I've put a lot of thought into what I want to do with my bitcoin when the revolution comes to a close. When the whole world enters bitcoin, there will probably be a global bitcoin mania sending prices to unbelievable and unsustainable highs. At the same time, the destruction of the legacy financial system will send stocks and real estate to all-time lows. People will do anything to buy bitcoin and will panic sell everything else they own at bargain prices. That will be the proper time to exit bitcoin and buy promising companies and resources.

Those of us with insight will then be in a position of great power. I believe curing mortality ought to be one of our highest priorities, since we will literally die if we don't solve this problem. Other important projects are artificial intelligence, quantum computers, nanotechnology, the colonization of Mars, and educating people about liberty. In the coming years I will chart out a plan.

It's perfectly safe because they can always revoke the domain name if you manage a double spend. Same thing if you did a credit card charge back.

Every once in a while I will talk to a new person about bitcoin, and they'll actually be interested in it and want more information. In the past I have resorted to sending them an email with a bunch of links. I realized what I really needed was a web page with lots of information and links all on one page. I was not aware of any such web page existing, so I have started making one: http://diveintobitcoin.com/

So far, Dive Into Bitcoin has a nice "What is Bitcoin?" section containing 5 separate analogies on what bitcoin is. I'm writing the next section, "How Bitcoin Works," right now, and it already has a nice section on hash functions. Eventually I hope to cover basically all relevant aspects of bitcoin, like how to mine and what's the deal with altcoins, as well as provide extensive links to further information.

The source is also available on github if anyone is curious: https://github.com/ryanxcharles/diveintobitcoin.com

I would appreciate any suggestions on what content I should include in the guide, as well as any typos or grammatical mistakes I may have made, or any other improvements you think would be good.

Amazing. I just read about WebRTC today thanks to the new version of Firefox which has this enabled by default. This is definitely the next step in exchange technology.

Could you post some screen shots?

Then again, it's not like it matters if a line is longer than 80 chars, and letting the line extend past 80 chars makes it easier to verify the signature manually.

Looks good to me, except the bitcoin signature is 88 chars long, which is longer than the 80 chars that is standard. The simplest thing to do is let the signature wrap with a limit of 80 chars per line. Then just remove the whitespace when reconstructing the signature. In other words, here's your signature:

-----BEGIN BITCOIN SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Signed by Inputs.io on 25/06/13 07:50:30

This is a signed message generated by Inputs.io

-----BEGIN SIGNATURE-----
1MDeZptpVfaNemwoSpeeph2P1UgHuQM62m
IIW/rq62ip/MtTSZbCZSdoQSkJKeWPyp6yJ1MxQFhzfmMlnSib1QUsYt8FOMYw9zzr4BnLfPM/0bIlPV
DiKVE6U=
-----END BITCOIN SIGNED MESSAGE-----

This Bitcoin Magazine article lists all of them: http://bitcoinmagazine.com/the-rest-of-the-year-bitcoin-convention-roundup/

Crypto-currency Conference in Atlanta on October 5, 2013. http://www.cryptocurrencycon.com/

Sounds like a good idea. I'm down.

Thanks! Absolutely. I'll give an update after a few months if I remember (anyone reading this thread in the future... remind me if I have forgotten).

(And if someone wants to move this to the services sub-forum, that's cool with me.)

Based on my emails with Riley, it seems they can't legally pay bills other than rent because it requires and unreasonable amount of overhead expenses calling the various utility companies.

I assume they are willing to pay landlords because the payments are always large and thus, long term, they will earn more money from each bill. (That is my speculation.)

When the service billpayforcoins.com came out, I was very excited. I had recently converted to full-time bitcoiner, and I needed to live off my bitcoin savings while I created the company that will hopefully be able to fund me in the future. I got in touch with Riley from BillPayForCoins to figure out if they were trustworthy or not. I told them I would be willing to take a gamble with them, and I would pay my June rent with them, and then if things worked out, I would write a positive review of them on the BitcoinTalk forum and reddit. (Unfortunately they had to remove the ability to pay for most bills due to legal reasons, but they still allow you to pay rent.)

I'm here to report that my landlord has officially received the check. It took three days for the check to be delivered. My landlord sent me a picture - the envelope and check were all written out by hand. (I'm not going to post the picture for security reasons.) Their checking account is titled "BILL PAY FOR COINS LLC" and they are from Westlake Village, CA. (For the record, I'm based in St. Louis, MO.)

I'm happy with BillPayForCoins and intend to use them to pay my rent for the foreseeable future (except July... I forgot to cancel my bank's automatic bill pay and so I won't need to pay rent again until August).

Service: BillPayForCoins.com
Rating: 5/5.

