Forget South American cartels and Russian arms dealers: the black market has moved online......


Want to buy an M4A3 assault rifle, a forged UK passport or a few grams of crystal meth and have it delivered to your door? On the dark web you can find it, on sites such as BlackMarket Reloaded, where AK47s are on sale alongside Afghan heroin, or CC Paradise, selling stolen credit-card data. You can even find dubious listings for contract killers (yours for £12,500, half up front). But the biggest digital black market-place of all is called Silk Road.

Silk Road - named after the ancient trade route between Asia and Europe - opened in February 2011. The site is similar to eBay or Amazon: users can sign up and buy and sell almost whatever they please. It has a rudimentary green-and-white design, but all the functionality you'd expect from a legal online marketplace: individual seller pages, buyer feedback, even an escrow system to protect against fraudulent vendors.............

They say when you're trying to catch a criminal, follow the money - which led GQ to a blandly lit conference room at London's Royal National Hotel on a weekend last September, listening to cryptographers and laptop economists talk about a currency that doesn't really exist. Bitcoin is a digital currency established in 2009 by another pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. The currency exists only online and transactions are encrypted, so that users can be anonymous. Rather than using named bank accounts, amounts are transferred between web-like addresses called "wallets". Coins can be traded for real-world currency at online exchanges. While the exchange rate has fluctuated wildly, at the time of writing one coin is worth about £7.50, valuing the total number of Bitcoins in circulation at around £75m.

Bill Still has a huge amount of credibility as a historian and monetary expert, but he doesn't fully understand Bitcoin. That does not translate as 'Bill Still has no credibility'.
Yes he probably should have stated that he isn't an expert on the cryptographically secure nature of Bitcoin, but it wasn't entirely wrong for him to surmise that Bitcoin is insecure - Mt. Gox makes up the majority of the market, and it is still vulnerable to attack, therefore the price of Bitcoin is also vulnerable to massive instability, at least on a short timescale.
So he didn't realise his comments were actually relating to a Bitcoin exchange, rather than Bitcoin the network - his comments were still partially valid.
If you're serious about promoting Bitcoin, then you should be sending Bill Still emails explaining to him how it works. The more people like Still that Bitcoin has on its side, the better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUqYrWYrc8o&list=UU0RJJ_Wm7jyOU9eY10LgcwA&index=18


Still: I basically have a lot of trouble being comfortable with Bitcoin. Number one, it was hacked about two years ago. Number two, although it purports to be decentralized money and everybody says 'oh, the security features make it impossible to control centrally,' you know, I just...I have no facts to support it, I just, I'm uncomfortable with the situation.

Great job, Gavin.

Quick aside. When Truthloader first came upon the scene a couple short months ago, I sincerely felt, and still do, that somehow Google is behind it. They only had a small handful of videos up at the time, each having very few view counts, but Google gave it tremendous juice on its news site. After kept seeing it over and over again at the time, and doing some research (basically finding nothing to support my theory), it still seemed like Google was/is behind it. I'm not saying that that's a good or bad thing. Just saying.

Boy, wouldn't that be something if we later learn that Google was behind Bitcoin from the get-go?

My apologies for the long aside.

~Bruno K~

ITN PRODUCTIONS TO PRODUCE “TRUTHLOADER” CHANNEL FOR YOUTUBE

ITN Productions is launching a new citizen journalism channel on YouTube as part of YouTube’s original channels initiative, announced today at MIPCOM.

The “Truthloader” channel will showcase the work of citizen journalists from all around the world with original daily programming from amateur eyewitnesses and passionate online campaigners. The citizen journalism will be curated by social media experts and professional journalists at ITN Productions.

ITN is one of the world's leading news and multimedia content companies creating, packaging and distributing news, entertainment, factual and corporate content on multiple platforms to customers around the globe.

The news programming produced for ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 reaches around 10 million people every day, providing comprehensive, impartial news provision for the British public. ITN's news is watched by millions of viewers worldwide, through partnerships with global news outlets such as Reuters, CNN and NBC and online partners such as Livestation, YouTube and MSN.

now people get enough time (couple of weeks) to get used to $20 before going to $30. so then $20 would be considered a bargain and form a new support. baby steps.

