Uh, this is not part of any movement. 1,249 hits since they started. And the site has a video with David Icke, who thinks the British royal family are reptilian extraterrestrials. 

Ya think now that Wagner's out of the picture a little, we could try not to choose someone even more f*cking embarrassingly ridiculous as a spokesperson?

I think this is the more important point. Merchants like us who are basically extraterritorial but legally liable face an uphill battle dealing with the conglomerated banking and payment processing interests. But Bitcoin only serves a utilitarian purpose for us as long as our customers are able to buy it with their paycheck and redeem it for bread, or something they can buy their bread with. We're wholly dependent on the functioning of the trading houses, they're the ones who absorb our risk and act as our interface with the world.

Now if it's not Bitcoin, it's gonna be something. Bitcoin didn't spring out of a void, it came out of a basic need that's developed to hold your value outside the government-controlled monetary systems. That demand is only going to increase as further corrupt regulation, sponsored by the banking sector and rammed through by their government cronies, continue to tighten the noose around the middle- and upper-middle class people who spent their lives playing by the rules only to see their life's savings swept up in the giant ponzi scheme that's playing itself out around the world. The further we sink into the crisis, the more people see they have no control over their own survival, the more realize they've been turned into slaves to these interests, the more people will turn to alternate currencies or anything that puts a little of their wealth off the grid for the future. The most productive land in Soviet Russia was the 10% that was set aside from collectivization for personal gardens in the '60s and '70s. [correction: it was 2% of the land, and it accounted for 1/4th the agricultural output. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_Soviet_Union]

Then and now there was a system of corruption masked by, and in the name of, social equality...where distribution from the able to the needy still turns out to be another way for parasites to rape the innovators and producers of value at the point of a gun. Yet the fact that the demand existed then, and exists now, for ways of storing personal wealth outside the crippling system of corruption, did not and will not make it a mainstream action. Even now, in North Korea, there are people privately producing what vegetables they can get away with growing and selling...they're basically in the same position as people who want something like Bitcoin to store their wealth in the Western world. A much worse day-to-day position, but not essentially different: Their product isn't their own.

"Fiat" isn't so much a description for currency as a description for the means by which governments disabuse citizens of their God-given rights as human beings. By fiat, they declare their collection of taxes on penalty of imprisonment. By fiat, they make it illegal to buy or sell outside of the channels they regulate, so they can take a piece of everything. By fiat, Steve Wynn can open as many casinos as he wants, although he personally could never do what we've done. By fiat, we're barred from taking bets in the US, or trading normally through other methods.

But we, and others, will make the most of the opportunity to blow this whole worm-ridden, corrupt corpse of a system sky-high. Maybe not us, maybe not Bitcoin, but the tighter they pull the noose on the ordinary man the more resistance they'll meet.

So fuck them. Bitcoin -- whatever else it might be -- is proof you can't keep humanity in a permanent state of oppression anymore. It might be a wild ride the next few years, and I'm sure it will be. We're gonna keep riding the waves.

Sorry to hear that, dude.

I don't personally give a fuck if Julian Assange is the most famous man on earth, a 15 year old in a basement in Omaha playing with puppets, or the daughter of the sultan of Brunei. I sent $100 to Wikileaks last year a few days before their payments were shut down, and I did it on my personal visa debit card for no other reason than to make a statement: I can support whoever the hell I want, and I believe in transparency.

My payment never reached WL, and I never got it back. It happened two days before they were blacklisted by the payment processors. So I've got reason to be mad.

If you look at the direction that the world's going, you'll see a pattern similar to what led up to the fall of Rome, the Great Depression and the Banking Crisis: The consolidation of so much wealth and power into the hands of so few, who are (importantly) less and less accountable, and more and more inbred and complacent over time. The rich can keep gettin richer forever, but they can't stop their children from being squandering idiots. Extrapolate over a few generations and you have the built-in mechanism that keeps humanity from ever turning into a permanent 1984-style dictatorship: The incredible loss, inefficiency, lack of production, sloth, greed, self-destructive urges and nihilistic desires that come along with a spoiled rich child's sense of a right to a larger piece of the pie than his betters, the people who actually think and create to produce value.

I'm not dragging Bitcoin into this as a way to rectify the current slate of wrongs, but I'll say that at the moment it's a symbol of economic defiance, and a hair's breadth from true political defiance against the current power structure. I'm proud to support it as a merchant and an entrepreneur, and I see it as the necessary next step in our social evolution as a species.

Long story short, I'm gonna send my contribution again, in Bitcoin this time. And I'm gonna start sending regularly. Why? Because no one has the authority to tell anyone else how to spend their capital.

You're just saying that because it takes two hands to type your username on a dvorak keyboard...

I don't usually post on the general board, but StrikeSapphire is doing everything in our power to promote BTC as a vehicle of trade to a wider audience, and in that vein we have a really exciting new giveaway we want to announce.

StrikeSapphire.com, the only complete & legit Bitcoin casino, is now giving away free Bitcoin QR cards from PayMyAddress.com with any deposit of $50 or more. We believe these cards are part of the bridge we need to build between the fiat currency of today and the digital currency of tomorrow, and we want to put them into the hands of as many people as possible, at our own expense.

Upon deposit you'll receive an email with a special link letting you sign up for the card for free. You'll receive two cards. One with your public address:



Plus our Player's Card with your Sapphire deposit address (and our original Mayan Gold game graphic):



Limit one set per customer. Shipments are sent worldwide (excluding the US, or anywhere that playing with us is prohibited by local law).

Come & get 'em!

Josh Strike
Founder/CEO
StrikeSapphire.com

We're still innovating... and now for something completely different. The first of its kind anywhere, and only playable on StrikeSapphire.com, only with Bitcoin!

Introducing...Scuba Cube!



Check out the quick video demo here:
http://youtu.be/lJV40hu9J38

The game has 100% RTP if played perfectly in Hard mode. Come try it out!

Ignore the douchebag. The current price is a dip. The more important issue is getting the currency to be treated as a regular exchange method every single day, for many more people than are using it right now. That means -- give more people reason to use coins.

I don't see how any of these things stop it from being a useful way for people to make anonymous transactions online -- which was ostensibly the original purpose of the currency. The fact that it doesn't meet your criteria as a national currency or a viable platform for future speculation is probably a good thing for those of us who are interested in simply having a payment option that (a) we don't have to pay third parties to use and (b) isn't regulated by a government.

You're a good coder. You need a full-time designer. But that's not the problem.

Here I go being blunt. The problem is that games like this don't turn big profits. The reason you don't see a lot of board games / multiplayer parimutuel stuff on mainstream casino sites is that they don't tend to be worth the cost of developing and marketing them. That's not to say that mainstream sites aren't blindly stuck in their ways, or that a particular game couldn't go viral. And I think you're going in the right direction, which is to try to spark a sensation, just keep churning 'em out and waiting for one to be a hit. That's basically the same thing we're doing. But the other problem is that a lot of good ideas that could go viral otherwise aren't having the chance right now, because they're hampered by the small size of the Bitcoin gaming market.

I think it would be great to have some really well-designed, parimutuel board games all under one roof, playable for Bitcoin, and separate from casino-land. Games like this are legal in the US, so there's a much bigger market. A site that just ran Bitcoin chess, checkers, go, battleship, connect four, risk, etc., that charged a 1 or 2 BTC/mo. subscription fee plus extras for tournament entries would probably be a big hit.

Just curious, who designed your software?

I sort of assumed they were the owners of bitworldpoker.
Seems like a lot of work to set something like that up just to take it down in a couple days.

That'd be us, right? Just to clarify: We only handle deposits and withdrawals in Bitcoin. It's true that bets and accounts are denominated in USD, but that's because we're taking on more payment options and we can't have everybody using different currencies. We're the only licensed, non-US casino accepting Bitcoin to date. And like most casinos, we've blocked players in the States in accordance with UIGEA and the Wire Act. You would too, if you knew what we know.

We also have no professional relationship or agreement with GoWest -- not yet, at any rate, although I wouldn't rule it out because I like his style. But we didn't ask or pay for ranking on his site. He's a player. His affiliate link is for the same referral program we offer to every one of our 550+ current players. He's been a member of the site almost since we opened, and he's caught good bonuses and run up some solid wins more than once on the tables & slots. That's all there is to it from our POV.

Just out of curiosity -- what happened to this site? It was up for like 3 days and disappeared 

Hey MD.

For the record, here's the thread where we went from not taking US deposits to flat-out-blocking the US entirely:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=41368.0

Americans living abroad are welcome to play, as long as they log in from a country where it's legal.

40 minutes until the tournament starts!!! We got our GMT and our London time mixed up... so there's more time to get in...

Tournament signups for this evening's freeroll are now open! 10 players max, $30 pot (about 5.5 BTC at the current rate). The game starts at 9PM GMT.

This got a little off-track, because transferring your most recent wallet to the "thing" in your pocket is always going to be a problem. But what if the thing in your pocket was automatically encrypted, and could only be decrypted when you punched in a pin code at a merchant who plugged it in, and only for an amount you agreed to in person? Wouldn't that kind of solve the problems?

The program would require a PIN that decrypted the wallet; the receipt would show the amount taken out by the program and your remaining balance.

Bitpay's nice. I don't have an iphone and haven't tried it. But again, scanning QR codes seems like a really hackish implementation. I'm trying to think of ways around that -- to access the wallet directly without the wallet owner giving up private keys, but in a way that gives the merchant instant verification that the coins were really in the wallet, really in the blockchain, and really sent right then.