Ah cool, I'll check it out.

I'm pretty surprised there hasn't been a full segment on Colbert or the Daily Show yet.

I hope so - it's greedy of me, but that means more value for the coins that are still in circulation.

Banks where I'm located are shutting down any accounts being used for local bitcoin selling. PayPal is a 1990s web dinosaur, and I look at it on the same level as I do a massive bank. They need to play it safe because of how large they've grown, and I get that, but yeah their policies are incredibly lame. Their fees are just as ridiculous as a bank's, too. No wonder Elon Musk moved onto better, more innovative things long ago.

On the plus side, PayPal is already in the process of being replaced...by bitcoin!

Badly written, short-sighted article.

"Fiat rules the world because it's what people are used to."
No, fiat rules the world because the modern capitalist world has agreed on a system of constant inflation for its money system.

"Bitcoin is technology based"
As is fiat in the 21st century. The foreign exchange market, credit card machines, ATMs, and personal banking all require an Internet connection to function.

"Bitcoin is complex"
Fiat is complex. Most people just don't think about the constantly fluctuating exchange rates, inflation, and the fact that governments routinely print money out of thin air. Because they don't need to think about it. If bitcoin becomes a valid form of currency, banks will hide all the technical details from end-users (while taking a cut, of course), just as they do with fiat dollars.

"Volatility and finances"
Every new form of currency is extremely volatile in its early years. The price will stabilize in the future.


There are several valid reasons why bitcoin may fail in replacing fiat currency (I think the massive global capitalist infrastructure profiting from and violently enforcing itself isn't going to go down fighting), but this article doesn't bring up any of them.

There are way too many factors for any sort of surefire prediction.
That being said, I think $1 million per coin is very possible barring some sort of global ban, serious social stigma, or an altcoin replacing it.

My reasoning:
$1 million/coin is 1000x the current value ($1000/coin).
Bitcoin went from $1 to $1000 on investment from nerds/techies alone.

2014 is going to be the year of "normal" people and Wall Street getting involved. That's going to be a huge amount of money coming in and will easily push up the value an equal or greater amount.

Vaultofsatoshi seems to be the best alternative. Verification times are supposed to be less than a business day, and I can confirm this as one of my friends recently signed up and was verified quickly. It's a lower-volume exchange, though, and prices are higher than Cavirtex. Another option is Localbitcoins.

Not a stupid question, I wondered the same thing at first.
Turns out the cryptography used when creating keys is complex enough that the chances of two identical keys being created is basically zero.

User Pieter Wuille explains it better than I can: "Since there are around 1.4*10^48 possible addresses, the chance that a duplicate is found can be calculated using the birthday problem as 1-exp(-(4*10^17)^2/(2*1.4*10^48)), or approximately 0.000000000005%, which means one in 20000 billion.

For all intents and purposes this chance can be considered 0."