That's not the question. The question is why Mr. Bernanke wants it not to be money. That's not really a question either, but I digress.

Slashdot really loves Bitcoin:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/07/13/2227223/Bitcoin-Mining-Tests-On-16-NVIDIA-and-AMD-GPUs

Ask any one of those horribly suffering under the overloaded use of $ whether they have heard of the Thai Baht. Ask them to point out where Thailand is. The continent at least.

Before you twist my meaning, I'm not saying the country is obscure and its economy doesn't exist. I'm saying the average person in the target audience has no clue and won't mind.

If as you say Bitcoin remains as insignificant as it is now, then it's not going to be a problem. If it grows to a stage where it will be, then people will know to look for the context, just as those horrible sufferers manage to now.

In the meantime, Bitcoin isn't hobbled by yet another artificial hurdle.

Are you the gatekeeper?

Ehm, you are advertising those hundred other ways 24/7 by running the client 24/7. Not having open ports/services listening that aren't immediately needed is common security practice.

Also, just because you don't know there is no security hole in something doesn't mean there isn't one and there never will be. Blind faith and security by obscurity are bad practice. A port scanner may even store the info regarding your service in some database and return when an exploit is found.

I see what you did there.

Well, it does look like an asymptote towards 100k users, so unless something changes it will die since you need a little bit more than that for critical mass (like a few million). That change needs to come from mainstream merchants supporting it.

It's only a terrible idea if you are against the quick adoption of Bitcoin through existing infrastructure. Or proud Thai of course CAD and AUD use $ as well, and I haven't heard of US protests over this. BTW, it already has wings, lots of people use it.

I'm not against a new symbol at some point, but don't think it's a problem to reuse a fairly obscure one, I'm sure most people are able to make the difference from context where necessary.

Heh, I think there is a higher concentration of feds that are already reading this forum than most others And uh, she's fat! (/me ducks)

Brave

If it goes to hell, it's coming back in 3 days

Exactly like Linux. From Wikipedia:

"In the United States, the name Linux is a trademark registered to Linus Torvalds. Initially, nobody registered it, but on 15 August 1994, William R. Della Croce, Jr. filed for the trademark Linux, and then demanded royalties from Linux distributors. In 1996, Torvalds and some affected organizations sued him to have the trademark assigned to Torvalds, and in 1997 the case was settled. The licensing of the trademark has since been handled by the Linux Mark Institute. Torvalds has stated that he trademarked the name only to prevent someone else from using it."

Bitcoin development is centralized too in a way (it's easy to find and cease and desist the devs), so are the exchanges and merchants. There is more chance of Bitcoin being trademarked and abused by a hostile/greedy entity than by whatever community entity is willing to do it. Maybe the FSF could take it under its wings or something (not sure if they do trademarks as well besides copyrights). It certainly will be more expensive to ligitate after the fact, and depending against whom, more or less successful.

Wait, are you saying Blizzard should stop accepting cash?


You got it the wrong way around. The most likely reason they aren't going to support Bitcoin is because credit card companies will threaten to make life difficult for them if they do.

I guess this means Mt. Gox has their shit together?

You do realize that if that 'normal' rate of inflation continues for twenty years as is, the $800 will have become $3200, right? Gold at $1500 now seems a pretty good investment then

Massaged inflation numbers in red, actual in blue, from http://www.shadowstats.com:



A deflationary spiral is already happening worldwide, it's just hidden beneath bogus statistics and stimulus packages that temporarily make it appear everything is going well, but in reality are only making things worse. Those packages come from going deeper into debt, which will have its price. The sad truth is, if the Fed does nothing, there will be a sudden crash, if they continue the massive money printing, there will be a long, drawn out one (also see 1920/1921 followed by the roaring twenties vs. the great depression, followed by hyperinflation and WWII..). The sudden crash is better for everybody, even those who stand to lose most from it (politicians/banksters), they just don't want to know it.

None of this is being helped by institutions like Goldman Sachs being allowed to make the same gambits over and over again with impunity (latest example: collude with corrupt Greek politicians to hide Greece's debt while betting against them on the side), and getting bailed out if it backfires.


That logic is mindboggling. Massive money printing, in your own words, will make your Dollars worth more than something they don't massively devalue? If the TBTFs do fail, the first thing to go is the USD. No amount of printing will help that, only accelerate (hyperinflation).

BTW, the off-book debts that are coming out also exist in the US, the UK and the rest of the Eurozone, but they are by far the largest in the US. Hence the ~400k USD debt per capita instead of the so far officially acknowledged ~45k.

If you think gold is in a bubble, at least invest in oil, grain, fresh water or something else that will retain its value then. USD is not that something (neither is the Euro, and definitely not the GBP). I wouldn't actually advise investing in Bitcoin either because that's even more risky right now, but if I had to choose between BTC and USD, I'd take BTC.

And this isn't investment advice, I'm not qualified to give it etc.

Which has nothing much to do with how many steps you have to take to get that Dollar. Even though Bitcoin is pretty new, any teenager will know long before you ever heard of it if it's interesting to them in some way (because the other kids show up in school with it, they need it for some online thing or whatever). The same thing is true of many other new technologies that the current generation takes for granted. Their thumbs are apparently now the most developed because of SMS, while for older generations it was the index finger. How long does Facebook exist and how many people do you know who hasn't heard of it? You underestimate how fast something new can spread.


