Dealing with Bitcoin is dicey enough on the regular internet. I'd take an awful lot of convincing to attempt it via the dark bit. And I'll assume that every service dealing with it is probably being run by a bored guy in an NSA cubicle.

Then you lose all your money when they've burnt through what you gave them.

A friend of mine is in tech PR. We talked a while back about a few Bitcoin related things.

The last time I saw him he was looking a bit glum. He and his father had put a ton of money into a crypto payment processor, I can't remember which one, it might've been the one that abandoned Coinbase, and lost the vast majority of it funnily enough.

I sat there and gaped at him. 'You put money into a Bitcoin company?'

This is an area best left to the VCs for a long time to come. And even they're going to get a little bored of throwing their money away eventually. Other than being speculated on by bigger VCs I don't see where any returns are going to come from within the next decade or two.

I don't need to be accredited to know that putting money into an industry at this nascent stage is borderline suicidal.

Have you pressed reload account on the accounts screen? I occasionally don't get a new deposit showing up. Reloading it does the job.

All coins regardless of how they're being used or who they're being used by, are in the custody of the exchange. All you have is an IOU that should allow you to withdraw what the site is telling you what you have. The coins haven't actually gone anywhere different, just allocated to a different bit of their database.

My ideal life would be a decent enough house somewhere coastal but most of my time would be spent travelling. I don't have any expensive tastes and have zero plans to burden myself with offspring. To achieve both for the rest of my days I suppose $4-5 million in current buying power would make it very comfortable.

I think realistically several hundred BTC would be needed and even that might be optimistic. People planning to retire on ten of them are to be commended for their faith and I hope it happens, but I wouldn't be betting the farm on it. 

Where I'm at you can't find a savings account that pays more than 1% interest. That might buy your descendants a double cheeseburger. Far more fun to take a wild bet on the future and see where it ends up.

I'm sure the will was there for more action, but nudging and perhaps breaking late 700s is very different than a run to $1000. I think it's all well placed for a positive end of year now. It's going to be fun to see what's served up.

Sssh. People don't want to hear that little fact. My bandwidth has been unchanged since 2004 and doesn't look like it's changing any time soon. Storage is a piece of piss. Bandwidth requires lumbering bureaucracies to slowly grind into motion.

I've zero interest in gold. Corvette? Hmm, if it was a ZR1 then I'd probably go for that, thrash it for a few months and then sell the wreckage for Bitcoin. Time to have some fun for once.

The pound is lots of fun but let's see where the UK stands in world markets post EU exit. There may not be much reason to mess around with it if we end up a third world backwater.

The Euro is a political creation. We need to see where the politics head in the years to come to know whether it's going to remain a fine bet.

Four short years ago people said the exact same thing about $100, let alone anything higher. Look what's in place now in terms of infrastructure compared to back then.

Having said that 100 or 1000 can be achieved by a few thousand nutters with some passion. Beyond that it needs some real people to pile in and keep piling in. I can't see many signs of that on the horizon.

I don't believe that at all. It may have carried on bouncing between 6-700 perhaps but that's about it. There's been no sign of the will to approach that pre hack and there's nothing particularly compelling to have made it happen had there not been a hack.

Is anyone who's been hacked willing to share how it happened? I would've thought most people here would be more hack savvy than most. Sharing might stop it for others in future.

An admirable idea but totally impossible. http://worldbitcoinnetwork.com/BitcoinPriceModel-Alpha.html this is about as close as anyone's going to get.

https://firstglobalcredit.wordpress.com/

An interesting take on how most of the BTC exchanges operate. It's probably considerably more odious than this in reality.

They're extremely cash oriented and one of the interesting things Roger Ver has said was that everywhere he went everyone was extremely intrigued by the idea of money beyond state control, with the exception of Japan. The main reaction there was one of fear.

You don't hear much about BTC out of Japan. I don't know if that's going to change any time soon.

I think it would broadly balance out. There's a lot of benefits and no shortage of downsides too.

It was a slow burn watching it develop as I grew up before it became ubiquitous so I've no idea what it would be like coming into a world with it fully formed. I think it's going to take a while before the full impact on kiddies becomes clear. I personally don't think it's a healthy thing.

An army of Bitcoin experts predicted $3000 and more for 2014 back in the day. It didn't quite pan out that way. I don't know if the will's there for a $1200 rise but some cool things are on the horizon anyway.

Of course, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum and maybe never will. There'll always be the need to interact with fiat.

Bitsquare's great for what it is but I'll guess that very few people use exchanges for the straightforward buying and selling of Bitcoin. They're there to play market and I don't think there's a way of realistically decentralising that yet.

What a sheltered life you must lead. I spent this morning lying in bed. I was naked. Should I move to the deep web too?