Math identifies numerical trends but not the "why".  let's put a story behind these numbers:

Once China BTC early adopter acceptance is saturated, it will be MUCH easier to convince a supplier to accept the currency.  This will allow the use of bitcoin for small volume wholesale purchasing.  The repetitive nature of these relationships makes the front-end effort of setting up a bitcoin payment channel (ie. EUR -> exchange -> BTC -> payment -> BTC -> other exchange -> CNY) worthwhile.

This is the first killer app for bitcoin -- B2B sourcing for small to medium sized companies.  These Chinese companies do not take Paypal (I'm not sure why), instead requesting something like Western Union.  For example, I was recently involved in prototyping and sourcing 1000-10000 units of a custom remote control, and other electronics.  We are talking prototype payments of 100 - 500 euro and wholesale order of 1000 - 30000 euro.  Payment was an incredible PITA, especially for the prototype.  A 100 euro payment took 400 euro in time (it took more time to set up the payment then the entire rest of the prototype vendor selection process)  This adoption process is slow and mostly invisible to the consumer (you), and will even be considered by some companies to be a confidential competitive advantage.  So expect news about this to be under-reported.  This is 2014. 

In 2015, adoption by Chinese suppliers will back-drive BTC adoption within non-early adopter small businesses in the rest of the world, especially for low margin products.  This should be aided by another year for the rest of the world to streamline the fiat to BTC conversion process within this legal environment.  This adoption will primarily be driven by the desire to reduce costs and will drive BTC into businesses outside of technology circles.


Simultaneously with world-to-China B2B commerce India will begin its early adopter acquisition bubble (spring 2014).  Mid to late 2014 will see the beginnings of world->India payments for B2B IT and consulting services, with real volumes happening late 2015 to 2016.

Broad B2B international commerce adoption will set the stage for these same companies to offer Bitcoin as a payment option to their direct sales (ebay etc) outlets, but I expect non-technical consumers will not move to the currency unless driven to it by political issues resulting in fiat instability.  However, a consumer "killer-app" (ad-less browsing or something) might drive end user adoption earlier.

At the same time 2014-2016, remittance will continue to grow slowly but will be hampered by lack of smart phone and fiat->BTC exchanges in the destination countries.  Adoption will be highest in countries with good tech infrastructure, an unstable fiat currency, and remittance.  Argentina looks to be the best bet, India looks quite good.

We want to access any web page without ads by just pushing 1 satoshi or whatever at the page as part of the http get request.

Don't rename we're at 1700+ pages and need a restart.  Maybe wait till 2000 but right now works for me.  Adam?

In theory the agent on the host could have code that understands the linux file system and accesses it directly through the VM's disk image file which is on the host.  But in practice this isn't going to happen today.  Because that ability (accessing Linux file systems in windows) would be pretty valuable as a real product...

Can you read?  EVERY and I mean EVERY intro to bitcoin article mentions that they are hard to actually buy...

Intl airports would be a good place for these if the exchange fees could be lower than fiat-fiat exchange rates...

with a wallet in a VM, two attack vectors exist:

First, through the host computer into the file that backs the file system of the guest.  At this point I would guess that this attack is unlikely in a security through obscurity sense -- because the attacker would have difficulty determining which VM hosted your wallet, have difficulty either downloading the 50GB backing file or parsing the guest file system on the host.  But if the attacker KNEW you had bitcoins, as opposed to a drive-by that just grabs whatever presents itself, it would be much more likely.  A successful attack through the host essentially requires human agent interaction, as opposed to the automated process of searching for a wallet.dat file...

Second, into the VM directly.  It is assumed that you are running your wallet in the VM to isolate it.  So the attack surface is much smaller than the host, hopefully uses a less popular OS (AKA Linux), and is reduced functionality both in the programs you are running and the ports that are open.  Don't be surfing random bitcoin info (with a little "present") sites in a browser inside your guest computer!!!

WRT your question:

If an attacker is in your VM, it would very easy to figure out your IP address.  Just send a UDP packet somewhere.  Your home gateway is not set up to filter outgoing packets, but it will rewrite the "from" IP address during NAT traversal.  Better to stop people from getting in in the first place (see above).  But if you were a programmer, you could for example, modify the virtualbox or xen networking layer to only route through TOR.  But justus is correct, this would be susceptible to an attack through the rather large host/guest interface layer.  If you are really that paranoid, better to route all traffic through a single home-brew router that pushes everything (it lets through) into TOR and have router's setup and control be inaccessible except through console.

your other question: any technology capable of traversing the NAT between your home or office network and the rest of the internet is inherently capable of traversing the NAT between the host and guest.

PPS: doing your normal banking on a similarly isolated linux VM is also a pretty good idea... and it has the added bonus that a typical laptop thief won't check your browser history inside the VM for your bank info.

