We've had the pleasure of meeting with Marc here in NYC a few times now (as did a few of you at our Jekyll Island Bitcoin Society Meetup last week). Marc is solid - intelligent, curious, and full of valuable insights. He has a genuine and sincere interest in Bitcoin, and he "gets it" for all the right reasons.

A journalist like him, as the executive editor at American Banker, balances out 50 crappy journalists elsewhere writing hit pieces on Bitcoin.

You're missing the point. The USD value is irrelevant and doesn't make an interesting story. It's interesting because Bitcoin enables these anonymous donations, with ease, and it creates a new dynamic wherein the journalist is forced to reject payments because of the anonymity.

In other words, it demonstrates how different BTC is, where it can be sent across the world to someone who doesn't even want it. It's so easy, it can simply slip over to someone who wasn't ready to receive it.

Thanks for posting, Gox!

Always good to see openness and professionalism within the Bitcoin community.

Dividends are always going to roughly be proportional to risk involved. Anything with "highly attractive dividends" will necessarily be very high risk. In the normal finance world, a 10% dividend on a stock which also has large growth potential is an excellent deal. In Bitcoin world, however, people tend to expect returns that are (in my opinion) unrealistic and extremely suspicious.  For example, Pirateat40's fund was offering 7% per WEEK. An amazing return... but then he disappeared as we knew he would, and the investors lost everything.

Within the Bitcoin world, SatoshiDICE should be considered a reasonable place to park some money, with relative security, and a reasonable return given that security. It will not make you rich overnight... to do that, you need to play SatoshiDICE

Correct, and there is no intention of ever accepting or paying normal fiat currency with SatoshiDICE or ever having a bank account. It's Bitcoin only.

ZING!

I agree with this. People will tend to lose fewer and fewer as they become used to Bitcoin, and as the value per coin goes up. It's only a problem for the person who loses it, anyway.

So Bitcoin works beautifully in so many ways, but because you think it's not perfect, you'd rather start from scratch than continue building?

No system is perfect, but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the amazing. Also, what you said about scalability and resource consumption is nonsense

Admittedly, normal terminologies aren't perfectly applicable in Bitcoin world. Hopefully the contract adequately informed people what was being offered, what the obligations are, etc. If there's some new term that should be used for such a thing, I'm all ears

Revolutionary technologies have a tendency of disrupting traditional nomenclature.

Roger Ver is Satoshi so you can believe him

All money is barter. Almost nobody realizes this, however.

Money is not separate from barter exchange, but rather, it is simply that thing which is most bartered for. The thing people barter most often with is de facto money. Seashells, cigarettes, gold coins, USD paper, bitcoins, etc... these are all things we barter for, and at any given time whichever among them is often used for exchange and trade is simply called money.

This is why it's ironic and somewhat hilarious when certain types of people say, "man, we need to get rid of money and just go back to barter!"

Very cool! This would be good for a news piece... you listening, journalists??

Central to the notion of a "killer app" is something which may be as-yet unseen and unknown, but which will revolutionize usage when it comes about. Thus, to say Bitcoin's "killer app" is drug trade, merely because that's a common usage now, is to misunderstand the concept of killer apps.

In all likelihood, none of us know what the killer app will be, and indeed there may be many since Bitcoin is such a versatile and enabling technology.

Bleh. Maher can be funny but his actual opinions, typically, are awful. 

Eskimo - you are very snarky.

I'll update the stats at the end of the month, it was only 5 days ago that I updated them.

Regarding the shares released - the first tranche of 2m is sold out. 4.879m of the second tranche are still available, as are the 3m shares of the third tranche.

The offered IPO shares aren't going anywhere. I like the price that it's at, but it's a lot of money/shares, so it may take a while to sell. Perhaps people will wait until they see the new sexy site launched

Anyone who has shares and wants to sell can list them at whatever price they want. If IPO shares are being sold at .0034 and you have shares you can sell for .0033 and they will be bought first, obviously.

Bingo.

Comparing Bitcoin's value to a company like Google is probably not going to be very useful or informative. However, the price of Bitcoins can very easily surpass $1,000. All it takes for that to happen is for Bitcoin to become widely used in any major niche for which it is useful. If it becomes commonplace for gambling sites to accept BTC, or porn sites, or money remittance markets, or forex sites, etc. Any of these segments, if they utilize Bitcoin in a widespread manner, would justify coins in the $200-$2000 range.

Silk Road itself, if it continues to grow, could justify a Bitcoin price around $100 quite easily.

I think long term there is no way Bitcoin can exist under a price of $500. It might all crash and burn and go to zero (and everyone who hold bitcoins needs to acknowledge this possibility and risk), but if it doesn't, then it'll grow to fill some segment on commerce and will require a price over $500.

Are you talking about ASIC mining, which basically increases security by an order of magnitude for any given level of energy consumed?

Exactly. Bitcoins should be treated identical to any foreign currency for any taxation reporting. Companies/individuals receive foreign currencies all the time and accounts know the rules for how to treat this under tax law. Bitcoin is no different for this purpose.