First and foremost... because I can? It would add another tickmark to the list of countries I visited. Also, since there are no laws or regulations in the country, aside from their code of conduct against killing/stealing/fraud, I suspect it may offer unique experiences other beach resorts don't (I'm sure the Pirates of Somalia ride there will be quite a bit more exciting than the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney  ). Mostly, I'll be curious to see how their local economy and culture continues to develop.

You can create a bicoin transaction that will only be spent some time in the future. So what you do is:

1) Create a transaction that will send all your coins to a spouse or children two years from now.
2) Two years later, before the time runs out, move all the coins to another address, and if needed, create yet another delayed transaction.
3) Since the coins no longer exist in the address used by the original delayed transaction, that transaction will fail and be rejected by the system.

Rinse/Repeat.

I typed in the amount into the entry field, then selected the option to send bitcoins, and it asked me to send 1 BTC to an address. It didn't matter what I typed into the entry field, it always asked me to send 1 BTC. I sent the correct amount to the address, and the confirmation button never went anywhere. It just sat there, looking grey. I'm aware of this Coinbase issue, where seemingly NONE of the features in the interface work or do anything, and just sending whatever amount that needs to be sent directly to the address provided seems to work fine.

There will of course be alternative cryptocurrencies. There are no laws or rules against them, and obviously everyone is free to use them. My main point is that Bitcoin is not dying, nor is it anywhere at risk of being replaced by something like Litecoin. Not unless something so radically different comes along that Bitcoin ca't implement it even with a hard fork. And sure, people use all those other OS's, but that still does't change the fact that Windows is the dominant OS out there.


I don't know what other people think. The reason I personally think that bitcoin is it, is simply because it's a protocol, not a piece of software that gets upgraded or not. If something like Litecoin's 2.5 minute block confirmation time turns out to be a significant advantage, Bitcoin can easily switch to such a confirmation with a fork. If, or rather when, SHA-265 hashing algorithm becomes inadequate, Bitcoin will switch to something better, like Scrypt, or something that is resistant to quantum computers. Bitcoin can even run two different mining algorithms at the same time if need be, giving time for miners to switch from old to new mining hardware. There is just nothing that I can think of, short of debt-based Ripple system, that Bitcoin can't implement if users see a need for it.



I actually think confirmation times may be too short in the long run. There are discussions elsewhere on this forum about the speed-of-light problem for using Bitcoin between Earth and Mars. As for buying things like coffee, there are lots of ways to use bicoin where you don't need to worry about confirmations. One of those methods will be released either in 0.9, or the version after.



This has been discussed at length, and the basic problem is, how do you control the increase? If you give that control to a party of people, you've basically defeated one of the biggest reasons for Bitcoin. If you base it on some algorithm, there will always be ways to game them. If you just set it to a constant 3% a year increase, not only will you have trouble convincing people to move their money into something that gives them a negative return (see Freicoin), but the world's economy doesn't grow at a constant 3%, so you'll still have boom and bust cycles with periods of inflation/deflation.


I'll name some of the richest Bitcoin people who are running bitcoin businesses:

Eric Voorhees (Satoshidice, Coinapult), Charlie Shrem (Bitinstant), Roger Ver (Bitcoinstore.com, and many others), Tony Gallippi (BitPay), Jered Kenna (Tradehill), Mark Karpeles (MtGox).

Now can you name some of the richest people who are bitcoin miners?

Sure, people started out thinking of Bitcoin as a get-rich-quick scheme, where you just run your GPU and print money. I was one of them. But bitcoin mostly makes people rich when they actually do some business with it. And Satoshi's brilliant idea was also that those who mined and hoarded at the start, found themselves wealthy once Bitcoin was more widely accepted, and are now pumping that wealth into developing more bitcoin tools. If you had been at the Bitcoin 2013 conference, you would've seen that of al the energy and enthusiasm there, barely any of it was about mining (BFL had a table, and Yifu made a presentation about Avalon), but 95% of the rest of it was all about bitcoin businesses, hardware, development, financial services, etc. The tens of thousands of dollars that were being thrown around at the conference weren't from miners.




