Its true - there's an asset called BitBTC that's market pegged to the value of a Bitcoin. It even pays you interest for hodling it. Give it a try

Im holding a few bitcoins just for sentimental value. My strategy is to hold BTC and suffer 10%/annum inflation and watch as my money gets bled dry to pay for miners.

Instead of transaction fees going to pay miners, its actually possible to instead store some of those fees in a fund on the network, which can be payed out to long term Bitcoin holders.

This is what bter.com does for their deposits. There is no reason why you couldnt do this on a blockchain as well.

If only we didnt have to pay miners for their costly task of confirming blocks - if only there was a more efficient way to do it.

Perhaps this meme will explain it:

It means that you get the freedom & convenience of crypto-currencies, with the price stability of the dollar. You can use BitUSD for trade the same way you can use Bitcoin. But now you always know exactly what the price will be.

It also means that if you want to cash out your BTSX, you can trade them on the BitsharesX decentralized exchange with zero counterparty risk. You dont need to risk sending your shares to some shady exchange in China or wherever.

Holding BitUSD also gives you +5% interest, payed by the other side who is shorting BitUSD.

Bytemaster is awesome - looking forward to BitUSD going live today 

Perhaps bitUSD will replace Bitcoin. bitUSD combines the convenience of crypto with the stability of the dollar.

People have just had enough of Bitcoin's 10%/year inflation, which was fine when there was lots of new money coming into the system, but its not OK now.

These days people want to receive dividends for holding crypto, for example BitSharesX has got the right economic model. It destroys transaction fees giving holders implicit dividends.

If you are looking for dividends, BitSharesX already pays dividends in the form of transaction fees being destroyed.

And if you think the BTSX shares are about to go down you can cash out into bitUSD and get +5% interest on your bitUSD.

Litecoin will pretty soon be replaced by BTSX once people see how useful bitUSD is.

Here is my suggestion:

Replace mining with DPOS, thereby relieving us of the need to inflate the coin supply at 10%/annum in order to pay for miners.

I want to be rewarded for holding an asset, not penalized with inflation. BTSX has got the right idea.

bitUSD here we come

As I understand it, both Mastercoin and Bitshares aim to support builtin trading on the price of other assets such as stocks, currencies, bitcoin etc. They take different approaches to solving the problem of tracking the asset's price and encoding it into their blockchains. Mastercoin will rely on trusted feeds, whilst Bitshares says that the true price is implicit in the difference between the ask & bid price give by the traders.

Both methods have their problems - Mastercoin's trusted feeds can be corrupted, precisely because the system is not truly decentralized. Bitshares' system is open to price manipulation by the traders.

Some people have suggested a voting system that allows users to vote on what the tracking/outcome price is, but havent solved the problem of how to make sure the voters truthfully give the real asset price. Here is my solution to this problem, and I hope it is useful to both the different teams. The solution is to incentive voters to vote truthfully.

For a prediction market, before trading can take place a market needs to be opened, which requires users spending at least N coins to confirm a proposed market statement idea. This is analogous to "crowdfunding" a market idea, and maintains the quality of market statements.

Miners can encode a vote for the outcome price/result inside their mined block. The market will be closed/resolved when at least N blocks have been mined that included a vote for that market's outcome. Casting a vote inside a mined block puts at risk 1 coin, and when all N votes are cast the miner will receive his "vote coin" back plus a share of the initial N coins spent to create the market. This happens as long as the miner's vote was in the majority when the votes are counted up. If a miner's vote was in the minority (because he made a false vote), then he loses his initial vote coin as well as any other rewards from making that block.

The benefit of miners casting the votes for the market outcome/price is that you can't be sure who will find the block and therefore cast the vote, so you don't know who to bribe to cast a false vote in order to manipulate the market. Each individual voter can only assume that everyone else will act rationally and vote truthfully, so he will be inclined to do the same.

I hope this idea is useful - I want to see decentralized trading on the price of other assets using crypto as soon as possible.

Does anyone have any comments?

I have read that Mastercoin will take in price updates in order to allow decentralized betting on other commodities etc.

Will we also be able to use Mastercoin to gamble on discreet outcomes, eg Intrade style betting on sports / politics etc ? How will Mastercoin get the feed for that?

Can someone explain this to me:

Datacoin allows anyone to place entire files permanently in its blockchain - so how long until someone uploads illegal material and then everyone who runs a Datacoin node can be arrested?

The most popular one in the pool right now seems to be Worldcoin - a scrypt-based coin. So Im guessing that means the erupter wouldnt work most of the time as the pool switches between coins?

I am using an AMD W7000 Firepro and getting 200Kh/s mining in an altcoin pool, which automatically switches to the most profitable altcoin and autotrades them back to BTC.

For a GPU, the results are pretty good - Im getting 0.001 BTC per day (although Ive only run it for 1 day). Block erupters are on sale for £60, and give 330Mh/s - over 1000 times faster. So from past experience 0.001 * 1000 == 1 BTC, which sounds great.

Any ideas what im missing here?

Ok after repeatedly paying the premium on localbitcoins.com, Ive finally got my ID & utility scans ready to get a proper exchange account (AML docs put people off buying bitcoin). The question is which exchange to go for.

MtGox has the highest volume outside of China, and is the most well established. They have had their problems, but they arent just going to run off with your money. Do they still deserve the flack that they used to get ?

Bitcoin-central.net also looks good because they are backed by an already established finance company operating in France.

And no I just would never trust sending my money to strangers in Bulgaria, so that rules out BTC-e.

Which exchange should I open my account at?

Yes I agree the charts are lovely, but the order book is just a load of numbers.

http://bitcoinwisdom.com/ has very nice charts.