http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/08/06/Bitcoin.pdfUS federal court rules that bitcoins are money. As much as this sounds self-evident and trivial to us here, it sets an important precedent. The ramifications are many, some good and some bad for some of us. Personally, I am happy to see this. first link reads the same as all those news reporting Thailand banning bitcoin drama. if you read carefully forbe's artile, you will see that court decided against Shaver's claims that BTCST did not operate in investment securities and did not fall under SEC jurisdiction, which court decided against. The Judge simply recognized Bitcoin being as a form of money which can be used in investment securities, exchanged for traditional currencies and to buy goods and services with it. There were no official ruling on whether Bitcoin is legally defined as a currency or not.in other thread you mentioned Liberty Dollars and that there is a bunch of laws designed specifically for currencies inclining that bitcoiners may be in trouble with this 'precedent' for making their own money. Firstly you dismiss the fact that US does not prohibit private currencies, there are few that exists and function today in the US. Secondly bitcoin does not try to compete with and look closely resembling with legal tender for which LD got in trouble; there are no single entity issuing Bitcoins and no single miner has control over bitcoin's production mechanism and clearly do not fall under any currency counterfeiting laws that protect USD. I fail to see the connection between the two quotes you posted. The judge did rule that bitcoins are money, as explicitly written in the pdf I linked to. Perhaps you could clarify your point in this discusion? Thanks. |
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This is true. "Virtual" is a misnomer in case of bitcoins. "Digital cash" or "electronic cash" or "digital currency" - these are all more appropriate. There is more to Bitcoin than bitcoins, though. Bitcoin is a public ledger of digitally signed and timestamped messages.
As for intrinsic value, it is not true that Bitcoin doesn't have any. Just like you can use paper money to produce heat in a fireplace, or to make confetti, you can use Bitcoin to timestamp, digitally sign, publicly anounce, and validate messages world-wide. We use these messages as announcements of transactions of units of account (bitcoins , or more precisely satoshis). In other words, while bitcoins have no intrinsic value, Bitcoin does.
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http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/08/06/Bitcoin.pdfUS federal court rules that bitcoins are money. As much as this sounds self-evident and trivial to us here, it sets an important precedent. The ramifications are many, some good and some bad for some of us. Personally, I am happy to see this.
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Several exchanges are not being updated as of yesterday. Just a heads-up if you depend on bitcoincharts or their API. I am sending them an email.  |
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Back in May I was able to remove and re-apply holographic stickers from a paper wallet, as mentioned here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=169836.msg2031469#msg2031469Perhaps naively, I viewed my hack (similarly based on a particular solvent) as trivial, and convinced myself that Casascius coins must have been tested against this vulnerability. Euro and dollar bills are similarly compromised by counterfeiting. The difference today is in the threat of ugly and violent consequences for the perpetrators. Not that I am implying Mike should take action, but...  As pointed out above, if chain of custody can be ascertained with sufficient trust, old Casascius coins are still functional. |
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First of all, Bitcoin has been surviving without compliance. The question is can it keep growing without compliance? - probably not much more than what we've got today.
Another question: is government-issued cash compliant? Much less than even today's bitcoin. With Bitcoin, there is at least a trace in the blockchain. With cash, not so much - and yet, cash is surviving.
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Besides facts stated above, I shall also restate the fact that 30-day trading volume (easily verifiable, e.g. from bitcoincharts.com/markets) adds up to ~2 million coins. In the same period, 108 000 coins were mined - due to ASIC pressure and resulting serial increases in the difficulty, there was some time compression, let's say 115 000 coins. This is less than 6% of the coins traded in public exchanges. If you decide to ignore the fact of cross-currency arbitrage, and only look at the USD trades, we are still at ~10% of the overall trade. What miners get and what they do with it is insignificant in this market.
No, it's not insignificant. In the FOREX Market, the additionally printed US-Dollars are less than 6% of the traded volumes in public exchanges. Therefore you would argue, that printing USD doesn't matter and is insignificant in the market. Such an argument is BS. "Printed" USD are immediately injected into the economy. You don't know what miners do with their coins. Blockchain analysis would reveal this - but we need to keep in mind that most mining is pooled mining, so a sufficient number of spends should be included in the tree to consider mined coins "spent" (as opposed to being kept in little miners' wallets). |
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Are exchange rates pulled from MtGox or Bitcoincharts? Ideally, I would like to be able to specify an exchange at bitcoincharts. VirtexCAD is more relevant to us here than thenlow-volume MtGoxCAD.
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In the future will people be able to crack out old lost coin by brute forcing an address with a faster machine?
If you are going to crack pubkeys, it doesn't matter if they are "lost" or simply stashed. Pick any key you like and start cracking today, because it'll be a very long journey. Quantum computing? No? What about it? Assume you have a working quantum computer. You also know a bitcoin address holding coins. Niw, you need to make your quantum computer reverse the sha256(ripemd160()) to obtain the public key, and then you need to make it reverse the EC calculation to find out the private key. How would you go about this? How much advantage would you have over today's silicon? Unfortunately, this only holds for unused addresses, since apparently the sha256(ripemd160()) is still difficult for a quantum computer to crack, whereas the EC isn't. Coins stored in paper wallets would be fine, but as soon as the public key was released, watch out. The nasty implication of this is that since spending from an address requires revealing the public key, as soon as you broadcast a transaction, others could crack the private key before it made it into a block and re-broadcast a different spend, from that address to one of theirs. It might not work most of the time, but is still an uncomfortable thought. Source: http://bitcoinmagazine.com/bitcoin-is-not-quantum-safe-and-how-we-can-fix/Cracking EC in a matter of minutes? Seems far stretched, even with QC. |
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In the future will people be able to crack out old lost coin by brute forcing an address with a faster machine?
If you are going to crack pubkeys, it doesn't matter if they are "lost" or simply stashed. Pick any key you like and start cracking today, because it'll be a very long journey. Quantum computing? No? What about it? Assume you have a working quantum computer. You also know a bitcoin address holding coins. Niw, you need to make your quantum computer reverse the sha256(ripemd160()) to obtain the public key, and then you need to make it reverse the EC calculation to find out the private key. How would you go about this? How much advantage would you have over today's silicon? |
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Gold is easy to lose. Gold recovery processes are never 100% efficient. There is always a certain rate of loss, and once there is no more gold to be mined economically, the total supply will be gradually decreasing. Losing jewlery, accidentally melting it with other alloys, leaching of gold salts from processing plants, dispersing it through crematoriums, fine dust blown away by the wind, evaporation...
And yet, nobody is worried about all that.
I'm going out for a drink now. I'll pay with bitcoins. Seriously.
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I still think that there is a serious possibility that the official saying this really meant: "Buying and selling bitcoins without a money changer license is illegal and since you don't have one, you better stop doing it" "Wishful thinking" is the term for your thoughts. I still don't understand why is all that drama that one central bank said Bitcoin is illegal? Becuase the central bank never said Bitcoin is illegal. Even if they did, it is their opinion, not the law. |
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Can we have some productive conversation here, and attempt to control the damage?
Dave and Goat are partly justified in their reactions, but not completely. Yes, it appears that some of the BoT officials have intervened in a negative way, and made a request to halt Bitcoin trading. From their alleged statements it appears, not surprisingly, that they are mentally incompetent ("due to lack of laws, these activities are illegal...").
No, there is no law against Bitcoin, and no, Bitcoin is not illegal in Thailand. Dave has not been careful in wording of his initial statements, and his careless public statements have reverberated and mutated into FUD in the World media. On the other hand, Dave may be right in that, despite their mental retardation, said BoT officials could make his life difficult and unpleasant.
What we all need now is a long, wet, kiss between Goat and Dave, followed by their carefully orchestrated PR and political campaign. Both of them have something to offer to this cause.
Goat, Dave, bahtcoin, and in fact the whole Kingdom of Thailand have vested interest in seeing Bitcoin as a technology adopted and used.
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For your edification. This shows total BTC minted versus total $Volume on Gox. The pink marker is where the halving occurred.  Beautifully telling graph. Yes, you can't ignore that unless you're... well choosing to be blind Block reward halving will absolutely cause an increase in value. I'm not saying other factors won't also increase it. But this is one for sure. Block 210 000 was mined on 2012-11-28:  There was no increase in value. In fact, the rally started a month and a half later. There was no increase in trade volume. The volume started spiking 2-3 months after reward halving. Besides facts stated above, I shall also restate the fact that 30-day trading volume (easily verifiable, e.g. from bitcoincharts.com/markets) adds up to ~2 million coins. In the same period, 108 000 coins were mined - due to ASIC pressure and resulting serial increases in the difficulty, there was some time compression, let's say 115 000 coins. This is less than 6% of the coins traded in public exchanges. If you decide to ignore the fact of cross-currency arbitrage, and only look at the USD trades, we are still at ~10% of the overall trade. What miners get and what they do with it is insignificant in this market. You are wasting everybody's time with baseless speculation and false data. The actual data clearly indicates that there was no any significant effect of block reward halving. |
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They have been running various electronic payment systems, including an e-cash of sorts ("webmoney") since 2006. Bitcoin is part of their offerings. No problems there. |
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When will the next big Bitcoin price jump hit? State what you think and most importantly why.
My personal guess is in 3 years when the block reward gets halved again. I think we'll see another major jump in value. This will be due to supply and demand factors. Halving the block reward will make the currency even more scarce.
My guess is we will see it hit $300-$400 per coin at that time or shortly after.
What do you guys think?
Block reward has nothing to do with exchange rates. All the new coins mined today constitute only ~5% of the typical daily trade volume. In other words, ~95% of coins traded are old coins. Even if ALL the miners decide to hold or sell their coins, it would be irrelevant. |
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Realistically, sometime early September. Ideally, tomorrow.  That would be far from ideal. Think about it. |
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I should have gotten some sleep before posting  |
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Two days ago I paid bitcoins (bitcents, that is) for my coffee and a snack. This is a great local breakthrough for Bitcoin!
A detail I particularly appreciate in the article is the use of "digital currrency" and "e-currency" instead of the virtually meaningless "virtual currency"... Also, the lack of inflamatory statements is refreshing. It's another payment option, with low fees, and relatively easy to use. Great.
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First I'll explain the problem and then my proposed solution: The problem is that if you want to go on holidays or somewhere where you don't have data connection in your cellphone (ey! I'm on holidays in Berlin http://tinyurl.com/bwg33vf and I want to use my bitcoins), it's not possible to pay in any shop where they accept Bitcoins because you can't broadcast the transaction from your cellphone. Of course, you can access WiFi or pay the data-roaming cost but I imagine a much easier scenario for the end user by using the shop's Point of Sell to broadcast the transaction. Here is the explanation: 1. When paying, the user scans the QR code of the shop address where the payment has to be sent to 2. The user includes the amount to pay and signs the transaction in the phone (android/iphone/etc) wallet 3. Now the transaction gets converted into a transaction QR code in the user's phone -> Offline broadcasting 4. The shop seller can now scan the transaction QR code in the shop's POS which has to be connected to internet5. The shop's POS broadcast the client's transaction and immediately verifies the payment Remarks: - Size of transaction: QR codes can't handle too much data (less than 3Kb according to http://www.qrcode.com/en/faq.html) but if the user were to use a specific address only for this offline portable wallet, like the physical wallet you take with you, the transaction size should be quite small as there is only one address to take the funds from and one to send funds to (usually). - Security: The portable wallet should have it's own address and private key separated from the rest of the wallets, therefore, if the phone gets compromised/stolen, only one address with the day to day cash amount is lost. This is very similar to what Armory is currently doing for offline wallets but the transference method through usb stick is not as simple as the QR code, specially in the mobile environment. I haven't seen this already implemented in any of the wallets but maybe I'm mistaken and some android wallet is already able to do this transference of offline transactions. Let me know what you think of the idea and if there is any extra trouble you can think of. With Mycelium, I can move funds to one my addresses, then export its private key as an on-screen QR code. The merchant, assuming they are prepared for this, scans the code and spends it away into their system. Other private keys are not exposed. Any problems with this solution? |
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