Of all people, he should have known better. Gambling is not the same as investing.

Farmland might be a somewhat better bet, if only because food prices are going to go through the roof. Hopefully you would buy the land with the intention of actually growing crops, rather than speculating and just planning to sell the land later. There are numerous variables that could make that a bad gamble too.

Really, real estate hasn't hit its bottom yet (well, I guess I can only speak of U.S. markets, but I believe most of the Western world is in the same boat.) If you believe this is likely true, then its throwing money away to speculate on real estate now.

If I had a lot of bitcoins and were looking to speculate with them, I would first determine how long I'd want to hold my speculatory asset. If it were 2+ years, I'd go with precious metals. I'm convinced that's the best bet.

For 1-2 years, I'd either look around for other commodities to play with, invest in bitcoin businesses, or just hold onto my bitcoins as a speculation.

For less than a year, well, there's always shorting commodities or day trading. Or just betting on black in roulette.

Just in case you missed my question, Casascius.

I see that Memory Dealers is selling the 100btc bars now. Do they have the full-length private key affixed, or do they also use a mini version?

Senior citizens? The mentally handicapped? Kids?

Why should this company have been subjected to an extreme standard that no other minter of silver rounds, or maker of alternative currency, would ever be subjected to?

Look at the rounds several posts above, the ones that resemble American Eagles. Do you think fully-functional adults have never mistaken them for real Eagles, sometimes just because they neglected to turn them over?

Doesn't matter. Those things are still perfectly legal, and SHOULD be, because they are still different enough that simple familiarity and/or examination reveal what they are.

Side note: LDs are not coins. Calling private silver rounds coins IS illegal, and it's something neither NORFED nor Bernard von NotHaus did.

Pure, instant, unadulterated convenience. Use at your own risk.

Something doesn't have to be regulated in order for you to take someone to court over them depriving you of it.

That said, in many cases, good luck tracking the person down to drag them into court.

I'm not derailing the thread, I'm challenging your premises, one of which seems to be that its imperative to NEVER use an ewallet that's not run by Google or Microsoft *shudder* because big companies can be trusted in all cases much more than individuals.

Obviously if one doesn't need to spend coins on the go, ewallets are almost useless. But to suggest no utility can ever come from storing even a single bitcoin on ewallet sites (you seem determined to lump them all into the same risk level) is unrealisticly extreme. People want to use bitcoins NOW, despite the immature infrastructure.

Those who don't take precautions when using ANY ewallet site, no matter who runs it, will learn the lesson the hard way. The FDIC can't just print new bitcoins if an ewallet misses a backup and loses your private key due to a crash. When they're gone, they're gone.

It would be a great help to the bitcoin community if something like that was found. Personally though, I'm still trying to keep an ear out for when the Android wallet app is proclaimed relatively bug-free by users.

Mezze Grille. Personal "cash" exchange on the way from a meeting/party/hackerspace/whatever. You're waiting at the doctor's office and found a cool band you want to donate to that accepts btc. Replenishing your witcoin account (or anything similar that crops up.) Playing a quick round of bitcoin poker on the train. Etc.

The number of options here is only going to grow. I take it your answer to my question is "I don't know?"

And if I'm only going to trust any ewallet enough to hold a few coins, why on earth would I use some website/program/anything-not-open-source to remote access my computer?

I think most people here recognize (at least now) that keeping a lot of bitcoins online is fairly unwise. And that keeping one's entire stash in someone else's hands—whether a few coins or 25k—is just nuts.

That said, I'll ask you, what do you say to those wanting to spend their bitcoins on the go, wherever they may be? Keeping in mind that not everyone can setup an ssh to their home computer running bitcoin.

Die hard libertarians will always embrace cryptocurrencies, and will likely flock to whichever is currently the best. Them's the breaks.

Unless you know locals who use bitcoins, you might want to focus on services that can be offered online.

What languages do you know? You might be able to offer teaching, tutoring or conversational services for bitcoins.

If you know any programming, there may be bitcoin bounties for some code segments wanted by others on this forum.

How about artistic skills? Can you draw well, or perhaps create original designs for personal projects (nightstands, etc.) to certain specs?

You might be surprised the things others find valuable.