Yeah, that's the exact mentality people had at the last $30 bubble.  Didn't work out well for a lot of people......

No Spekulatius, you just want to speculate

http://kim.com/mega/press/

22 hours left.

To the Rothschilds, [England's] chief financial agents, Waterloo brought a many million pound scoop.
... a Rothschild agent ... jumped into a boat at Ostend ... Nathan Rothschild ... let his eye fly over the lead paragraphs. A moment later he was on his way to London (beating Wellington's envoy by many hours) to tell the government that Napoleon had been crushed: but his news was not believed, because the government had just heard of the English defeat at Quatre Bras. Then he proceeded to the Stock Exchange.
Another man in his position would have sunk his work into consols (bank annuities), already weak because of Quatre Bras. But this was Nathan Rothschild. He leaned against "his" pillar. He did not invest. He sold. He dumped consols.
...Consols dropped still more. "Rothschild knows," the whisper rippled through the 'Change. "Waterloo is lost."
Nathan kept on selling ... consols plummeted—until, a split second before it was too late, Nathan suddenly bought a giant parcel for a song. Moments afterwards the great news broke, to send consols soaring.
We cannot guess the number of hopes and savings wiped out by this engineered panic.

I meant ones who, like me, actually went to college to learn programming and database design.  Not just someone who attempted to sort of learn it on the internet and only learned the syntax then volunteered for a FOSS project like phpBB3 or something.  That reminds me of all the women in my web design class who knew nothing about computers or servers or the internet.  They just wanted a more modern job than fashion design so they switched degrees and now they make website without knowing what Redhat is or what JPG compression means.  Those people have no business working in IT.

The client isnt user freindly, takes a good deal of research to use, your average person is computer illiterate (read:likely to delete thier wallet, send to the wrong address, etc), and requires a lot of steps to keep your money secure. The exchanges are a hassle to use, leave you open to having your money stolen by the owner of the exchange (as we have seen a shitload of times), most require an ID (so much for anonymity), and if you are lucky enough you might not get your money stolen in a hack.

Rather than lay low until the extradition case is resolved, Dotcom will hold a news conference at his $25 million New Zealand home on Saturday, Eastern Standard Time
(Sunday in New Zealand’s time zone.)

what the fuck does he mean he was buying for?

My VIP for NZBsrUs ran out I guess, or they couldn't verify it or something, so I have to buy a new one with BitCoin. It doesn't bother me really, it's just a pain to get an active BitCoin Wallet. I linked it to an account that doesn't ever have much money in it, so I figured what the hey. It's taken me a few days to verify my account, and I just bought my first BitCoin to join.

bitcoins are wayyy overpriced right now. even ignoring technical analysis (which i generally do not -- i've been following along in the CRASH thread with similar notations and predictions as lucif) there is reason to suspect, as many on this forum -- albeit quietly -- do, that we are heading towards a midterm downtrend or even, for the first time in bitcoin history, a long-term downtrend.

and finally, probably my most subjective point:

bitcoins were worth $5 six months ago and there has been no significant increase in their utility or future value promise: i firmly believe the recent doubling is due to hype about the reward halving and market manipulation by pirate and others.

this is sickening.

can give me an example?

Trump claimed that upon his arrival to Manhattan in 1971 he was practically broke, this gave birth to his plan to acquire and develop the old Penn Central for $60 million with no money down.

Newzbin2, once one of the web's most popular sites offering links to pirated content, has decided to close.

It comes 15 months after a UK court ordered internet service providers to block the site, and amid global pressure from copyright holders.

Internet rights groups said the move was "pointless" in stopping piracy.

In a statement, Newzbin2's owners said it had struggled to cover costs because payment providers had "understandably lost their nerve".

"Newzbin2 was always hoped to be a viable underground commercial venture," the site said.

"The figures just don't stack up."

................................

"All our payment providers dropped out or started running scared," the site said.

It added that accepting Bitcoin - an electronic, hard-to-track currency - had not been an option because it was "just too hard for 90% of people".