Part of the reason there are uproars is because newbies get suckered into investing in scamcoins, or investing their money into altcoins thinking they can be "early adopters" or wealthy miners, when whatever it is they are adopting has no support behind it. Personally, I don't see Litecoin's "economy" growing beyond just the miners who feel butthurt about not being able to mine bitcoins anymore, and thus expect that it will eventually stagnate. There really aren't any benefits that can't be overcome on bitcoin's side. Look at this list:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_alternative_cryptocurrencies

and think about how many fools were parted with their money.

I'm not a networking wiz, and only know IPX as the old Novel Netware that DOS based computers used to run before they switched to Windows and TCP/IP. Could you explain why that comparison was "stupid pseudo-technical drivel" please?

Sure. But there is one huge factor between the northern part of that one country, and the southern part.


Yes


I live in United States. I have previously lived in Ukraine, Russia, and Italy, and have spent time in Canada, Switzerland, UK, and Iceland. I would not choose to live in Somalia right now, but will probably visit in the future.
Here's a freebie for you http://www.independent.org/publications/working_papers/article.asp?id=1861

It's a bit of a long read, but the gist of it is that Somalia, despite having no real government, still has a system of law, and talks about all those things I mentioned, where ex-warlords are now running the business of providing security for those living on their territories, Somalia's economy is improving rapidly, and things aren't nearly as bad as the media makes it out to be. They are basically turning into a collection of private gated communities / free economic zones. There was even an article out recently about an entrepreneur planning on building a high-end beach resort for tourists there, using the local security providers to keep things safe. Once that happens, I see no reason not to visit.

1) http://spices.org.my/   PAID
https://blockchain.info/tx/96c53e22e10716c452a45cb0f9074f81f3a0ad79a3a48f6ecff543e1dcc43733

2) http://www.asiconservachile.org/ PAID
https://blockchain.info/tx/9acde89d4cb83772fe586a9ee2de47a6d9b6fad93f8f32a5f28256653169974a

Am I forgetting anyone?

FYI, that Coinbase 1.0 donaton amount is pretty much arbitrary. You can send whatever amount you wish to the address that it provides. Whatever you type into the entry field doesn't seem to actually do anything.

Awesome news, glad it seems to be working out, even if the process is getting a bit overwhelmed, and I am really fighting the urge to say "I told you so" in response to all those who called me a Bitfloor shill or acused me of kissing Roman's ass, when I was slapping down unsubstantiated claims 

You must know something I don't. Or I must know something you don't 

Almost everyone does. Especially in business and government.


Because cars wear out, and you are forced to switch to either a new Ford, or something else. Bitcoin doesn't wear out.


I have no idea why this is relevant 


Sounds like a strawman argument, as I don't know anyone who does. Certainly not the developers who are continuing to fix problems and add issues. Certainly not businesses, who are still sitting on the sidelines, waiting for increased adoption and easier to use tools. And certainly not the users who find some things a hassle, and are hoarding coins with the expectation that eventually they will be easier to use, and thus will be worth more. If people thought it was perfect, everyone would be using it for transactions, and almost no one would hoard it, since there would be no future developments and adoption to "invest" in.

It's not competing with an economy, it's competing with a currency and a financial system. Currencies are being inflated, in some cases are very unstable, and have tons of restrictions on them. Financial systems are slow and clunky, with lots of bureacracy and paperwork, with huge fees and likewise tons of restrictions on them. Bitcoin's main flaw right now is low adoption, but the way to fix that is just to increase adoption, which shouldn't be too hard, since it doesn't have those other currency and financial system flaws.


