I can replace "Monero" everywhere in your post with my choice of an alt-coin and I can have the argument as yours.

So we should have a separate heading for each and every alt-coin in existence.

OK, you got me 

But the casascius coin and the one I mentioned have different purposes. If you just wants to get someone curious and involved with BTC, the coin can do the job even if it does not have any funds on it. (They can buy their own BTC or Satoshis I don't care   )

Casascius coin may be for someone who is well versed in Bitcoin game and wants it as a collector's item.

No, but we wouldn't be at $235 either.

I am waiting for Satoshi's p2pfoundation account to become active now and post:

"I am not EhVedadooAnonimato"

And what good is it if they're just going to sell those BTC right away and turn them into fiat again, by creating large sell walls everyday?

Remember the price fall for BTC started and got worse when large merchants (Overstock, Dell etc.) started accepting Bitcoin? They did not actually hold or used their BTC, rather they converted them to fiat 'on the fly' using services like BitPay - which caused large sell walls.

The ideal solution is to just stop gambling.
But as you said, it is hard to resist the temptation when you are addicted to it.

So I would suggest you use a very stringent cold storage to save your BTC. Just create a paper wallet and put it in a bank locker (or any other safe storage that you can't access on daily basis or very frequently). Whatever BTC you get, immediately send them to this cold storage. Problem solved. If you can't access them you can't spend them.

There is no doubt the people who invested earlier have multiplied their money several-fold if they sold now.

But the pump is gonna be over and NOW is not the time you want to get in.

Nice try! Keep going.

Ditto. A coin that goes from 2 satoshi to 14 satoshi in 2 weeks of time bounds to fall on its face within no time.
If anyone on this thread has bought at lower prices, this is the time to sell everything you can and get off the train. Otherwise lose all you invested.

For me, bitcoin.com domain is already re-directing to:
https://bitcoin.org/en/

I'm sure it must not be only me, though?

Japan is also infamous for its forced sex or rape movies largely known as 'pink films' - the name has become almost a Japanese trademark.
I don't know if has any relation to world war and USA but there is a cult following for pink films in Japan, some directors explicitly focusing on such works.

I always wondered how a country full of such porn and pink films has such a sex problem and dangerously low population growth.
Now I understand that porn and pink films ARE the reason for low sex and population growth.

For gifting purposes, I prefer a 'dummy' physical Bitcoin, which looks same as the Casascius one, except it does not hold any private keys so basically a collection item:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Hot-Gold-Plated-BTC-Physical-Bitcoin-Commemorative-Hobby-Art-Collection-Coin-127-/261865138280

I just gifted one to one of my friends to get him started.
They're way cheaper and gets the job done of making people curious about Bitcoin and get them started.

That sounds like good news to me. I always wanted to buy cheap coins during "HUGE BIG" crash. Now we have it.

BRB, checking on my fiat deposits.

On the very first page of this thread, you can find a note of the successful trade and the name of the person who accepted the BTC and send the Pizza:


The seller goes by the username "jercos" however when I tried to look up the forum, I couldn't find the username in the list. Probably he left the forum or his account got abandoned during forum migration/upgrades. May if jercos is still lurking around using a different account. Only he can answer.

I see almost 45% people voted for Bither; however I have never heard of this wallet before.

Are there any advantages to using this wallet over Multibit or Electrum? I visited their website which provides no information about its features, just the download links. I can see it also supports Android and iPhone which is a good thing, but couldn't find more information.

What creates more suspicion is that he changed the authoring date on his blog post about Bit Gold to make it look like it was posted AFTER the release of Bitcoin, when in fact it was published BEFORE the release of Bitcoin - or at lease what the web archive shows.

If he truly had no connections to Satoshi or Bitcoin, why would he care to do that?

Until now I have been using Multibit, so far so good. Lightweight and fast.

But I have been facing some issues - not really issues but features I'd like to have. Like checking balances for individual addresses, sending BTC from a specific address in wallet etc. which is currently not supported by Multibit.

Someone recommended Electrum to me and I'm seriously thinking to switch.

The article points out a wide range of 'coincidences' between the activities of nick Szabo and Satoshi. Too many to call them just coincidences or to ignore them.

A) Nick acknowledged that .... he was among a small group of people who .... laid the foundation for Bitcoin and created many parts that later went into the virtual currency.

B) Nick's most notable contribution was a Bitcoin predecessor known as bit gold that achieved many of the same goals using similar tools of advanced math and cryptography.

C) In 2014, Nick joined Vaurum, a Bitcoin start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif., that was operating in stealth mode and that aimed to build a better Bitcoin exchange. After his arrival, Mr. Szabo helped reorient the company to take advantage of the Bitcoin software’s capability for so-called smart contracts.

D) While Nick was at Vaurum, the array of arcane skills and knowledge at his command led several colleagues to conclude that Mr. Szabo was most likely involved in the creation of Bitcoin.

E) Nick mentioned bit gold, saying it harnessed many of the same obscure concepts, like secure property titles and digital time stamps, that made Bitcoin possible. He also said "....you can go through secure property titles and bit gold — there are so many parallels between that and Bitcoin that you can’t find anywhere else.”

F) Many concepts central to Bitcoin were developed in an online community known as the Cypherpunks, a loosely organized group of digital privacy activists. As part of their mission, they set out to create digital money that would be as anonymous as physical cash. Mr. Szabo was a member.

G) He worked for six months as a consultant for a company called DigiCash.

H) In 1998, he sent the outline for his own version of digital money, which he called bit gold, to a small group that was still pursuing the project, including Mr. Dai and Hal Finney, a programmer based in Santa Barbara, Calif., who tried to create a working version of bit gold.

I) When Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper describing Bitcoin appeared in the fall of 2008, it cited Mr. Back’s hashcash. The first people Satoshi emailed privately were Mr. Back and Mr. Dai, both men have said. And Mr. Finney, who recently died, helped Satoshi improve the Bitcoin software. All these people were members of Cypherpunk community.

J) In spring 2008, before anyone had ever heard of Satoshi Nakamoto or Bitcoin, Mr. Szabo revived his bit gold idea on his personal blog, and in an online conversation about creating a live version of the virtual currency, he asked his readers: “Anybody want to help me code one up?” After Bitcoin appeared, Mr. Szabo changed the date on that blog post. It then looked as though it was written after Bitcoin’s release, rather than before, archived versions of the website show.

K) In 2014, researchers at Aston University, in England, compared the writing of several people who have been suspected to be Satoshi and found that none matched up nearly as well as Mr. Szabo’s.

L) Unlike Mr. Dai, Mr. Finney and Mr. Back, Mr. Szabo has not released any correspondence from Satoshi from this period or acknowledged communicating with him.

M) He wrote about it again at greater length, noting the similarity between bit gold and Bitcoin. He acknowledged that few people would have had the expertise and the instinct to create either of them.

N) May 2011 was when Mr. Szabo went on a lengthy hiatus to work, on a new concept he called temporal programming. May 2011 was also the last time Satoshi communicated privately with other Bitcoin contributors. In an email that month to Martti Malmi, one of the earliest participants, Satoshi wrote, “I’ve moved on to other things and probably won’t be around in the future.”


Last but not least: