Spreading Ponzi scheme fear and buying all you can get before the market comes back over $30 are complementary strategies.

$1000 USD - I liked their previous feedback but let this be a warning to others.

I will post here when they pay me. I still hope they are honest, just unreliable.

Today our analysts detected a new threat spreading in the Russian sector of the Internet – Trojan.NSIS.Miner.a. This Trojan has two components – the legitimate bcm.exe file BitCoin Miner (not-a-virus:RiskTool.Win32.BitCoinMiner.a), and a malicious module that installs bcm without the user’s knowledge and adds it to the autorun registry. The infected computer then starts to generate bit-coins for the Trojan’s author.

Of course, the Trojan’s code clearly indicates the server address where the cybercriminal’s account is located.



We decided to see how successful our nameless ‘miner’ was, and ended up getting a bit of a surprise.

Missing options: Sexcoins! or Bitsex! I see new market potential!

Something isn't right about that.  Tradehill has a reasonable level of activity. Mt. Gox has about 10x more volume and 6x more market depth, but Mt. Gox is more volatile. The bigger exchange should be less volatile.

Signing up:tradehill and bitcoin7 ... give me a good reason to use your ref code.

Also, which should I use most (including mtgox)?

The prevalence of GPU mining makes one application of bitcoins rather obvious: gaming. After all, who has GPUs? Gamers. I'd suspect that a large portion of current bitcoin miners are PC gamers. It makes perfect sense to give them something to spend their hard-earned coins on. But before I get to specific gaming uses, I think it's important to acknowledge that the biggest hurdle bitcoin faces at this stage is on the consumption side of things. There simply aren't enough good ways to spend bitcoins at the moment. More distressingly, the most popular ways to spend bitcoins are to obtain other currencies. In my mind, this almost ensures speculative bubbles and market volatility, which, will make merchants and service providers shy away from accepting bitcoins. In my opinion, what is needed in this crucial period is a robust service market which is relatively resistant to speculation. Such a thing could ultimately increase adoption and stabilize the market.

The solution, I think is a bitcoin gaming client/API. Such an application could allow a number of interesting possibilities including:

Server Donations -- Fast, anonymous ways to contribute to a favorite server. In this case, you'd be literally trading computing power stored (i.e. bitcoin) for computing power. There would be no need to enter your credit card information or anything else. The use of mods could make it as simple as just a button in-game.

Betting -- Allow players to bet bitcoins on the outcome of a match. This could be managed by a central authority or handled through bitcoin contracts verified by published server statuses. Interestingly, a secure technical solution might not be required. The purpose of the betting--unlike in poker--wouldn't be the money but rather to keep the game interesting. The bets on something like the outcome of a TF2 match would likely be voluntary and small enough so that welshers could be dealt with via community blacklisting.

Pay-to-Play -- Many online multiplayer games suffer from leavers and griefers. Currently, in many games there is no good solution. An permanent account ban is often the only solution but often ends up being a rarely used nuclear-option reserved for the worst-of-the-worst trolls. Servers which require an up-front bitcoin payment might help in this regard by making players invest, literally, in each match. At the end, the bitcoins could redistributed among the winning team and the players on the losing team which stayed and contributed.

Microtransactions -- Instead of in-game currencies, developers could use bitcoins for small in-game purchases. I could imagine this would be a good way for them to decrease the overhead of credit-card and paypal transaction fees. Note that, for retail games, this might work because the developer would still use traditional currencies to sell the game, limiting their exposure if bitcoins decreased dramatically in value.

And those are just the advantages off the top of my head. I think the community should begin working on such an application because it might just be a key way to make bitcoin more widespread and accepted.
And, even it doesn't, at least it would be fun... right?

What do you all think?

Since you wrote this, I'll propose the fix here instead of just doing it -- I propose removing "Windows" from the title and encouraging any new Bitcoin users to read this, especially those who are not highly savvy about computer security.  What does everyone think?

..the house of representatives staffer I talked with did suggest that encouraging you-all to introduce yourselves to your congressperson's staff is a good idea.  If they know that interesting, job-creating bitcoin businesses are happening in their districts and they've met the person making it happen, then they're much more likely to support bitcoin-friendly legislation.

So, if you're an upstanding, law-abiding, clear-thinking citizen doing interesting things with Bitcoin, I encourage you to take a little time and introduce yourself to your representative's staff. I wouldn't bother talking to the representative-- they're probably too old to really understand bitcoin ("Tubes!  Money through the tubes I say!"). Talk to a 20-something staffer who grew up with the Internet and is likely to be a lot more sympathetic to the idea of a peer-to-peer Internet money.

http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2011/06/29/bitcoins-does-an-internet-currency-mean-the-doom-of-the-dollar/

could be good press...

Some U.S. politicians - including a few running for President, namely Ron Paul and Tim Pawlenty, think getting rid of the Federal Reserve and returning to a gold standard is the answer.  That would fix the number of dollars in the economy, and, they believe, insulate it against the U.S.'s growing debt woes. But the experience of Bitcoins, which is also a fixed currency system, argues the opposite. Yes, under a gold standard you could redeem your dollars for gold, hopefully pegging your bucks to some hard asset. But what's to stop the value of gold from dropping. What's more, gold gets found all the time, so it's not really fixed. What's more, economist John Wright of John Hopkins University, who studies monetary policy, says there were many examples of "price level instability" during the days of the gold standard. If anything, Wright says removing the Fed would make our currency less stable, not more.'

What's clear is that moving away from the dollar alone will not cure what's ailing the global economy, and it could potentially makes things worse.

running a js bitcoin miner reworks the stats to a very noticeable degree, in turn gaming adsense.
How is it this wasn't realized before?

 If not, it's not holding down anything, just screwing up the bid/ask charts.

While I'm trading (I'm the 15.851 bid) It seems that I can't pick up the first few asks. They all seem like phantom asks. Yet at mt gox, I'm told when placing an order that the lowest ask is 16.75, even though it doesn't seem be real.

It seems like this could be artificially be holding prices down.

of course we know the glitch doesn't work like that but people are stupid.