Yea, just like Apple stock, except instead of chinese kids in sweat shops, there are mining rigs in pools, and instead of shiny designs, you have solid math.

He did have a valid point, though.
You don't need energy to store the BTC (you can shut down your computer), you need energy to protect them. It can also be said you need energy to protect gold from theft.

I don't get what you have against web-wallets. Everybody already has to trust the banks. I trust things like blockchain.info much more than the banks considering they actually don't have control over my wallet file. The vast majority of people out there simply aren't going to have the knowledge needed to control their own wallet.

Offline wallets are always a good idea, however.

If I needed to sue them, then I'd be screwed. I had a grand total of maybe $2 worth of BTC in there. My 'fortune' is safely on my own PC

I surely hope not. Instawallet dying could severely hurt bitcoins. I know that a website can be up or down for each individual user, I never asked that question.

No, how about lets not. Lets just hope that this one blows over without a shitfit occurring, and not let the government get involved with the BTC rally going on right now.

You wake up tomorrow (or the day after, or the week after) and some people (it must be the government!) decided it'd be time to take profit and dump a ton of BTC on MTGOX. Ticker is back into the $110-ish range and falling. At what price do you decide to buy, and how much do you think you'd risk, or would you just run away as fast as you can?

Personally, I think $100 is a great level to buy at. I'm not saying that BTCs are only worth $100, I'm merely saying that $100 is a level I think that many people will be sad to sell below and is thus a major support for the price.

What does "up" mean? Does that mean "showing the we are down HTML page" or does it mean "actually working?"

Sorry to get off topic, I'd just like to congratulate you on an epic choice for a sig...

I wouldn't be surprised if we see $150 by Friday. In fact, I expect it.

If Bitcoin becomes really big, all that will happen is that the normal Bitcoin-Qt client will only be used by big companies and people who are obsessed with controlling their own wallet, and web-wallets will end up being used all the time, with (smart) people downloading their wallet.dat file daily just in case something goes wrong with their particular web-wallet.

That doesn't seem to me that BTC doesn't scale well, it scales better than 99% of other things. However it does mean that people will have to adapt a tad, which is to be expected.

Only a true badass like Western Union. You see, the joke was, that they did it on april fools, so that you'd think the joke was a joke of the nature that the jokester wants the jokee to believe the joke really wasn't a joke, when in reality it was the joke of the variety in which the jokester wants the jokee to believe the joke is actually a joke. Thats the whole joke.

Man, if the Government really does try to buy out all of them, people will just start dividing their coins down smaller and smaller and putting up smaller and smaller amounts on MTGOX for larger and larger amounts.

Their is always gonna be that one last person that decides that he's gotta hold that last satoshi. Or probably a good thousand people that decide that they've gotta hold what they think is that last satoshi. For the good of civilization and all that jazz, you know.

Destroying the wallet would just end up causing the price to skyrocket. If the feds really wanted to mess around, they'd buy assloads of BTC, then sell them all at the same time. THAT would erode confidence. However, the fed by definition moves slow. By the time that happens, probably an even bigger-ass corporation would have decided that BTC is too sweet to let the government screw it over, and will start providing liquidity.

Really good luck that I started it when I did if BTC really does go up to the 1k mark 

We're gonna need to hit that 1.5B market cap number pretty damn soon, else press coverage might die down, causing less new business to accept it, causing a downward spiral much like the upward spiral we are currently in.

Either that or somebody like Bitpay going apeshit with marketing. Honestly, with the recent increase in price they should have made enough money to afford some TV ads by now  

Really mad, deposit pending on MTGOX for days... support says I need to wait even longer... I started the transfer when it was in the 80s... 

To be fair, Gold has several advantages over BTC too, and there is nothing to stop the government from manipulating BTC in many of the same says they attempt to manipulate gold.

Bitcoin will always be the "more liquid" of the two commodities, while gold will be the "more solid."

I honestly can't believe that people here dislike Western Union.

Western Union was like, last generation's bitcoin. While it was not as completely revolutionary as Bitcoin has the potential to be, it was loads better than anything offered at the time and even now remains loads better than most other 'normal' ways of sending money, aside from things like Liberty Reserve that are entirely online.

Yes they charge high fees, but this is a capitalist society, they are supposed to charge as high a fee as they can get away with. At least they are honest, unike 'real banks.'

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Western Union became a sort of Bitcoin processor. There are lots of demand for instant payments, and while BTC transfers are fast, they aren't quite instant. Instant is needed for buying groceries in a timely manner, and people will probably pay some for that service. Its hard to buy BTC with USD. They could bridge that gap. If nothing else they lend their legitimacy to BTC and walk away with a few extra coins in their pocket for the favor.

I don't see anything particularly dishonest or ignoble with what they are doing. It makes business sense, and its perfectly fine. (Assuming they actually do what I think they plan to do.)

There needs to be one that says "in math we trust."

I agree completely. I'm just saying that you can't expect people to understand that (what even a decentralized currency IS) instantly.

Just noticed, when I try executing that command I get the error:

Error: An attempt was made to break through the security policy of the user agent.

From my browser. Whats going on here?

No I meant in general. Of course, I, now, believe BTC. However I didn't the moment I came to know of it, and if my boss had come up to me and said "hey here is this thing called bitcoin, tomorrow tell me what you think of it" I probably would have responded with something along the lines of "I'm not really sure about it, it looks complicated."