Short answer: no.

You want a coin that's pegged to gold,myou need gold to back it, and the mans for people to easily convert back and forth.

Start gold coin

Buy 2.1 million ounces of gold.

Announce that for very gold coin that a user delivers to you, you'll deliver .1 ounce of gold to them.

Then there will be reasonable basis to peg a coins price to the price of gold. You can't just say this coin is pegged to the price of gold. That'd be a decree. Or, in terms that are used over and over here, by fiat. A fiat crypto currency.

What it comes down to is that you should never sell an item that can not be taken back (a bitcoin) for something that can be reversed (a credit card payment, gift card, etc)

That's been discussed in great detail many a time on this forum and plenty of other places too.

You tried to do an end run around that, and in doing tow, expected amazon to assume the liability that should have been on your shoulders in the first place. Would you have sold your bitcoins to someone for a direct credit card payment (say, with a square credit card reader)? Would you have sold them to someone who would only pay via paypal? Likely no to both of those, since you could have done so rather than using purse.

Sorry you lost your coins, but you can't expect amazon to let you Spend money on a gift card that they haven't been paid for. That you resold the card doesn't doesn't matter to the  either.

So, essentially, someone used a stolen credit card to buy an amazon gift card, which they then traded to you for bitcoins? And once amazon learned that they weren't being paid for the gift card I question, they should continue to honor it?

Sorry, but no. Amazon shouldn't have to take the loss simply because you bought fraudently obtained gift cards via bitcoin. That you didn't know they were fraudulently obtained doesn't make a difference or mean that they should have to make you whole.

Me thinks that your numbers are VASTLY inflated.

Rubbish!

I never have and never will bought anything from silkroad or any other "dark net" marketplace. I do find the whole phenomenon fascnating, however, so I've read and will continue to read about them. And when I do, I do so over my ordinary internet connection, knowing that the police will NEVER show up at my door because I happened to google "silkroad news", "ross ulbrict" or anything else.

Take off the tinfoil hats, everyone!

As much as developing countries can benefit from bitcoin, I'd lean toward not pushing it toward them until transaction volum increases and prices stabilize. Because if it is to truly be an international payment system like so many hope, it's volatility is going to need to go way down.  We in the developed world can put some savings into bitcoin, see the price fall, and replenish our savings from work. In the third world, savings don't exist like they do here - people moving from their local currency to bitcoin, only to see a significant drop will suffer to a much greater extent.

Bitcoins got potential. In the third world, it's biggest role is likely to be in he remittance market, just as an intermediate unit of account (sender buys bitcoins, sends to recipient in different country, who immediately redeems hose coins for local currency). I wonder how bitcoin stands currently - yes, transferring bitcoins is incredibly cheap, but when you factor in the spread from buying the coins on one side of the sea and the transaction, and selling for currency on the other side, how do those fees stack up compared to more traditional remittance schemes?

I don't understand why difficulty increases would be different whether the hashing power is concentrated in a single pool or spread out among many pools. Can expand more on that?

yeah, I can't spend 50 BTC for a name change... I just need to separate my bitcoin interested personal from the rest of my online life. I just started working for some very conservative people and i'm trying to clean up my online existence. This site might not seem too controvertial to you all, but in my particular situation, it's not at all beneficial and, I'm hearing, could even be detrimental. Not just here, I'll probably have to scrub my profile from reddit (i'll either have to delete my profile altogether or else delete a ton out of my post history), twitter (thankfully, can change your user name there), etc... Probably TMI, but that's my story... I'd be so much happier if i could just be BTC-Lucas or Lucas-BTC or something similar!

that's all, just wanting to see if its possible to change my name (so that things like my post history stay intact) rather than making a new account?

Thanks.

Darkccoin didn't fuck you. I know exactly who did, but you might not like that answer...

As for trying to cash out this amount, keep it safe AND keep it out of the knowledge of the IRS, you'd have a lot of challenges and steep, steep penalties when you get caught,

For instance, I assume that "safe" means deposited in an insured institution somewhere, and not just in a hole you dug in your back yard, correct?

