyone know the exchange rate of Bitcoin?

We'd probably all hop on IRC and the forums and report transactions.

How do you think prices for cars, stamps and comic books are estimated?  The dealers formed networks to inform each other of the prices they are paying/getting.

Its amazing how many people don't ever use IRC, they'd be ripe for the plucking, unable to know how much they are being overcharged due simply to their own prejudice against text-mode communications, Hilarious.

-MarkM-

That's what localbitcoins.com but it's also centralized and don't have critical mass.

At this moment Bitcoin aren't a menace for the governments.
They ignore it.

Bitcoin-OTC

maybe "The Foundation" will tell us what to price it at :o

simple. an exchange will open on Tor. It will probably have some hefty fees, but it will let you come in via lots of worldwide financing options, and let you cash out using lots of different methods. And if you dont like it you wont have to use it, you can keep doing OTC stuff with sketchy people in back alleys ;)

+1

A new system would spring up, an OTC private exchange. A lot of people have a lot of money invested in keeping this going. They would have to do a lot more than just shut down the exchanges I think. Would definitely cause some problems for some time although. I like the example of how stamps and coins are priced by the collectors themselves.

I could never get the bitcoin-OTC stuff to work properly on my window box, so I was happy when MtGox rolled around. :)

That's great! So the 1000+ customers that BitPay has and the thousands more that will someday use Bitcoin will be shut down unless they open and IRC window and monitor what trades are generally going for? There really aren't very many exchanges to DDOS in order to shut down Bitcoin growth and create a panic. It's not like there is real world signage with the price of bitcoins like at your local fuel station.

Unless you think that sign is magic, we aren't looking at the end of the world.

Those signs are updated a few times a day, by humans  Increases are urgent, declines are meh..

Gasoline is unusual, politically, but can serve as a good example for other goods that are less regulated.  In the US, we have PADDs, and 99% of the time, what you pay for fuel in your car is the spot cost of gas, +/- the PADD premium or discount (PADD 4 is almost always the highest), +/- the local refinery efficiency (thank you Pine Bend (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Bend_Refinery)), and the delivery cost (usually not more than a couple of cents per gallon).