I had malware.  I got rid of it several months ago, but my computer never really fully recovered from the effects of it.

I originally thought I had a hard drive that was going bad, but then I bought a new hard drive and the problem didn't go away.  I had some malware several months ago and I'm fairly certain that it corrupted some of my Windows drivers.  I tried doing a repair reinstall a while ago but it didn't fix the problem, so I think I'm going to have to do a clean reformat / reinstall to fix it. 

Although your comment about 0.93 being just around the corner makes me wonder if I'd be better off waiting a little longer for that stable version of it to come out.

Hrm, good point.  Not having to let Armory build the database again would be a pretty big benefit to that approach, so I think I'll do that. 

...And I'm going to need to do a reformat / reinstall to fix it, unfortunately.  I was wondering about the process of backing up my Armory wallets.  Is there anything I need to do other than saving all the private keys to ensure that I'll be able to restore the wallets once I reinstall Windows?

I totally agree with everything you said here.  But...we, on this forum, are kind of the true believers of bitcoin.  Fiat isn't going anywhere for a while and ideally bitcoin will take over one of these days, I just meant as an intermediary step until that day occurs.

This is hilarious.  Want to know why bitcoin really crashed?  It's because it's being adopted like crazy, by businesses, but they're only using it as an ATM, not as a currency - in other words, a cheaper way to get money than credit cards.

The other reason?  Speculators.  That's right, speculators.  Speculators have left the building, and that's why the price plummeted.  If there were still a bunch of speculators out there expecting the price of bitcoin to go up, you can bet it would be going up, not down.  It's basic supply and demand.

A lot, though not nearly as much as one person who commented here.  I'm hoping it'll go back up again one of these days.

I'm not sure if this forum or the Bitcoin Discussion forum would be the better place for this thread.

I was just wondering if anyone has created a bitcoin equivalent of Western Union.  It seems like kind of a no-brainer given the fees WU charges.

...Well, sort of, anyway.  Given how volatile bitcoin is, if you're truly wanting to give someone the same amount of money in the fiat currency that you sent, the site may have to do some sort of hedging to compensate for bitcoin's volatility. 

In theory, if a service like this doesn't exist, creating one would have no effect on the price of a bitcoin.  The person sending money would buy x bitcoins and send it to the person in the foreign country, who would then sell the bitcoins - in other words, the two transactions would cancel themselves out, unless the receiving party decides to keep any bitcoins.

Does anyone know if this type of service exists?  If it doesn't, and anyone's feeling entrepreneurial, feel free to use my idea and try and create said service / site.  It really seems like it ought to be a natural market for bitcoin.

Two things: first, encourage them to pay their employees (at least in part) in bitcoin.  Second, encourage them to ask their suppliers to accept bitcoin as a payment, and so on.  If they ask their suppliers, some say yes, and they do the same with their suppliers...eventually we won't need the payment processors.

A miner dropping out, seriously?  No, the obvious reason for the crash in price is that the recent hack at Bitstamp panicked a lot of people, who started selling.  I can't say that I blame them, really.  I'm starting to wonder if I'm dumb for not selling earlier, but I always knew it was a gamble and high risk investment buying bitcoins, and I sleep soundly at night even with my paper loss.  I'm still hopeful that the price will go up again eventually.

The amount of bitcoin fans who are pestering Amazon is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of people who either a) aren't even aware of bitcoin yet or b) are aware of bitcoin, don't care about it, or are like me and use bitcoin but are happy to buy from Amazon with my credit card.

I still think it's hilarious that people here think that Amazon accepting bitcoin today would create a rally in the price.  The volume Amazon has is so huge that I'm sure that if any of the CSRs forward these messages to Jeff Bezos, he's probably laughing about it.

The only possible way that Amazon accepting bitcoin wouldn't cause the price of bitcoin to seriously plunge would be if this adoption happens after a majority of Amazon's suppliers also accept bitcoin, and don't immediately convert to fiat.  It's going to be a long time, if ever, before that happens.

I really wish I bought now instead of six odd months ago when the price was $650.  But the price seems to have stabilized around $350 or so and it'll probably go back up eventually.

Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with the OP.  Mining seems pretty bad from an economic standpoint unless you happened to be one of the lucky ones who found out about Bitcoin in 2009 and did a bunch of CPU mining when that was still possible.  I'm more concerned about the environmental issues with mining than the economic ones personally though, considering how much energy miners use, although I do think that if we ever get to the point where bitcoin takes over fiat (highly unlikely, but we can hope), the energy miners use would likely be less than all the energy banks & the Federal Reserve uses.

I don't, personally, think it'll catch on overnight.  Maybe it'll never catch on to the point we'd like it to, it's entirely possible. 

I think a major problem with bitcoin is that it doesn't really solve a problem that most people have.  By people, I mean the majority of people, the consumers, people who buy stuff.  It's a huge asset for businesses, of course, because they don't have to worry about charge backs and all that jazz, but it also introduces other problems for said businesses.  Most businesses still pay most of their bills in fiat, which is why they use the bitcoin -> fiat conversion for the most part.  One problem businesses would have with bitcoin is returns: there are probably gonna be people wanting to return whatever they bought.  Do you give them their bitcoins back at the exact bitcoin amount they bought the item to you and incur an exchange rate risk / benefit, or choose to make it the fiat value of what it was at the time of purchase?

You're quite right, apps like this are easier to use than bitcoin.  The interview on insidebitcoins.com had a great point.  Yeah, usability sucks right now, and it talked about a service that abstracts out the public key of people's bitcoin addresses to people to make it much easier to send someone money.  Which is a great idea, it's like creating a domain name system for bitcoins like there is for the internet so you don't have to manually type in IP addresses to get to websites.  Of course, for this to really work well, this system have to have at least a double abstraction layer so that it would point to a whole wallet full of bitcoin addresses, not just one wallet address, in the same way that a major website like Google is served from a different server depending on where you are in the world.

Anyway, I guess you could say my point is give it time.  People are creating apps to make bitcoin easier to use too.  Remember, fiat's been around for hundreds of years (in the current incarnation anyway), bitcoin has only existed since 2009.  I'd say the growth in bitcoin use since then given the relatively short time period is pretty amazing personally.

I wouldn't be surprised if Venmo adds bitcoin functionality to their app, honestly.  Someone should suggest it.  I might myself, but the next several days are crazy, so if you're reading this, feel free to do it.

I read the BusinessWeek article - it was pretty interesting.  And yes, they charge to use credit cards because credit cards charge the merchants (Venmo in this case) to use credit cards - a lot of their subscribers were just using Venmo to get credit card rewards points and since they originally didn't charge for credit card use, they were seriously hemorrhaging money.  Not exactly what you'd call a good business strategy, which is why the fee was eventually introduced for credit card use.

And to jcoin200 - technically, if you're thinking of the recent price downturn for bitcoin, you should realize that the price of a bitcoin has actually been trending back upwards lately.  It went all the way down to $280 or so for a bitcoin and now is at $377.58 / bitcoin per bitstamp prices.

I'm surprised it wasn't longer than that if you downloaded it recently, personally.  I downloaded the Blockchain back in June of last year and it took me about 3 full days, and that was when it was "only" 9 GB.

I'm having to do some troubleshooting stuff to recover my computer from a virus I had earlier, enough that it may end up wiping my drive knowing how messed up Windows is.  Is the blockchain BitTorrent still being maintained?  I'm just wondering because I need to know if I need to make a backup of the blockchain on my hard drive.

Nah, you're better off with the lottery than with Mr Obvious Scam.  At least then when you probably lose, you'll be supporting good causes.  Lottery proceeds in the state I live in go to support things like schools, which I feel to be social goods.  That's why I didn't feel like I was *truly* throwing away my money when I played the lottery several years ago.  I knew I likely wasn't going to win, but considered it a small donation to improving the schools where I live.

This is hilarious.  I really hope no one's dumb enough to invest in this scam.  Granted, I'll fully admit to falling for TF's scam with Coinlenders, but this one's way more obvious.  No one can promise you this kind of return.  They're going to run off with your money, don't believe this guy.

You do realize that the internet that we're using to carry out with this discussion was created by a United States taxpayer funded program, right?  It's no Star Trek, but let's face it, reality isn't as quick as science fiction.

Don't get me wrong, I live in the United States and I don't like a lot of things taxes pay for, like wars.  I'd love to be able to dictate precisely where my tax dollars went, but unfortunately, I don't have that luxury.  My point is that while it's not the most efficient way of creating things, government programs have created some pretty awesome things.