It is important to note that the Bitcoin network, from inception, has paid miners primarily through currency inflation. Fees are a tiny % of miner revenue.

For most of the Alt coins, that model has been catastrophic. For Bitcoin, due to a popularity surge (bubble?), the scheme has worked.

Unclear whether it can continue. Prices have been declining to flat for a long time now and mining is becoming very unprofitable.

Real US dollar transactions are not reversible. If you wire someone money, hand someone cash, or give someone a legitimate cashier's check that money is gone. Gone like a freight train, gone like yesterday Gone like a soldier in the civil war, bang, bang Gone like a '59 Cadillac Like all the good things that ain't never coming back She's gone, gone, gone, gone, she's gone.

The transactions that are reversible almost always involve a middle man such as a credit card provider. For most credit card transactions, the buyer is not immediately spending any USD. Rather, he is relying on a line of credit with the provider. Similarly, the merchant is not immediately receiving any USD. He is relying on the provider to mail him checks at regular intervals.

So what is happening with credit card payments is largely an illusion. The buyer thinks he has spent money. The seller thinks he has received money. But in both cases all they have spent/received are ledger entries in the private database of the provider. That is why those transactions can occur in seconds with little or no verification. This same third party (off block-chain) infrastructure can be put in place for Bitcoin. There has been much discussion about Bitcoin credit card providers that essentially act as a middle man to facilitate instantaneous, virtual, and of course easily reversible transactions.

One Hong Kong Dollar is worth .13 US Dollars

If you made a stack of all the shirts lost betting against the dollar in the past 24 months, it would reach the moon.

If anything, the dollar's strength is accelerating . The US has passed through the crucible of the great recession and, clearly, has reemerged as the world's dominant economy. As icing on the cake - as if the trillions made in Silicon Valley weren't enough - the US will soon be the world's largest oil producer.

Bizarre that people use these exchanges as a bank account and then bitch when the funds are taken.

Would you trust a currency exchanger at the airport with your life savings? Of course not. You only use them to convert small amounts of fiat.

Same applies to exchanges. Only a fool would put keep large sums on deposit at those places.

It is at a constant price. One Bitcoin is still One Bitcoin. You need to stop thinking in terms of fiat exchange rates. Anyone who acquired a large quantity in 2009 was best served by completely ignoring fiat to BTC rates since every price quotation from those years is now meaninglessly low.

Stop loss orders are only meaningful if there is some counter-party on the other end of the trade willing to buy your coins.

With some of these Alt coins, I suspect there are cases where days go by with NOBODY willing to buy them. At any price.

I'd love to see this methodology applied to Enron stock. Should be worth TRILLIONS by now!

Also LOL at the notion that D-Wave can crack Bitcoin. Their product is interesting but it's not really a quantum computer and, to date, hasn't offered much performance benefit over classical computers.

"We're at a point where we see that our current product is matching the performance of state-of-the-art classical computers" - DWave VP 2014

"the most powerful quantum computer to date managed to use Shor’s algorithm to factor the number 21"

I suspect instances of fraud would be extremely rare in brick and mortar establishments. Most shops have cameras in place and many ask for ID on all transactions including credit cards.

Six months in jail is a steep penalty to pay for getting a free "double spend" coffee.

More likely:

1. ASICS hardware, like any technology, will become progressively more power efficient and less expensive.

2. Mining will thrive using new power efficient hardware.

3. A 51% attack using old hardware will rapidly become impossible since newer hardware will be 10x faster, 10x more power efficient, etc...

PLEASE bring back the newbie zoo

Paper money is fine but COINS suck. Was in a long line at the movies and, you guessed it, some a-hole insisted on digging through his pockets to pay with exact change. Seemed to take hours.

Fine to speculate but make sure you get out by 2012. Mayan calendar confirms the world will end.

Happy to report YES. I bought more at $189.

If all goes well, I think 100 should be sufficient. Might take 10 years.

1. There is no decentralized way to keep the price of a crypto currency stable relative to fiat. The founder can promise to buy at X price but he might fail to honor it, die, spend his money elsewhere, lose his money elsewhere, etc... See PayCoin's woes. The fiat currency offered in the guarantee might also crash or cease to exist. What good, for example, is a guarantee to exchange 20 chitcoin for 20 rubles if the Ruble ceases to exist?

2. Fast confirmation times come at the cost of security. See all the AltCoin woes. Tons of people have lost tons of money on low hash rate "fast coins"

3. Bitcoin already has exceedingly low inflation. New coins are produced at a very modest rate that decreases over time and the total number of coins ever produced is capped.

Obvious scam. No exchange charges you money to join.

Glad we missed the moon. Last thing I want to see is some guy's ass