It's drives me nuts every time I hear some politician blaming speculators for the prices of this or that.

If you sell $100,000 worth of bitcoin in the market right now, you'll push the price lower by at least $0.10.  That is not good for commerce.  So, I personally would like to see as much trading activity in Bitcoin as possible.  If leveraged trading brings in more speculators then I'm all for it.  I would love to see trading volumes increase 100x and exchange commissions get cut to 1/10th of what they currently are.

Trading tools are essential to any currency and Bitcoin is no different.  If you think Bitcoin can be successful without efficient markets for trading Bitcoin, you are mistaken.  While the traders trying to trade market swings are certainly in competition with others trying to do the same, in the process they create deep, liquid and efficient markets for the rest of us trying to use Bitcoin to improve commerce.

P.S.  The only thing I regret about Bitcoinica is that there weren't a handful of others competing with them…I think there's no question they were making substantial profits for themselves simply because they were the only option available for leveraged trading…which shows there was demand for what they were offering and enabled them to command what, in my opinion, were very large spreads.

It will take care of itself…as more and more mining starts to be done with specialized hardware (that is much more efficient than GPUs), botnets will become irrelevant (they might still be operated, but they'll quickly diminish in terms of their percentage of mining activity).

I think you have it backward…this stuff is going to be the end of the traditional banking system.  At least with Bitcoin you have a fighting chance of securing your assets.  With the traditional banking system, the theft just gets subsidized and no one cares or will care until entire companies (or nations that bail them out) start to collapse.  Unfortunately, by that time, it will be too late for that system.  I find it interesting that these criminals are using a superior (and ultimately less vulnerable) system like bitcoin to exploit an antiquated system that is rife with insecurities.

The good news is that Apple's model is not sustainable in the long run.  Reviewing/approving every single app is incredibly wasteful.  If you give them the benefit of the doubt, you can understand why they do it…they wanted to make sure the iPhone experience didn't become a cesspool of viruses, malware and spyware ridden garbage.  The app store approach is a non optimal, but practical way to solve that issue.  The operating system technology in iOS, Windows, Android, etc is 40+ years old and wasn't designed with today's internet in mind.  It is possible to solve those issues without an app store, but you'd first need to rewrite the OS from the ground up with these modern issues in mind.  In the long run that will happen and we can all have our cake and eat it too.

It's in the works: http://dev.w3.org/2011/webrtc/editor/getusermedia.html

And precisely what would such arbitrageurs outside of China do with the Yuan they purchase with their bitcoins?  Normally, the arbitrageur would need to wire/convert the Yuan back into USD and then buy back more bitcoins than they originally sold.  But China has strict controls on such transfers and exchange.  The problems that people in China have with spending their Yuan outside China are exactly the same problems that will impede such arbitrage.  Hence the need to create a domestic exchange of bitcoins for Yuan.

I think there would also be benefits in such an exchange to currency traders that might want trade Yuan against other currencies.  They could sell dollars for bitcoins, send the bitcoins to the Chinese bitcoin exchange, and sell the bitcoins for Yuan to hold in their account.  Then reverse that trade as they see fit.  Given there there are such strict controls on trading Yuan for other currencies on the free market, I bet you could make a fortune doing it if you could do it in large enough quantities…you buy Yuan after interventions force the exchange rate back in line with the USD, then sell as it rises and in advance of another intervention.

Just add this to the dozens of reasons I already have to jailbreak my phone.

We've run into similar issues regarding the Chinese being restricted in spending their currency outside their borders (for an entirely different business opportunity).  After some thinking, I came to the conclusion that you need to get a domestic exchange going in China and people like yourself need to start using Bitcoin to buy things from the Chinese (so they can obtain more Bitcoin to use on their local exchanges).  Since Chinese currency isn't very usable outside China, it's unlikely that many people outside China will offer to sell Bitcoins in exchange for Yuan (but maybe speculators will).  So, you need domestic sellers of Bitcoin and for their to be sellers, they need to have Bitcoins to sell.

