This would only be true if difficulty added value, it does not. Bitcoin has never been hacked before ASICs so the ASICs just add frosting to the cake.

The current stable price of BTC is about 22$ rising some 100-200% per year. If it goes further and then crashes though we will probably never go below 10$.

BTC is following a predictable exponential adoption curve, but is varying along that curve.

However that variation will get smaller as BTC has gotten bigger, the 2011 spike was a times 30 increase in value, today that would mean 300$ per coin or some 1-2 billion dollars moving into BTC within the year. This will not happen. The traders are also more numerous and smarter today, I doubt we will see such clear bubbles again.

That would be incorrect. I haven't heard of anyone buying BTC for status yet. If you think BTC will be worth more tomorrow it makes sense to buy it now.

I'm not sure this is possible, the address derives from a key only you know, if it were to derive from your brand name everyone would know the private key.

Seems to me there's no way to get both.

I would suggest letting a beefed computer run a week or a month to create a vanity address for your company and then use that. 1 layer of extra security anyway.
The more serious the company the more money and CPU you could put into it.

The only way to do it is to get most major clients to accept larger blocks AFTER a future specified date.

That way once say "2017 Dec 31" rolls around 90% of BTC users will all accept larger blocks at the same time and the confusion will be minimal.

This is not that hard honestly just get MyWallet, Armory, the Satoshi client and Electrum programmers/distributors to agree on a date say "2020" and a new limit "100mb" and you're done.
I don't see why that many people would reject this change and as such the new standard should be rolled out way before it takes effect.

Miners are irrelevant in this, but they should welcome the change; BTC will never grow if normal people can't use it. We would be right back to trusting banks, only backed by BTC instead of gold this time. We all know what a wild success THAT has been!

Bad copy paste job I know.. anyway do I get points for getting it so close 3 months in advance?

Here is another quote of mine from Nov 4:
"In this case total price increase factoring in market anticipation is: 20/12.5 = 1.6."*
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=122197.msg1315679#msg1315679

The interesting thing here is that market anticipation had pretty much 0 effect.

EDIT: * as in ~11$*1.6=17.6

Haha not bad really. Might be we get a wagon load of anime freaks to join over that

Wasn't ASICs the huge thing coming out in December, what happened to all that? Another scam to be revealed in the near future...?

You are correct except the secret number will cycle only between 1 and 9 and I will encrypt the number I send back so the terminal will not be able to read it.
Your attempt would also be limited to 6 times the user's median purchase or about 10-12 BTC.
It will probably be a simple Caesar cipher, but that should be safe enough for 8 characters ("1,23e-99" encrypted to say "A,AFeDBJ").

I estimate that most people will never use the card more than 10.000 times (about 27 years if you make one purchase per day on average).
If 1 in 500 purchases happens on fraudulent terminals (with most happening at trusted merchants) the PIN code will have incremented itself the next time you use a fraudulent terminal and even a network database of fraudulent terminals would need to collect data over a few years to decrypt the Caesar cipher.

With the maximum amount in place any such criminal effort is largely wasted.

To make high value purchases you could either pay simply using your normal BTC client OR use the card multiple times charging up to the maximum amount. (the median/maximum purchase amount will update exponentially upwards should you stubbornly try to buy a house with the smart card)

As far as I know the Electrum client is open source, since this is a lightweight client you can run it without killing your server easily.

Either it will have an API OR you can modify the code to write out the events you need etc..

We should do flash advertising to such countries concentrated on a few days... sad to say I have little money.

It is still the ZC5.4.

However I developed a payment process that does not require trust in the terminal (its in the thread somewhere):

The card will multiply the requested amount with a number only you know and then you only give the PIN if this number fits. The terminal cannot fake-double-charge either as the card will lock itself for while after each transaction.


You can still trick this system, but it requires quite some effort and the card holder could immediately know who ripped him off and can call the cops.
Further safe guards are possible like self-incrementing PIN codes or maximum withdrawals.
Even if somehow overcharged the keys never leave the card so it cannot get compromised the way a VISA card can.


The paper wallet thing; if you just keep the card in a safe and only use it with your own phone/PC to withdraw once in a great while it becomes safer than paper since paper doesn't require a code to read (except for encrypted paper wallets).

If you mean litecoin and such you could conceivably add support for those too.

USD, EUR, Yuan and such; no.

That might be pretty neat.

