PM for more details. Please be able to supply some real references.
can pay in BTC or Dwolla.

Just a simple demographics survey based on age.
Thanks for polling. 

Bitcoin is currently a speculation vehicle. If the community really wants a currency, or even a good way to "wire" funds, I believe BTC has to be pegged to something.

Theres several things you can peg it to:

-Peg it to the actual average cost of mining. Data can be gathered from stats to arrive at an actual cost of mining, or a producer cost index (PCI). Take the higher value of the range, that way all the miners make something on the effort. Also this insures there will be miners in the distant future working to get the last of the BTC. The price of BTC will rise with the cost of living.  This will of course make mining in some areas more lucrative than other areas, and this is where the invisible hand will come in and dictate the logistics.

-Pick a commodity, silver for instance and peg it to that (but I would suggest that we create a free market exchange to base the silver price off of because the comex is jobbed by              pigs)

-Pick an existing currency and peg it to that as some ratio, china has successfully done that with the RMB to the USD. Why not peg it to the Brit pound or Canadian dollar. . I would say USD or Euro, but those are having lots of trouble.

as a speculation vehicle BTC is a joke.  Ive traded in about every kind of thing you can name, and trading BTC compares with the very worst of the worst penny stocks, topped off with very bad mechanics of money deposit and withdrawl. The volume is thin, large orders goose the market up or down. No real trading is possible as only 6.6 mill BTC exist and most of those are not traded, meaning that the trading pool  is essentially some small percentage of the actual float, Im guessing 10%.

My conclusion; Peg it to something. And use it as a real thing.

Seems that many of us have watched the "golden circle" TED talk.
And it also seems we are already collectively changing our argument from what is BTC to "Why BTC? We believe in BTC. "

It only seems appropriate that a BTC representative now do a TED talk on BTC!  with of course the new framing "We believe".

I immediately thought we should ask Gavin to consider a TED talk, I mean hes already giving the CIA some lovin, so why not so loving to progressives that watch TED.

With our vast borg like resources, and initiative I think we can arrange a great TED talk. 

Volunteers to contact and arrange with TED?

Volunteer or Nomination for someone to give the talk?

I should say I have nothing to do with tradehill. and I only have some cash in the Gox.
Tradehill BTC has been trading at a premium to Gox BTC most of the day.
A signal that a premium is worth paying to have your funds in TH.

30 minutes before the "grand reopening" and 90% of users still have no email confirmation of account claim.

No surprise, classic GOX.  Ive been Goxed about 12 times this week.  the frustration is tangible everywhere in the BTC community.

The whole thing hinging on one/two guys...the irony of a decentralized currency.

sources are telling me that there is chatter and likely action focused on  "killing btc" before it grows up, by card companies and their trade associations.
Visa and other usury based entities are nervous that if BTC is successful, that there will be many other copycats that pop up, that essentially kill
their debit transaction business.  Theres little fear on the credit side of things at the moment, because that is loaned money, but the debit drafts are another can of worms and there are billions in global fees to lose.

The banks and credit card companies have the security knowledge to pose a hostile threat to BTC based companies and exchanges.
Of course these same entities are in bed (or at least exchanging nude photos) with central governments, although they make it appear that the government is cracking down on their business with regulation.

My contacts believe that some of the recent attacks were orchestrated by groups with sophisticated understanding of market dynamics and exchange platforms. For instance, The trading on MT GOX was in a bullish break out pattern, meaning that the market was wound up and ready to move higher based on price action.  At the apex of this setup the attack was launched effectively killing the market dynamic at a critical point.

make of it what you will....

http://uk.ibtimes.com/articles/166815/20110621/lulzsec-lulz-security-arrest-essexy-19-hack-census-hacked-data-release.htm

and this was found on the MTGOX hosting service homepage

http://www.prolexic.com/

[Update - 6:30 GMT] Still here. Still working hard to get things online.

    SHA-512 multi-iteration salted hashing is in enabled and ready for when we get users reactivating their accounts
    We are going to push our relaunch time to 2:00am GMT tomorrow so we have time to launch a our new backend and withdraw passwords.

Thanks to everyone sending the supportive emails and our extremely patient users.

has Bitcoin Charts thrown in the towel?

"Out of coins." is all it says.

Ok, guys, when MT.Gox reopens, I presume there will be a rush to the exits.
We dont want to crash the value of BTC itself.  Ways we can preserve the value are as follows....

Dont sell on Mt.Gox, instead take delivery of your coins by withdrawl. (The market is weak to begin with, sell orders were always stacked against buy orders.)
Once withdrawn, Keep the coins in your client / secured wallet.dat file.
Move them to the exchange of your choice (Im guessing Tradehill, how long before that one is hacked though?)
The value of BTC will one day return after this hysteria. Hey, all those coins will be wanted by someone, even if it is to spirit money from one side of the globe to the other.

The trading in BTC is characteristically volatile, too much so, but for the past three days there are huge blocks of BTC swirling around the globe and the market is flat, not range bound but outright absolutely flat.  Who thinks this is normal? This to me is impossible (considering standard volitility) without large manipulation. We want a more stable market but this is flat lining, "the patient is now dead" price action is also dysfunctional for BTC. Too many questions, too much weirdness, not a natural market.

I am trying to determine the real costs of mining bit coins.

Im looking for the average numbers across the country (USA). Id like to create a monthly cost of operation.
the factors below all have a price tag, here is my initial assessment, please correct me if these numbers seem wrong.

These numbers are for one rig.

Cost of average rig : $2875 - $239 /per month (is this about average?)
Electricity: $30/month
Overhead/rent: 1/10 of rent @ $600 month = $60 month
Time invested: 15 hours a month @ $20 an hour = $300 month (how many hours directly applied to rig set up, etc?, what is a reasonable wage, does this work?)
total investment: $629/month

Taking away the labor expense the total monthly expenses are $329/mo.

at the current rate you need to discover 33 BTC per month to cover expenses with labor costs.
or 17.31 to cover capital investment and overhead costs only. 

looking for confirmation or objections....

thanks

Found this tidbit in the "BTC stolen" thread. Who else is just mildly interested in these goings on?  If MTGox has been hacked the entire BTC "economy" is at risk.
If this is given no serious inquiry, I think its time to close out mtgox accounts. How are normals going to overlook these issues in considering adoption of BTC?

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16457.msg215164#msg215164

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Re: I just got hacked - any help is welcome!
June 13, 2011, 11:01:51 pm
   Reply with quote  #86
allinvain, you're not the only one.
Same hacker got to my mtgox account, he converted the USD i had to bitcoins and transfered them to the same address.

I'm not sure how he got in, if my pc is compromised or how this happened, i've been scanning and analyzing my pc for the past hours but nothing indicates a virus or whatever...
   

this is the most neurotic sentiment Ive seen on an issue possibly in my whole career.  Ive traded commodities for 16+ years, and its easy to see in the price action that the people in this market are emotionally unstable and immature. The greed / fear oscillation is beyond compare.  Match that with tiny float / no liquidity and you get this roller coaster of emotional and financial insanity.

For those having important money in BTC, i.e. college fund, retirement etc, you should be warned that the the lows will be plunged again. Protect yourself, at this stage of development this is a wealth grinder.  Ive seen the effect is some OTC stock issues, but nothing this extreme.

yesterday was the shumer/manchin release,  Correlation? 
and I have funds somewhere between...

looking for up to 100 BTC, payment through dwolla, or ugh...paypal
please be able to reference reputation by third party. Will consider smaller quantities.

Ive got an assortment of silver coin and bullion that Im looking to trade for
around 100 -200 BTC.  Tell me what youre looking for, I probably have it.

Looking to trade 3 rolls of mixed F-VF+ Morgan silver dollars for BTC.
Exchange rate of 1 Morgan to 2 BTC.
All pre 1904.

Diversification is good.  

First let me say, Love this community and spirit.

been studying bitcoin for about 6 weeks now, and while Im enthusiastic about its speculative future there are some nagging issues which make me question continued long term success.  Ive been in trading of commodities, stocks options and etc for 16 years. I may be making many assumptions here and hope to be corrected with filler facts I may be missing.

The first, the number of BTC in circulation is very low 5.6 million or so, which makes markets very illiquid and extremely volatile.  Even if all 21.6 million were in circulation, and completely fractionalized- (140 years from now?) the volatility would still be hard to deal with and build a stable economy upon. Yes it may go up against the USD 100% in a day, but it can just as easily go down 75% in one day, depending on what the large old holders do.
How many total bitcoins will be in circulation if the BTC is fully fractionalized?

Bots! The biggest issue I see in the US stock markets (besides uncle gorillas intervention) is bots. Its not possible to long term invest in a thing and expect a return if the bots are always churning the commodity. This is why Ive cashed out of many other markets. They are not free , based on human interaction, they are completely gamed by thugs. It seems to me that in such a tiny, volitile market, as the bots are written and start controlling the market more and more, the BTC will be in many ways more unstable than even the most instable US OTC markets. So what anonymous thugs are/will be gaming this tiny market?
MT Gox on their website sanctions the creation of more bots. 

MTGOx and other exchanges.  If uncle gorilla decides to go after BTC, which I will assume he will (HIS fiat is his power), a point attack on a popular exchange like MTGOX will send users, and many other users of BTC scurrying down the mountain. It is feasible, it can happen. Look at the Norfed case as a somewhat similar example. The homeland security laws and new addendums allow big uncle to do anything he pleases outside of constitutional law. Habeus corpus is done.

-The technical challenges ordinary people must currently hurdle to do anything with BTC.  BTC is a programmers currency. Seemingly Not a currency for non programmers. The term currency is used to describe a commodity used in exchange that is currently widely accepted, by a majority.  If the goal is to get the masses to use bitcoin the dumbdown factor must go exponential just as btc in USD is going.