Tacotime - a falling difficulty does not compel a lower price, nor does a rising difficulty compel a higher price. Price is set by the supply of coins for sale and quantity of buyers, that's all.

If the supply of coins for sale is not affected by the difficulty, and the quantity of buyers is not affected by the difficulty, then the difficulty doesn't matter.

Dude... nobody is getting paid to troll bitcoin forums lol. If I'm wrong please present evidence.

It would certainly be cool and have a wow-factor to it, but I must ask, why doesn't such a thing exist for normal money/goods? Why isn't there a mall like that just for dollar purchases? Or is there?

I would have no problem with Marxists, if they didn't advocate coercion, theft, and violence.

Alright Surawit now there is a genuine and worthwhile critique of Bitcoin. I disagree with you for a number of reasons, but you bring up good points. I will say that greed and the desire to change society are not mutually exclusive, and typically the former is the cause of the latter.



But when a rich white libertarian nerd has a hella dumb idea, he doesn't force it upon you with guns and imprisonment.

Let's not assume that just because someone disagrees with us that they're a paid shill of some nefarious scheming enemy. More likely, they just don't know what they're talking about. Ignorance is far greater in quantity than conspiracy.

It's people like me that enabled scammers to get all the bitcoin so easily?

I merely said that holding one's own wallet carries risks, which it does. If you know how to safety use your own client and wallet, then it is safer than 3rd party sites, but that is a big IF. Before MyBitcoin scandal happened, more bitcoins were lost by mistakes by client users than from any online scandals.

My recommendation, if you have any substantial amount of coins, is to learn how to use your own wallet safely and store most bitcoins there. But, keeping a minority of them on a few ewallets and exchanges is not a foolish thing to do as long as one understands the risks.

And there are many online bitcoin services that are "legit." Can you name more than one ewallet service or exchange that "ran off" with everyone's money? The truth is that any established site that manages to gain the trust of the community to the extent that it has many bitcoins has an immense profit incentive to maintain that trust. This doesn't mean everyone is trustworthy, but saying something like "don't ever store any bitcoins anywhere online" is pretty silly.

Wow... you are suggesting that the government mandating usage of USD by coercion (ie - throwing you in prison if you don't accept dollars or pay taxes with them) is equivalent to a distributed group of Bitcoin users who have absolutely no power to coerce anyone else to use the system?  You are equating those things? You are calling those two things "functionally identical?"  

And Dictionary.com, and Wikipedia, were not written "long before anyone could conceive of such a thing as Bitcoin." They are not ancient tomes of outdated terminology. You can go to Wikipedia right now and update it if you think it's outdated. But you won't.

"Fiat currency" has a very specific meaning. It means, a currency that is valuable due to the decree of a government, ie - by force. Bitcoin is the very opposite, getting its value from an open market of voluntary decision making. One has value purely by diktat, the other has value purely by choice. Your attempt to equate the two betrays either a gross negligence on the nature of monetary systems, or an intentional insult to Bitcoin, despite your knowledge of the invalidity of the basis of that insult.

Do you really want to persist in your wrongness here? Or will you graciously admit that perhaps you made a mistake?

Alright bud, listen. I picked that definition from dictionary.com (you call it "a place?") to provide the definition of that term. This definition is wholly relevant to its usage in monetary economics, as a "fiat currency" is a currency "by decree" of a ruler or government.

We could go to another "place" and get another definition, this time of "fiat money," specifically. The first line from Wikipedia: "Fiat money is money that has value only because of government regulation or law."

Given these two definitions provided, we can observe your statement, "bitcoin is a fiat currency by almost all useful definitions of the word fiat" and it becomes apparent that you don't quite know of what you speak. Bitcoin is in no way a fiat currency. It is not created by any government. Its value does not come from a mandate for usage.

And on "intrinsic value"... nothing has intrinsic value, for that would mean the thing has value without a human to value it. Things have value to the extent they are useful to humans and scarce. Bitcoin is both absurdly useful and limited in quantity, thus it commands a market price. You don't have to agree with the price, but at least try to make sure your statements regarding fiat money and value are valid.

Soooo... maybe you should encourage people not to put more money than they can afford to risk/lose on something so new and unproven. It would be insane to put anything other than "gambling money" into Bitcoinica at this stage. But with that said, Bitcoinica is damn impressive and worth playing around with.

Holding them in your own client wallet has risks as well. Mainly due to user error... but user error is a risk. For this reason, it may make sense for people to store some amount online with exchange or ewallet, and some offline.

For a casual user with low amount of Bitcoins, I would not recommend even bothering with client software.

Online services will get more trustworthy over time as the market weeds out the bad ones. But it's very important for anyone involved with Bitcoin to understand that anywhere they are stored carries risks. Learn the risks and act accordingly. This is the price we pay to be early adopters of this new system without the taxpayer subsidized insurance of the FDIC =)

From Dictionary.com (bold added):

fi·at   [fee-aht, -at; fahy-uht, -at]  Show IPA
noun
1.
an authoritative decree, sanction, or order: a royal fiat. Synonyms: authorization, directive, ruling, mandate, diktat, ukase.
2.
a fixed form of words containing the word fiat,  by which a person in authority gives sanction, or authorization.
3.
an arbitrary decree or pronouncement, especially by a person or group of persons having absolute authority to enforce it: The king ruled by fiat.

Just as Americans were supposed to have "a nation of laws and not men," Bitcoin is in fact a currency of laws and not men. Bitcoin is at the whim of no person or group, and while this makes early adoption difficult, strange, and awkward, it is in fact the greatest strength of the system.

And indeed, what would be the point of a central group creating a decentralized money system? If the transaction ledger is centralized, then it possesses none of those benefits so crucial to Bitcoin. If the transaction ledger is decentralized, then why would a central group benefit from creating it, for once created it would be beyond their control.

Look, if you don't like Bitcoin, then don't touch it. But I'd prefer not to touch USD or other fiat currencies. Unfortunately, I'm not given this freedom.

Don't confuse short-term and long-term. Current usability is mediocre, agreed. Make an attempt to see the future, Shinobi. The first automobile was considered a silly, expensive toy for the rich. Many problems. Many glitches. Many undue accidents and unrefined systems. Totally silly to imagine that private industry might figure out how to harness the potential and fix the problems.

Yes either they're manipulating their system for short-term profit and risking what could make them millions of dollars in long-term business... or it was a feed/display error.

People should be diligent of course, but MtGox has been doing a fantastic job since the calamity a couple months ago. If you want to use a different exchange I encourage it (I use multiple), but don't hate on MtGox just because they're the current market leader.

Yes, with the advantage of being able to send money instantaneously from Alaska to Singapore with no fee and no middle-man comes the oppressive responsibility of backing up one's wallet.

bittalk.tv might be a good choice, also see operationfabulous.com

Bitcoinica is worthy of at least a few more. Freakin' amazing that a 17-yr old built it in a week and it's designed well, intuitive, and (thus far) has been very smooth and glitch free.

Seriously impressive.

I think the simplest explanation is that tons of people have money at the exchanges and are waiting for the time when they feel there is a bottom. While one day might see 10,000 btc traded, the next might see 100,000 traded, and it doesn't mean a single new market entrant appeared. After a huge drop, people assume it was an overcorrection and then buy it up again. And after a huge rise, people assume it was a bubble and sell it back down. Thus you get flare ups of activity where none existed the day prior. It's just part of a new and extremely volitile market trying to decide whether Bitcoin is worth a penny or a thousand bucks.

Bingo