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It's actually a very good idea - and people forget that Bitcoin makes it possible because it permits payments of .00000001 btc.
I can certainly imagine that, if implemented effectively, senders of email would barely notice the cost and spammers would have a serious hurdle and risk.
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all new things are likely to fail. I stopped reading here. This quote was probably mentioned and true quite sometime back when neanderthals ruled the earth. Saying something like this now is just retardant(  ). Maybe you shouldn't stop reading as soon as a disagreeable point is made, for you may find such a point to be supported by reasoning following the making of said point =) I said that all new things are likely to fail because it's true. New stuff tends to fail. New businesses, new products, new ideas. The tendency is to fail, and only a minority of them succeed after being tested in the real world. I didn't realize such an observation was contentious? Statistically speaking, Bitcoin is likely to fail purely because it is new and revolutionary. However, the more one analyzes Bitcoin, the more sound it appears to be. The world will be a much better place if it succeeds... and good riddance to fiat. |
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Hi all,
I own BitcoinBooty.com and am willing to sell if anyone is interested.
Obviously a great name for pr0n, gambling, payment services, pirates, or other fun stuff.
Pls no offers under 40 bitcoins as I'd rather just keep it. Transfer can be quick via GoDaddy.
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... living-wage...
LOL that term is so silly |
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It would be impossible for one person to accumulate all bitcoins unless they had dropped to essentially zero due to a devastating flaw/security issue. Why impossible? Because every marginal bitcoin which is purchased from some other owner will increase in value up to infinity. Imagine if one man started buying all the bitcoins now... the price would rise and rise and rise. Perhaps he could get half the bitcoins. Maybe 80% of them. But as he approached 100% ownership, those with the remaining coins would only sell at higher prices. A bitcoin would become so expensive that not even Warren Buffet could purchase the last few. Note: this same economic concept is why the world will never "run out" of oil, or trees, or any resource. If the last barrel of oil were found... at what price would it sell? Infinity. And long before that last barrel, alternatives would be used. So cheer up all, we'll never run out of oil, and Bitcoins will never all be owned by one person  |
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Hey everyone - So far we have 8 Bitcoin users who are going to be rolling up to Panera Bread
Coordinate a few attendees to ask the cashier if you can pay for your Bacon Turkey Bravo with Bitcoins. |
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So when will 1 BTC equal one BTC?
Shortly after the world finally realizes that credit cards should be abolished for the good of society.  Plastic is not the problem, fiat currency is. We'll still have credit cards in a bitcoin world - one will always be able to borrow now for higher repayment in the future. And a plastic card you can swipe at a store is extremely convenient, thus the market will demand it (unless mobile credit payments become easier which is very probable). |
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Saw your video and liked it. Good point - and of course the more important point is that there certainly other "uses" out there that we don't know of yet. CAPTCHA can't be the only one =)
The video was well-argued, good job.
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CoinSluts.com is now sold.
The other five are available for 20 btc total or 8 btc each.
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I think it will raise, because of the difficulty.
Price changes are not significantly influenced by difficulty changes. However, difficulty changes are significantly influenced by price changes. If price followed difficulty, then we could all make ourselves rich merely by agreeing to increase difficulty tomorrow by 10,000,000x. Think what the price would be!!! |
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Run Before You Walk Troll:
I can't fill my car with gasoline so Bitcoin is useless
I can't buy tampons at Walmart so Bitcoin is useless
I'm not able to pay rent so Bitcoin is useless
I can't have sex with a Bitcoin so Bitcoin is useless
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Today I received 2 BTC in the mail.  If you keep those in your wallet, make sure not to get your wallet stolen Keep it encrypted. |
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Wouldn't this still leave Sarah's Hair Emporium at risk for fake/nonexistent bitcoins? Seems to me that they still would have to be confirmed before Sarah's Hair actually receives any money.