How Americacentric of you. Goods are not just priced in USD. They are also priced in EUR, JPY, GBP, and other currencies. And when they are priced, they are typically priced in the currency that the buyer uses, so if I'm in US, and I'm selling to someone who uses Euros, I give them a price in Euros, not in USD. If they accept BTC, I'll price things in BTC. As more and more people use BTC, there will be less and less of a need to do a conversion to get a sense of what you are paying for.
Also, what do you mean by "anything except the name of how you are paying for the item?" Are you claiming that there is no difference between bitcoins and dollars besides the name???


Exactly right. In business, that's called "First Mover Advantage," which was quickly followed by "Network Effects," which is where everyone uses something because everyone else uses it. First Mover Advantage benefited bitcoin because it allowed it to set up the biggest customer and developer base first. Now Network Effects are sustaining it because everyone else uses bitcoin. The only business term left to decide whether bitcoin will succeed or not is called "Switching Costs," or the cost of switching from using Bitcon to something else. While true, they may seem very low, such as adding a Litecoin module to your shopping card plugin, you also have to take into account things like support and development, learning about new systems, opening up new accounts, etc. All of these concepts are perfectly exemplified by MS Windows, which had a First Mover advantage with DOS and GUI being built on top of it, Network Effect with everyone using and developing for Windows because everyone else is using it, and Switching Costs, where it would cost a lot in time and lost productivity for people and businesses to switch from it, despite Linux offering much of the same things, including a full office suite, for free. Microsoft tripped up, and may get beaten by Linux eventually, especially since they missed the boat on smartphones and tablets somehow (despite having them first). I don't think the same thing can happen with bitcoin, since it's an open source project from the start, and no one is restricted from developing or improving it.



Unless your definition of insider trading is different from mine, ASIC mining has nothing to do with insider trading

That sword cuts both ways: If it's so easy to switch back and forth, why not just stick to what everyone else is already using, anyway?

   Not only did you not bother to read the wiki articles, you didn't even bother reading my post, where I specifically saif which wiki articles to google for.
But here you go
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Italy#Violent_crime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Mafia#Ten_Commandments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Mafia#Protection_rackets

Read the "... from theft" and "client relations" too.



I get my info from whatever I find on peer-reviewed web articles and news sources. Plus from my short experience living in Italy, where mafia guys kept an eye on things, and as long as you didn't bother them or others, they wouldn't bother you. There's also a similar situation developing in Somalia now, where former war-lords are learning that they can have a much more comfortable life and business just selling protection to people living in their territories. It has brought a lot of security and stability to places where government and police can't provide that service. Sounds like you have a shitty mafia. Hopefully they will either get their act together, learn from other mafias, or get "replaced" by a better competitor.


Sounds like an apt description of most countres' military soldiers  

Don't people use credit cards to buy groceries, apples, and cups of coffee?

The question isn't whether bitcoin can replace cash (paper representations of Dollars/Euros) or credit cards (digital representations of Dollars/Euros). Bitcoins can be printed on bills, made into coins, and used on smart cards and credit cards, too. The question is whether Bitcoin can replace Dollars/Euros. As this point in time, Bitcoin has replaced about $1,000,000,000 worth of Dollars/Euros. Every time it grows, that means that more and more of the world's economy has had it's local currency replaced by Bitcoin. So, regarding the question of "Will the bitcoin reach $1000 one day...?", the real question is "Is Bitcoin here to stay?" In other words, can bitcoin stay and outlast USD, or at least exist long enough that USD inflation drops the value of a dollar to the point where 1BTC is worth $1,000?

I was told not to feed you, but since you have put so much effort into this, and I don't want newbies to be misinformed, I'm obliged to reply. For those who want to avoid TL;DR, I bolded parts I consider important.


My point was that the overall supply of bitcoins is fixed. It doesn't matter how many people are mining, or how powerful the hardware they use is, the number of bitcoins being brought into the world will not change. And the larger the number of people mine, the less each person will get.


Businesses are not in the business of mining coins. They are in the business of selling goods and services, using whatever payment methods are easiest and cheapest. All they care about is how many of their customers and business partners accept the same payment method they do. They don't care if the US Mint bought faster, more efficient money printers, or saved on electric bills by turning off some of the lights and the air conditioning.


