Thanks Script!  You just made my day 

"BitCoin" has no historical basis.  As theymos and others point out, the software calls itself "Bitcoin".  The original paper is titled "Bitcoin" and refers to "coins".  Here on the forums, Satoshi interchanged both the capitalised 'B' and uncapitalised 'b' versions for the technology, the software and both plural and singular versions of the currency:  I know because I checked before I decided to start using "BitCoin" in my own posts.  I wasn't trying to be correct, I was just creating an arbitrary convention for readability like the one FatherMcGruder proposed in December.  I'm not overly attached to it, but it does have the advantage of being unambiguous at the beginning of a sentence.  Consider, for example:

Bitcoin rates exceeded....(exchange rates)
BitCoin rates exceeded....(network transaction volumes)

Bitcoin trading could mean exchanging USD for btc
BitCoin trading could mean a type of commerce based on encoding contracts and other data into scripted transactions.

Bitcoin domain names could refer to domain names whose market value is approximately one btc, as in "penny stocks" while
BitCoin domain names could refer to domain names stored in the blockchain via a bitDNS scheme

etc.

For something that has the air of officialness like the "Introduction to Bitcoin/BitCoin" thread I'm quite happy to use whatever the prevailing wisdom prefers.  I do think it's quite reasonable for an open-source project/community to change their conventions for practical purposes should they so desire, but maintaining a creator's original capitalisation is also of social value in the respect that it signifies, etc.  As I say above, I'm not overly attached to my usage.  The readability issue really only comes into play when trying to differentiate technology from singular btc at the beginning of a sentence.

It's important to note that my use is not the historically "correct way".  The software calls itself "Bitcoin" and Satoshi interchanged both the capitalised and uncapitalised versions for the technology and the currency:  I know because I checked.  I was creating an arbitrary convention, like the one proposed by FatherMcGruder in December.  I'm not overly attached to it, I just did it to improve readability.


This is not correct.  I made the choice the first time I ran into the ambiguity myself, and there are many possible ways it can come up.  For example,

Bitcoin rates exceeded....(exchange rates)
BitCoin rates exceeded....(network transaction volumes)

Bitcoin trading could mean exchanging USD for btc
BitCoin trading could mean a type of commerce based on encoding contracts and other data into scripted transactions.

Bitcoin domain names could refer to domain names whose market value is approximately one btc, as in "penny stocks" while
BitCoin domain names could refer to domain names stored in the blockchain via a bitDNS scheme

etc.

Your dad is a wise man--BitCoin itself is supposed to be a currency, not a moneymaker.  The real work of growing the BitCoin economy requires people to build businesses and earn wages in bitcoins.  People making money in mining or speculating right now are just profiting off of being ahead of the curve.  It's still a long, hard road before BitCoin becomes stable and established.  There's no such thing as free money!

Yes, this will all be covered in the "Where do I get the free money?" thread.

Thanks Danube--some of these will be included in the existing threads.  Specific questions about using BitCoin in China, for example, will probably not warrant a canonical thread unless they show up again and again--they can simply be asked normally on the forums.


Just to warn you all, I'm going to disappear for a while now--it takes a long time to write and proof good answers to these types of questions!

In the long term, transaction levels and security are correlated.  If bitcoin stops being used, it will decrease in security and eventually go away.

Regarding a tangible real-world example of how currencies function when they are in limited supply and without a backing entity, see the so-called "Swiss dinar" in Kurdish Iraq.

The convention I hold to quite carefully is to call the technology "BitCoin" and the money itself "bitcoins".  This is largely so that even at the beginning of a sentence it can be clear whether I am referring to specific coins or the technology as a whole.  It is an arbitrary choice, but I feel it improves communication of the concepts.

The convention I hold to quite carefully is to call the technology "BitCoin" and the money itself "bitcoins".  This is largely so that even at the beginning of a sentence it can be clear whether I am referring to specific coins or the technology as a whole.  It is an arbitrary choice, but I feel it improves communication of the concepts.

All of those threads are currently under construction--and I will probably be making a master "security" thread at some point that links to both Vlad's and HostFat's methods of backup.  So much to do, so little time!

Just as a reminder to you all I am going to have a mod delete all your posts when this is ready to sticky, so don't be offended!

+1.  Audiences need tangible applications, not just abstract possibilities.

The specific reason that cryptocurrencies like BitCoin won't proliferate without heavily differentiated features is security.  Blockchain-based systems become more secure the more people use them, so there isn't a very good reason to use anything but the most secure one out there.  This means that there are very few if any equilibria where similar cryptocurrencies will coexist.  I could see fiatcoins (nondistributed cryptocurrencies with single trusted government issuers like today's paper currencies) and bitcoin carving out separate niches, but for almost any feature that proves worthwhile in a distributed currency it's very likely bitcoin would just add this feature, immediately making that the most secure way to utilise it.  It makes very little sense for there to ever be a competing version of BitCoin unless it is fundamentally different in some respect.

