Bitcoin Forum

Why are you sold on bitcoins?


Here's my story. An open source gaming of mine link to bitcoin to a thread. I checked it out, then I immediately realize its potential for agorism. I was sold right there.

I never heard of the idea called cryptocurrency though I was vaguely aware of crypto-anarchism. I thought about digital money but concluded that they will never work in practice because there's no way to render them truly scarce.

I've had a long-term interest in distributed systems such as Gnutella and Tor. I also support Austrian economics and anarcho-capitalism. Bitcoin is basically an exact match for my interests.

I know that Bitcoin will work because I understand both its technology and its economics.

I had thought about it a little and decided it wasn't possible also. Followed here from slashdot. Read and was amazed that it had been accomplished.

I know for sure a limited number of transferable tokens makes a good money. And although I can't verify the implementation myself it does look good.

I'm not "sold" on bitcoins, in that, I have no clue if they will succeed or fail.  I think failure potential is >50%, and that it's a high risk endeavor.

It's also an intriguing concept, fun to play with, and a potential "disruptive change", a genuinely new idea in the area of currencies, which hasn't seen many truly unique ideas in the past 100 years.

As theimos, I'm also amazed with decentralized systems and libertarian economics. I come to bitcoins from tahoe-lafs.org and the first was 'wtf'. Currently I believe in original idea a lot. It still needs much work to be usable by my mom, but I see the way.

At this time I'm affraid of two things:
* reaction of government when bitcoin become more popular. But it is just 'we will see'. Keeping infrastructure decentralized can help a lot in future.
* missing services for which we can pay in btc. It is egg-chicken problem. We can only try to talk with service providers and again 'we will see'.

I have been a p2p enthusiast for about 10 years. I have been a strong supporter of pseudonymous p2p projects  such as Freenet, i2p, and Tor since I think their existence is essential to guarantee free communication in society.  But I always thought that most p2p networks don't have a satisfactory mechanism for allocating bandwidth among their users. I already came up with the idea of a p2p cryptocurrency myself to solve this problem about 5 years ago (my version was not nearly as ingenious as Satoshi's).

Also, I have always been angered and frustrated with the crappiness, inconvenience, and lack of security of popular online payment methods such as credit cards and paypal.  

My credit card has been scammed twice. I felt that the ensuing grief was completely unnecessary. There is simply no good reason to give everyone on the internet (and on the street) you pay a few dollars a blank cheque (essentially that's what CC details are) and then to trust them not to abuse it. The stupidity of this system has always amazed me.  

When I first stumbled accross Bitcoin (thanks to the now deleted Wikipedia article), there wasn't much selling to do, I simply thought, YES this is what I have been waiting for all these years.  

I came to this project from the original Slashdot announcement and was incredibly skeptical that this idea really would work as suggested.  

The idea for electronic money first grabbed my interest back in an issue of Byte magazine almost 30 years ago, where the article went into details and even had some software published with the article about how to implement the currency and how to even send that money by e-mail (the suggested method at the time and WAAAAAY before the web happened).  The one fatal flaw that I saw of this particular money system was the need for a central authority to perform the record keeping, but the basic concept was pretty sound and I kept an ear to the ground in terms of future developments of the idea.

When the slashdot article suggested that somebody figured out how to decentralize the record keeping aspect and maintain the integrity of the currency, my first impression was "bullshit" and to think it was some major scam.  It was something I studied and even implemented in terms of a test currency.

Satoshi certainly deserves some kudos with putting together some ideas from different places and shoving them together to make something new and different.  None of this is really all that new by itself, and I was aware of nearly all of the pieces even before Satoshi created Bitcoins, but never thought of putting them all together in this fashion.  I even vaguely remember HashCash, but didn't think of using it for real money.

This is also an enabler concept, as it opens up a whole bunch of other possibilities, some of which I've described in other posts, some of which I still have yet to act upon.  We've really just started to come up with the power of this idea, and I don't think it will be restricted to just this current implementation of Bitcoins either.