Hold on... he may not be the LAST bear.  Has the ir-rationalSpeculator bought back yet???

To the moon.  And here I would have linked an article about the experimental 100+mB laser link to the LADEE satellite but the site is down because of the USG partial shutdown.  Its amazing how these government computers require constant human intervention whereas my servers run for weeks, even a whole year, without any intervention.  I have visions of uniformed employees running in man sized gerbil exercisers powering these devices...

Its funny how people have this cathartic need to confess.  wingding do you know anything about perfect money and how bitcoin was engineered to be such or was it just like day trading ABC stock vs. CBA to you?

Bitcoin or a similar crypto-currency will become a de-facto international exchange currency in the next 5-10 years due to its low to no transaction fee, distance is irrelevant behavior.

China is coming... and when that happens it will drive another run of adoption in western countries with intl B2B trade.

Probably you misremember Thailand in place of China... lets not start rumors which become FUD.  China has been silent WRT bitcoin.

https://moneero.com/web/blog/post/bitcoin-is-not-illegal-in-thailand

Ahh gold... investors keep telling yourselves "but diversify"!  Keep imagining Armageddon.  You may feel a bit better...

the silverbox update (comparison from the beginning of this thread, March 13th, 2012, gold=1690, nasdaq=3055, Bitcoin=5.4):
Bitcoin is 150.53 (142.44 btcChina in USD).  Gold is 1272.00.  Nasdaq is 3815.00
Bitcoin: 2687.59% (2537.78%)
Gold:    -24.73%
Nasdaq:  24.88%
Gold Diff:  3604% advantage Bitcoin
Nasdaq Diff:  2132% advantage Bitcoin

this is not stable.  Miners are mining at 20-30% faster rate than expected but price is stable or slowly rising...

past performance is no guarantee of future results... stop living in the past

Watch cbx it actually led yesterday, moving up to 127 with a large bidwall (normally it is near bitstamp).  Even though it has low volume, I think its a barometer of USA sentiment.

And a blast from the past for all you "traders" that have just realized that China is important...

print a mold for clay.

Ironically, this result is actually a great outcome for privacy proponents.  It basically affirms that criminals can still be caught even though pseudo-anonymous payment systems and online privacy exists.  Therefore there is no reason to deny privacy to the public.


Also, it may be obvious to most but it needs to be said:

If there was a backdoor to TOR (or whatever), its protection would be of greater importance than this small % of the drug trade.  So the FBI would have to work the end back to the beginning to find a plausible detection path that did not expose the back door.  But having said that, I don't believe it.  If you look back at "altior"'s posts its obvious he was developing a BTC service exactly at the time SR was created.  I didn't do it but you can imagine how easy it would be (if you were an agent working this case 40 hours a week) to examine every bitcointalk post around that time.  You'd end up with a very short list of people asking these questions...

Its just one data point but the amount of BTC seized (26,000 by one media outlet) tells us how much SR was affecting the supply of coin.  In other words, not much.  And this coin may be tied up as evidence for quite some time so its confiscation is not about to affect supply.

However, I would imagine that the SR economy formed a group of people willing to buy and sell at the current price whatever that might be (I'm assuming the drug price is in USD and constantly repriced in BTC, and of course that addicts need for a fix is fairly price insensitive -- but I don't actually know having never been to SR).  So some liquidity may leave the system.

the level of taxation to some degree can be considered an indication of how much the people want the government to spend... yet long term govt bonds derail this system by essentially hiding spending where it is difficult for people to get upset about, while simultaneously offering a carrot that the beneficiaries CAN get excited about.

Every American is essentially in debt via bonds floated by the USG.  Perhaps there needs to be a constitutional right that affirms that no entity can lay debt upon the person or property of any individual without that individual's handwritten signature.  This is already the case, EXCEPT it can be done via the government's taxation right. 

So essentially the govt could not write many debt instruments.  But SOME could be written; for example a mortgage to buy conservation land, build a building, etc could be secured by the land or building itself.  That would be one way to keep the budget balanced.

Would be hard to get from here to there though :-)

My only problem with bail-in is that it seems to avoid bankruptcy, these people who lost your $ keep their jobs and don't go to jail (if applicable). 

But surely on these bitcoin forums you guys don't think that we should magically print more $ to cover what the bank lost?

OMG I actually briefly unignored Walsoraj because he posted right after mine... stupid stupid stupid how can I get these seconds of my life back?  

PS: I just slipped/pushed Gox 135.25 to 136.00 75 cents to buy 5 measly coins!  That's got to be a slippage record but I've finally gotten clean of that disaster  I'm thinking of b&h and going BTC information blackout for a few months, we'll see if I can resist :-)