Obviously bitcoins provide something unique that collective governments with their respective currencies can't provide. Otherwise bitcoin wouldn't need to have been created in the first place. People value bitcoin at over $1billion right now, because they believe bitcoins provide something government currencies don't or can't. Perhaps you should figure out what that is.



I do get out plenty. Maybe we just live in different types of societies, but where I live, almost no one uses cash any more. It's all credit/debit cards and digital payments. As for fees, you have to pay those and jump through hoops every time you use your card. You pay those VISA/MasterCard transaction fees, which are typically 2.7%, every time you swipe your card, through increased prices of goods. If bitcoin was used for nothing else but a payment mechanism, you and the merchant would only pay 0.5% to 1% fee, meaning a combines 2 * (0.5% | 1%) = 1% to 2% fee. That alone can save you and the merchant as much at 1.7%, and for businesses where the profit margin is 4%, that could mean almost double the profits.



Absolutely! http://www.whyisntbitcoinworthless.com is a good place to start. Besides just the technical, it also provides for a way to store value that does not depend on a whim of any entity, and is not restricted or controlled by anyone, while allowing you to send any amount of it to anyone securely and anonymously. Nothing else does that.



How is having to wait ~2.5 minutes for your cup of coffee versus ~10 a major improvement? Both bitcoin and litecoin will require extra trust and the use of a third party to allow for instant transactions. Can you give me an example of when waiting for ~2.5 minutes is better than ~10? As for being taken over, Litecoin can easily be taken over by botners, government and university supercomputers, or if need be, custom made and built ASICs. Bitcoin could have been taken over by a malicious entity or government that could send some money to design ASICs in secret, and suddenly overwhelm the network with their own much more powerful mining equipment, but now that ASICs are in private hands distributed among many owners, that scenario is becoming less and less likely.



It doesn't matter that it's not commonplace. It's being developed. And it's not the ATMs and credit cards that are the actual problem, is the fiat currencies. They are broke. Bitcoin is an attempt to fix the problem. All that stuff I listed just makes it a hell of a lot easier to use them, to the point where people who use bitcoins don't even need to care about what it is, besides "money." From a customer and business perspective, bitcoins will be easily swapped to/from cash, will be easily carried on phones and cards, and can be used to easily accept payments using well established businesses and software. Litecoin doesn't have any of that yet. It might, but thanks to "network effects" it will likely have as much chance as Bitmint and Bitcoinstore have of taking over eBay and Amazon. Network effect is the main think that will keep bitcoin going despite altcoins, btw.


Only if you are willing to mail that cash in envelopes or boxes, paying postage, waiting for days for it to get there, hoping no one opens the package and steals it, and having no proof that the person the money being sent to actually received it other than their word.


Bitcoin services are not mostly based in US. MtGox, biggest exchange, is in Japan. Blockchain.info, biggest digital wallet, is based in UK. Bitcoin Wallet for Android, is developed in Germany. Tons of bitcoin services are in Canada, South America, Europe, Russia, and China, and even Iran. The Feds have no control there, and have as much power as the RIAA has over file sharing. How successfull are the feds at shutting down ThePirateBay? The only reason you keep seeing the US based services is because they are they ones catering to you and your US dollars specifically.


Which are becoming more and more numerous as more and more developers create better software and tools to make it easier to use...


Yeah, bullshit. You'll have to show me where you got the idea that "more and more developers are moving onto new coins." Developers want to be involved with something big and widely used, where their time and work will actually be appreciated. Bitcoin is typically the first choice. As for third world shitholes, do you consider Brazil, Russia, or China third world shitholes? Because they could give a shit what the feds want.


What BitInstant or any other such service does, has absolutely no impact on the underlying bitcoin system. At all. Sure, I may need to break anonymity to convert government currency to bitcoin, but it's trivially easy to launder those coins through a "mixer," and still use it in private transactions in the same way that bitcoin was intended. Using names databases to break anonymity isn't a new symptom of bitcoin, it's the old symptom of having to deal with government currencies. As as soon as you're done with the trade, you leave fiat, and all its issues behind.


