If they attempt to search your laptop and find that the whole drive is encrypted... they will ruin your trip to America, especially if you refuse to provide the password.

I think that it would be smarter to leave your bitcoins at home and uninstall all bitcoin software from your computer.

Bitcoin as property = 0% tax most of the time, sometimes up to 20%

Bitcoin as currency = 25% tax most of the time, sometimes up to 39.6%

Also you will realize that the record keeping hassle for using it as currency is identical, if you stop to think about it.  Plus wallet software will take care of this soon enough.

There is no practical advantage to it being treated as currency.

That's because you are ignorant.  If you don't understand a topic (such as tax law) you should refrain from commenting on it.  Do some research and then come back.

Bitcoin being classified as property is far, far, far better than having it be classified as currency.

Bitcoin as property = 0% tax most of the time, sometimes up to 20%

Bitcoin as currency = 25% tax most of the time, sometimes up to 39.6%

Let's say that you could, on average, reliably double people's money.  Like you said, you won't always win at your gambling, but sometimes you would get triple or more, so in the end you are able to double money typically.

Why not just spend 10 weeks and make yourself the richest man in the world?

Let's say that you started with $1 worth of bitcoin.  In 48 hours you would probably have $2.  Then in 48 more hours you would be up to $4, and in 48 more hours you would be at $8, and in 48 more hours you would be at $16.  Not bad for 8 days of work.  What if you kept going?  In 8 more days you would have $256.

In 16 more days you would have $65536, after 32 days of work.  After another 32 days you would have 4.3 billion dollars.  8 more days and you'd be the richest man in the world, 72 days from now.  In another month you would be richer than all of the world's billionaires combined.  At that point you could probably just make yourself king of the world.  That's what I would do, if I knew your secret.  It seems really silly of you to waste your talent helping us out here to make $10 or $15 at a time.

This will create independent bits but there will be a bias towards 1 or 0, depending on the details of your particular setup.  You need to compare two intervals created by the same process within the same system, instead of replacing one of them with an external constant.

I think that the price surges ("bubbles" as people incorrectly call them) derive from the behavior of a few basic rules:

The natural rate of appreciation is a fairly smooth curve at about 0.6% per day.  Most people do not know this, but two groups do.  Group X consists of people who are highly invested in bitcoin and do not want to buy more due to diversification concerns.  Group Y consists of people who buy bitcoins whenever they have money to spare.

Group Y's demand for bitcoins is met by bitcoins leaked by traders, people in groups X and Y who have fallen on hard times, and miners.  During this time the price is fairly steady, however as time goes on the leakage isn't enough to satisfy group Y's demand at the current price.  Thus the price starts to rise.

Once the price of bitcoins starts to go up it starts to draw in new people.  News stories and emails spread the word that bitcoin exists and that it is doing better than ever.  People are making fortunes!  So people start to buy up bitcoins at a much faster rate.  The leakage definitely can't keep up and the price skyrockets.

Then the members of group X see a good opportunity to diversify their assets.  Maybe they see a chance to pay off a mortgage or buy a rental property.  They sell a third or a half of their bitcoins.  Group X has a lot of bitcoins, so when they enter the market the supply explodes and the price falls to a new equilibrium.  The new equilibrium is higher than before because some of the new people have joined groups X and Y.

This is really corrupt.  I will make sure to stay away from Bitstamp.  The request for a passport is a civil rights issue, as many fathers in the US are prohibited from having them.  Plus it just doesn't make good business sense, as most people don't have a passport.

We're already in this situation.  Many people never use cash.  I went a couple of years without ever having a single piece of paper money in my wallet.

I've been using bitcoin for three years now, and following it before then.

Today I got a check in the mail for $30k from my credit union, the proceeds from selling a fairly large portion of my bitcoin holdings.  It doesn't get more real than that.


Bitcoin was designed with certain properties that make it very similar to gold and other precious metals.  If you understand why gold is valuable (few do) then you will understand why bitcoin is valuable.  Based on its use as an investment we can expect the price per bitcoin to reach somewhere between $10k to $100k.  I believe that this will happen over the next 20 years.  However I think that the price will actually be higher, because of its non-investment uses.