The government issue is perhaps the worst part of it.  My hope is that it becomes popular enough fast enough that it will be like e-commerce:  It hit the government so hard and so fast that regulatory agencies weren't able to cope with it, but it was adopted slow enough that the grandchildren of senators and congressmen were involved enough that those regulation would have to put the relatives of members of congress in jail if it was made illegal.  Even now the concept of sale taxes for internet purchases is still a huge issue, yet most state legislatures have broadband internet access in the legislative chambers now.  If Bitcoins becomes popular enough that members of congress are using it before it is regulated, we might have a chance to avoid this bombshell.  Had congressmen thought that the internet was for distribution of pornographic GIF images and playing NETTREK, I doubt they would have funded DARPANET or even permitted it to remain in operation.

In terms of services, I think it is trying to find the "killer app" which in and of itself justifies the use of Bitcoins.  I'm talking something which can't be done unless you are using Bitcoins.   Other things will be nice in terms of helping expand the overall market and other applications will show up, but that is to me what will make or break Bitcoins.  I have no idea what that might be either, and I don't think anybody has come across it yet.  There could be a gradual discovery of Bitcoins and several small things that together will eventually add up to be something big, but I don't think you can use existing e-commerce sites as a template for this "killer app".

My fear is that perhaps hyperinflation and/or civil unrest is going to show up and become the "killer app" that will make Bitcoins necessary.  If people stop trusting the fiat currencies, Bitcoins might be a salvation together with other alternative currencies, but then again that might give a reason to do regulations on those alternate currencies to try and prop up the fiat currencies too.  It will make a whole bunch of people who are currently on this forum quite wealthy, but that is a world I'm not sure I'd like to live in either.  Perhaps wiser heads would prevail and be grateful that trade is happening at all and turn a blind eye to something like Bitcoins in that situation too.

I also came here via the Slashdot post. Living in Europe, options for safe online payment are very limited, even more if you are, just like me, very sceptical about paypal and similar services (they are not banks and don't have to comply with regulations that governments put upon them). Although I have a credit card (they are not so easy to get here in Europe as compared to the usa), I'd rather not use it, because it puts me in debt of someone.

Bitcoin doesn't have these side effects and I understand how they work, this generates some trust for me and I hope bitcoin will be accepted by many people in the future.

Why am I sold? Well, I've been waiting for a system like this for a long time. ;) I've been through every 'slash and burn' Visa merchant regulation change since 1998. I've witnessed the rise and fall of many centralized payment systems. I've seen bank/court/government corruption with my own eyes, and on and on.. :) A lot of people on this forum can probably relate to this. ;)

My biggest fear is that government will stifle the adoption of Bitcoin by making it illegal. This, in turn, would compel any corporation in their jurisdiction to refuse to use it.

We will end up with people who use Bitcoin illegally or from jurisdictions where it is still legal. The "wild west cowboys"; if you will. :P

The mainstream media would likely smear Bitcoin and tell the general public that it only has one use - to further the black market. You'll get the typical vox populi reaction in the name of protecting children/animals/environment/"insert some cause here"; individuals will stop using it out of fear and it will snowball from there. They know how to play the hegelian dialectic game quite well. :P

That said; I think we still have to try.

I, for one, am not giving up. :)

Cheers!
The Madhatter

Lack of centralized (government) control and fixed supply.
I think that if bitcoin becomes widely adopted, it will severely mitigate the ability of government to raise revenue by force (tax and inflation). This will shrink the size of government and make it more accountable.

No dependance on 3rd party for transactions.
Bitcoin gives us a way out of the parasitic banking system and limits the ability of the government to monitor/audit our economic activity. This means it will be very difficult to regulate much of the economy leading to freer markets and therefore, greater economic growth. Taking away the power of the government to manipulate markets kills the incentive for corporate-government partnerships.

Bitcoin is nothing short of revolutionary.

I'm an agorist/libertarian.  I've been waiting for this for thirty years.

+1.5 (minus half a point for missing that it will make government impossible if it out-competes the central-banking/fiat-currency monster)

I don't think that he missed that, I think that it was implied.  The central bank is the beating heart of the beast.

I read the article by Elliott Prechter in the September Elliott Wave Theorist.  I think the biggest attraction was it's non-inflationary nature, followed by the potential for micro-payments.

I'm also concerned about government banning it.  Possibly one way to fly under the radar of government long enough to get established in the mainstream and thus make it politically expensive for government to intervene is to blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah.

