All that sensible bearishness probably helped push up the price. N00bs go online, search for "bitcoins", find proudhon's posts and think "hmm, what a sensible bunch! It's not a bubble after all. Buy buy buy!"

I have moral objections to BTC imitating the dollar sign. Bitcoin is better than that. Therefore, the symbol should come after the quantity.

Bitcoin is clearly in the clutches of murky powers, Hell-bent on turning her and her followers to the dark side.

As pointed out by the Dark Lord, E. Voorhees in his thread, Bitcoin is wearing "the mark of the Beast".

How do we wipe it off?!

Why can't Bitcoin have some other exchange rate against the evil US dollar, like $5? That seemed good enough the other week. Or how about $10? Yess... $10 sounds goood. Then it might actually reflect dollar devaluation and keep up with all that evil quantitative easing.

What say ye? A seance? How do we turn Bitcoin back to the light with minimal fatalities? This is an extremely serious poll so no funny business.

Edit: Poll improved slightly to reflect See-Beast's suggestion.

What's the economy like now? Just pulling numbers out of my @ss... We've got ~$40 million of mining, plus MtGox, Bitcoinica (assuming they bounce back from hiatus), a bunch of smaller exchanges... so there's maybe 6~12 businesses in the 1 to 10 million dollar range, and the rest of the field seems to consist of 100s, maybe a couple thousand small on-line start-ups in the $500~$50k range. All up, I'm generously guesstimating $70M at the moment.

In as little as 6 months, there could easily be 5~10 more "big" (by Bitcoin standards) $10 million players. Again, just pulling ideas out of the aether, there has been a lot talk about porn/cam/gambling sites lately, but those businesses could be anything. Remember that it's an international monetary system. That bumps the economy up to $120M~$170M. Things could go either way for miners, but even if their revenue halves, that's still a potential $125M on average (assuming a steady $5 exchange rate).

In a couple of years? Guesstimating by pulling similar numbers out of the same place: 10~20 $50M-scale businesses join in, + 1000 ~$1M businesses (some are new, some have grown). We should remember that the nature of money is such that it can't be everywhere at once. Therefore, even with a ~$2 billion economy outside of mining, the total bitcoins in circulation might only be say, $400M.


So there you have it, folks, in a couple of years, Bitcoin could have a 2.5B economy in today's dollars.

In 6 months... that would be what, November?
US election time,
the UEFA championship and the Olympics will be a distant memory...
AAPL after the bubble; Facebook a total facepalm,
the world paying for oil in anything but the dollar,
even more Mid East tensions; pissed off troops deserting; OWS doing whatever,
China waking up from its slumber and threatening some military shit,
a tsunami of dollars starts hitting US shores and everybody screams holy-hyper-inflation-f*ck!
More stuff happens with the PIIGS; the Dollar and the Euro battle it out to see who will self-destruct faster...

Meanwhile, Bitcoin continues to meander along at say, $6.50?? Bitcoin is screaming out to early adopters right now, it's just not so obvious from a distance. All this uncertainty means that you could be right, or a huge wave of adoption could conceivably be just round the corner, which pushes the price up to $80 (May 2012 dollars), and the difficulty gets ramped up by a factor of 10. By then everyone will be too busy ripping out each other's eyeballs to notice a decrease in the mine supply.

Wasn't 'tainting' a MtGox speciality because of supposed regulatory pressure? I think their own security breach must've left a few scars. Perhaps there's a niche for some kind of decentralised/P2P exchange that the banking cronies can't bully?

Isn't this the MAD (mutually assured destruction) escrow thing again? A robber breaks into a bank, only to discover that there are no piles of cash lying around on the floor (unlike a certain web service that got cracked recently...), and that the money is locked away inside an indestructible vault.

In the end, the robber manages to take the entire vault with him. Upon hearing about this, the bank manager gets really pissed off and has the key melted down, thus making the stolen cash inaccessible forever. And everybody lives happily ever after.

I'm moderately concerned about that too. Fortunately, Bitcoin is not a US thing, or even an EU thing, it's international. Several governments tried and failed to oppress the Internet with ACTA. To me this indicates that the public at large is at least "catching on", and are refusing to consent to oppressive nonsense. Maybe I'm just lucky to be in a fairly liberal country right now, but I see a pretty bright future for Bitcoin, despite whatever the US might try.

By now, the bureaucrats should start getting worried about how they're going to get paid in the next few months or years.

*Sigh...*
The whole concept of taintedness is ridiculous and based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how Bitcoin works.

Unknown Entity A and Unknown Entity B do a transaction.

Bitcoins that were in A's wallet get sent to B's wallet.

With the exception of situations where multi-signature Bitcoin escrow is used, B is the undeniable new owner of the coins, no matter what.

If something goes wrong and A claims that B stole the coins, there is no way to prove that A isn't lying.

Sure, A can go to a government-funded police force in Country F to complain, but then it becomes a ridiculous who-dunnit that can always be gamed if A is a sufficiently clever con artist.