What are those principles? The ones I'm aware of are:

1) No inflation - still holding
2) Pseudonomous - still fine (may need mixing if it touched fiat)
3) No regulations or restrictions on payment - still ok
4) No third party or banking risk - still fine, and getting better with hardware wallets

What else am I missing that was brushed aside?



It's "have little vendor, user, and developer support." If only because altcoins don't provide anything of substantial value (VHS was inferior to Betamax, but it had vendor, user, and developer support, and wasn't all that much worse). Besides, if someone comes up with an altcoin idea that substantially improves on bitcoin, first, thanks to more developers, it can be easily and quickly implemented in bitcoin too, and second, thanks to more developers, it's much more likely to be created by a bitcoin developer in the first place.


And this final sentence right there tells me that you are a newbie when it comes to bitcoin. I never noticed how much of an ENORMOUS PAIN IN THE ASS the current financial system is until I had bitcoin to compare it to.

Why not? How are they worse than debit cards? If they are at least as good, or even just a bit worse, there are still a ton of benefits they provide that can help drive adoption.



How so? Just the having to wait for only 2.5 minutes instead of 10 for a transaction? And why do you believe almost all hardware point-of-sale terminals and web shopping cart plugins are being developed for bitcoin instead of litecoin?

You didn't read it Mafia doesn't "whack" their customers. That's bad for business, will piss off their other customers, and will   likely get them either reported to the police, or worse, make the customers switch to other mafia organizations, which will deprive the "whackers" of money, and sick a much better financed mafia military on them. They can at most mess the place up a bit, but the best method is to simply advertise who IS paying for protection, letting thieves know that some businesses are fair game. And yes, had you read those wiki entries, you would have read that business owners and private individuals do actually seek out protection services, as well as other help. Mafia keeps your store safe by advertising that it's under their protection, mafia can be hired to recover stolen goods or get compensation for vandalism, and can be used for arbitration purposes when two people, say a store clerk and a supplier, wish to trade, and want to make sure one doesn't screw the other. Mafia actually does care about its business reputation, and does negotiate with "customers" to make sure they are getting the service they are paying for, and are not ripping them off. The mafia depends on all the businesses they protect to keep running just as much as the owners are. This isn't something you can say about governments or police.
As for murder and rape, it's not my simplistic banter, it's just crime statistics. All they say is that crimes like murder, theft, and rape, are much more prevalent in Northern Italy, and barely existent in Southern Italy. You make your own conclusions.

Regarding civil rights, things like no marriage between races and segregated schools and businesses was the law, forced on everyone by government, because that was the prevalent belief at the time. It didn't take laws to change this, it took the changing of beliefs, which were also later codified in law. So, even businesses that wanted to sell to everyone were kept from doing it because of laws, even when more and more people believed that we shouldn't discriminate. Mafia doesn't care about laws, just business and profits, so I seriously doubt they would care about foreigners or other races visiting the businesses they protect. As for financial regulation? The point is not to have any. If we're going to have regulations, we might as well have governments and police, too. Now if you mean financial mediation/arbitration/escrow, and making sure people don't commit fraud or theft, yeah, that's what their business actually is.

Hey, Hateface, Are you advocating that people abandon Bitcoin and switch to Litecoin, or are you just saying that Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies in general, are a bad idea? I seriously can't tell any more.

There was a period of time back in 2011 when Bitcoin price declined to $2.95, and mining became unprofitable for many GPU miners. So, a lot of miners shut down their hardware, and time to include in a block went up just a tad. It wasn't really noticeable unless you bothered to calculate an average over the course of a few days. A week later, difficulty actually went down. Two weeks after, difficulty came down again, and it became profitable to mine again. That's how it works: if it's unprofitable, miners stop mining, difficulty drops, and it starts being profitable again.