It was a very weird time. Felt like a financial playground, really the wild west...no feds were about to come galloping in when the stagecoach got robbed, and the only justice was a public lynching by the forum mob.

If anyone is looking to buy some nostalgia, I think I still have some ASICMINER shares around here somewhere...

Speculating is fun and all, but the best thing I ever did was buy a bunch of btc in 2011 and just leave it alone.  I play a little with change here and there, but I think the bigger, long term questions - e.g., are cryptocurrencies here to stay? - are easier to guess than what some random coin is going to do in the next 24 hours.

That's great that you have references and a picture, but if you include your username and a date in the picture then folks will know that it isn't someone else's picture from 2012 that you copied & pasted...

I received my SSD from jorjito25 a week ago, its legit and working great...

Cheapest I got was around $5 after the crash of 2011. More than one person called me an idiot  .

A few points:

1) There is no legal or accounting infrastructure for large established companies to hold bitcoin in any meaningful amount.  Quite frankly, it would be negligence on the part of such companies to do so, as it would be tantamount to directly diverting gross income into an extremely volatile quasi-legal (especially for international companies) investment.  That said, even allowing bitcoin to be transacted is a huge, huge step towards building the bitcoin infrastructure and maybe towards these companies holding a position in bitcoin.

2) For years, people have been lamenting hoarders who do nothing with their bitcoins, creating a vicious and ultimately destructive cycle of price increases and further holding that would doom the currency to irrelevance.  Now that people are spending their bitcoins and the price is dropping, people are complaining of the exact opposite phenomenon.  Personally, I think that circulation of bitcoins is much more important than inflating the price.

3) Bitcoin is still in an inflationary stage - somewhere around 10% per year - and miners have (increasing) fixed costs that need to be recouped in fiat.  Frankly I'm surprised the price has held up so well.  That said, I don't expect any serious increases until the next block halving in 2016.

There's nothing magical about credit or debt cards - in the former case someone is vouching that you're good for the money in the future, in the latter someone is confirming that you have the funds already.

There's also no intrinsic need to use fiat for this sort of transaction. It is irrelevant whether the medium used is USD, bitcoin, or seashells, as long as the merchant and bank both work in that medium.  At least with bitcoin you have the option of cutting out the middleman entirely.

Comparing credit cards to bitcoin is pointless, because the two are entirely different (and not at all mutually exclusive).

I keep a significant portion of my bitcoins on an encrypted ironkey usb drive stored in a security deposit box and stored in a zip lock bag (in case of vault flooding, which was an issue in Manhattan after hurricane Sandy, although the ironkeys are very well contructed and would probably work after a year or more underwater). The ironkey uses hardware-based encryption and automatically erases and disables the drive after 10 wrong password attempts, so brute force isn't an option. The file on the drive is itself is encrypted with a password in combination with a keyfile that I don't keep anywhere near the bank.  I have an encrypted copy stored within a personal ironkey, also using keyfiles that I do not keep locally or anywhere that the drive itself routinely travels to or gets used.

Just remember, you're much more likely to lose coins than have them stolen (i.e., forgotten password, hard drive failure, house fire, ruined paper wallet).  For that reason I always make sure I have 2 working copies which are physically separated.  I also have redundancies for the keyfiles, which are necessary to recover the wallets, but its easy to keep copies of those in various places since they by themselves are not valuable to anyone.  The keyfiles are not labeled as such, obviously (you can use any kind of file).

Because it's a predictable pattern that is easy to profit from.  FC speaks, confidence increases, share prices go up, silence ensues, price falls back down. Unless this announcement comes accompanied by a dividend (not likely), you can expect prices to drop afterwards.

I notice that the people complaining about Bitcoin "fading" have only been registered through the latest boom-and-bust cycle.  Having been through 3 of these, this lull after the hype is pretty much standard.  That said, I don't expect anything huge to happen until late 2015/2016 when the next block halving happens.  Right now, bitcoin inflation is around 10%, which is huge for any currency.  Keeping prices level at this point is somewhat surprising, especially considering that loads of bitcoin are currently being exchanged for fiat through huge mining enterprises and major retailers accepting bitcoin.

It could survive, just send a usb with your transaction to every node through the mail.  Simple.

Everything is easy in hindsight.  I remember buying bitcoins when they were $5 and feeling slightly embarrassed about wasting cash on magic internet money.  Back then things were much more underground and unsure. Most people, myself included, probably didn't really expect bitcoin to succeed, even if we thought the idea was brilliant.  There were a lot of questions about potential bugs, what ASICs would do if/when they were developed, hard forks, upscaling, and legal questions that just had not been encountered yet.  I just looked at my purchase like a donation to an interesting cryptographic protocol that I wanted to support.  After the first big crash in 2011 (after reaching the ridiculous peak of $32), the death of bitcoin was declared and many people sold their bitcoins in the following months at a loss somewhere around $2-5. Since I saw the whole thing as a donation, I never bothered to sell mine.

Don't think of it as wasted money, think of it as tuition for the School of Hard Knocks.

If I were sending $500,000 somewhere, I'd treat it about as seriously as a nuclear ballistic missile launch.  He was lucky this time, but someone that careless will have trouble holding on to that money in the long term.

How is this less complicated than the current system where the jury just votes?

Actually, that is complete nonsense.  We know from failed bids that he paid more than $675.  Even if he had got the coins below market rate, he could not sell them without crashing the market and losing money overall.  And this isn't his "new fortune." He already had a fortune, he just exchanged it for bitcoin.

Finally, he's already publicly discussed his plans for the coins.  He is a professional.  He didn't get control of millions of dollars formulating the sort of ridiculous conspiracy-laden get-rich-quick schemes that everyone on this forum seems to be obsessed with.

I just told you I'm spending my bitcoins, and you tell me to go away.  Maybe you don't "see" people spending bitcoin because you, like so many, form your conclusions before you go looking for premises.

People have been saying this for years, but it's simply not true.  Back in 2011, you could buy socks for bitcoin.  Today Overstock.com and NewEgg are surpassing their estimates for bitcoin-related sales.  I've been around since 2011 and I would've have loved to have had the opportunity to buy something besides Casascius coins back then (although in retrospect, forcing me to hold made me quite a bit of money).  Now I pay for VPN service, food, hotels, and electronics with bitcoin on a regular basis.

I don't know how people expect to "see" others spending their bitcoins.  In any case, its time for this argument to die.

I ordered some of these peppers and other sundries from the website. Arrived 5 days after order.  The "small" box was quite generous in size.  Haven't tried the sauce yet but the peppers are NO FREAKING JOKE.  I love hot food, but a sliver of pepper had me drinking straight out of the milk jug.  Tastes good, very sweet with an interesting bitterness in the background, but I definitely need to train up to handle these peppers.  It honestly scares me to think there are hotter peppers out there right now, one day someone is going to melt their face off with these things.

Someone who was serious about this would have done that long before they spent any money.


...so your strategy is to give money away?



Well that's brilliant. The legality of bitcoin gambling is an open and yet unchallenged question, but if you throw some fiat money into the mix you go a long way towards eliminating that ambiguity.


Pass.