And another news article comes out stating that Bitcoin is used for drugs. This is patently false.

Nice find, but the 200 BTC estimate does not meet the barrier.


Thanks for reporting, but the amount is too small. The list would become worthless if these small-scale scams were included.


Good call. I'll put this down with a 2000 BTC estimate.

Briefly, the Bitcoin market cap exceeded $400 million USD. The market capitalization is an upper bound for the monetary base, as many coins are not in circulation. This is the first time Bitcoin's market cap exceeded $400 million USD.

This excess allows the Bitcoin system to transfer more money without impacting the market significantly. Only 0.1% of the market capitalization needs to be moved to purchase a house, for example. A higher market capitalization allows Bitcoin's economy to strengthen.

X-codes are reserved for not only metals. XDR (Special Drawing Rights) is one example. Bitcoin should not have a local code because Bitcoin is decentralized and not local to a country. Assigning a Bhutan code is counterproductive to that goal.

There are several advantages to XBT:

1. Clearly indicates Bitcoin's non-governmental and decentralized nature.
2. Backwards-compatible with the current symbol. Applications can simply look for BT to detect the Bitcoin currency code during the transaction period.

To use on the forums, you can add an invisible X before the currency symbol:

A good month for the house for once . Maybe that double-spend consulting is paying off.

Theymos can state this better than I: "Even if you use Bitcoin through Tor, the way transactions are handled by the network makes anonymity difficult to achieve. Do not expect your transactions to be anonymous unless you really know what you're doing."

The network makes every transaction public, including the sending/receiving addresses and a very good sense of how much was transacted. This makes Bitcoin require technical expertise to be anonymous, something many drug dealers don't have. Bitcoin therefore can't become a haven for drug dealers, as it requires considerable investment in anonymizing techniques. This is in contrast to cash, which is anonymous even if you're on cloud nine.

For those discontent with the reception, here's a workaround:


This produces the text XBTC, which is not optimal but still better than BTC.

Previous hashrate jumps were caused by price increases, not new technology. That said, I don't believe ASICs will drop the price any more than psychologically.

Remember that increased profits means inflation, so if miners do earn more money there will be more inflation. However, mining is such a small part of the economy (~2%) that this isn't likely to matter.

Below are a few falsities about Bitcoin and its communities. Suggestions are welcome.

1. A majority of Bitcoin transaction volume is composed of mining pool payouts and gambling transactions.
Status: Myth

Blockchain.info provides an estimated transaction volume. In the past 30 days, 8772900 BTC were transacted. Let's take a look at gambling and mining pool payouts, and see how they stack up:

• Mining pool payouts. An upper bound of this is the amount mined in total, as no more can be payed out. An average 30-day period would see 109500 BTC mined (including transaction fees), and so the amount of transaction volume for mining pool payouts is at most 1.3%. So much for that idea.
• Gambling. While there's no question that gambling is a large part of the Bitcoin economy, the idea that it's the only part is grossly mistaken. Most gambling is centralized by one company, SatoshiDICE. SatoshiDICE processes approximately 330000 BTC every month. If we assume it is only half of gambling volume, that's still only 700000 XBTC gambled every 30 days. How much of transaction volume is gambling? Less than 8%.

2. Bitcoin is used only by criminals.
Status: Myth

This is an easy one to debunk. Silk Road processes $22 million annually, according to a recent study. Bitcoin's blockchain, which doesn't even include Silk Road activity and other off-blockchain transactions, is over $1000 million annually. This is a fraction of total transactional volume, which is likely billions of dollars annually.

By comparison, US GDP is around $15000 billion, of which at least $30 billion is drug trade.

There is little evidence that guns, child pornography, or any other illegal goods are sold with significant volume.

Bitcoin is not suitable for widespread criminal use because of how difficult it is to keep it anonymous, and in fact the drug market is stagnating. Far fewer criminals use Bitcoin than many would believe.

3. Bitcoin supporters hate fiat currency and the Federal Reserve.
Status: Myth

Whilst it is true that Bitcoiners tend to reject the Keynesian school of economics, the world's dominant school has no reason to fear Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not eliminate the Federal Reserve; rather, it contemplates it. Many Bitcoin supporters see Bitcoin not a challenge to central banks, but rather a novel way of sending currency the central banks issue. Companies like Bitpay advocate for holding zero Bitcoin, and instead using it as a system to instantly send money from one hemisphere to another.