Yes the confirmation delay is still an issue. Repeat customers who the vendor knew, would probably not require confirmation delay. I'm confident this problem, too, will be overcome soon. |
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The pieces of the bitcoin infrastructure are coming together quickly. Two weeks ago, it was hard to imagine how someone could pay a brick & mortar store on site with Bitcoins. The solution seems to now be here. Let's use Sarah's Hair Salon as an example... Step 1) Winston has the new Android app ( https://market.android.com/details?id=com.bitcoinandroid) that was all over the news today Step 2) Sarah sets up account with Bit-Pay.com, and selects the "deposit as USD" option, so that btc payments instantly convert to USD in her account (she's unsure of btc and would prefer dollars for the time being). Step 3) Sarah puts out a "We Accept Bitcoin" sign with a QR code of her bit-pay.com wallet address Step 4) After the haircut, Winston scans the QR code at the cash register, and sends payment in btc to Sarah's Hair Salon. Result: Sarah has received the money as US dollars, and Winston paid with Bitcoins from his pocket. No credit card fee, no chargebacks, no fraud. This is pretty damn simple. Vendors have incentive to accept Bitcoin because it will enable them to steal customers from competitors who don't. Nobody needs to "switch" to Bitcoin either... it grows organically alongside normal payments with credit cards and cash. I think Bit-Pay.com is still in beta (and the android app is still "experimental") but you can see the functionality is ready. Proof of concept completed. |
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Bitcoin is for anyone who wishes to transfer a payment to someone else in a frictionless manner. No fees (almost), very fast, no third party involved, no currency conversion if done across borders, easy authentication, no long-term inflation, etc.
Bitcoin is money. Like all money, if you want it, you will generally have to trade something of value for it, or risk present assets for possible future returns. TANSTAAFL
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What other currency is the rest of the world going to switch over to? Euros? Yuan? Yen? The USD is still far and away the safest place for other nations' currency reserves.
I agree that our national debt is getting too large and we need to reduce our deficit to avoid getting ourselves into hot water down the road, but it's hardly the impending apocalypse you're trying to portray it as. As for your 35 year argument, you're trying to create a more uncertain image for the USD than is realistic. It's not like there was some fundamental shift in the 70's where people were marching down to the bank to get their gold every week and suddenly couldn't because of this massive paradigm shift. The government simply realized that keeping large reserves of gold was unnecessary -- the training wheels could be taken off and the bike would keep rolling along just fine. Which it has, and will continue to do. Better, in fact, because now without the training wheels you can do maneuvers you couldn't do (like avoid a full blown economic depression).
Well your response was civil, thank you =) Regarding the 35 year argument, there WAS a fundamental shift in the 70's. That shift happened August 15, 1971 when the "gold window" was eliminated - the gold window allowed foreign nations to exchange dollars for gold at a fixed rate ($35/ounce). American citizens were not allowed to exchange in this way, but nations could. In other words, the US dollar was still on some semblance of a gold standard until that day. At the beginning of 1971, a US dollar was essentially still "as good as gold," at least on an international level. After the gold window was closed, the US became pure fiat. This was even more influential because many other countries tied their currencies to the dollar, so it effectively thrust much of the world into fiat. You wouldn't call this a "fundamental shift?" I'm guessing you never learned this in school... I sure didn't. Not surprisingly, after the gold standard was completely destroyed the value of the dollar plummeted and within three years it took $195 to buy an ounce of gold instead of $35. This was the equivalent of a default on debt obligations. If you were a foreign nation, and held dollars, this dealt you a crushing blow. Instead of your dollar pile representing a set weight of gold, it now represented... nothing. Or more accurately, it represented "faith" in the US Government. The US Gov defaulted only a few decades ago... also didn't learn that in school, right? =) So perhaps you consider gold "training wheels," and you say a mature currency doesn't need them. Well, the dollar has lost 80% of its purchasing power in these few decades since. It will lose much more than that in the next decade or two. Voltaire famously said, "paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value - zero." I think you may find yourself understanding why that is the case over the next several years. |
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I have no problem with speculators, but they will kill / have already killed Bitcoin as a currency. Obviously, if there's money to be made, people are going to try to make it, so the trick is to set up the system so that speculation can't make it so unstable as to be unattractive to new adopters.
Speculators make markets MORE stable, not less. Or perhaps I should rephrase that - they make markets more rational, because when a speculator sees a price he deems "irrational" he can take a financial position in the other direction and profit if he's correct. This incentive encourages people to critically asses the market in question. A market in which speculation was difficult would be a market I'd be less confident in.
Oh dear, I suspect you might be one of the nutter-butters I was referring to. Here, write this down: The USD isn't going anywhere. It's not 1895, you don't need to trade your greenbacks for shiny metal anymore. Controlled inflation is a good thing, not a bad thing.
It's puzzling to me that so many people involved with a cutting-edge electronic currency project are so economically primitive.