So, you'd be needing to get $250,000 into your bank account without the bank reporting it. They have to report cash transactions of $10,000 or greater. That can be a single deposit, or a series of deposits if they think a series of deposits is all the result of a single transaction. And, they have to report if they suspect that you're structuring your deposits in such a way as to avoid those reporting requirements. The penalty for getting caught attempting to avoid any of the above to be egregious, like 50% or so.

Even then, when you get all the money into the bank without triggering any mandatory reporting things, you still have a problem. Interest income.It's not much, but if in 2013 you had $25 of interest income, and in 2014 you have $1,400 of interest, their computers will note the HUGE leap in amount of cash savings those amounts imply (at 0.7%, your $25 of interest implies you had on average $3500 in your savings account, whereas $1,400 in interest implies $200,000 in savings. So if there aren't any other items on your tax return that can explain the huge jump in in interest (sale of a house, sale of investments), then they're going to come knocking (well, really, they'll just send a letter) to find out where that huge increase came from.

I know a lot of people here will poo-poo me, but I do work for a lawfirm that does tax planning (amongst a lot of other related services) for high networth types, so i've seen and heard about a lot of the things that have caused them IRS difficulties.

Again, I would love to have the problems you have... And yeah, if it was me,  I would love to get to write a check that big to the IRS, just because if i owed them that much, that'd mean I'd made many times that for myself...

I envy your problems...

The tax man is gonna be an issue, I would honestly say that you save yourself a potentially HUGE headache if you simply suck it up and pay them off like everyone else does. They will discover your cash at somepoint, if you deposit it into a bank account. But, the tax hit won't be as bad as it could be - that the fact that the IRS is treating bitcoins like an investment asset rather than as a currency - that means that most of the coins you sell qualify to be taxed as long term capital gains, which is pretty much the most advantageous way to be taxed.

So, lets say you have $425,000 and that your tax basis in all these coins is $0.00. You say you want to cash out 60% of your coinage. You'll end up with

$170,000 in Bitcoin
$255,000 in cash

I don't know what your other income is, so rather than speculate, I'll just assume you have no other income. You have $255,000 in LT gains. $255,000 income puts you in the 33% tax bracket (don't worry, you're not paying 33% tax), which means that your long term capital gains are taxed at the rate of 15%, so your tax liability will be around $38,250, leaving you with $216,750 at the end of the day.

What yo do with it from there is anybody's guess.... IRA? Max out your contribition to your 401K (if you have one)? Ordinary investments? Cash? Purchase a home or condo? And so forth.

Point is, yeah, the tax hit is a hit. But you're being taxed at the lowest possible rate there is for it. 15%.

If you earned that money from your job, you'd be looking to pay around $67,000 in federal income tax, state income tax (i didn't mention that above, because i have no idea what state you're in), not to mention social security and medicare (another 7-8% or so, averaging things out since you only pay SS tax on the first 117000 you earn.)  

I don't think you can burn CPU-cycles just for the sake of it and have that be your proof of work.

You COULD create a system, whereby a rendering job is funded with x amount of Bitcoins and broken into a ton of tiny blocks. Each worker could be assigned a new, random block as soon as it finishes its prior block, and each block would be sent to three workers (at least). So long as those three workers all generated the same result it would be deemed to be a valid result, and they'd each split the reward for that block.

So, studios could access a huge amount of CPU power if they were willing to pay for it. But, in the whole world scale, it would mean that each render would consume at least 3 times the electricity as compared to if they ran the rendering process in house without worry about anyone trying to game the system by submitting false results.

But turning that into a blockchain?

I dont' see the cause for complaint.

On one hand, they could make chips, assemble mining equipment, dump it all into a datacenter, and then start paying ever decreasing divs, as they and everyone else keeps dumping mining equipment into the market.

