Hmm, I stand corrected. I've always heard monetary inflation and currency devaluation used interchangeably. Never knew it had this meaning.

Bitcoin is a complex thing to explain, and the many misconceptions about it have to be addressed without losing site of the awesome strengths that underpin its revolutionary nature. It think "prezi" presentations are the ideal way to do this because of how they enable efficient and grounded visual communication.

Here is one I found about bitcoin as an example: http://prezi.com/tbpky5fm7qbl/bitcoin-new-p2p-currency/

There it's merely used to "jazz up" the presentation with panning and zooming, but this functionality can be used to keep sight of the big picture while delving into details and dealing with objections. It can be used to visually represent many things that would take too long to say in text. Images can be embedded, and Youtube videos can be viewed right in the presentation itself.

Plus it can be set to freely allow copying so that anyone can make their own branch tailored for specific audiences or for the purpose of easily recording a video with the prezi as the visual with voiceover. It takes about 20 minutes to figure out how to use the interface, and from then you can make presentations really quickly.

To get more of an idea of the potential for explaining stuff, here is one on the theory of relativity: http://prezi.com/vgj5kiy-3zsd/the-magical-theory-of-relativity/

I can so imagine this. Persistent mention eventually wears through people's shields.

Yes. Verbs are powerful, and psychologically make things feel like normal, household things. Think: "Just google it!" "Can anyone paypal me some cash?"

Companies seem to have even wised up to this and are naming themselves verbs: twitter, yelp, etc.

This article is Feb. 6, not 11. I got halfway through before realizing it was an article I read last week. The date in the Subject line is supposed to be the date of article publication, not the date it was posted to this forum. Thanks for posting it, though. It was a good article.

To make this scenario more concrete:



Imagine if the July-to-mid-August 2012 slope on this log-scale chart were setting the exponential pace for the next few years, and it just took a little detour because of the pirate@40 scam. Then following that line to the present day would put us at around $200/BTC right now just to revert to the mean

Now notice that this slope is almost as steep as that of the current rally that started last month. Is the current pace, or just a bit slower, the multi-year trendsetter??

This of course seems highly unlikely, and would normally be a classic investing error of wishful/"greedy" thinking, but I want to note it for reference purposes just in case something insane like that actually happens. For example, if we see $100 in the next few weeks - probably justified, in the eyes of spectators, by the breaking of the all-time high at $32 - and it holds above $100, it might be worth considering the exponential moonshot more seriously.

Note also, the July-Aug 2012 slope could very well be a bit steeper than the real mean in an exponential run-up scenario, just due to overexuberance, making the $200/BTC figure too high. Combined with the fact that the current rally is a bit steeper than July-Aug 2012, even this crazy exponential growth scenario might suggest we're getting overdue for a small correction.

Once again, I emphasize that this is merely a far-fetched "just in case" analysis. More than likely this post will instead be looked at in hindsight as a classic sign of a bubble. Either way, long term BTC is either zero or galactic, and if it's galactic it has a huge amount of unreasonably fast running to do.

I have a use case (old, air-gapped phone.) where it'd be very helpful if I could do this, but the app isn't letting me just paste in a private key. Is there some trick to it? Incidentally, I couldn't do this in the Windows version either (I think it asked for a password).

I'm a newb at cryptography, but how does BitcoinSpinner generate its addresses randomly? I read "random seed" somewhere, but how do you ensure that no one could look at the address-generating algorithm and narrow down the search space for possible private keys? For example, if it were based on time, someone could just try all the addresses associated with the various times...right? It doesn't mention using mouse movements to create entropy like bitaddress.org does, for instance.

My biggest fear is that addresses generated for me will be somehow predictable (I know this isn't limited to BitcoinSpinner).

Hmm, I suspect to do a proper contrarian analysis would require taking into account how typical those on this subforum are, from among all the people buying and selling bitcoins. For example, what percentage of the whole actually spend much time watching trends? How many are investment-savvy? There seem to be reasons to doubt this little subgroup is typical of the broader market.

You could also give them S.DICE addresses to ping with their bitdime, to up their psychological investment. A few will win enough money that they'll have a significant incentive to look into it further.

Could also add "Click here to get a Bitcoin address instantly (2 seconds)."

No no no, this link here is, uhhh... newer.  

Suppose just for kicks that the trend that started in December, of BTC prices doubling about every two months, were to continue for the next three years or so (reaching mass adoption, million-dollar bitcoins). Sometimes it'd take more than two months, sometimes less, with all manner of crazy mini-bubbles and crashes within the bull run, but suppose the trend held relatively steady over time.

Needless to say, it'd be a white-knuckle roller coaster ride with plenty of euphoria and ample gut-spilling scares. Millionaires and billionaires would be born, profits would be taken heartily all the way up, bubbles would be called constantly, and many would miss the train - perhaps multiple times. Most of all people would be wondering WTF was going on, endless theories would be postulated and debated.

My question is, if this were to actually happen, how would speculators like those on this forum react? What would be the patterns in sentiment?

With the benefit of hindsight, or true belief in Bitcoin, you'd just calmly hold, accumulate when you could, and spend or take some relatively small profits as your life situation and needs required. But what would everyone else do?