Also on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1fnmdn/i_paid_my_rent_with_billpayforcoinscom/

At the recent Bitcoin 2013 conference, I was very inspired by other bitcoiners in their success in creating local bitcoin communities. I have started a new bitcoin meetup.com group in St. Louis, Missouri available here:

http://www.meetup.com/St-Louis-Bitcoin/

There were a total of 5 of us at the first meetup last Wednesday. The next meetup will be announced on the meetup.com page. Tentatively I think we'll have another one next Wednesday, since there should be enough interest for one.

It's almost two years later and I stand by everything I said, with two exceptions:

1) There can be more than one cryptocurrecy if they use different proof-of-work. This is one of the points unk was trying to make. He was right, I was wrong. This is why I did not foresee the rise of litecoin. However, for psychological reasons I believe bitcoin will always be the gold to litecoin's silver.

2) Speculating on bitcoin because you believe the price will rise does produce wealth, and does not merely represent a wealth transfer, for the reasons Terpie was arguing - it signals that others ought to take a look. They benefit from this because bitcoin actually is the future of money.

Thanks for the correction. I must have misremembered.

I wrote the article this thread is based on. Although I've taken my website down, you can see a copy of the article here:

http://themonetaryfuture.blogspot.com/2011/06/bitcoin-is-economic-singularity.html

I was obviously wrong about some of the predictions, particularly the timing. The exponential growth of bitcoin stopped shortly after I wrote the article. At this point, I'd say it is very unlikely bitcoin is going to be the world's money in a mere two years.

I was also wrong to suggest that people should take out loans to buy bitcoin. Although I think the long-term trend in the price of bitcoin is still up, I clearly underestimated the probability of a significant crash before it reaches new highs. Shortly after I wrote the article, bitcoin shot up to $30, but then eventually dropped down to $2. I felt a lot of pain at the $2 mark.

However, I still stand by some of the basic predictions of my article, although have learned to be a lot more cautious about predicting timing. Consider the following facts:

* Bitcoin is what it claims to be. A secure, open-source, decentralized digital currency with a limited supply.
* The economic properties of bitcoin are ideal. (In particular, the limited supply, pseudonymity, divisibility, and market-based transaction fee price setting.)
* The technical properties of bitcoin are either ideal or good enough to be a world currency, with two possible exceptions. 1) The cryptographic tools that bitcoin uses (especially SHA256 and RSA) may be found to have weaknesses, which would enable attacks on bitcoin that would depend on the nature of the weaknesses. 2) Quantum computers may be able to crack RSA (but this problem is easily solved, even without changing the cryptography of bitcoin at all, by keeping balances in each address low enough that the effort to crack the key, even with a quantum computer, is not worth it).
* There are no other players in bitcoin's domain, and there probably won't be, because they would have to compete with the momentum that bitcoin has.
* Bitcoin fills niche markets, like online gambling, porn, drugs, and speculation that support its growth from zero to something sizeable.
* Bitcoin is economically superior to all commodity moneys because it is virtual. (Don't give me the "intrinsic value" argument... the intrinsic value of gold is merely what got it off the ground. Today, the price of gold, like the price of bitcoin, has almost nothing to do with its "intrinsic value".)
* Bitcoin is superior to all fiat currencies because your value is not constantly snatched by the central bank and well-connected elites.

Because bitcoin is superior to all other moneys, and because it cannot be competed with, the market will eventually choose it as the world's one money. Exactly when will it be that your grandmother buys her groceries with bitcoin? I don't know. But it will happen. My only reservation about this is the hypothetical weaknesses in bitcoin's cryptography. My position here is that by the time any weaknesses are found (should that ever happen), bitcoin will be so popular, and so many people will have an incentive to keep it going, that everything will be done to convert bitcoin to a new protocol while preserving existing balances. Once we convert to quantum bitcoin, there will no longer be any question over whether it is possible to break the cryptography. It will be cryptographically perfect.

Agreed. A good buying strategy is the same for what most people should do with gold and silver. Buy some bitcoins every month, regardless of the price. In the long run, you will probably be ahead. The idea here is that, like gold and silver, bitcoins are money, and it is better money to save in gold, silver and bitcoins than fiat currencies. Don't treat it like an investment where you try to maximize your gain. Just treat it as savings, and that's why you buy some every month, just like you should be saving your money every month.

Has anyone else noticed how stable the weighted average price is over the past 6 months?



Notice how the weighted price is about $10.50 going back up to 6 months. The price has been highly volatile, of course, but perhaps this price makes some kind of economic sense. If I had to guess, this is basically the price that can be supported by libertarian computer nerds with disposable income. Not every bitcoiner fits into that category, obviously, but as a sort of average, this could explain why the price has settled on this value. All the libertarian computer nerds with disposable income have already adopted bitcoin, and we'll need to invade a new demographic for the price to rise further.

Yeah, our planet is finite. But we're going to space. Economic growth will continue.