None of this even takes into account the network effects of being already trusted, already accepted, software and services being available for it, etc.  Why weren't there many competing shell currencies in 19th century Africa?  Because only one made sense for a given society at a given time, despite the trivial possibility of more.

Good!  Such extreme changes in our economic systems are at best very speculative and much longer term (decades or centuries).

Actually I recently pitched BitCoin unofficially at an invite-only TEDx event, and I do have quite a bit of experience with public speaking.  This would be great fun for me!

It seems likely that most users will accumulate both +'s and -'s as -'ed users try and cancel out their own "bad karma".  Public records or the advanced system would reduce this.  But there is also the fact that you can only - someone once every 10 days.  So as long as other users consider your minus unjust, they will be able to easily outvote it.

Business reputation is definitely useful, and that is precisely what the OTC ratings are for.  It's also very valuable, though, for a first-time visitor to the forums to be able to tell which users simply post a lot, and which have achieved some kind of recognition by their peers.  Especially if that visitor is a potential entrepreneur, investor, journalist, etc.  There are a lot of people who use the forums but don't spend a lot of time on them getting to know everyone.  We'll have to see how it goes--I think the advanced system sounds like a good idea.

This might be a good idea, too.

Welcome to the Bitcoin forums!  It's a diverse and happening place, but before you jump in here's what you need to know:

First, please read the "Introduction to Bitcoin" below before posting questions about Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a complicated technology, and it can take a while to wrap your head around how ingenious it is.  There are many people here to help, but they have also put in a lot of work already to explain things in detail.  Most questions have been asked before, and answered well.

Second, the following resources are your friends.

• The forum search function
• The unofficial wiki, with FAQ
• The academic paper describing Bitcoin
• This thread.

Finally, there are a lot of diverse opinions and personalities here.

• Be a little thick-skinned.  Some users here have prickly shells, but we've grown to love them.
• Nothing said here is an "official Bitcoin position."
• Bitcoin is not a company or an organisation--it is an open-source project that anyone can contribute to or participate in.
• The closest thing there are to leaders are the project developers.  Bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto.  The Project Lead is Gavin Andresen.
• The forums are moderated only for on/off topic, spam, and illegal goods.

Introduction to Bitcoin

Forget most things you've heard.  People discover Bitcoin in a variety of ways, but usually pick up some sort of misconception like "Bitcoin gives free money to people with computers" or "in order to use Bitcoin I have to use a program that wastes electricity for nothing" along the way.  Here is a good summary to help you understand Bitcoin in general, by focusing on what Bitcoin is and what problem it solves.  These two things are not typically well explained on most websites, and it is difficult to appreciate just how effective a technology Bitcoin is until they are understood.

What Bitcoin is:  An agreement amongst a community of people to use 21 million secure mathematical tokens--"bitcoins"--as money, like traditional African and Asian societies used the money cowry.  Unlike the money cowry:

• there will never be more bitcoins
• they are impossible to counterfeit
• they can be divided into as small of pieces as you want
• and they can be transferred instantly across great distances via a digital connection such as the internet.

This is accomplished by the use of powerful cryptography many times stronger than that used by banks.  Instead of simply being "sent" coins have to be cryptographically signed over from one entity to another, essentially putting a lock and key on each token so that bitcoins can be securely backed up in multiple places, and so that copying doesn't increase the amount you own.

Because bitcoins are given their value by the community, they don't need to be accepted by anyone else or backed by any authority to succeed.  They are like a local currency except much, much more effective and local to the whole world.  As an example of how effective the community is at "backing" the bitcoin: on April 4th 2011 30,000 bitcoins were abruptly sold on the largest Bitcoin exchange, consuming nearly all "buy" offers on the order book and dropping the price by nearly 1/3.  But within a couple of days, the price on the exchange had fully rebounded and bitcoins were again trading at good volumes, with large "buy" offers slowly replacing the ones consumed by the trades.  The ability of such a small economy (there were only 5 million out of the total 21 million bitcoins circulating then, or about 3.75 million USD worth at then-current exchange rates) to absorb such a large sell-off without crashing shows that bitcoins were already working beautifully.

What problem Bitcoin solves:  Mathematically, the specific implementation of the bitcoin protocol solves the problem of "how to do all of the above without trusting anyone".  If that sounds amazing, it should!  Normally a local currency has to trust all kinds of people for it to be able to work.  So does a national currency.  And in both cases, that trust is often abused.  But with Bitcoin, there's no one person who can abuse the system.  Nobody can print more money, nobody can re-use the coins simply by making a copy, and nobody can use anyone else's coins without having direct access to their keys.  People who break its mathematical "rules" simply end up creating a whole different system incompatible with the first.  As long as these rules are followed by someone, the only way Bitcoin can fail is for everyone to stop using it.

