Bitcoin Forum

It feels like people starting to understand btc for real , even economists in todays Financial Times

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/612ed094-8aaf-11e3-9465-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz2sURCquH6

Registration wall. 

same here.

OP, can you post the article?

I hate the FT.  No matter how interesting a story they might have, I never waste time fussing with their little tricks to get my e-mail so they and all their friends can spam the hell out of my inbox.  Fuck the FT.

I hate giving my email as well. Try here (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ffi_01SZ7noJ:www.ft.com/cms/s/0/612ed094-8aaf-11e3-9465-00144feab7de.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk#axzz2sXyiN22P).

Do people still only have one email address?

No, but I only use it if I actually want to receive their emails.

sure here :


Bitcoin is far more than a currency for speculators

By John Gapper
People could gain ownership rights to digital goods similar to physical ones

Bitcoin is being forced to grow up fast. The arrest last week on money laundering charges of Charlie Shrem, a leading Bitcoin champion, coincided with a regulatory hearing in New York to consider what on earth it is – a virtual currency, speculative asset or a means of exchange?
The best answer is the last, although most excitement has been generated by its wild swings in value and the libertarian promise of a cryptographic currency replacing fiat currencies such as the dollar or the euro. In the end, the old laws affect everyone, including Mr Shrem, who has resigned as vice-chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation.

Payment sounds like the most mundane use for Bitcoin, or other tokens of value, yet it has the biggest potential. It is a challenge to the banking system and may allow the quick and cheap exchange – and transfer of ownership – not only of currencies but also of other assets, goods and services. It fixes a fundamental gap in the internet.
This potential is becoming clear, through the confusion and alarm created by Bitcoin speculation, and criminal uses such as trading drugs on Silk Road, the former online marketplace. Benjamin Lawsky, New York state’s superintendent of financial services, who called the hearing, wants to issue “bitlicences” for virtual currency businesses.
Bitcoin allows one person to hand a token of value to another securely, with no intermediary
Mr Lawsky is right to create a legal order for virtual transactions, rather than trying to stamp on Bitcoin, as some governments are starting to do. It would be feasible to push Bitcoin and similar initiatives underground but it would also be a wasted opportunity.
The temptation is to dismiss Bitcoin as being weird and easily abused. The fact that its inventor used the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, and that deals are authenticated by a peer-to-peer network of software “miners”, makes it hard for ordinary people, or regulators, to take seriously.
The other disincentive is that Bitcoin’s most-publicised use, apart from Silk Road trading, is as a speculative asset (the price has risen from less than a dollar in 2009 to about $920 this week). A virtual currency with no central bank backing and no yield is worse than a casino chip.
Look beyond this, however, and Mr Nakamoto’s invention is very useful. He called it “an electronic payment system” and the innovation is that Bitcoin allows one person to hand a token of value to another securely, with no intermediary such as a bank. The deal is authenticated and recorded by the network.
The best way to think of Bitcoin, or other such tokens, is like the data packets that carry information on the internet. They are valued because of what they allow, not for their inherent qualities. Most people do not want Bitcoin but they do want a fast, cheap way to make payments in their own currencies.
People can already use Bitcoin for foreign currency payments in this way, swapping dollars into Bitcoin and out again into euros. Ripple, another peer-to-peer currency network, emphasises such real-world uses rather than the value of its own XRP currency. “The world is not going to adopt a new math-based currency,” says Chris Larsen, Ripple Labs’ chief executive.
Swapping in and out of Bitcoin sounds complex but is less so than a typical foreign exchange transaction via a bank, which passes through correspondent banks, exchanges and clearing houses, all of which are regulated. This adds layers of extra costs compared with a peer-to-peer network.
Payments are also a profitable activity for banks, compared with the risky, capital-intensive business of lending. The average cash flow margin on global transactions was 38 per cent in 2010, according to the International Payments Framework Association, a bank group. It is, in other words, ripe for some peer-to-peer competition.
There are already signs of payments across borders being disrupted. M-Pesa, a mobile payment system developed by Safaricom, the Kenyan operator, was partly inspired by Africans using airtime minutes as a virtual currency. TransferWise, a London start-up, uses an exchange-like mechanism to make low-value currency swaps.
Old-fashioned financial services are thus an obvious target for Bitcoin-like networks. But there could be wider applications in the future, as the technology evolves. Nakamoto’s use of cryptography to assign and transfer ownership of online tokens creates possibilities that reach beyond payments.
One is the idea of “smart contracts”, suggested by Nick Szabo, a computer scientist and former law professor (Mr Szabo is among those suspected of being Mr Nakamoto, which he denies). They would be completed with cryptography – for example, by giving a person who buys a car digital keys.
Another is that people could gain ownership rights to digital goods similar to physical ones – lending or trading them as they want. At the moment companies tend to restrict digital rights to online goods because they are so simple to replicate – one item can be copied millions of times from the original source.
Bitcoin solves this for currencies – it provides a method for the effective transfer of ownership. Once a Bitcoin is handed to someone else, the first holder cannot spend it again. If the same kind of transfer were achieved for other digital items, ownership would be meaningful.
For now, these are possibilities. Fred Wilson, a partner in Union Square Ventures, said last week that virtual currencies reminded him of the internet of the early 1990s and had similar innovative potential. The wild days of Bitcoin should not blind us to what it could become.
john.gapper@ft.com
Twitter: @johngapper

