No particular value in that widget...it's pretty easy for the interested consumer to make his own.

To imagine that the people who manage our monetary and political systems are clueless mouth breathers might be fun, but is probably vastly incorrect.  It could be the case, and it could be that something as complex as the federal reserve, BIS, and various departments of state all operate in some mindless random fashion, but it seems unlikely to me.  And I see increasingly less evidence that such entities operate with the well being of the general public as their primary goal.  I make my investment decisions and formulate my 'tinfoil hat' theories accordingly.

I strongly suspect that TPTB are fully aware of, and largely in control of, the demise of the USD.  Far from 'self destruction', I suspect that it will be a great leap forward for them.

If _I_ were doing the engineering, I would formulate things such that a bulk of the population were in need of the support of the government for survival.  Like having government issued and government re-charged debit cards for buying food, paying bills, obtaining health care, etc.  In this way the population is dis-incentivezed toward picking up guns or stirring up trouble on twitter, and will likely be antagonistic to those who reject the new monetary solution as such people (i.e., us Bitcoin users and those of us who might hold PM's) would be a legitimate threat to their survival.

As an added benefit of such a scheme, inflation could be tuned by putting card holders into debt.  Indebtedness is especially effective in keeping people working for limited pay so that is another feature of such a scheme.

Personally speaking, if I got hungry my BTC would be the first thing on the auction block.  In fairness this is mostly because I have never had any interest in stocks and sold any that I have acquired ASAP.  I also have completely shunned any IRA crap and tend to sit on as little cash as practical.  But I'd certainly hold on to my PM's and property longer than my BTC which I view as highly speculative (but something which I can secure more effectively than almost any other asset which is an unusual and welcome feature among my choices.)

Debt (aka 'money' under our current monetary system) has deflated in some sectors.  There is a desperate effort to offset this by accounting (FASB rules changes involving mark-to-market for instance) and shifting debt to other sectors (namely the government's balance sheet) but it cannot go on forever.

As always this is just my read of things, and I am by no means an expert.

I believe that we've had significant deflation for a few years and...

...all of the above (the pension funds being gone already but just not really widely understood.)  To my surprise, PM's have held up fairly well in this environment.  As awareness of the magnitude of the problems becomes more widely understood is when PM's (and hopefully also Bitcoin) will start to take off.

I believe that all current monetary systems, and most throughout history, have a built in life expectancy defined by mathematics.  And that we are nearing the end of the one which is currently dominant and, by virtue of globalization, fairly universally used worldwide.  I could be wrong...I often am.


I'm sure that we'll see what Sinclair calls 'cost push inflation'.  I am also betting on war as a time-tested way for the leadership of nations to deal with such problems.


I only ever started buying PM's as a break-even way of storing value, and that remains my philosophy.  I do, however, allow for the possibility that they are undervalued through various schemes so I am (or at least have been) obtaining them at bargain rates.  Happy days.

That explanation (liquidation of performing assets) has been used in the past and as far as I can tell it's held water, or held water on par with other theories.  I'm waiting for some clarity on the CDS situation, and even more so on similar CDS issues with other countries besides Greece in hopes of some really significant liquidations.  If such a thing filters down into the physical markets in a significant way, I'll back up the truck (again.)

Bitcoin could have a giant increase in value because that is what BTC is worth thanks to the supply constraints and usability built in by the designer(s).

Bitcoin could go to zero if it never really 'catches' either because there is never a real need for the solution or because it is attacked effectively by those it threatens (and the resources at the disposal of such entities are vast.)

A third option which I did not really try to bring up in that entry is that Bitcoin could become a victim of it's own success and fail in the face of issues involving a combination of scaling problems + exploitation of the attack vectors that these problems open up.  I suspect that BTC values will approach zero in this instance though having control of elements of the block chain will not.

That is my current philosophy on the issue.  I have no idea which way things will go, but it is my nature to be prepared for failure and be pleasantly surprised if good results transpire.

I have had to sit tight on my PM supply and wait it out for a year now and then while things consolidate.  Thankfully I have had zero difficulty doing so and ignoring all of the people calling a top.  Maybe this will be the time that the PM "bubble" finally pops, but I can think of no plausible change in the mechanisms which have been responsible for the increased value over the last decade.  There are things about PM's which concern me quite a lot and caused me to diversify, but a popping bubble is not really one of them.

I project that Bitcoin will either increase in value by several (if not many) orders of magnitude, or it will go to zero.  I think that the latter is much more likely than the former and always have, but I do hold enough BTC as a long-shot bet that if it takes hold I'll do much better than I possibly could with PM's.

Voted no, but of course there is no way to be sure.  I've seen no particular evidence (unlike, say, 9/11 being a false flag.)

I suspect that the 'banking elite' are actually favorable to Bitcoin as it solve problems they might have to a much greater extent than us plebs here on this forum.  I think it just as likely that the surprisingly favorable mainstream-ish coverage is some sort of (or evidence of) 'elite' interest in Bitcoin (again, in a positive direction.)  Basically it would be a waste of time to dick around with bitcointalk.org, and probably dangerous given that the operators are likely strongly supportive of Bitcoin and would like nothing better than to catch 'manipulators' red-handed.

There was some thread similar to this earlier on this board.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3141.msg574197#msg574197

When I was fooling around with arbitrary QR code generation I burnt one for bitcoin.org onto a bill (example in thread) thinking that people would be curious, scan it, and find themselves surfing the bitcoin.org site.

I only have a laser printer hooked up, and the ink didn't stick well.  And it was a giant hassle to align the bill right.  Probably illegal to for all I know.

Just for the record, the check didn't bounce.  Between USD and BTC, Tradehill returned around $2500 in value to me with no muss, no fuss, no bother.  Jered and co join ~weex as individual who I would tend to have confidence in in future business dealings.