Protip: name-calling is unnecessary. I'm not going to call you a "nutter-butter" just because you believe economies should be centrally-planned. People have this impression that the dollar has been around for hundreds of years and has proven its trustworthiness. They do not realize that it has only been a mere 35 years since it was disconnected from gold. The USD, in its current form, is only 35 years old, and given the fact that the US Gov is in debt far beyond what it can repay without printing the money (especially if interest rates rise), and that other nations are growing increasingly skeptical about its place as the world reserve currency, you will see the dollar in a long-term decline over the coming two decades. This decline could turn into a collapse very quickly as the vast sums held in reserves are sold by nations who increasingly prefer to trade without US dollars. And let us not forget that the US is already defaulting on its debt by buying its own Treasuries with printed dollars from the Federal Reserve (euphemistically referred to as "quantitative easing"). It is paying back creditors with devalued currency - that is a default by any honest assessment. It was not so long ago as 1895 as you jest that the Dollar was backed by gold. It was the 1970's, good sir. And so you're certainly welcome to put your trust in politicians who understand nothing about economics - for god's sake they listen to Bernanke who was unable to predict the greatest housing collapse and recession in 80 years - but I do not trust them as you do. You make fun of gold, because you do not understand why it is good money - you do not understand why it is preferable to paper fiat. You claim that "controlled inflation" is a good thing... not realizing that what you advocate amounts to "controlled theft of property" by the Federal Reserve for the benefit of the US Government and at the expense of all holders of US Dollars. Money itself - the very core commodity of an economy - is a monopoly product and service of the US Government, and yet school children spout that we live under free-market capitalism?! How silly is this! The price of money itself (interest rate), is fixed! You call me "economically primitive" because I think money, like all goods and services, should be chosen and priced by the free market, instead of by politicians? That's primitive? Is someone who believes in gravity primitive, merely because such a theory is hundreds of years old? The laws of markets, like those of apple trees, do not change over time. And do you think your beloved fiat is a new invention? Governments have been inflating money supplies for thousands of years, trying to bolster the wealth of a nation by printing it. THAT, in my opinion, is not only primitive but highly immoral and profoundly destructive. You admit to being "puzzled" that so many Bitcoin advocates are "economically primitive." It would do you well to check your premises. |
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I'm pretty skeptical of Bitcoin's chances at this point. Not because the underlying technology isn't sound, but because it's been completely co-opted by speculators and "the USD is just, like, paper man!" doomsday nutballs. I think the problem lies with the mining algorithm: it's a great idea to use mining to incentivize peer to peer participation in the payment processing network, but the model of exponentially-increasing difficulty is just foolish. A model where participants earn a share of transaction fees based on the number of actual transactions they help process would be far less wasteful of electricity and CPU cycles and could potentially encourage far broader adoption of the Bitcoin software, thus paving the way for it to be used as an electronic currency by more than a handful of enthusiasts. There wouldn't be large windfalls for mining, but that's a good thing. The windfalls and speculation are what are going to kill it as a currency -- right now it's basically a mix between a commodity and a penny stock, which creates a large barrier to entry from anyone not trying to make a fast buck off it before it collapses.
I still think it's an interesting project that will be used as a model by future economists, but I'd be very uneasy if I had a large amount of money tied up in them at this point.
1) There is nothing wrong with speculators (so long as they aren't defrauding anyone) - they are merely individuals who try to predict future value, by putting their own money on the line. An efficient market is made by their actions, as they bring pricing signals forward in time. It's as important in Bitcoin as it is in the oil markets. But people HATE speculators!  2) The dollar IS just paper, man. It's an important philosophical, economic, and moral issue. Expressing antagonism toward a monetary system which is inflated at whim at the expense of those who are coerced into holding it is a very reasonable position to take, IMO. 3) Regarding mining, exponentially increasing difficulty is anything but foolish. You forget that one of the primary reasons for the number crunching (which you call wasteful) is to make it difficult for any computer or network of computers to manipulate the protocol. The longer Bitcoin operates, the more secure the blockchain becomes due to this dynamic. Not foolish. At the core of your skepticism is, I think, a disapproval toward anyone who is able to obtain wealth without "hard work." Some miners will indeed make a killing from their early discovery of Bitcoin, and that doesn't sit well with you. You think it's "unfair." The irony, of course, is that in the same breath you defend fiat paper currencies which have for centuries enabled the politically connected to obtain incredible wealth through the process of inflation. Yet, it is not wealthy bankers profiting from the printing presses for whom you seem to have disdain - but rather a small group of tech-enthusiasts who first discovered what may become a revolutionary technology, and risked their own time and capital to invest in it. |
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