If you start paying some of your Chinese vendors in Bitcoin and find someone to run a domestic exchange, I think that would be a necessary prerequisite to making Bitcoin available to the Chinese for spending when they travel abroad (Macau or elsewhere).  And from what I gather, many Chinese have this problem when traveling and would love to have a way of converting their Yuan into something that is spendable outside China.

Now, there is a 2009 law that makes it illegal in China to use virtual currencies to buy real world goods…and you are skirting around their capital controls…so anyone engaging in this activity in China needs to be aware of the risks involved.

Excellent…I hadn't heard of btrfs until now, but see that it offers similar capabilities to zfs.  I'll have to check it out.

BTC_Bear is right.  If done properly, any copies that any intermediaries made would simply be of encrypted gibberish.  Only A and Z could spend from the wallet.  The B-Y handlers would only have an encrypted form of the wallet…make all the copies you want, they would be useless without the private key that Z possesses and which is needed to decrypt the wallet.

I originally had some concerns about the overall tone of the video, but I think in the end it came out great.   Especially for a Max Keiser audience.  If you haven't checked it out, the page showing the cast of characters is hilarious.

What, if anything, does this say about the legitimacy of this Bitcoin document?  It's hard to imagine someone would go to such great effort to produce a fake that doesn't even have anything terribly controversial in it.  We certainly know the government agencies are well aware of Bitcoin and it's hard for me to imagine the FBI hasn't produced reports such as this.

Is there any way with the current Bitcoin-Qt client to share the block chain with multiple wallets?  Ideally I'd like to be able to do that when the multiple wallets are running concurrently.  From looking at the directory structures, about the only way I can see is if you swap out wallet.dat with the desired wallet when you start it up.  I now have about 5 copies of the block chain on my computer…I'm looking for options to consolidate around a single copy of the block chain.

I'd love it if the wallet functions and the client functions could be separated into two different processes.  Another way of solving it would be to enhance the Bitcoin-Qt such that it could manage multiple wallets (even just a feature to open a different wallet.dat file from the file system).

Not only are we able to manage the exchange for them, but we can provide detailed accounting reports of the sort that would be needed in any kind of financial audit of revenues should that be necessary (including detailed real time exchange rates at the time revenue is recognized).  This is very important for many companies considering Bitcoin as a payment option.

If my objective was to earn a rate of return on my bitcoins, I would rather buy shares in a loan portfolio than make a deposit into a fractionally backed account.  If the loan portfolio under performs, I'd rather have my shares go down in value than to lose everything to a bank run.  And an FDIC like insurance will be impossible with bitcoin (so bank runs would be a very real possibility).

If my objective is to secure bitcoins, I would consider using a service that assisted me in securing them and carried insurance against loss…but I wouldn't give them full control over the bitcoins…I would be looking for some kind of service that made use of multi-signature (or p2sh is some other manner) to secure the bitcoins to make it only possible to move the bitcoins with my consent or in the event of my death.  I would not simply give the bitcoins to some company to secure.

We processed over 7000 BTC (about $35,000) worth in transactions during April and that is strong growth over the previous month.  This represents bitcoins being used in real commerce to buy real goods and services.  We are happy with our progress thus far and believe that several more years of investment will yield good results.  Looking forward, our continued growth is dependent on our ability to attract more merchants selling higher priced products.  We believe that our ability to deliver risk free, next day deposits for very large, international orders sets us apart from many other payment processors.

I think it would be a long shot for this company to be successful.  It's basically a really small computer with a wireless radio…and there's a lot more that it can be used for than just bitcoin.  This is an obvious evolutionary direction and I'd expect many hardware manufacturers to be working in this direction.  Their best bet would be to attract investment from these hardware manufacturers (but if many of them already have internal projects working on it, they may not be interested).

Well said…and in fact many of our merchants do choose to keep bitcoins for precisely that reason (it's a small portion of their overall sales and they are as interested as anyone else in the long term prospects for bitcoin's success).  For merchants that have a fairly steady stream of bitcoin sales, the volatility is even less of an issue as their overall cost basis for the coins they receive is a dollar cost average.