http://paymentsviews.com/2011/01/22/innovations-in-card-acceptance/

Willing to take us in?  How noble of them.

I periodically check to see what is being said in the Local forums for the non-English languages.  Though I only can read posts written in English, viewing those forums is trivial thanks to modern browsers (e.g.,  Chrome) which translate -- however doing so is time consuming and often there appears to be much lost in the translation.

If anyone is wondering what they might contribute to the Bitcoin Times and happens to be multilingual, even just a paragraph or three highlighting the best of what was found in those forums over the past week would be something I would find quite worthwhile.

Yes, it's a scam, ... but it's making money!  0.1 BTC so far.

  http://blockexplorer.com/address/1Jv3APkm3APMHexVGVzxCk4NCGUy4Csm67

I had not seen the term "hard digital currency" used before, but this article describes it as:

   http://www.finance-weblog.com/86193367/what_is_digital_currency.php


It is a good read.

Interesting when one considers it that way.  So what about a parallel currency whose exchange rate is being subsidized such that mining the new parallel currency is more profitable than mining Bitcoin currently is?

In other words can enough of Bitcoin's miners be seduced into switching to a new parallel currency such that Bitcoin becomes vulnerable?

Maybe that quora question's part 3 (#3. Competition) merits further discussion?

This just occurred to me.  The existing 150 Ghash/s network costs just $144 per hour.

There were 165 blocks created in the past 24 hours (per Bitcoin Watch) and each earned 50 BTC.  That means 8,250 BTC were paid to those mining.  At BTC/USD currently at $0.42 each, that's $3,465 per day that is paid for a network that will do 150 Ghash/s.

So why does Amazon charge seventy times as much?   :-)

What method is used then?

The last price as-of 11:59:59 PM using NAT (Nome -Bering Time) -- a timezone that is GMT-11 I believe? http://www.timezonecheck.com/

Heh, ... composing answers, collaborative / wiki style against questions that evolve based on the answers being composed.

[edited]
Once yours is online, you might wish to add it to the selection of Bitcoin-related Blogs: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:Blogs

if anyone wishes to guest blog, I'll consider publishing submissions on either of the two collaborative blogs that I edit, Bitcoin Money and Bitcoin Miner:

  http://www.bitcoinmoney.com  General and Financial topics
  Submit: http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/submit

  http://www.bitcoinminer.com
  Submit: http://www.bitcoinminer.com/submit

I'ld like to create a community response to the post.

I set up a collaborative editing pad:
   http://meetingwords.com/GO5tVHslbz

Following is my stab at a response.  Anyone care to make it better?  I'll paste the community response on the Quora post at a later time.


Community response to:
  http://www.quora.com/Is-Bitcoin-doomed-to-fail


Is Bitcoin doomed to fail?

> 1.) Technical
> it would require ~2k CPUs for 1h to steal 5M BTC.

Let's do the math.
 - Amazon Quadruple Extra Large Cluster Compute Instance $2.10 per hour. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
 - That instance is 2 NVIDIA M2050s, or about 32 Mhash/s per https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1334.msg26185#msg26185

The currenty network is about 150 Ghash/s.  To get 50% of current network hashing, that means you'ld need to match that amount.
That's 4,688 of those XL Cluster instances.  Hey ... that's just under $10,000 for the hour.

Whether or not that amount of capacity is available to just spin up is unlikely however.  49.9% of the hashing strength won't be enough.

So if you take over the network, what does that let you do?

Yes, there are over 5 million bitcoins that exist, but they aren't yours to spend.  You can try to accumulate bitcoin and then double spend once you have control of the network.  Assuming you start sending those to Mt. Gox and other exchanges in hopes of double spending, its quite likely the combination of a ramp in the number of nodes plus an influx of bitcoin funding by the exchanges wouldn't go unnoticed.

Amazon is likely to be the only one likely to profit from such an attempt.

> 2.) Legal
> BTC will represent a deadly threat for a national state, and that they would react accordingly using their full moral, legal, judiciary, police, military, PR, press powers to shut down such a threat.

Governments could make trade using bitcoins difficult, that is true.  If they make it a crime to trade with bitcoins only criminals will trade bitcoins, or something to that effect is how the saying goes.

> 3) Competition
> the lock-in power of such network is extremely low, and the entry barrier for competitors is also very low

There already is competition.  Testnet Bitcoin is a live, functioning parallel currency.  Today you can mine for it, exchange it .. it even trades on Bitcoin-OTC!  But you might want to think twice.  Because it is not protected by 150 Ghash/s like Bitcoin currency is, it is rather vulnerable at this stage.  There will be competition at some point, certainly.

> 4) Community
> infiltrate the community of developers in order to push their own agendas

Bitcoin is open source and runs on open protocols.  Let the best fork win.

Are there more variations for promoting bitcoin?

I created this using the DIY Dotty Dots tool.

[edited]
So, what industry will be the first to get clobbered by bitcoin?

CPC advertising is one that is quite vulnerable to anonymity + micropayments + remote workforce.

 / me thinks it might be a good time to reconsider using CPC advertising.   :-)

Of course, if you believe the price shown at Mt. Gox reflects the scarcity of LRUSD more so than it reflects the market price of bitcoins, then that source of data is not terribly useful:
  http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2903.msg40006#msg40006

But I don't doubt there are many here whose only life saving are in bitcoins.

For consumer use, time-of-use pricing would provide a nice benefit. [edited]

When equipment is dedicated for mining -- as long as the cost of peak electricity is below the revenue from mining during that same period of time, mining will not likely be curtailed for any part of the day whatsoever.

Time-of-use electric pricing irrelevant — Mining is 24x7:   http://www.bitcoinminer.com/post/2858427974/time-of-use-pricing

A Google search returned the following.   The original post on PayPal's Community Help Forum has since been deleted, but fortunately there is Google Webcache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1M9nMVSIq90J:https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Account-limits-and-verification/Are-You-KIDDING-PayPal/td-p/173790+bitcoin&cd=174

 [Emphasis added]

Then again, they got nothing on Bitcoin:


At this moment, Bitcon's money stock is 5,188,550 BTC (103,771 blocks, each of which had 50 BTC generated), ... is that Bitcoin's M0?
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply

We're still dancing!

Late 2009 through 2011 YTD

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/m2-update-1



http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_(economics)#Empirical_measures

The title of this thread is a quote courtesy of former Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Charles Prince who said that in July 2007, shortly before the complete meltdown of our financial system:
  http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aBBDg8lSUmrM

Thus there is an imbalance between the supply of one commodity (bitcoins) and the supply of the exchange medium (LRUSD)

At this phase, insufficient access to LRUSD (the common denominator for trading) is Bitcoin's Achilles' heel.
  http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2436.msg32962#msg32962

from: http://www.psfk.com/2011/01/starbucks-makes-life-on-the-go-even-easier.html