Doh!  I was planning to diversify and start using ExchB, though the low price has gotten even me down so I may not have followed through very soon.  I'm a shitty customer for exchanges, though, since I don't actually trade much.  (OTOH, I don't play scummy chargeback games or have a lot of red flags requiring a lot of financial research either.)

Thanks for being one shining examples of a Bitcoin enterprise who was straight up and exited with dignity.  I'm not surprised...it's gotta be a tough row to hoe in the exchange business for a couple of diverse reasons.  Hope to see you back at better times, and I'm sure that you've achieved some respect and trust from other people besides just me.

Actually I was just looking into FPGA mining with an eye toward protecting my investment, and it seems like an interesting science worth knowing something about one way or another.  My instinct had been to hold off to see what popped up in the ASIC realm, but the deterioration of the markets must have slowed any progress in that direction considerably.

I am no trader.  I am quite certain that I would lose my ass so fast that it wouldn't be funny if I got into trading, and it would irk me to be paying the commissions to boot.  I don't particularly want to learn to trade even if it were possible that I could (unless I got into trying to program trading bots for the fun and challenge of it.)  I've had generally good luck and a lot less stress just buying something I think is undervalued and sitting on it, but by nature I tend to look at least several years out.

Nah.  I kissed the money goodbye already.  I started in in the $16 range (on the way down) so my losses are way more significant than I could hope to recoup by winning a few coins here and there.  At this point it's a long term (and long odds) bet that over time the blockchain will end up having some value, and if so, I will have gotten a chunk of it before it while it is lawful to do so.

Just for the record, I pussied out.  I split the aforementioned target and bought half of it in right away.  My larger and lower ones stand unmolested.

When I was a kid we used to have 'Sambo's pancake house or something.  There was a set of tiles around the ceiling with the story of 'Little Black Sambo' and how he ran around some lions so fast he made a ring of butter.  Something like that.  The chain changed their name to something else.  Dunno if they were outside the Pacific Northwest or not.

I certainly don't long for the good old days, and I think it is good taste to re-name an unfortunately named establishments, but the politically correct stuff is all kinds of amusing to poke fun at.  I personally would patronize a 'honkies' or 'crackers' or 'Thai-food-Mary's or order a 'mad cow burger' without hesitation because I find the stuff wildly funny.  I probably would avoid something that had name which was derogatory to minorities (unless I was in that minority) just in case the owners actually meant it.  Similarly, I avoid buying things which I know the owners are either racist, or worse in my opinion, actively exploit people.  I pay attention to this, at least slightly, when buying shoes for instance.

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Actually I just read up on Sambo's on Wikipedia.  They change Little Black Sambo from an African to an Indian (India Indian that is...benefits by clarification to Northwestern US natives of a certain age as 'Indian' is how we referred to Native Americans who actually did exist in the population.)  Nice try.  It didn't work...they apparently didn't anticipate the influx of people from the Indian subcontinent and more or less folded.  The building we mostly went to did change to something else.  Maybe Denny's.

Heh.  That was me.  'beaner' is a word which rhymes somewhat with 'border'.  It was a semi-inside joke which, unsurprisingly, went right over your head.  The intended recipient, who had had some goings around with someone who seemed to care significantly about...er.... immigration issues, seemed to have gotten.

Happily no.  But I also missed the run-up from $5 to $7 a few weeks ago.

It's perhaps conceptually difficult for people, but as the speed of transactions increases, the average impact in a bear (or bull) market approaches zero.  And Bitcoin retains some niceties in terms of speed and cost of execution.

I've had a buy in at 3.23 for some time now.  I'm going to let it stand.  I am still trying to get my 'bag' up to a certain nice round number which makes the math easier (having overshot my original bag size in this bear market.)

People who want to use the bridges, jettys, buracratic infrastructure that makes it so I don't need to shoot people who trespass on my property, etc, etc which my taxes built, but don't want to pay their fair share themselves.


And I don't want some unregulate nuclear power plant melting down in my area under some whackadoodle theory that the free market will put people out of business when they melt down enough power plants.


No, you are supposed to have a functional justice system so you have options.  Unfortunatly, this is part of a 'society' (where the word 'socialism' comes from) and it costs money.

I will grant you that for someone starting 'cold' it is not very practical to use Bitcoin as a means of making donations (though a reasonably savvy person, and especially one who was not opposed to using a Dwolla/Paxum-like solution or already had such an account could do it readily.)  But you responded to someone who clearly already had an account at and exchange and could easily convert at will and could hold funds in USD or in BTC at his discretion.

I will also grant you that holding an account at an exchange is not the safest thing to do, and not for everyone.  So far I have not been burnt here, but I am careful in initial research and in ongoing use.

But the argument that significant losses are even likely occur due to the falling price is non-valid.  If the recipient is not cashing out quickly, that is their problem and not a difficult one to solve.  With code if need be, and that would make more sense when smaller donations are trickling in.

It would be nice it one did not need to be somewhat nimble to avoid losing value in playing with Bitcoin, that that is the current shape of things.  As I've said earlier, I expect that at some point a floor will set in based on what usefulness Bitcoin has and how nimble what remains of the user base becomes.  The floor may have a tilt one way or another due to utilization and inflation.  And like any market, will have some amount of volatility.

It is true that an uncontrollable cryptocurrency has a more natural appeal to moochers who want to ride on the back of society's efforts for free and who use code-words like 'violence' in a pitiful attempt to gain sympathy.

If/when the other groups get off their asses as have these protesters and actually do something it might be easier market Bitcoin it more direct ways (e.g., 'you can easily cheat on your taxes!')  In the mean time, these protesters are unlikely to have much love for the Fed and the financial institutions who control the USD so just showing them that Bitcoin exists and is useful in a tangible way should be plenty good enough.

'More convential means' are not available when our minders take a dis-liking to a certain project (e.g., Wikileaks), and even in strong secular bear market one loses very little other than exchange fees, and nearly half the time they may still come out marginally ahead.

Your FUD might be more effective if you:  a) pay a little more attention to the thread, and b) make more valid points generally.

I approached the problem by explaining what a hash was and how after trying enough, one could by chance get a kind of magical hash.

Then that the blockchain (which I referred to a 'ledger') was hashed and distributed around to 'everyone' without a central controlling system.

Both my mother and sister, neither having much computer experience,  were able to understand this and appreciate that solution is plausible and could be fairly resilient.  Neither was interested enough to actually do anything with Bitcoin, but they are also not as interested as I in monetary issues generally.  The current monetary system has been fairly good to most of my family so far and other of life's offerings are more interesting than Bitcoin at this time.

I would not worry to much about either of those.  They should be fairly simple and low-cost to operate, at least when the initial development is worked through.  I would be more concerned about them being shut down.

I have always assumed that the larger exchanges work closely with the various financial and governmental agencies to do monitoring and such and have done so since early into their lives.  I may be wrong, but I'd rather err on the side of caution...or would if it mattered very much in my case.  If these larger exchanges were shut down they would be replaced by players who are much more difficult to manage.  So I expect that they will have relatively good staying power.

In instances like this I have no expectation of, or particular interest in, engaging the author in anything.  Lotsa people know how Nagle is, but others not.  I simply aim to provide an alternate view.  Sometimes it is even a viewpoint which I have some belief in (as in this case.)

Sounds to me like you are guzzling down the cool-aid so I have every expectation that you'll finish up that graduate degree.

Does your curriculum cover trade considerations in times of war?  Or is war thought to be a novelty of history which is impossible in a form involving two powerful belligerents in these modern times?  Or is it assumed that Oceana, Eurasia, and Eastasia will be large enough to allow the 'contract' principles you are learning about operate within?

I see nothing whatsoever wrong with stirring people's imagination with alternate forms of currency generally.  I am sure that at least a fraction of these people have contemplated alternate money systems, and are aware of various efforts, most of which have failed.

The technical hurdles of decentralizing the currency in the way that Satoshi has done, and the skill with which he has done it are actually quite novel,  impressive and interesting.  If that inspires and interest people, what's the harm?

I can say for sure that if I were a protester who had never heard of Bitcoin, I would be very thankful to whoever took the time to inform me of it.

It wears off.  In certain cases at least.  I remember how superior I felt to my anti-globalization friends in the mid-90's because I understood the efficiencies of making trade curves line up and all that.  IIRC, I had just come out of macro-econ class of several hundred with the top score (albeit in a 100 level class at a low end university.)  In fact I had learned nothing more than what the tiny minority of wealthy people wanted me to learn regarding capital and currency and such.  I wish to God that I was still in touch with those friends to I could apologize.  Whether they understood capital better than I at that point I'll never know, but 15 years later I see that their instincts, at least, were much better than those which I had implanted in me in school.

What government's whitelist/blacklists?  Do you believe that two waring states are going to honor one another's lists?  Or are you anticipating a one-world government as a foregone conclusion?  Or extreamely difficult to implement travel and international trade restrictions?  Or what?