Useful in your everyday life?  Some people are finding it useful in their everyday lives.  I haven't really had that experience yet.  However, as time goes on more and more infrastructure will be built, making bitcoin more and more useful.

If bitcoin starts to become widely used then the price per bitcoin may climb into the millions.  If this happens it won't be for a long time, at least a couple of generations.  Maybe it will happen before I die, maybe it won't.


Government hostility would suppress its value.  A currency is less valuable if you can't use it without risking prison.  Can it be shut down?  That is debatable and kind of a big topic that would be hard to explain to a newbie.  I feel confident enough in bitcoin that I am keeping the majority of my wealth in bitcoin.

Figure out why gold is valuable (hint: fungibility, scarcity, and convenience).  Then imagine that you could send gold over the internet (very convenient!).


I think that bitcoin won't perform well this year, so if you wait a while you'll probably still be able to get coins fairly cheaply, before we start to hit the $2000+ prices.

That said, the easiest way to get out of debt is to buy $1000 worth of bitcoins and wait a couple of years.


That's entirely up to you.  I keep my bitcoins in cold storage using 2 of 4 paper wallets distributed throughout the country.  The only way that I can lose my coins is if the site custodians collude against me.  I used to have much lower security but no one stole my coins then.

Update: Coinbase apologized and gave me bitcoins equal to the difference, so that I can sell the bitcoins and receive the dollars.  I consider this case to be suitably resolved.

Forever, unless the internet is destroyed or something in the protocol is found to be fatally flawed.  The network effect will prevent altcoins from dethroning it, so really only total catastrophes can kill it.

Other than the global disaster scenario the only other way that this could happen is through concerted government action.  Right now that would be difficult, because mining is spread out over a large number of miners across many jurisdictions.

However this seems likely to change in the future.  Imagine a future where 99% of mining power is held by a five giant mining companies.  Shutting all five companies down simultaneously would be pretty easy for a super power.  Then the network has only 1% of the hashing power, which means that it takes four years for the difficulty to reset.

Until those four years are up the smaller miners are not able to mine at a faster rate.  They would be able to charge more in transactions, so if nothing else changes it would probably still be worth it for them to mine.

Except that something else has changed: confidence in bitcoin is shaken.  The value of a bitcoin drops dramatically.  The remaining miners are unable to pay for electricity.  90% of them quit, with the remaining 10% continuing even though they are losing money.

So the difficulty won't reset for 40 years.  40 years to mine 2016 blocks.  That's one block per week.  Something to think about.  I'm hoping that mining companies and the like do their best to harden themselves against a scenario like this.

Thanks for bringing up the Terms of Service, hellscabane.

So here is the relevant paragraph, with the key part in bold:


I updated the first post in this thread to include this information.

I agree that it was an error to start with, just some bug in their software.

I just edited my post to include my initial chat with tech support, which is just more evidence in my favor.

Just to be clear up front: this is not about a cancelled transaction.

On March 22nd I sent 60 BTC to Coinbase:


After six blocks I sold the 60 BTC to Coinbase:


Note that in the message Coinbase is acknowledging that I sold them 60 BTC for $33,713.51.  The money never arrived.  The transaction was not cancelled.  If it were, it would have said "cancelled" instead of completed.  If I had done nothing at this point I would have no money of either kind: the 60 BTC were permanently gone and I didn't have my $33,713.51.

So I went onto their tech support chat and here is the conversation that we had:


At this point the price had rallied.  If they had given me the BTC back then they would be losing money, because I would be able to sell the BTC for a much higher price, close to $40k if I remember correctly.  However I was content to get the money at the price that we originally agreed on.

Also this is how the Terms of Service say that things should be handled:


So I sent an email to tech support:



Here is his response:



So "some reason" being a bug in their software.  The problem with getting the BTC back is that prices had fallen quite a bit.  Here is the transaction of them giving us their BTC instead of our dollars.



Now one could argue that this is not a big deal, when trading you lose some and you win some.  I am not a trader.  I buy and hold and never sell because I am saving for my family's future.  I really, really need money right now to take a burden off of a loved one and so I forced myself to part with these bitcoins.