The card will behave as follows:
1. It is very secure, more so than even a paper wallet in some ways.
2. It holds Bitcoin and pays Bitcoin, no MasterCard/VISA etc. involved.
3. Anyone with a PC or an Android phone could accept this BTC credit card (globally).
4. You can pay no fee if you want or easily program your own card if you don't trust providers.
5. Is open source.
6. It would cost 6-20$ with the price dropping every year as with all electronics.

Would you buy this?

I was in camp claiming that it was NOT priced in and that the price would increase.

(My logic was that
* Bitcoin is not just speculators;
* that there is a constantish flow of money going into Bitcoin from people who just discovered it
* and hence COULD not buy in the summer 2012
* and finally that this flow and the shortfall of new coins would push the price up.)

Now I will admit I expected BTC to be easily above 15$ by now but I also knew that it would not be an overnight thing (unless there was some panic buying).

I think there HAS been a strong upwards pressure though - it is a whole 1$ more now than at the end of November and every drop has been quickly reversed since.

I expect continued strong behavior the next few months.

Perhaps not most current nations, but I think for the people a Bitcoin nation would be strong.

I also agree with DeathAndTaxes that Bitcoin will benefit the poor and protect what savings they have. I have always held the view that Bitcoin will help even the last adopter.

In a way you could say that simply holding cash is a loan you have given to the world.

As for traditional banking loans I don't think Ripple can replace that, those things are based on police kicking you out of your house if you don't pay.
Trusting family and friends is not really foolproof, I have seen many family members rip each other off and its not pretty.

Ripple is extra risky because a chain of people owe each other money; if any one of the people in that chain or net doesn't pay up then the next link may have no money to pay with or may decide not to as well.

Loans, stocks and contracts are based on police and courts. Honestly I think people should rent or fully buy with savings instead of continuing our failing credit-card-economy.

Tell me; why all this debt slavery and personal bankruptcy when you could rent the first years and then buy, effectively ending with the same final price as a loan would have cost you? Lets do away with the old system.

I am rather confident about SHA256 as well and it is a little less critical due to the difficulty adjustments.

If it starts to break down slowly like MD5 has in 50-100 years or so I am sure most bitcoiners would agree unanimously to a protocol upgrade.

I read rather carefully about the EC algorithm Bitcoin uses and this is the very core of Bitcoin. Everything else follows and is patchable.

EC is like an equation with more than one unknown, there is mathematically speaking no way to solve it except brute force.


(I assumed your poll meant catastrophically hacked not some minor and temporary exploit or rare double spend.)

I don't know about that. I still think there is upwards pressure due to the halving. That pressure will likely persist as a strong factor until we reach 15$/BTC or more.

Plus Bitcoin is looking more and more mature by the day. I myself am working on a bitcoin card that will let anyone pay to any Android phone user in the world in a secure and fast manor. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7539.140)

Wordpress accepts Bitcoin along with thousands other online shops now. The list goes on. Even skeptics I am talking to are starting to take it a little more serious when you throw around the big numbers Bitcoin has already and they are impressed when largely any country they can name shows up on LocalBitcoins.

The USA alone has 100 billion $ in fraud costs per year due to VISA/MasterCards; sooner or later people will start using Bitcoin for everything at all times.

Another month, but I have meaty progress and good news to report!

The link at the end I ask you to download and share, it contains the source code, my research and progress so far. It has everything you need to get started etc etc..
(You wouldn't want the FBI to shut this down now would you!?)

What I have done so far is familiarize myself with the ZeitControl IDE and I have programmed some key commands and key/address pairs into the card-program. I still have to work out some kinks with correct command definition as their book has a really crappy way of showing syntax (no examples!  ).

I have started to program every day on my commute so I think step 1 of my plan could be done in a week or two. (Step 1 was making the terminal and card exchange addresses).

Quick guide to ZC IDE:
1. To add a file you first create and save it. Then you include it and rebuild. Only then its will show up as part of your project.
2. Under "help" and then Example projects->"Calc" you can easily access examples of basiccard code.


Now as for the good news: It seems ZeitControl does in fact have a Java library. As you may know Android is mostly straight normal Java and so this could mean putting the terminal program on Android phones could be very easy. The only major problem left is to figure out USB standards. (Android expects an out-going USB connection but the smart card reader is in-going, USB is a one way host->child standard as far as I can tell. Basically both reader and Android are normally "child")

Link:
http://www.4shared.com/zip/HdI942A-/BitcoinCardProject.html