The beauty of Bitcoin is that it can be used how one wishes. Many Bitcoin supporters identify with pro-Fed political factions, such as the Republicans. In fact, Bitcoiners represent a wide political spectrum; there are socialists, liberals, greens, libertarians, conservatives, and just about any other party represented. See this study to better reflect upon the diverse political beliefs of Bitcoiners.

In conclusion, Bitcoin is apolitical. It is fantastical to assume that all Bitcoin users identify with Ron Paul or other anti-fiat factions.

4. ASIC miners will cause blockchain size to increase.
Status: Myth

ASIC miners do not affect the rate of blocks beyond a one-time catch-up effect. Bitcoin is designed so that the rate of blocks always converges to 10 minutes per block. Although it is true that ASIC miners will increase this block rate, this increase will in short order be caught up to by the blockrate adjustment algorithm. The blocks mined during this adjustment period will be the only faster-than-normal blocks ASIC miners create.

On average, Bitcoin's blockrate will actually be faster than 10 minutes per block, thanks to Moore's law. The law states that hardware will increase in power steadily (exponential growth). So long as this law holds, the Bitcoin network's difficulty adjustment will always lag behind the betterment of technology. Thus the temporary blockrate increase caused by ASIC miners is not an unusual instance, and stronger increases have happened before thanks to GPU technology and software improvements.

5. One must mine to own significant quantities of bitcoins.
Status: Myth

Mining is not any more productive than any other Bitcoin-related industry. Indeed, most small-scale miners will find themselves squeezed by high operating costs, unexpected equipment depreciation, and an uncertain future. In contrast, other industries can often fare well. Starting an exchange, stock exchange, payment processor, or middle-man can be a very profitable endeavour.

Miners make up around 1% of the network's gross profits, and often have large operating expenses. Services often earn more and cost less, but usually carry an unfortunate risk of hacking. If one feels disillusioned by both, one can simply work a regular job and convert a portion of the wages to Bitcoin. Mining certainly isn't needed to be Bitcoin-rich.

Currently, the moniker [btc] produces the following output: BTC.

When copied, one discovers that this is a BTC with a stylized 'B'. I propose this be replaced with the text 'XBT', to comply with the ISO standard and encourage usage of the new symbol. In addition, I propose the forum implements [xbt] as an alias for [btc].

A satoshi won't be the smallest for long. We should use the nBTC (nanobitcoin) as the base unit, so that we can maintain the current BTC unit as simply bitcoin and go down from there.

In addition, if hashrate more than quadruples, even the retarget will not be enough to slow blockrate.

I don't want to join the witchhunt, but here's my case.

I was promised a generous payout for advertising, which I believed to be too good to be true; however, as Andrew Bitcoiner seemed trustworthy, I went for it. After very little time (less than a week) the account balance reached a point where the "automatic payout" should have activated. Instead of a payout, I was greeted with an inaccessible site for some time. I waited it out, leaving a broken advertisement on that I expected would earn nothing; the reason for this was purely laziness. After the site went back up, my balance was reset. Although the amount was little (just over 0.1 BTC), I immediately pulled the advertisement and my initial concerns were proved valid.

I believe Andrew Bitcoiner was acting extremely unethically through this account reset, that coincidentally occurred after an outage. While I never bothered to speculate or research on the cause of the outage, I have reason to believe he was hacked and intentionally dropped small amounts off people's balances to compensate. This was particularly noticeable on my account because of its newness; there was a very small balance anyhow. This would explain why only a few users reported problems.

Although I am certain that he is a scammer, I can understand the doubt and uncertainty (after all, I am also not the Universal Arbiter of Bitcoin Truth and Justice). In order to ensure that he does not scam more users on these forums, and in an incognito manner (the most dangerous form of scamming), I strongly recommend the use of a scammer tag which can be removed if he successfully defends himself.

In support of this recommendation, I must remind you of the purpose of a scammer tag—one, to deter scamming, and two, to remind newbies to choose an honest vendor. Andrew Bitcoiner has clearly acted dishonestly, and newbies should be reminded of such.

The exchange rate is a significant markup over the current market rate of 1 BTC/20000 XRP.

These all are either unlikely typos ("mount[-]btc.com") or carry negative connotations ("stackcoinica.com").

Done.

Why not...

1JfWcFMSrnmTsEpFwzkcMWVGaUUtdP2uCE

Will start ASAP after paid, will end no earlier than 30 days from then.

We know that ionic salts, in sufficiently high concentrations, can inhibit microbial growth.

Different salts affect microbial growth differently. Some of the factors that can change the impact include: toxicity, acidity, concentration, etc. What are some of the other factors?

They are using the accounts to get free ripples.

This is their reply: