We passed Bhutan in market cap a while ago, and the King is very young, happy, and seems cool. He even married a commoner. Is it possible we could convince him to use Bitcoin for their national currency?

I'm guessing it might be too high-tech for them (how high is celphone penetration there?), but it's worth a shot.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/expensify-now-offers-support-for-bitcoin-an-alternative-to-paypal-for-international-contractors/

Previously, our US companies with international employees or contractors were incurring currency conversion or wire transfer fees to the tune of 4% in some cases. To this end, Bitcoin is a great tool for minimizing the cost of reimbursing companies outside of the US. As a plus, transfers are secure and instant – no more waiting multiple business days for your ACH to clear!

This is the application I've been waiting to see. I knew Bitcoin had to offer major cost-cutting opportunities some way or other, and I was always surprised no one really seemed to be leveraging that. It seems like this could be a game-changer.




[For consolidation purposes, the Press Forum thread is here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=159491.0]

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1b1clt/all_you_mtgox_traders_out_there/c92r23t

What is the justification for OpenCoin's secrecy in the development of their Ripple implementation? OC is supposed to have superior dev support compared to Bitcoin, yet they're afraid of competition?

It looks like they're rather fond of a version where they get to control where the money goes (with "input" from the community), and they hope to keep it closed long enough that it has too much momentum to fork by the time they release the source (if ever). That way they keep control by keeping half the market cap and deciding how to distribute the other half. Is this not totally against the spirit of open-source? Am I missing something?

EDIT: Note this wouldn't make it a scam, since no one is being tricked into buying XRP from OpenCoin, but it does make it seem like the giveaway-half-and-keep-half "distribution" scheme is to be interpreted as, "Make us filthy rich and we'll bootstrap Ripple into viability." I'm not even sure this is a bad idea: it may be that this really is the fastest way, but I doubt it. It seems like an attempt to ride on Bitcoin's success, but it looks like one of the core reasons for Bitcoin's success has gone unnoticed: people knew they could trust it, or didn't have to trust it.

Simple extrapolation of the very steady exponential growth trend since January.

That also means we pass $50 by late March.

So many spats between husbands and wives end up revolving around the dishes. What is it about dirty dishes that causes so much friction?

It's not so much that the annoyance of doing the dishes causes the contention, but more that the dishes serve as a focal point for all the various little things that bother the spouses about each other. The dishes merely bring matters to a head.

The recent controversy over the coming change in blocksize reminds me of this, and specifically I think we are witnessing the first wave in the clash between ideological bitcoiners and practical bitcoiners.

The first party are more motivated by what they perceive as Bitcoin's ideals than its practical benefits, and the second party care more about benefits than ideology. Some people wear both hats at different times, and insofar as ideology is ultimately (if roundaboutly) aiming at some kind of benefit there is a degree of overlap and interplay between the two. For example, the concern that larger blocksizes will leave poorer people behind can be called both ideological and practical. Moreover, Bitcoin's immense practical advantages inevitably move the world toward shifts that happen to be favored by certain ideologies.

At first the ideologues dominated, and this was good because it gave bitcoins their initial value. Inasmuch as Bitcoin continues to be advertized in terms of its ideological points, it is clear that the ideological side is both strong and persuasive. But as we leave the innovator/early-adopter phase and the general public starts pouring in, the ideologues will be drowned out, and the pace of this drowning out will only accelerate.

As such I expect more controversy going forward, and I think recognizing the undercurrent and pedigree of the controversies will be of great assistance in sorting them out.

Was playing around in MSPaint, thinking about how everything interrelates. The green arrows mean "drives." Thoughts?

Where will we see the first closed loops in the Bitcoin economy, where businesses take payment in bitcoins and then use those same coins to pay for business expenses?

Anyone have a technical view on this tight trading range since the big announcements (reddit+Mega)?

So far the current correction has brought us all the way back to..... a week ago.

C'mon bears, is this all ya got!?

Bitcoin is a complex thing to explain, and the many misconceptions about it have to be addressed without losing site of the awesome strengths that underpin its revolutionary nature. It think "prezi" presentations are the ideal way to do this because of how they enable efficient and grounded visual communication.

Here is one I found about bitcoin as an example: http://prezi.com/tbpky5fm7qbl/bitcoin-new-p2p-currency/

There it's merely used to "jazz up" the presentation with panning and zooming, but this functionality can be used to keep sight of the big picture while delving into details and dealing with objections. It can be used to visually represent many things that would take too long to say in text. Images can be embedded, and Youtube videos can be viewed right in the presentation itself.

Plus it can be set to freely allow copying so that anyone can make their own branch tailored for specific audiences or for the purpose of easily recording a video with the prezi as the visual with voiceover. It takes about 20 minutes to figure out how to use the interface, and from then you can make presentations really quickly.

To get more of an idea of the potential for explaining stuff, here is one on the theory of relativity: http://prezi.com/vgj5kiy-3zsd/the-magical-theory-of-relativity/

I have a use case (old, air-gapped phone.) where it'd be very helpful if I could do this, but the app isn't letting me just paste in a private key. Is there some trick to it? Incidentally, I couldn't do this in the Windows version either (I think it asked for a password).

Suppose just for kicks that the trend that started in December, of BTC prices doubling about every two months, were to continue for the next three years or so (reaching mass adoption, million-dollar bitcoins). Sometimes it'd take more than two months, sometimes less, with all manner of crazy mini-bubbles and crashes within the bull run, but suppose the trend held relatively steady over time.

Needless to say, it'd be a white-knuckle roller coaster ride with plenty of euphoria and ample gut-spilling scares. Millionaires and billionaires would be born, profits would be taken heartily all the way up, bubbles would be called constantly, and many would miss the train - perhaps multiple times. Most of all people would be wondering WTF was going on, endless theories would be postulated and debated.

My question is, if this were to actually happen, how would speculators like those on this forum react? What would be the patterns in sentiment?

With the benefit of hindsight, or true belief in Bitcoin, you'd just calmly hold, accumulate when you could, and spend or take some relatively small profits as your life situation and needs required. But what would everyone else do?

The reason this question interests me is that this is one possible scenario* and I'd like to know if there is any way to identify it if it does happen. That is, at each point in time, I want to be able to tell the difference between this kind of relentless, meteoric rise and just a big frothy bubble: for example, a bubble where it doubles three more times by August - to $200 - then drops back down to $12, leveling out at $35 or so, which might be considered a healthy growth target from the current $24 price.

*Three years to mass adoption may be a far-fetched, but even if it doubled every 4-6 months and took 6-10 years it would be an insane ride all the same, with I suppose many of the same characteristics.

"Value investors" try to pick stocks based on the fundamentals: strong management team, large cash reserves, proven track record, etc. Why not look at virtual currencies/payment systems the same way?

If we imagine a world where there are a lot more virtual currencies and payment systems floating around - such as Linden dollars, Amazon coins, Ripple, Litecoin, MintChip, etc. - Bitcoin's fundamentals compare rather positively from a "value investing" perspective:

-4 year headstart and never been hacked, so proven track record
-strong, independent dev team
-significant "brand" recognition
-substantial liquidity in most major countries
-significant business adoption and user base
-fairly decentralized (compared to Amazon coins, MintChip, and even Ripple it seems)
-totally inflation-proof (beyond the preset schedule)
-sound, proven method for ensuring the transaction-securing mechanism grows as needed
-allows for substantial privacy
-etc.

And there are probably a few disadvantages from an investment perspective as well. In addition, opinions will vary as to which characteristics are most relevant.

The point is, if we assume cryptocurrencies are the future in one form or another, the "Dow Jones Industrial Average" of all functioning cryptocurrencies in the future (whether it turns out to be one or many) will be gobsmackingly huge. And right now, Bitcoin is far and away best poised to take the lion's share of that future "DJIA."

In that sense, Bitcoin could be called a value investor's dream come true: the most undervalued asset of all time.

Here of course I must pause to give the standard warning against "new paradigm" thinking, where - like right before the top of the dotcom bubble - people were talking of tech stocks as being an entirely different animal that would keep going up and up. And it was somewhat plausible, too. No one knew how much potential the internet really held. But even if the hopes placed on the internet were well-founded, they were too early. For the same reasons, this line of reasoning on Bitcoin may also be too early; but one day it won't be.

Take-home message: do not count on it, but also do not be overly surprised if Bitcoin just keeps on rising in giant steps. Note that this holds even if userbase and infrastructure lag behind speculation, for it is a speculator's job to anticipate trends before they happen, and for all we know the soundness of the monetary system is just as much of a fundamental as the userbase.

I'm looking for something like this:

                                                                  Cash      Gold       Bitcoins

Instantly transportable worldwide       YES        NO         YES
Giant online transactions possible       NO         NO         YES
Small online transactions possible      NO         NO         YES
Impossible to inflate                               NO         YES        YES
Fast transactions across borders        NO          NO         YES
Unfreezable account                               NO          N/A       YES
Private online transactions possible    NO          NO         YES
Not confiscate-able                                 NO          NO         YES
Etc...

Bitcoin has such an overwhelming host of benefits that it's easy for people to be incredulous or forget about them in the confusion they encounter when evaluating the concept. It may help adoption to have a handy table like this so people can see all the heavy-hitting points in one place.

Any problems with this?

If it works, it seems we could do away with escrow and centralized exchanges in many cases. A reputation system would only be necessary to keep out misanthropists who would pay to see some random, faceless person lose money.