If people want to avoid the problem of theft, use MAD (mutually assured destruction) or some other type of multi-signature escrow feature that is built into the Bitcoin protocol for this very reason. Here's a couple of other questions to ponder over:

• Entities A and B are located in different countries, which have different laws. A transaction occurs and bitcoins are sent. However, it turns out that the product/service/theft/whatever is totally illegal in one of the countries, and totally legal in the other country. In case of a dispute, what happens then? War?
• If coins are transacted multiple times after an unprovable accusation of theft, what is the correct way -- if any -- to undo the damage?

No no no... AV companies are like "reformed criminals" -- you never really know if they're 100% trustworthy.

1) They're self-proclaimed experts on viruses and other malware,
2) They like to install software on your computer which just happens to be a massive resource hog,
3) Their business model relies on a never-ending supply of viruses and customer fear.

If someone wants to be completely genuine about anti-virus software, why not ask for a government grant to kickstart a FOSS AV program that users are able to download and compile themselves? Then you can absolutely guarantee that your friendly anti-virus isn't burning up the idle time on your GPU.

The thing is, Google keeps it's ranking recipe secret to make it harder for sites to game the system. Everybody seems to be assuming that because Wired is very popular, its ranking must therefore be legitimate. There are some unanswered questions:

1) Apart from the age of the link and pre-existing popularity, why would the "The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin" article rank higher than this site? After all, Google themselves recommend focussing on creating quality content, and that article is clearly a load of propaganda.

2) By now, Google has surely come across "king-maker" problems. If a site somehow finds itself at the top of the results, it can cause that site to become much more popular. How does everyone know that Wired was already legitimately popular before Google started giving them high results?

I regularly delete my browser's cookies, and it doesn't accept 3rd party cookies or Adobe cookies. Even if (or especially if) they track my IP and have a bunch of other tricks up their sleeve, then I would assume the bitcointalk link should be right up there on page one because I've been using this site a lot lately. Whereas I had never even heard of Wired until the discussion in another thread about a leaked FBI document.


Rank based on... what other criteria? This site has been around for a lot longer than 5 months.

Earlier today, I tried a little experiment: I googled "bitoin". Everything seemed fine at first glance -- Google tried to outsmart me as usual by correcting my spelling, and the first page of results all seemed legit.

However... A 5 month old blog piece (The rise and fall of bitcoin) by some shady outfit calling themselves "Wired" was also there on page 1 (in amongst the standard wikipedia and bitcoin.org results). Whereas I had to click to page 2 before finding "bitcointalk" (page 2 for the '.com.au' locale, and page 3 for my locale).

Feel free to test it for yourself, since I realise that different locales may give different search results. Regardless, it seems awfully suspicious that a single old blog page would get a higher ranking than a current and highly active forum. It makes no sense. I thought Google didn't engage in a "pay for ranking" business model, or has that changed? I'm not out to get Google or Wired or anything like that, I'm just naturally suspicious of authority and possible attempts to cut Bitcoin off from the broader non-Bitcoin community.

Has anyone else experienced possible examples of subtle censorship in their Bitcoin adventures?

I see you're new here. Of course Bitcoin has a control mechanism. Just have a look: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ The automatic difficulty adjustments make bitcoin behave like a finite resource with an extremely well-controlled supply: http://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins

Last year's "crash" was because the bubble burst. Back then, Bitcoin's value was much lower than it is now, but speculators kept on buying like crazy. An exchange got hacked, which caused a sudden mass realisation in many people's minds: "I paid too much". And when a lot of people suddenly don't want a product any more, what happens to its price? However, thanks to Bitoin's mini DotCom, and continued investment by entrepreneurs, the market is now more mature and the economy has a lot more value supporting that ~$5 exchange rate.

With 40Gh/s you would control around 40/12000 = 0.33% of the total mining supply. And then there's circulation of older coins. So the price probably wouldn't change much no matter what you did with the coins. You could stick them for sale on MtGox or Intersango for $5.30 each, or how about $6? The other miners would have slightly less bitcoins to sell, so they might be inclined to put their prices up slightly. Whether or not people actually buy at a higher price is another matter.

Do these banks have to be specially anointed by the Pope to be allowed to use the bank label? Or do the organisations that already host banks of e-wallets count?

This has probably been covered 100 times, but where does one draw the line between crooks and the oppressed? If Arabs buy alcohol using bitcoin, how is that different from Westerners buying marijuana using bitcoin? Similarly, prostitution is legal in some countries, but illegal in others. Who is right? There are often lots of social problems with things like drugs and selling sexual services, but what about things that are more subtle like intellectual property? Is it OK for large corporations to cheaply produce medicines in third world countries, but then claim exclusive export rights for 20-or-so years? After all, those corporations are still profiting from America's military activities that devastated/destabilised a number of Asian and South American countries.

The export concept reminds me of an important point. Since the bitcoin economy is so small at the moment, it's hard to compare prices internally vs externally. If someone lives within the bitcoin economy and uses the currency directly for everything, how does their standard of living compare to people using other currencies? If things are very cheap, exporters (e.g.: farmers) might want the exchange rate to go down, so that they can sell more stock and make higher profits.

Bahahahaha!

oMG Illuminati numerology? Page sucks, article 3 cubed



In the Democratic People's Republic of America, explaining Bitcoin comes under "spreading terrorist information".

(No offence intended to OP - great find!)