While I agree completely with the idea of someone giving a TED talk about Bitcoins, I fear we're going to stall when it comes to deciding who that someone should be. It can't be someone who thinks this is just an experiment, but it also can't be someone who thinks it's a panacea. No religious zealots, but also no anarchist hackers. No bankers, no libertarians, no drug lords... What we need is a philosopher who can explain the concept of money to a bright audience, take on the usual battery of anti-bitcoin arguments and knock them down one by one, hopefully while eliciting a chuckle or two from the crowd...

Does such a beast exist? I hope so, but doubt it.

Bitcoin Laws Imminent

Yup, the very difficult quantum maths is not perfect, so the "space daddy" theory of everything MUST be right! As Einstein said, two things for sure, the infinity nature of the universe and of human stupidity, and there are doubts about the former.

This is being discussed in another thread. First, and foremost, a search of the US courts website found not even a passing mention of bitcoin. Secondly, in the US, Congress makes laws, not the courts. There is no law in the US against trading in currencies other than the US dollar, contrary to what the trolls may suggest. Thirdly, and this has also been discussed ad infinitum, how exactly would the US propose to make bitcoin illegal anyway? Shut down the internet perhaps?

Right now, I for one don't give three hoots what the US wants to do about bitcoins... I'm MUCH more interested in the approach the Chinese government will take. This could be a godsend for a country that wishes to trade with the world, yet wants its own currency to be artificially devalued.

Cheers, everyone

Sort of proved my point, didn't s/he?

Heh... back in 2000 NOBODY knew who the president was :-)

Nope, and it reminds me of when president Eisenhower flew into a rage when he was told by his advisors that 50% percent of Americans were of below average intelligence...

Last time I checked, criminal laws in the US are made by the legislature, not by the courts. Really, that was the best you could come up with?

This has the potential for being some of the greatest news yet! Can't wait for it to come out.

48 percent of Americans say another great depression is likely? Hmmm... 48 percent of Americans also don't believe in evolution... Jus sayin'

I'm sure this made sense in your head, but it lost all logic in the translation.

It's only 14:25 gmt...

Technically, the sound of U doesn't start with a consonant, but with a diphthong, which for the purposes of the a/an rule is about the same thing... A Euro, not an Euro.

And this is only because we're all bored out of our minds waiting for 15:00 Zulu (gmt), and then we can sit and watch the fireworks.

There a couple of other "values" to bitcoin as well... it's naturally deflationary, uncounterfeitable, decentralised...

We can all predict bubbles that have already happened. Few of us can predict them before they do.

See? This is why we wade through the sea of trolls, because once in a while someone comes up with a truly awesome idea! Well done TraderSteve!

and while you're here... email confirmation of things like BTC address change for withdrawals, transactions beyond certain limits, etc... simple, but very effective

Let me try to jump in here before the Libertarian crowd starts pelting you with innuendo about how your precious US dollars and government guarantees mean nothing.

Imagine that in the same week, 1/260th of all the US dollars in the world had been stolen, and just a few days later someone had hacked into the New York Stock Exchange, causing stock prices to plummet. Put yourself in that particular situation for just a second, then think of what the value of one US dollar would be under those circumstances... and how long it would take to recover.

Well, pretty much the same thing has happened with Bitcoin. In one week, if we are to believe what we read (and there's never an absolute certainty that things are as they appear on the internet), 25,000 BTC were stolen, then just a few days later the exchange through which 90% of all transactions take place (and which truthfully is really partly an exchange, and partly a BTC bank), was hacked.

Yes, both of those were hard blows to the Bitcoin economy and concept... and yet, this little currency/commodity has somehow managed to steam on ahead, with prices rising back to values that not only are similar to those before the Mt. Gox collapse (just three days ago!), but that reflect a ridiculous profit margin for anyone who had purchased BTC before June 5th (just two weeks ago!).

If you understand the concept of currency, or a commodity, as never having intrinsic value, but only being valuable inasmuch as its fundamentals are a solid basis for the trust of people to transact with it, you have to be impressed by how bitcoin has recovered.

THAT's why you should invest in it. Is it possible that the original programmer left a backdoor open? Conceivably, yes, but don't forget bitcoin is open source, and there are a lot of spectacularly smart people out there looking at it... and yet, when a few of these smart people decided to do something bad, it wasn't against bitcoin itself, it was against one person's unsecured password and against one exchange which had grown too big, too fast for its own good.

Cheers,

Agreed, Bitmarket.eu has this extremely simple function, whereby any changes (to your email address, BTC withdrawal address, etc) has to be confirmed through a two step process. Simple and effective.

Agreed, if Bitomat got their act together, translated their website into English and other languages, and allowed different currencies to be traded, they'd be pretty much unstoppable.

Heh... when a tsunami is coming, you can either stand on the beach and yell "Thou shalt not pass", or you can buy a really big surfboard!