Thx for the clarification.


Completely understandable.  It does seem to me from some of your other posts that you are sensitive to the variety of privacy considerations that people might have in addition to the challenges facing both the producer and consumer ends of the user base.  I'll look forward to seeing how your offerings evolve going forward.

No, no.  An earlier adventure that I was thinking about was a way of giving out BTC to the general public to get more people involved.  I envisioned a solution which did not require the recipients to have accounts on the donation system, but the concept was so foriegn as to not be broadly accepted (and a real bitch to try to explain.)


I could not put it better.  From a system design point of view, I think that the best way to make people feel like they are not being taken advantage of is to have a system so simple that there are few realistic way to do so, and to give the users all the tools they need to verify things to their level of interest.  Simple systems also have other benefits in my experience.

I really like JAV's Instawallet approach.  I have to retain and keep secret one URL, but that's it.  Even if I do my part, he could still take me for all the BTC I have there, but that is clear both through his documentation and from common sense so I just keep some spending money with that service.  JAV never requested more info from me than he needed, and if I want an extra level of privacy from him, I just have to be careful about from whence I access the site.  (I've actually not checked my Instawallet for a while and have more funds there than I should at the moment...though no more than I can afford to lose of course.)

I appreciate that Bit-Pay is facilitating adoption by mainstream vendors, and hence my comment.

It does occur to me that a great many economic relationships could be handled by Bitcoin in it's native form and specifically _without_ need for accounts.  If any organization is keen to get me to have an account, I in turn am especially keen to NOT have one with them.  (I'm sick to death of everyone wanting more info on others than they need for their stated business goals and this is really becomming endemic as the Internet evolves which is, to me, one of the reasons that Bitcoin is such a breath of fresh air.)

In the case of PMF, and a lot of other things I've dreamed up, the actual needs are highly simple and there is no need for accounts due to the features inherent in Bitcoin.  As I mentioned earlier, if I have a green address of PMF's, I can send both funds, and instructions (by way of a small transaction for a specific amount.)  PMF need only an address to send what they owe me (refund if not fully funded, or installments in more complex campaigns.)  If they keep open books, I can cross-check that I am not being cheated...and if they won't keep open books there is some problem there and I don't want to be involved.

A solution such as I've outlined should be very easy to secure with no external access at all, and the logic involved in the BTC flows and instruction set should be very straightforward to code.  Have you guys (in bit-pay-land) considered offering a service to make such a solution practical to those who don't absolutely need a pay-pal-esque solution?  Needless to say, you could run in entirely in-house and square with the vendor in ways that users don't care about.

I didn't particularly mean to 'dis your service and I think you are doing great things, but I would rather see third-parties avoided when possible.  I, for one, am both annoyed at having to keep track of a zillion accounts all over the place and also sensitive about information within those accounts being leaked.

PMF with their lofty goals, big talk about hating the mainstream markets and financial systems, and not-completely-retarded (if busy) principle actors should be able to figure out 'native' Bitcoin...particularly for a campaign which has no revenue stream.  And if they cannot, surely they can find someone who can.

I've never gotten around to figuring out PMF.

Ideally PMF would get it together with Bitcoin and I would be offered and offer exactly one thing each:

 - They tell me:  A Bitcoin address to send Bitcoin to (green)
 - I tell them:  A Bitcoin address to remit any proceeds to.

I don't want to dick around with bit-pay accounts, PMF accounts, 'following' this and that, and on and on.  Bitcoin should be stone simple and anonymous and as best I can tell, it _could_ be.  I have not a whole lot more interest in having a bit-pay account than having a pay-pal account to be honest.

All of you folk who want to know in detail the issues behind trying to run a Bitcoin exchange might consider starting one yourselves and finding out first hand. 

We are lucky that we found out what we did from Tradehill about the Dwolla fiasco.  Tradehill would have had to tell us something about why they dumped Dwolla, but we got a pretty good picture of things before they clammed up (particularly those who hit the Mountain View meetup.)  There are two reasons why it would be inadvisable for Tradehill to bare all, and I don't think that either are any particular secret.

1)  Unfortunately, the business being what it is, it burns bridges to share the dirty laundry with the general gaggle of plebs.

2)  The details and intricacies of the business are hard won 'trade secrets' in much the same way that the suppliers of a retailer are.  Assuming that the Tradehill guys intend to pursue endeavors in related fields going forward, the knowledge gained in running Tradehill gives them a well earned advantage.

I'm as curious as the next guy, but Jered et-al owe me nothing...as long as the check I got when I arrived home just now does not bounce

I find [some people's] blind faith disturbing.

Actually, that is not exactly true.  I'm glad to see it because these people may help me end up in the green, but I suspect that Bitcoin will ultimately survive, if it survives at all, on the back of people who have a more coldly pragmatic view of the world around us and who are innately aware of both the virtues and the warts of the solution...and of alternate solutions (i.e., gold, or even the USD for that matter as everything has it's strengths and weaknesses.)

By my estimates Mt. Gox is paying the bills and the rest have not made a dime unless there is a lot of dark-pool activity, but as best I can tell there is not.

Bitcoinica is probably doing OK as a low-overhead show.  (Due to low headcount and shunting the cost of the financial hassles to the exchanges.)
 

Ummm...the scammers and thiefs?

TL; skimmed

I would say that Tech won the recent SOPA skirmish largely because the Western peeps still have to much power.  I'll expect a re-doubling of efforts to reduce that power through a combination of economic disenfranchisement, distractions (probably war with Iran which serves several purposes), and intimidation.

But anyway, corporate titans at battle make for a good show.  Tech happened to be on the right side of this one, but that was strictly accidental.  They'll almost certainly be on the wrong side of various future police state efforts is my guess.