The average adult does not know a whole lot of things. Most won't ever care, as long as they aren't hungry or homeless. Or their children tell them.


Not gonna waste time on that since you have made up your mind anyway. You should just know that probably half your items are or will be superfluous soon. There are already sites taking out the steps for conversion and allowing you to pay directly in Bitcoin. If Blizzard ever supported Bitcoin I'm pretty sure some would specialize on making this a one-click process. I expect online wallets and Bitcoin clients with built in CC to BTC via exchange plugins or similar will be commonplace in the not too distant future.

Once you have Bitcoins, for every renewal you just grab your mobile and punch in the amount, select WoW from your bookmarks and you're done. Seconds later you are online. Android wallets already exist, FYI.


You're confusing the items on your own list, the above would be step 5. Step 9 takes seconds. As for step 5, last I heard people were using Dwolla because it's much faster than CC/banks. Maybe you should try another exchange? There are at least 2 professional alternatives now (Tradehill, Camp BX), more soon enough.

The steps involving Dwolla can be eliminated too BTW, you can wire to an exchange directly. AFAIK people use Dwolla because it's faster and/or they already have money in there, and possibly if wire transfers are more expensive from say Europe to a non-EU exchange.


I don't think so, if you read other threads the whole weekend dip has been debunked to begin with. Proof: exchange rate didn't dip this weekend, it increased slightly (14.40 to 15.00 right now).


But they can. I don't know where you are getting your information, exchanges are 24/7, transfering Bitcoins in or out is a matter of seconds. Deposit/withdrawal of Dollars takes longer, but that is the exact same thing as any other USD only merchant, CC etc., the delay is on the bank end, nothing to do with the Bitcoin economy. Except the fees are lower for BTC. Also, there are already plugins for ecommerce suites (magento for example, 2 others I forget the name of) and merchants who have dynamic pricing and immediate conversion on an exchange, e.g. bitcoinworldmarket.com


Sorry but that's just bullshit. Look up the merchant list on the wiki (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade) and see how many are charging the exact same or possibly less because of the lower fees.

BTW, I could guess the function of timecard from the context but wasn't familiar with the term (I would have called it prepaid card).

If the US says they aren't going to pay the Chinese, or invent some financial vehicle around it (like inflating the USD into nothingness), the Chinese will retaliate by dumping US treasury bonds. That will default the US without any US say in it. If you say that doesn't matter, then what do you think will happen to Chinese imports? What will happen to the US economy if all the shelves start to resemble the soviet era eastern block? The only thing preventing this is China not wanting a sudden manufacturing collapse either. But eventually they will get to a point where they don't need the US export anymore and other interests will matter more (Taiwan for example).


That depends on whose numbers you believe. Even the cooked numbers say 85% in 2009, 95% in 2010. QE and raising the debt ceiling makes sure it will be over 100% this year.




Heh, the US debt is at a historic high, the US has the largest amount of debt in absolute terms (larger than the whole Euro zone together) and if you exclude tax havens and maybe the UK only a few catastrophies like Iceland, Greece and some IMF colonized African countries come near in relative terms. If you believe some conspiracy sites, the US debt per person is something like 400,000 USD currently. Good luck repaying that by going into more debt (what do you think raising the debt ceiling is good for?).

That's only a problem if there are no smaller independent pools and individual miners left and a concerted attack is mounted in the form of a large attacking pool trying to subvert the blockchain, but this means a lot of investment and once the big pools return they might have done some work that will invalidate the bogus links in the chain anyway. In fact, if it comes down to a catastrophic event once they are back the big pools could decide to cooperate on fixing the blockchain (sort of like a Mt. Gox rollback ).

The average botnet operator will gain more by simply participating (have their own pool if other big pools reject them).

Meta moderation sytems open up a new can of worms though. Slashdot comes to mind: since they changed the site a couple of years ago they have almost made it impossible to read lower rated posts (you literally have to click through a dozen times on large threads) and it's basically impossible to get rated if you're not logged in, which means both manufacturing consent and hiding the often most interesting content of dissenting voices (valuable e.g. in whistleblower type situations, people posting anonymously due to employer etc.).

Also, some TLA with a large staff and sophistaced bots will overwhelm such systems by numbers. They could build up lots of personas to the level this is possible, then use them while building the next batch to replace any fallen ones.

I don't think this is going on here yet, the noise isn't very sophisticated

Heh, thanks, now I don't have to make a similar list I was going to include writing a CV, getting a job, going through the hassle of getting IDd/rejected/reapplying for a bank account, waiting for your first paycheck etc. - since Jalum conveniently ignores the fact that US Dollars do not magically fall out of the air either.

You only need many of the steps once, and some of them are nonsense to begin with (9. waiting for confirmation over the weekend, huh? It's seconds for reception, minutes for confirmation - half an hour if you're extremely unlucky). Also, similar to USD, once you have Bitcoins you can use them for other things as well, which inevitably will follow if/when Blizzard starts supporting them.

Cool about Wuala, LaCie is a big brand.

BTW, I don't personally think Blizzard will jump into this soon, they will probably want to wait it out regarding legal status and the biggest issue is that their competing payment providers will undoubtedly have something to say about this.