So I write back:


So now Josh should just recognize his mistake, take back Coinbase's BTC and give us our dollars.  Actually his coworker Alex just blew me off completely:



Umm.... then who can?  What a blatant lie.  Maybe Alex can't initiate a bank transfer, but if that is the case then why is he dealing with my case?  Shouldn't someone with the power to fix things work on my case?

So it was Friday night and we realized that we weren't going to get this issue resolved in our favor at least until Monday, if ever.  Meanwhile we have an urgent need for the money and the price is falling fast.  We think about suing Coinbase but we don't have the money to hire lawyers and we don't have years to deal with this problem.  We need money now.  So we decide, as an emergency measure to recover some of our funds, to sell Coinbase's 60 BTC in this transaction:


So we get most of the money that we need now, though it is going to be a hit on the bank account to make up the difference.  An additional benefit of doing this, is that the amount that they owe me still ($3965.55) is less than the maximum amount recoverable in my state's small claims court.

I decided to not post this until I got the $29,747.96 out of my Internet Credit Union account, just in case Coinbase tries to take the dollars back.

Update: Coinbase apologized and gave me bitcoins equal to the difference, so that I can sell the bitcoins and receive the dollars.  I consider this case to be suitably resolved.

If you have $20 worth of bitcoin and $10 of debt, your total wealth is $10 and your bitcoin wealth is $20, so that would be 200%.  If your debt is $19 then your total wealth is $1, meaning that the percent that is in bitcoin is 2000%.  Something to keep in mind, and I wouldn't be surprised if many people had more than 100% of their wealth in bitcoin.

Sraosha, it is nice to hear from someone who actually lives in Africa.  Many Westerners have a very romanticized view of Africa, so hopefully you can give us some good information.



Is the truth racist?  These are things that are happening now or that have happened recently in Africa.  I realize that Africa is a huge continent filled with a wide variety of people in a wide variety of situations.  However, taken as a whole, Africa is undeniably dysfunctional.

There haven't been any Western witch burnings in the last 200 years.  Cannibalism?  While there have been isolated incidents of cannibalism (mostly by criminally insane people) there has never been a time in Western history where one group of people hunted down and ate another group in order to gain magical powers.

Westerners have committed genocide but it was almost always against non-Western people, which means that Westerners do not have to worry about being subject to it, and thus are not subject to the societal disruption that it brings.  This brings me to another point: how come Africa is always the one being invaded?  How come they don't get into ships and invade South America?  It is because they can't.

Furthermore, this discussion has been going on for a couple of days now.  Only now does an African (you) chime in.  How come this discussion hasn't been dominated by Africans from the beginning?  The answer to my question is that there are very few Africans on this forum.  Are they all on an African bitcoin forum instead?  Or are there just not that many Africans into bitcoin?

I'm just asking people to work with the facts that we have instead of fantasizing.  Hopefully you can bring us more information.

It is interesting that you point out that I do not know much about Africa (which is true, I don't know much about Africa) but you didn't point out the extreme ignorance of the people who think that bitcoin will do well in Africa.  They are living in a fantasy world, and it is their fantasies that are harmful to Africans.

Think about it for a moment.  Who is more likely to attempt to colonize Africa?  Someone like me who doesn't think much of Africa, or someone like LostDutchman who says things like "Do not deny the continent.  Africa is The Mother and Father of Humankind."  To people like him Africa is an opportunity, something to fantasize about, something to reshape (destroy) when it doesn't meet expectations.  As the saying goes "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".

Think of Liberia.  Because of optimism Americans invaded and send freed slaves to colonize the place.  The freed slaves then enslaved the locals.

So you have nothing more than wishful thinking?  Yeah, it would be great if these places started using bitcoin.  That doesn't mean that they will.

"in some areas" That is somewhat more believable.  Could you list some of these places?  I am genuinely curious, and also a bit sceptical.  It seems like a lot of people genuinely think that Africa as a whole is someday (soon!) going to be something other than.... Africa.