Hope we didn't scare you off. You have an interest, that's a start. I recommend you pick up a small (tiny) amount as that tends to focus attention. I agree with the questionability as an investment. It could all fail horribly. I happen to believe it won't but I don'd discount it as a distinct possibility.

For my own part, I have been in computers since before it was called IT. I have followed and been involved with technology through 8 bit micros, the internet, the web and P2P technologies and I have a decent working knowledge of cryptography. For the past 13 years, I have been delving into Austrian economics and dissecting other schools of economics. I had heard of Bitcoin a couple of times and just dismissed it as some daft scammy idea presumably being run out of some low-rent website. Then I sat down and read about it (I can't even remember why) and everything slid into place. Between my solid understanding of technology and my (arguably disputable) understanding of economics, it looked like a technology set to take the world by storm. It wasn't a question of investing, it was a case of here was something cheap that was going to cost more to get into further down the road. I bought a modest amount, less than I could afford but I'm glad I did.

Now? I still think there's a lot of growth in the future. But I don't push people to buy. They should determine for themselves what is prudent. (I do give free samples though. *Evil laugh*)

A lot of the exuberance you see here when the price is rising is not about investments gaining in value (though yes, that is a lot of it), a fair chunk of it is because it means Bitcoin is gaining ground.

FTFY. Choo choo.

I don't mind a good bear. Even some of the trolls are worth a read. It just rubs be the wrong way when someone comes in and doesn't give "Why won't (debunked reason X) affect the price/adoption/whatever of Bitcoin?" but puts it in the form of "I am an expert (i.e. too important to actually do any reading on the subject) and (debunked reason X) means bitcoin will fail and you are all stupid. And your little dog too"

I don't doubt that they have been getting real death threats. Possibly even Mark found a mouse's head in his frappuccino

Key difference: You have no choice but to use government money (well, not completely true anymore). You have the choice not to use the scamcoins. There may be a crypto-coin which pushes out Bitcoin, there may eventually be several different crypto coins which fill different niches, possibly some even inflationary but the presence of alt-coins does not imply inflation in-and-of itself since they are not fungible.

His posts are all rehashes of old complaints that have been debunked ad-nauseum. There are some genuine criticisms of Bitcoin to be made (though I have heard most of those already) and undoubtedly a few new ones yet to see the light of day. This "academic" is just posting like a noob. It borders on the trollish but I'll give the benefit of the doubt and put it down to arrogance.

Even this is not true. Trades are typically made because each party values what they are receiving more than what they are parting with. Hence non-zero sum. Of course, there are scenarios where either party may be mislead or deluded which negate this but these will tend to be fewer and rare.

Of course, if one assumes that Bitcoin brings no actual value to the table and is purely a speculative investment then it applies but it is not. I won't bore everyone with the reasons (blockchain, distributed etc) because that has been done to death many, many times over and anyone who comes into this thread who hasn't educated themselves on the subject should be ashamed. Triply so if they are supposed to be some kind of academic.

And yet... Doesn't know the definition of a Ponzi scheme. An imposter maybe?

Gox does, Stamp doesn't (Though I believe a full dataset is available from Gox but on a restricted timetable). If you look back at Chartbuddy (which you can't cause I now delete old images), the Gox charts would look "hairy" due to their truncation algorithm whereas for Stamp, I had to do the truncation myself so I could give it a nice, neat haircut.

Yeah, but the guy who first said that was a tit.

Broken window fallacy. Don't just know it, understand it. Then you might understand why production and consumption are not worthy goals in and of themselves.

Do you even dictionary?

The thing is, it is not Gox's money to control. It belongs to the people whose accounts it is credited to. To maintain confidence, Gox should be doing everything they can to allow people to access their money. They're not.

But ran out of disk space. We have a new hard drive on order from Newegg.

Bill Gates?

Return of the Living Dead zombies?

Yes, that /is/ not a good attitude to have but is somewhat orthogonal to the current Gox-induced implosion.

It is not Bitcoin that is at fault though. Would you suggest those who were victims of Madhoff blame dollar enthusiasts?

Yeah. Legit investors keep quiet about the hits.