Then I guess you hadn't followed him for long enough though.

He still tried to talk down the market after the bottom, check out his posts.

But then again, I take off my hat to you guys who just want to give everyone credit and say nothing but good things after you have sealed your win.

How thoroughly some Americans are spoiled and brainwashed by the credit card industry is beyond belief, they seem to be completely ignorant that there is a much superior method for customer protection, which Bitcoin fully supports and improves to a new level, and has been employed to process trillions of dollars of transaction in China by payment processors like Alipay, called escrowing.(shocking revelation!)

Escrowing provides equal protection for the seller and buyer, unlike chargeback, the favored system in the U.S, which unfairly protects the buyers only and allows a buyer to conveniently scam a merchant on the pretext that no good is received, because the fund is placed in the wallet of a third-party, and once there belows to neither the buyer nor the seller.

You may ask, how does the third party verify if the buyer is lying when he requests a refund? Dead and simple, all delivery companies have a auto-tracking system, which will update the escrower about the status of the package, once the buyer signs the package(which is required if he wants to accept it), the escrower will be immediately informed, there will be no way for you to lie.

I was shocked to find even Paypal doesn't support escrowing, cause the business model is beyond maturity.  It may sound crazy but I am convinced that had the U.S has proper escrowing payment and delivery industries, their unemployment problem would have been solved by now by a C2C platform like Taobao, which alone supports millions of online shops and creates 20 million jobs for China,(no kidding)

Chargeback is a dinosaur and should have long gone into the history, yet there is this journalist defending it like it's jewel in the crown.

If you have been paying attention(which you shouldn't ), he is still happily trolling away like nothing had happened.

Wow, this guy seems to know a thing or two about investment! Did any of you listen to his advice? Or are you suffering because you didn't?

Maybe just cash out a small portion and tell them it's all you have?

There is an alternative I think, you first check if the sender's address has unconfirmed transactions, then wait a few seconds for propagation time, then for small-time purchase you can just deliver the goods, as race attack would have been infeasible and only Finney attack would work.

Besides, for online purchase of physical goods, there is no need to worry about confirmation time, since you have evidence for double spending, you can always refuse to deliver.

Brainstorm: is there anyway to make fee payments anonymous as well? I figure that since on one hand some are concerned whether there will be enough unsuspected users to help them hiding the trail, otoh some are concerned about fees, it would be one stone for two birds if we can give some users the opportunity to have their fees paid by those willing, if they choose to do a Coinjoin transaction.

If there is a limit on the rate of growth of the blockchain size, then I guess no matter what confirmation time you use it's going to be all the same?

Also, I doubt if shorter confirmation time block really has the merit of adjustable security-security here is something binary, you are either completely screwed or completely fine, one successful double-spend is enough to do much damage to people's confidence in Bitcoin, so we better stay on the conservative side.

So it's Monday and we are back with the joy of following after Mr.Gold for a scuba dive.

Made me rethinking why Satoshi has to vanish, people would certainly hate him much more than they admire him had he remained in the public space.

Such hatred is pretty evident already in this forum, see how mnay have made baseless "premining" accusation against him.

That might happen, and Satoshi made it clear in the beginning that it might happen. That's why it's a honest system, people don't try to make you believe everything is OK.

That being said, the exodus of small time miners may stop if the price gets high enough, at the current price miners get a revenue of 1/10 of that of Paypal each year, which still has large space to grow, a Paypal-scale revenue should enable millions of USB miners to make a healthy profit.

Of the last 5 years, miners have released bitcoins almost entirely according to the plan, other than certain periods of high fluctuation of hashpower, show me one government that was able to do that.

We know at least Hal and Sirius were also involved in the January 2009, and they haven't shown us the originating address yet.

And the snowball will get bigger and bigger, until no one in the world is left uninvested, then people will make a shocking discovery......"I have this, everyone has this, why don't we use it as a currency?"

That's the plan.

 

PMs are real money, but they are like that nation under God, indivisible.

This is not a problem with a sraightforward solution, as it will bloat the blockchain, checkout casascius's probabilistic nanopayment and Mike Hearn's rapidly adjusted micropayment proposals if you are interested.

I got tired of people complaining about having to pay 8 cents min transaction fee........

It just occurs to me that divisibility is one of Bitcoin's great features as a investment, you can't normally buy fractional share on the stock market, or a fraction of an ounce of gold/silver, so when a bubble is forming small time investors have to avoid buying as they risk losing dearly in a market crash, but even when BTC price reaches $10000/BTC you can still buy 0.001 BTC and take advantage of the potential rally continuation, as the most you can lose is only $10, this would potentially make Bitcoin the first product to be investable, and investable rationally by everyone, even really deprived people.

Because that's the unit they use in the gold market.

Yes, gold will always have value, as copper, nickel, and many other metals, but we are talking about speculative value here.

The general population is insanely ignorant about the current financial/banking system as well, but they just sheepishly follow the instructions given to them.