I'm just going to take advantage of opportunities to demonstrate the Bitcoin is usable for interesting things.  Like yesterday when there was a relatively highly watched segment about Wikileaks, I and some other people pointed out that Bitcoin make it so I don't have to be a slave to the big financial interests.

I expect that many people will have heard vaguely of Bitcoin, and at some point something will spark their interest enough, and they will be at a point in their lives when, they will go ahead and have a look.  That is what happened to me in fact.  Being a geek with a long term interest in cryptography, I had heard of Bitcoin by at least early this year, but happened to have been busy with other stuff until around June.  And the Occupy-X protests have brought out a lot of interest in and education about in financial sector shenanigans in the last few months.

Anyway, as long as the network remains sound I would anticipate a trickle of people entering (and a trickle of people exiting for that matter.)  Because there was a run-up already, I imagine that at some point on some minor spike there could be a flurry of interest by people who don't want to be left behind again and we could be off to the races.  Or not.   Who knows.   One way or another, I accumulate because BTC is something I like to have.

I already have such a utility on my linux box, and I use if regularly:

  shred -u ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat

Nobody's stealing that fucker!

Reminds me of the rather absurd 'mappers' vs. 'packers' thread.  I don't even remember whether this make you a 'mapper' or 'packer'.  The latter I think.

Your observation is amusing, though.  Probably because it has that certain truth that makes things amusing to me.

Revenge does not strike me as illogical from a cost/benefit analysis given that the same scam could happen again and again and end up costing a lot.  But it is something of a slippery slope which could easily land a person in one (or more) of several pools of hot liquid.  Probably best avoided unless one is quite savvy with such things.

A friend of mine who knew a lot about big cats once explained what to me was a mystery about why leopard would risk life and limb to 'get even' with a park ranger who poked him with a stick.  He says that with overlapping ranges, competing animals (hyenas, leopards, etc) will run across the same individual numerous times.  So there is a distinct net benefit to having it be known that a specific individual is not to be fucked with.  I could see such a thing happening in the Bitcoin Serengeti at these early times.

I think it would be more likely that they instruct people to declare their Bitcoin activity in the same way they do with other things like PM's.  People who fail to do so will simply be breaking the law.  I hope so at least since a consumption tax is highly regressive and thus unfair and damaging to society (in my opinion.)

First $1000 bag at around $4.30 iirc, and more thereafter.  The yellow one I started in at the 'big decline' at around $375 if my memory serves, and had to take a loss for some number of months.  I've not sold almost any, so I'm still a 'bag holder' in a fairly literal sense.  Switched over to property this year although I expect to sit on a loss there for a few years but kind of break even on rental income.

But the salary keeps rolling in so I've been taking a position in BTC to see what happens there.  It's a much more exciting investment and it is my fondest hope that 1) it will live and become a game-changer, and 2) that I will have enough of a position to contribute to making the game go the right way even if it means a personal monetary loss.  Both are what I consider to be very long shots.

If I sell BTC or PM's, I will end up with USD which I don't need and tax hassles which I don't want so it is pointless to me.  Plus, I don't think that the fireworks in PM's have even started yet.  BTC...not so sure

Looking at BitcoinCharts.com, it seems like Mt. Gox RUB exchange stopped on the 24th.  I'm not a customer so I don't follow their boards and I suppose it has been announced somewhere there, but I didn't notice discussion of it in this forum.

Then I see that you, presumably a Russian, seem to be getting a fair amount of grief from Mt. Gox on this.

It seems to at least one conspiratorial minded person (namely, me) that perhaps there is some desire to cut out the Russian block from as much of the Bitcoin fun as practical.  Could it be that the amount of financial visibility within the Russian sphere is limited enough to make it worthwhile to exert significant pressure on Mt. Gox to cut them out?  Or perhaps that the user base within that sphere could sustain Bitcoin even if it were effectively quashed in the West?

BTW, The Young Turks just uploaded a segment about Wikileaks, but did not mention Bitcoin.

I went ahead and made the donation I was planning on, and stated so on the comments.  Several other people have also mentioned Bitcoin in the comments and thumb'd up one another enough to get these comments on the top.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5KkmcMonY4&noredirect=1

Possibly, but it's that would be 'secret' which is vital to 'national security.'

http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/terror-watch-list-counter-million-plus

Seems like an onion article, but it's apparently not.

All this stuff is such an obscene joke I cannot believe that people take it seriously.  I hope someday people wake up and realize what is happening to them, and why, but I'm not holding my breath.

Anything which could be remotely stretched into 'terrorism' is auto-illegal in the US as soon as it is convenient to make it so.  Bitcoin certainly could be called a 'unique form of domestic terrorism'.  In fact it probably has already, but so have just about every other damn thing so I've lost track.

price volatility is hardly an unheard of phenomenon in any currency system.


They can adapt or die.  It isn't rocket science.  Indeed, having decimal places already makes the jump that much easier.  It's not like (most) people are forced into using base-e or something.

The more the merrier in my opinion.  People can choose which one suites them and exchanges can do a good business automatically adjusting for people so they won't need to care that much, though they could save the exchange fee by operating within their chosen block-chain.  My hope is mostly that each alternate chain is backed by value in the 'satoshi block-chain'.

I find it inspirational that a severe underdog can come up on top against the might of the corpgov system by employing some cleverness.  So it seems at this point.

I'm sitting on some BTC with Wikileaks name on it in hopes that the price spikes a bit from the current levels, but I'll send it as soon as I feel that the noose is tightening around conversion systems so much that people as cagey as those at Wikileaks will have troubles.

Maybe I spend to much time on the speculation board, but it seems to me that a healthy portion of us don't give two shits about making the world a better place, and those who do tend not to agree on what that means.  And all this matters relatively little since an even smaller number of us have the native ability to contribute anything of substance anyway.

In the mean time, I see all the trading and scheming as quite useful as a means of stress-testing the system and exploring facets of it which might not be thought of by the more capable developer class.  I think that it is a huge net positive for the network as a whole at this time particularly as the economy is much smaller than I would have imagined given it's (what I consider to be) quite revolutionary nature.

In order to explain the lack of interest and 'success', I have settled on the philosophy that the current state sanctioned currency systems are working fine and actually work much better than Bitcoin ever could (for now.)  Whether my explaination is correct or not, it is hard to deny that if the world population cannot absorb the current rate of inflation with more ease than seems to be the case, there seem to be issues.  Again, I see it as a big net positive that there is fair amount of trading interest and activity and that at least one example of the system making people $$$RICH$$$ at one time as psychological tool, at least, and one which is likely to pay off going forward if the system hold together.  And speculative interest can be thanked for that I think.

The cool thing about that would be that I could finally see what is in the 'insurance.aes256' file.  That could be a very nice x-mas present.  Or it could be nothing.  Maybe we'll find out one of these days.

Doogie Coder seems to have that one covered.

I dearly hope you are right since I'll do some serious buying in the mid 1.xx's, but it looks to me like the sellers blew most of their wad clawing down through 2.90 so a wall at 2.00 is not worth the bother.

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On a unrelated topic, and as a point of reference, Tradehill took 1.1 business days for my domestic (US) wire.  Their newest claim is 2-5 business days for this.

Kinda makes one wonder who did Tradehill piss off and how did they do it?  Or maybe the DDOS was just an artifact of a general strategy...it sounds like Mt. Gox was hammered pretty hard too.  These things are kinda fun to muse about.

Again, Tradehill, I would hope that the cost savings in DDOS mitigation investment are eventually passed down to your customers in some tangible way.  Although we don't (necessarily) lose the kinds of money you guys do we are still inconvenienced by the disruptions.

I'm baffled at the continued support for Bruce Wagner's show by Mt. Gox (as is claimed by Bruce at least.)  It would be interesting to hear some discussion of that if you guys have the time.

I think he may or may not be right on this one.  It would not surprise me in the least if it was declared illegal in the US to use Bitcoin (all the talk of 'freedom' here being mainly a lot of piffle...)  A cool thing about Bitcoin, however, is that one need not be physically anywhere near where you 'use' it.  So unless all the countries clamp down and clamp down hard on Bitcoin and do so more or less simultaneously, what's to stop me from paying someone to keep a client or even an FPGA miner which I control online in, say, Vietnam?  Or Greece should the Greeks tell the EU to piss up a rope a-la Iceland?  Venezuela?  Or any number of countries which are not completely under the US/EU sphere of influence?

It would be quite interesting to see what happens to BTC demand if Western governments start to crack down on Bitcoin use.  I have no idea really and could see it doing all kinds of interesting things, particularly if it coincided with other shifts asset values, regulations, etc.

Seems like Prechter has been calling for a 40% correction in gold every year for about 8 in a row now.  It's hard for me to shake the term "Idiot Wave Analysis" from my mind such has been the magnitude of his fail on this one.