This marvelous quality of not having to trust anyone is achieved in two ways.  First, through the use of cutting-edge cryptography.  Cryptography ensures that only the owner of the bitcoins has the authority to spend them.  The cryptography used in Bitcoin is so strong that all the world's online banking would be compromised before Bitcoin would be, and it can even be upgraded if that were to start to happen.  It's like if each banknote in your pocket had a 100-digit combination lock on it that couldn't be removed without destroying the bill itself.  Bitcoin is that secure.

But the second way of securing the system, called the blockchain, is where the real magic happens.  The blockchain is a single, authoritative record of confirmed transactions which is stored on the peer to peer Bitcoin network.  Even with top-notch digital encryption, if there was no central registry to show that certain bitcoins had already been "paid" to someone else, you could sign over the same coins to multiple people in what's called a double-spend attack, like writing cheques for more money than you have in your account.  Normally this is prevented by a central authority, the bank, who keeps track of all the cheques you write and makes sure they don't exceed the amount of money you have.  Even so, most people won't accept a cheque from you unless they really trust you, and the bank has to spend a lot of money physically protecting those central records, whether they are kept in a physical or digital form.  Not to mention, sometimes a bank employee can abuse their position of trust.  And, in traditional banking, the bank itself doesn't have to follow the rules you do--it can lend out more money than it actually has.

The blockchain fixes all these problems by creating a single master registry of the already-cryptographically-secured bitcoin transfers, verifying them and locking them down in a highly competitive market called mining.  In return for this critical role, the Bitcoin community rewards miners with a set amount of bitcoins per block, taken from the original limited quantity on a pre-agreed schedule.  As that original amount gradually runs out, this reward will be replaced by fees paid to prioritise one transaction over another--again in a highly competitive market to ensure the lowest possible cost.  The transactions are verified and locked in by the computational work of mining in a very special way so that no one else can change the official record of transactions without doing more computational work than the cumulative work of all miners across the whole network.

In conclusion:  All this mathematical technology may be a bit of a mouthful, but what it means in practice is that Bitcoin works just like cash.  Bitcoin transactions are intentionally irreversible--unlike credit cards or PayPal where chargebacks can invalidate a payment that has already been made.  And there are no middlemen.  Transactions are completed directly between the sender and the receiver via the peer to peer network.

Because of Bitcoin's intricate design, the network remains secure no matter where or how you process Bitcoin transactions.  Which is incredible--no one else has ever tried to create a system that worked this way!  All previous monetary systems have relied on trusting somebody, whether it was the king, town hall, the federal reserve, or banks.  Bitcoin doesn't.  It's guaranteed instead by the laws of mathematics, and that's why it has everyone from technologists to economists very excited.  I'm sure you have lots more questions, so scan the index below to see if they've been asked before, then dive in!  The so-called "canonical" threads linked from this index are considered newbie-friendly zones; outside of them you're welcome to try your own luck.


Frequently Asked Questions about Bitcoin

Is Bitcoin a Ponzi or pyramid scheme?        See the canonical "newbie-friendly" thread for this question.

Where do I get free bitcoins?        Discussion thread here

What if someone bought up all the existing bitcoins?        Discussion thread here

What is a 51% attack? And what is double spending?     Discussion thread here

Won't loss of wallets and the finite amount of bitcoins create excessive deflation, destroying Bitcoin?        Discussion thread here

What happens if someone starts another blockchain or cryptocurrency?        Discussion thread here

Could miners collude to give themselves money or fundamentally change the nature of Bitcoin?        Thread coming

How can I store bitcoins securely?        Instructions here.

What are the pros and cons of using new bitcoin addresses for each transaction?        Discussion here.




As an experiment in improving feedback, please send tips for this post to 166kqXTt5VgtPYSCPFzYUvLRf9mTbzWzAD , not the address in my signature below.

Well, I haven't so far.  But I might be tempted to use it for people who are repeatedly abusive to newcomers.  In any case it should definitely be used sparingly, or else it will lose meaning.

Oh well--guess I will just need some mod support as work progresses.  Can someone sticky but not lock the New to BitCoin? thread?

Yes--please try and treat the feature wisely people!  It will be good if we can use it as effective meta-data rather than as a joke or game.

I think this is one problem the advanced reputation system attempts to address--users who get in a negative karma war will end up invalidating their own ability to influence reputation.  Can someone who has used the system comment on the "softer" points of how it tends to work out socially?

I think either the advanced system or karmalog would be good so that abuse of the system can be identified.  Has anyone used a forum where this feature worked particularly well?  How was it configured and what was the social convention around it?

Edit: Leapfrogged you there, SgtSpike.  Sounds like a vote for the ARS!

Yes, it will be interesting to see how it develops and/or how scores compare to my intuitions about the subjective reputations of other users.

Details of feature are available here.  Do we know the details of

for the forums?  It would probably also be good early on to establish a social convention of treating these ratings seriously rather than just as a joke.  As long as the established user base does this the feature should retain some correlation to its intended purpose.