<offtopic>Bitcoins became popular in online gaming world once it will be easy to securely and quickly buy bitcoins; it will stay as currency for geeks and hackers until we have to go to IRC and find somebody to buy btc from them.</offtopic>

Your use of the English language makes my eyes bleed.  Are you using a translation program to post?

Oh, sorry. My English is poor, I know. And when I think faster than write, it leads to crazy sentences like this ;-).

I think bitcoin is the first virtual commodity independent of any central control that has made it to a stage where it's being adapted. Combined with the fact that it is easy to send over the internet, this makes it very promising as an international unit of exchange.
(this could never happen with a real commodity such as gold, as it is way too expensive to store and transport)

Even though I'm not exactly sure that bitcoin in its current form will make it, it shows great promise.

 bla

<void>

 I was interested in alternative currencies ( well I m interested il all kinds of alternatives ), but never found one that seemed to be a good investment; bitcoins have all the important points for me :

* seems well enough implemented and secure
* Its made to be worldwide, not tied to a town or country
* can be converted to real $
* have an active and growing community
* is already pretty big and developped, and it seems it ll continue growing
* begins to be accepted for web services , games and more

 I wont say bitcoins have xx % chance to make it, taking the world is never easy, but it seems the best alternative to try for anyone interested in alternative currencies.

I've lost trust with humans.  I'm tired of having to "trust" some single entity, be it a bank or a government, with my money.  I do, however, trust mathematics and the proofs to cryptographic computational complexity.  :)

Okay I've edited mine, now you have to edit yours!

done...

I'm originally from the Slashdot crowd,  I downloaded the program and didn't really understand how it worked at first.  About a month later (after siting at the back of my mind), I downloaded the source code and "bitcoin.pdf", and went through it much more thoroughly,  gaining a (somewhat deep), understanding of how bitcoin works.

Overall as a Laissez-faire Capitalist I'm convinced that bitcoin (or something better) is immensely important for the future.

Now bitcoin, is a bit of a passion, I hope to gain a decent amount of coins before the price skyrockets, and do everything I can to help it skyrocket.

OMG!!!!  OMG!!!  I never realized that the government is reading my forum posts!!!!  NOOO!!!!  I'm going to have to delete all my posts!!!!   EGAD!  But I can't delete my posts!!!

Seriously, folks.  Focus on liberating minds.  Ignore the government.

The same thing happened to me.

The idea that the address where to send the money should be different every time did not fit in my head.

I think theese thing is necessary to highlight particularly in the adverts about bitcoin.

Bitcoin is the perfect agorist currency.

I lean the same way, though this is far from proven. Some limitations I can think of:

• A substantial majority of humans lack computers and/or internet access.
• Bitcoin might be out-competed by something else in the works (Truledger, Loom)
• Bitcoin might be out-competed by something not yet invented
• The entire model might be flawed
• Space aliens could destroy the intertube
• etc...

i've been interested in alternate currencies for about a year and half now, since I completely lost faith in the dollar. When i discovered bitcoin i got really excited about it, it blew my mind! I'm not a hacker or programmer type, so it took a lot of reading to get an understanding of it, but i think it was worth it. as long as it's not made illegal to trade, i think bitcoin will become a widely accepted currency for sure. Also, it really needs to be made more user-friendly so more people like me, or with even less computer knowledge than me, can use it. It seems like there are some brilliant people involved so i think it will happen.

There have been some threads that have suggested a way to at least compensate for the fact that Bitcoins is an electronic currency, such as this one:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1514.0 (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1514.0)

If you have somebody you can trust which is printing out Bitcoin notes in some fashion, it can de-couple the currency from the network and computers.  I would see this most useful in a situation like a farmer's market or small trade group of some kind, but it could also be used in 3rd world countries where computer access is considerably more limited.  The stability of Bitcoins compared to currencies in 3rd world countries is something I think might be appealing enough that some smaller countries might even accept Bitcoins perhaps as a national currency, especially if they could "stick it to the man" in terms of Euros and Dollars.

Why won't Bitcon be cloned be anyone else? New genesis block, ... voila, another competing currency,right?

So you discover bitcoin and the new competitor, one has merchants and exchanges and developers and a community, and the other is the same thing, but without those good things. Which do you choose?

Certainly something could displace bitcoin, but it will have to be better in some way, not the same thing two years younger.

Glad to see that the world-famous "stateless ex-American" Mike Gogulski is using bitcoin!  Just sent a donation to your website nostate.com. 

Those are all fair concerns.  Of course, the best solution (as always) is diversification, since each method (physical gold, electronic gold, loom, barter, state fiat paper, bitcoin, public key transaction processor, etc.) all have their relative benefits/weaknesses.

I think that bitcoins will work beautifully as a transactional currency.  I do not see people using them for savings.

However, I consider the seperation of transaction/saving as a great thing.  People can use bitcoins to do buisness and then convert into gold for saving.  This would create a nearly perfect monetary system.  Untouchable by governments and reliable through the centuries.

One of the main weaknesses of fiat dollars is that they are used for transaction and saving.  Dollar users are 100% tied to the whims of the central bank.

Bitcoin is a better store of value than any fiat currency in the world, but everything is relative.  Good money is chased out of the market by not-so-good money, so your Bitcoin/gold duality theorem might be correct.

@RHorning: The discussion you point to is very interesting. I am not at all certain I understand all of it. My related reservation is around latency. If a meatspace vendor is going to sell me something for BTC, right now they face a confirmation latency on the order of 10-20 minutes if they require at least one confirmation in the subsequent block. If they require zero confirmations it's 0-10 minutes. When I walk into a store and buy a pack of cigarettes, the equivalent "confirmation" comes by the clerk (cursorily) examining my banknotes and coins, and reaching an instant genuine/counterfeit decision. I wouldn't tolerate a 0-10 minute wait to get my fix, let alone a 10-20 minute wait. At the same time, maybe I'd *like* to adapt to a better system, so who knows. (Yes, I'm probably late to the game and this has already been addressed someplace)

@sgornick: You can bet your ass the moment I hear of someone else initiating another Bitcoin system based on a new genesis block that I'm going to start mining that one, too. Fork, baby, fork!

@em3rg3ntOrder: Aw schucks, ya know me already? :) Thanks for the contrib :) And you're right of course in your qualifications. What I've been breathlessly anticipating, though, is the moment of realization that Bitcoin or a system very much like it definitely will out-compete, displace and render obsolete fiat paper. I'd love to be sold on that point.

Gold is no longer money and it should remain that way.  People just need to realize that money exists only in the mind, to make transactions fair.  Money is the human concept of value as it relates to the real world.  Gold is payment in full by virtue of it's existance in the real material world (any physical object can be payment in full but gold is best if you want to store value for the future).  Gold should never be linked to the imaginary in any way.  Bitcoins are the best representation of the imaginary money system because they are only a small step away from being imaginary.  They have just enough structure to ensure a constant supply (stability).

No money supply can ever be permanently stable.  All systems can be gamed.  But, if you save in gold then the failue of money can never hurt you.  If bitcoins fail someday then the bitcoin savers will be burned just as bad as the dollar savers will be.  The gold savers will just shrug and convert some of their saving gold into whatever comes along next as money.

I should add that bitcoin's characteristics make it capable of outlasting any money system ever invented.  Once the adoption group is large enough, they will remain stable for longer than gold money or fiat money ever could.

Gold has been money for nearly all of recorded human history, and remains so; despite the desires of governments.  If that were not so, it wouldn't be worth much more than lead, and certainly less than many other heavy elements.  Uranium, for example is much more dangerous and capital intensive to mine and refine than gold, yet has recently been described as being in a bubble rally for breaking $60 per pound.  Gold's current spot price reflects it's position as an ideal, physical money.  That has never not been so.  The primary advantage that Bitcoin holds over gold as a trade currency is that 1) you can't transfer it over the Internet and 2) if you could it would still impose a transit overhead well beyond a transaction fee.

If you are attending the University of Kentucky as an Economics student and you have been taught that gold isn't money, you should consider transferring before you learn some more falsehoods that are difficult to overcome.

The one concern that a "meatspace vendor" would have to deal with if you conducted a transaction is to make sure you aren't double-spending the same bitcoins.  The confirmation latency is an issue that I haven't spent too much time to think about, and it seems like an issue that needs some work, but for a straight person to person transaction it would be more like writing a check.

