Not quite. Fiat currencies do have governments and central banks behind them. Not everyone counts that as a "good" thing, however.

The "actual economy" is economic activity, i.e. people doing useful stuff. Economic activity isn't somehow "behind fiat", just because it makes use of fiat currency for much of its trading. If a better trading currency comes along, the economic activity will switch to the better trading currency without missing a beat.

Please define "geek".

Is a geek someone who runs Linux by choice? Or do they have to live in the basement and rarely emerge? Do geeks need to be in their teens and twenties, or can someone in their 50s or 60s be a geek?

I suggest you courteously invite the Madhatter to respond here. He doesn't systematically monitor the forum. As presented here, it doesn't look good. Surely he would have hedged his locked-in deals?

If 50% of the hashing power agreed (which they would), the new block chain would be initialized to include all the transactions from the old block chain prior to the breakage of SHA256.

Especially for a business based on writing, the introductory post should be comprehensible.

You must be new here. Theymos tells how surprised he was that he was able to sell bitcoins that he generated on his computer for $0.003 (three tenths of a cent) each (in quantities of 10,000).

Here's an angle I haven't seen discussed. I may be misinterpreting this, in which case someone please put me straight. The Russian-English sometimes makes it hard for me to understand.

At the top of this thread, bitcoinex said:


My English interpretation is: "Dammit, I resent having to pay people (for work done) with Bitcoins! Confess that you (i.e. MtGox) are fixing the exchange rate!"

Perhaps bitcoinex contracted with someone to do some work, and set a price in BTC (e.g. 100BTC per week). It's now costing too much to buy the BTC to pay for the work being done.

A bit later in this thread:

Interpretation: "I like the idea of Bitcoin as a means of payment, but now I have to pay three times as much (because of the rate increase). These jumps (in the exchange rate) are a black mark against the use of Bitcoin as a means of payment."

Perhaps bitcoinex is financially desperate due to the three-times increase in his costs (measured in fiat), and he can't meet the payments due.

MagicalTux said that the ransom demand associated with the DDOS asked for two things: a sum of money, and for the MtGox exchange rate to be reduced. Now who might want those two particular things?

Then bitcoinex's exchange stops paying out, but for a short time keeps accepting deposits. These things make one wonder.

I'm not making any kind of allegation here. I'm just painting how the material already out there already looks, and inviting bitcoinex to clear his name.

One useful metric would be the number of newcomers getting involved with Bitcoin. As long as the rate of newcomers keeps increasing, there won't be a big pop. I don't know how one would estimate the number of new users.

I predict it's going to fall all the way to $10 by Monday then eventually $100.

As epii says, you can't pick the peak till after it has happened, because exponential curves have the same shape at all parts.

He doesn't really analyse the bubble at all. He doesn't provide any insight as to what he thinks the value of a bitcoin should be. He just makes a lot of derogatory comments about things he is not comfortable with (such as unregulated exchanges).

Except ... the person who believes they will be raptured must bet that the rapture will not happen by X date, for this to work.

And who is going to bet against them? There's nothing in it for the person who bets that rapture will happen.

I'm sure one or two of the big guys are already slowly cashing out.

Most of us here are either buying or holding. All the new people arriving are buying, and who is the counterparty? It's the big guys, I think.

Income isn't something handed to people by fiat. Income is something people get by working. And even in poor countries there are some jobs that you can do which don't require capital.

So you could work even harder than you otherwise would have to, and live even more frugally than you otherwise would have to, and save the difference as bitcoins. Providing for a better future.

I'm not saying it's easy. Just that it's desirable, and for many people is possible.

So probably a 10BTC transaction was the input, and the change of 0.00999999 incurred the fee.

Money doesn't grow on trees...
     Oh yes it does!

But actually I prefer this one, even though it doesn't exactly meet your criteria:

Money grows on trees...
     Merkle trees!

Much better to promote Bitcoin in the third world as a system for micro-savings rather than micro-borrowings.

1. Change the documentation to use "/msg gribble" for e.g. gpg eauth/everify. Lots of new IRC users don't know how to do it this way (nor did I until a few days ago).

2. Make some of gribble's responses more compact so that they're more likely to fit on one line.

I ask myself that question every day, believe me.

It's a bit different when you're married with kids; you can't take so many risks with the family money.

That would slow the growth of Bitcoin a bit, but not to a halt. People would still generate the same number of new bitcoins each day (the difficulty adjustment takes care of that), and they're going to do something with those coins. Those who generate the bitcoins would trade them within an ever-increasing group of Bitcoin users. I think Bitcoin is already at critical mass and would cope with exchanges being made illegal.

But buy the physical metal, not some paper derivative.