The reason this question interests me is that this is one possible scenario* and I'd like to know if there is any way to identify it if it does happen. That is, at each point in time, I want to be able to tell the difference between this kind of relentless, meteoric rise and just a big frothy bubble: for example, a bubble where it doubles three more times by August - to $200 - then drops back down to $12, leveling out at $35 or so, which might be considered a healthy growth target from the current $24 price.

*Three years to mass adoption may be a far-fetched, but even if it doubled every 4-6 months and took 6-10 years it would be an insane ride all the same, with I suppose many of the same characteristics.

The size of a bitcoin is largely arbitrary (if it were a million satoshis instead of 100 million we'd be past parity with gold even), but there are enough people who might fall prey to that fallacy to care that it "upstaged" silver. Still, the number of people who write off Bitcoin because of the 2011 bubble is enormous, so I'm pretty sure the latter will be much more significant. Still it's possible the mainstream news (or just the precious metals community) will pick up the silver parity story and generate tons of interest outside of just the people who have heard about Bitcoin.

"Value investors" try to pick stocks based on the fundamentals: strong management team, large cash reserves, proven track record, etc. Why not look at virtual currencies/payment systems the same way?

If we imagine a world where there are a lot more virtual currencies and payment systems floating around - such as Linden dollars, Amazon coins, Ripple, Litecoin, MintChip, etc. - Bitcoin's fundamentals compare rather positively from a "value investing" perspective:

-4 year headstart and never been hacked, so proven track record
-strong, independent dev team
-significant "brand" recognition
-substantial liquidity in most major countries
-significant business adoption and user base
-fairly decentralized (compared to Amazon coins, MintChip, and even Ripple it seems)
-totally inflation-proof (beyond the preset schedule)
-sound, proven method for ensuring the transaction-securing mechanism grows as needed
-allows for substantial privacy
-etc.

And there are probably a few disadvantages from an investment perspective as well. In addition, opinions will vary as to which characteristics are most relevant.

The point is, if we assume cryptocurrencies are the future in one form or another, the "Dow Jones Industrial Average" of all functioning cryptocurrencies in the future (whether it turns out to be one or many) will be gobsmackingly huge. And right now, Bitcoin is far and away best poised to take the lion's share of that future "DJIA."

In that sense, Bitcoin could be called a value investor's dream come true: the most undervalued asset of all time.

Here of course I must pause to give the standard warning against "new paradigm" thinking, where - like right before the top of the dotcom bubble - people were talking of tech stocks as being an entirely different animal that would keep going up and up. And it was somewhat plausible, too. No one knew how much potential the internet really held. But even if the hopes placed on the internet were well-founded, they were too early. For the same reasons, this line of reasoning on Bitcoin may also be too early; but one day it won't be.

Take-home message: do not count on it, but also do not be overly surprised if Bitcoin just keeps on rising in giant steps. Note that this holds even if userbase and infrastructure lag behind speculation, for it is a speculator's job to anticipate trends before they happen, and for all we know the soundness of the monetary system is just as much of a fundamental as the userbase.

10% ($1 million) would be more than enough. If Bitcoin takes off you'd be richer than Bill Gates (which in itself might be risky - you'd want to take utmost privacy precautions, divide up the wallets in random amounts, tell no one about your holdings, and be very careful what you buy), and if not you'd still have $9 million.

Somehow a future where Voorhees and Ver (and Satoshi, etc.) are richer than Bill Gates doesn't seem half bad.

That's what I was looking for. We could make different tables for different audiences. Some could be more sales-pitch-like and some could be optimized for seeming fair and balanced while still showing BTC's obvious superiority for certain situations. Some could be targeted toward libertarians, some toward investors, some toward privacy freaks, some toward merchants, some toward the man on the street.

The idea is that during the long process of wrapping your head around Bitcoin and going through skeptical phases, you never lose sight of the extremely compelling advantages.

The Bitcoin subreddit (http://reddit.com/r/Bitcoin) has swelled tremendously in the past few months, to the point where it seems to have more commentary on the more significant news stories than the bitcointalk.org Press forum. Also a better system for judging significance of posts and a better format for debate. Just an overall better user experience in terms of being a one-stop news+analysis site, in my opinion.

If currency devaluation meant that an angel went around and simply doubled the amount of money in everybody's wallet and bank account - all at once - then Mike would be correct. Everyone would have twice as much money, but the price of everything would also double immediately.

However, this is not what happens. The newly issued money does not flow into everyone's hands at the same time: the government contractors get it first and then it ripples through the economy until finally the wage-earners get their wages raised. Meanwhile the price of everything has nearly doubled. This might take two years, during which time the everyman (and especially the retiree on a fixed income) is screwed unless he has his savings in hard assets (gold, bitcoins, land, etc.).

The disparate effects of this non-homogeneous distribution of newly minted cash are called Cantillon effects: http://www.economictheories.org/2008/08/effect-of-changes-in-money.html?m=1

It's easy to get the public key, but actually importing the private key into a client has been a nightmare for me. I tried to do this on ALL the Android bitcoin apps, plus Electrum, and they all refused for different reasons. I tried Multibit but it took forever to download the blockchain. Finally I just used blockchain.info as I nervously sent the funds from a paper wallet that I realized may be insecure to a new, more secure one. This experience made me realize how far we are from mainstream adoption (joe blow really has to use paper savings wallets for large amounts, yet something as simple as redeeming a private key is incredibly difficult).

This was just an example... what I meant to ask is does such a table exist??