You will have some level of trust with a merchant (most likely) and there are already existing laws in place if you try to screw over the merchant.  That would be a form of fraud at the very least and certainly would be non-payment of services if, and this is the catch, you double-spend the same bitcoins with multiple merchants.

Normally banks have as much as a full week of latency in order for a check to clear.  I'm not entirely sure what country you live in, but I would think that getting a "check" to clear in 10-20 minutes would seem like a godsend to a typical merchant in this respect.  You wouldn't get far before some police radio channel is buzzing that some idiot is kiting "checks" or Bitcoins in this case and is presumed to be in the process of doing it again.  The penalties for doing stuff like this is far worse than shop lifting.  Also, a merchant can confirm that you have the coins "available" and possibly will charge you a small "transaction fee" as well to make sure your purchase in this case has priority.  They would know that at least within the past 10-15 minutes you had the money to make a purchase, which might be good enough to them, particularly if you are a regular customer.  The fact that you authorized the transaction giving enough information to make it included into the next block would be sufficient for many merchants... presuming that they or somebody they trust has thought this through.

As a further incentive to "stay honest", merchants would presumably be connected through the network and could also receive messages from each other (using existing Bitcoin network protocols.....nothing new even needs to be added here) where they could in theory scan to see if those same bitcoins have been spent somewhere else but not yet included in a block.  Those messages are floating around the network too and can be used to stop dishonest behavior.  In short, the concern about the network latency is misplaced.  It may take some extra programming and a special "merchant" client that has tools to try and prevent this kind of fraud, but it is possible and doesn't need changes to the network as a whole, just to the particular front-end software that the merchant is using.  Presumably that would be something custom anyway due to the needs of a typical merchant.


The value of gold can also crash real hard too.  I love to use the analogy of finding some ultra-pure veins of gold on some asteroid.  If you could get a million ounces of gold @ $10 USD per ounce (in theory something which could happen), it would certainly send the gold markets crashing if those guys decided to dump it on the world markets all at once.  The days of a major gold rush to somewhere still aren't over, but they are going to be found in more exotic places than we've seen in the past.  If that happens, Bitcoin users are going to smile and those who are hoarding gold are going to look foolish.  The only similar kind of event with Bitcoins is if somebody who is hoarding a large number of bitcoins decides to dump them onto the major currency exchanges for Bitcoins to push the value down.  I think that would only be a temporary situation anyway.  Somebody doing that is also shooting themselves in the foot, and self-interest is one that would encourage you to put a large hunk of Bitcoins into such a market much more slowly.


The value gold has is such that it would still be worth more than the other heavy elements, because there are a number of electrical, biological, and metallurgical properties gold has which make it incredibly useful for many industrial applications.  It is biologically inert as the human body or for that matter most other forms of life really don't react to it... unlike lead which is incredibly hazardous.  It is very dense, has a unique color  (useful for art), incredibly ductle (can make some very thin wires), and with ordinary tools can be pounded down thin enough to be just a couple of atoms thick.... useful for many scientific experiments and again art.  Its use in the electronics industry is primarily due to the fact that it doesn't oxidize very easily, again unlike lead and for that matter most other elemental metals.  These and many other properties add value to gold well above and beyond the ability to easily make coins out of the stuff.

Uranium is hitting a bubble right now because there are a whole bunch of nuclear reactors going on line, along with a few countries like North Korea, Iran, and China who are eating up Uranium for making nuclear bombs.  The previous bubble like this hit during the 1950's and made some instant millionaires, but when America and Russia stopped making new warheads in large numbers and curtailed the construction of nuclear power plants as a result of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the bottom fell out of the Uranium market.  There just aren't that many other uses for the metal and the one remaining application, as a super-heavy metal for gunnery (depleted uranium bullets) isn't enough to sustain the market.

Gold is a much more valuable metal in and of itself, even if all of the metals of the world could be found in equal quantities, of which gold is rare because of raw physics and the make up of the Earth, it would still be one of the most valuable of all metals.

I wonder if a system like this would work.

What if you could send a bitcoin before you intended to purchase ? A merchant may broadcast an address or something and you could deposit there while walking past then come back later and just take the coffee thats waiting for you without needing to hand over cash at all.

This may not work for instant gratification and impulse buying (this might actually be a good thing lol) but if you could just have a bitcoin credit wallet sitting at your favourite coffee shop buying stuff would be instantaneous wouldnt it?