Or, they could take those mining units they've manufactured, sell them for at least the max amount of BTC they'd expect from it over its lifetime (or even quite a bit more... remember the horrible deal that USB Block Eruptors became, yet people kept buying them up?), and you get your "mining" revenue all upfront from the chipbuyer, rather than have to wait for the chip to actually generate that same revenue.

Look at what's happened to difficulty since last July when ASIC's started hitting the market for real... now imagine how much ASICMiner would have had to reinvest in their operation just to maintain 10% of the market. Would there have been any div's at all, if that were the case?

Seems clear that selling chips is far more optimal than maintaining a presence on the network now that the ASIC armsrace is in full swing. I wouldn't be dissappointed by the shift in strategy, but rather thankful that FC & Co are openminded and nimble enough to navigate these waters.

Of course, i have no skin in the game, sold out of my shares a long time ago (before BTCT.co shuttered)

Everyone talks about how bitcoin is free of all constraints, yet when a high profile event happens (this, silkroad) there are those who out forward the idea of locking certain coins out of being used in transactions.  Don't you get, if the community came together and enabled such a thing, then those dreaded courts and governments could step forward and make the same requests?

No. Once you start locking coins out of being processed, then the entire idea of bitcoin and it's commence without constraints is over.

I know that that has worked so far, but that can't stay the case forever, else why would anyone mine?

I'm thinking well soon get to the point that there'll be so much hashing power on the network that all the new chips arriving won't cause such big jumps on a percentage basis. Maybe a few months, or maybe a year. But once we reach that point, buying into mining will become more feasible, as there won't be this insane demand that a mining setup pay for itself in 3 months else it will never pay for itself.

Are you still looking? I have exactly 6 to sell.

First, i'm not sure if i posted this in the right topic or not.

But say Satoshi wanted to come forward one day, but everything electronic had been lost (say, he lost his computer and didn't have his private keys anymore, nor access to his email address). Would he still be able to establish who he was with everybody? Or would he just be shrugged off like people saying they're the new jesus - saying "well, that sounds daily convincing, but if you can't sign your message with the private key to one of your old wallets, tough luck"?

I have a friend that was talking all about bitcoin back in 2010 and 2011 (still does). I sat around poking holes in his arguments for why this wouldn't work and implored him that if he was so confident, to put his money where his mouth was and buy into it to show me wrong. In 2012, I came across BFL and offered to ordered something from them, let him go 50/50 on it with me. In the intervening time between order date and delivery date, studied more and more about bitcoin, litecoin, etc, and dabbled some, bought a GPU to mine, etc. I don't know where i'm going with this, but to say, yes, I kick myself a little for not listening to him, but finally came around somewhat. As for him? As big of a cheerleader as he's been for the currency for 3 years now, he never even acquired even a single bitcoin. At least i was disbelieving about it, that's my excuse. He bought into the whole idea, and if he'd just gone ahead and spent any amount of his own money he'd be sitting pretty right now.

As it stands now, I'm still disbelieving on the phenomenon. Just being honest. But I also acknowledge that my crystal ball isn't always correct, so I've acquired a few bit coins over time to hedge against being wrong. Would i be a shit ton richer if i'd bought in when he first went on about it? Or even two years later? Yes. Willl beating myself up for missing out on it accomplish anything? No.

Who i really feel bad for are all the silk road people - buyers especially, but sellers too. Here they've been, acquiring and spending BTC this whole time - i bet a lot of them could tally their total spending and realize that they'ed have millions of dollars if they'ed just held onto their coins instead of spending them!

And then, there's that 10,000 BTC pizza guy. Talk about opportunity cost!

Not to mention campbx needs you to pick up a postal money or just mail a check (ach to come in two days). And coinbase, you can sell at today's price, but if you buy you have no idea what you're going to fill at, 4 days from now.

Basically liquidity is not your friend here. If you could wait for your money, though, you'd make tremendous returns buying at campbx or coinbase, and selling at mtgox, but from the sounds if it you could be waiting quite a while before the funds reach your account so you can trade again...