Article is somewhat good, I like multiple analogies authors tries to put there.

But wow, a news site which needs your email just to view an article? Preposterous. That's one of the many reasons I avoid facebook and alike.  Simply viewing should be open to everyone.

Sometimes when google-cache fails , I use temporary e-mail sites like 10minutemail and alike. Sometimes it's blacklisted, but they cannot blaclist ALL of the temp e-mail sites.



On a side-note wanted to share that btc found it's way into my country press yesterday. It was not presented in a good light though, basically Bank of Latvia and Finance and Market Committee are aware of bitcoin and ask our people to avoid it or at least to be uber-skeptical about it. And also that local gold traders are interested in bitcoin.

here are the links to latvian:
http://www.delfi.lv/bizness/biznesa_vide/fktk-un-latvijas-banka-nerekomende-iedzivotajiem-izmantot-bitcoin-virtualo-valutu.d?id=44103599
and russian articles, if someone's interested.
www.delfi.lv/biznes/bnews/bank-latvii-i-krfk-predosteregayut-latvijcev-ot-ispolzovaniya-bitkoinov.d?id=44106009

lol, sorry!. It was begging for a cliche reply..

but its funny that every news-site lists the mtgox price of btc  ::)

because either they search bitcoin exchange in google and click I'm feeling lucky or type directly bitcoinexchange.com. Both takes them to MtGox :)

I liked most of this article except for the part talking about how we could use a digital ledger system like Bitcoin to transfer ownership rights of digital items (and I assume they were referencing media). I just don't see the feasibility in that for most digital items.

A ledger functions perfectly because we can't somehow transfer a bitcoin and double-spend it. But media can be copied and is very difficult to verify its legitimacy especially since media can be used offline. Sure the ownership is verifiable, but what's the pure benefit of that if we can't regulate it? At least with Bitcoins, it's pegged (in some way) to something that we continuously audit (in this case fiat) and has protocols that only mean something in one transactor, whereas media isn't (media can be used on many different transactors).

Just my thoughts...

Picture the title to a house or a car. Make sense now?

Thank you for the clarification. I wasn't sure of the scope what they would want to use data-based ledgers for. I should have been clearer. Yes, I definitely see it being beneficial for verifying purchases of physical items using a digital means. I just wasn't sure if they were also implying using this type of safeguard for purely digital goods too. The way I read it made it seem like that.