Maybe I just like to plan purchases ahead too much. :-[

Well, it might be annoying to have to walk past, but if you go to Starbucks or Podunckville Coffee Express regularly there's no reason you can't pay before you go out, or even on your way from your phone. Request addy to pay, pay it, get a "code, broadcast code from your phone automatically when you walk in, pick up mocha.

For merchant point-of-sale (POS) systems, the merchant should display a QR-code on a screen.  The customer uses their mobile phone to snap a picture of the QR-code

Automated processing software reads the QR-code in the picture, determines that it is a payment request from merchant CoffeeYourDrugOfChoice, Inc. for 35 BTC, and prompts the customer to approve the payment.

Presuming sufficient payment processor speed (see the snack machine thread (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423.0;all)), you could probably get away with zero-confirmation, instant bitcoin-denominated purchases.

Quite so.  The actual transaction can be verified as valid by the merchant's own client instantly, and other forms of fraud can be reasonably protected against by the use of a specialized network peer that watches the network for transactions that would have tried to spend the same coins, etc, and warn the vendor in real time; much like how the credit card companies' approval process works.  Confirmations from the blockchain are not necessary for normal transactions, and likely only to be waited for on big ticket items, such as buying a new car.


As useful an industrial material as gold would be, without it's monetary value I would seriously doubt that it would be valued higher than scandium, beryllium, or even silver (itself primarily an industrial metal so highly prised for it's usefulness that there is much more gold in an 'above ground' refined state than silver).  All of which are significantly more abundant in nature than gold.

A QR code is really a work-around solution.  Phones with near-field communications chips will be able to communicate with POS systems much faster and more conveniently.  Cashless & cardless commerce is the primary intent for the development of NFC, and the reason that NFC will be included into google android 2.3.

I'm not sure that there is any point to trying to make QR codes work, since if the credit card companies decided that they were too inconvenient to bother with over plastic cards with magnetic strips; there is not much point in us trying either.

I like Bitcoin because it actually provides the properties of money. Dollars do not -- how can you have any economic security if your savings depreciate at the whims of politicians? Or if they create a monetary system that is designed to expand credit into a bubble that collapses every so often?

Secondly, I like how it is nearly impossible to steal them. Your dollar savings, on the other hand, are easy as pie to steal -- just ask anyone who has been involved in an unjust lawsuit.

I originally discovered Bitcoins through an Austrian Economics Distribution list at the company that I work. That was right about the time it was Slashdotted. Wish I had gotten in even sooner, of course.

I use the word "money" for lack of a better term.  Read my definition of it above.  It is an internal calculation of value.  It is not part of the material world.

Gold has been used as money in the past.  However, this stopped for the common man after FDR and it stopped for international trade after Nixon.  It hasn't been money since.  We have been using fiat dollars to make our mental calculations.
Gold is an excellent wealth reserve(the best wealth reserve) but it is not money.
Also, I am not university trained.  They teach crap economics in all universities.

If you think gold is money then find me somewhere that you can buy something directly with gold.  Find somewhere that a person uses gold to calculate value.  Find somewhere that gold settles international trade imballance.  It doesn't currently exist.

This actually happened to the spanish during the colonization of south america.  They brought so much gold back to spain from the new world at such a low cost that it caused monetary inflation(they used gold as money then)  It also disrupted their internal wealth calulations.

However, despite the disruption, it remained valuable.

If we find a gold asteroid today, it won't even disrupt society(gold is not money, we don't use it for value calculations).  It will just drop the value calculation via the dollar.  It will still be an excellent wealth reserve because people will still want it.

You are confusing a currency with a money.  They are related, but distinct concepts.  Gold is an ideal money, but only a fair currency.  Coins used in the past were all (ideally, not actually) minted to the same standard weight of gold, silver, or copper.  This creates a defacto unit of currency, but physical coins are a poor currency because they both have mass and volume.  Fiat currencies have done well in the industrial age because they are representations of a numerical unit.  This is why Bitcoin is a currency, and not a money nor a commodity; as it is a pure unit without any physical representation required.

And I take offense at the statement that all Economics courses are crap in American higher education.

The great thing about economics courses is that they can use the same exam questions every year. It's just the answers that change.

Now that's funny!

:D :D :D