Also, in case I gave anyone the wrong impression, the above photo shows "generic" silver rounds from some unknown (to me) mint. They're regularly sold in the USA, despite the similarity to legal tender American Silver Eagles, and no one thinks anything of it.

Liberty Dollar rounds look more like




But (to try to bring us back on point) regardless of the case, does anyone really think that people who paid for Liberty Dollars and know exactly what they are should have their door kicked in and have their property stolen?

But that's just it... added up to what? What was the crime?

Making silver rounds that borrow some common features of coins? That's done all the time, by all sorts of silver mints. It's a non-issue—no one cares. There was clearly no counterfeiting going on.

Creating an alternative currency? Again, it happens all the time. Ithaca Hours, Butte Bucks, REAL Dollars, BerkShares, Salt Spring Dollars and many more circulate in their communities unmolested by federal agents.

Ignoring the (glaringly obvious) possibility of simply being targeted by a biased system for any number of ulterior motives, the only realistic reason for going after Liberty Dollars was some notion of some folks, somewhere being defrauded. In an age where people get suspicious whenever I hand them an older dollar coin or a $2 bill, this seems like a hard sell to me.

I suspect most complaints were from people who greedily took the LDs, no questions asked, because they assumed the offerer mistakenly gave them something with a resell value higher than face value, and who were ticked to discover otherwise. That, or some of the people using LDs were fraudulently passing them off as U.S. legal tender—in which case, why go after the manufacturer instead of the actual fraudsters?


Thanks, I'll read this. My phone apps are having trouble opening the file though, so it'll have to wait until later.

So it's not that it looks just like U.S. money... it's that it shares a name with a mid-1800s coin that most people have never seen or heard of? Funny, I don't recall that being mentioned in the write-up of the trial that I read (it's seriously becoming a nuisance that so many judges ban video cameras from the courts, I'd have paid to see the footage of this trial.)

And a quick question on that point: which is worse, calling your money "Liberty Dollars", or producing and selling silver rounds which look like this



but which are actually NOT really U.S. coins, and calling them "1/2-oz. Walking Liberties," while neglecting to put the phone number and website of the minter on the reverse?

I'm wondering where you draw your line.



I'll concede as to how Liberty Dollars could sound to some at first. Actually, Bitcoins reminds me a lot of LDs in that regard... complete with the whining about how the model is "unfair" to latecomers. But curiously, in both instances, the models that were implemented are pretty much the only realistic way to get the currency off the ground and make it work.

I take it you refer to his (admittedly contoversial) tactic of doing "the drop?"

I've just looked over the actual codes he was convicted of violating, and I'm not seeing how the jury did it other than through ignorance of the meaning of "current money" (although apparently "causing offense" to the US was also enough for them—heaven help us all.)

According to Black's 6th ed.:


The problem with saying that offering one's own currency to someone, or that even "doing the drop" violates the code mentioning current money is that it leads to clearly unintended absurdities.

If someone dropped a $10 Canadian dollar bill into a clerk's hand to pay for a burger, stayed silent, then explained it as being Canadian money when asked, have they also violated that same code? If not, what is the difference?

And we might as well get the word out to all users of Ithaca Hours... looks like they're all criminals now. Although I suspect that the Fed will leave them alone. No silver or gold to confiscate (and then try to resell on eBay!) from those folks.

(BTW - Do you have a link to that online pdf of the state's case?)

Anyone feel like commenting on the status of the coins they've converted to BitBills? IOW, checking out the public address on a card you own to see if the coins are still there?

I had really wanted to get a low-denomination one, for the novelty if nothing else...

@Synaptic: Two questions...

1) Does your proposal result in a limited number of ?coins being produced?

2) Does your proposal attempt to distribute ?coins at a constant rate, or a variable rate? And if variable, what determines the rate of distribution?

-------------------------

@Minsc: I don't see how you're going to avoid what you're perceiving as a problem.

Mining needs to be based on something. In the case of Bitcoin, it's based on computational power. Whatever resource you propose to replace computational power, is going to be more available to those with more wealth.

Even if mining required answering Captchas, who will be more successful at this: someone trying to mine alone as a hobby, or someone who can hire a roomful of folks to do it for him? Greater wealth always means greater power. There's no way to avoid this in the physical realm.

Ah, nostalgia.

They need a SimCity app for Android.