An excellent point.  I aim to write an article on this sometime.  If I had to sum up what BitCoin really is in one sentence, I would say:

BitCoin solves the problem of how to have a widely used monetary unit without trusting anyone, by implementing a distributed proof-of-time server.

I'll be concerned once p2p filesharing is shut down.

If this attack works, I suggest it should be tried on p2p filesharing networks first as a test.  Oh....wait....hasn't that basically been tried?  I don't think many people would use a non-open-source Patriot Edition.

Personally I would see this type of regulation as a positive thing--if entities who are getting their coins frozen (presumably by court order of some kind) have to buy significant mining power to process their own transactions it is good for everyone.  To prevent forking they would be wise to process regular transactions too, and thus the overall difficulty etc. responds as expected across the board.  If some administration goes overboard and starts freezing so many coins that the regulated miners aren't making a profit anymore and are being out-competed by the underground miners, then the regulation will naturally be pushed out.  So there is a selective force for a regulated-but-not-too-regulated environment to develop.  Having some way to freeze (=make substantially slower, by court order only!) undesirable use of the BitCoin network would be a great way to keep the "non-infringing" uses of BitCoin at the forefront.  As someone looking to build legitimate businesses etc. on this that is a big boon.  If criminals want to use bitcoins, let them pay to amp up security for all the legitimate users!

Personally, I've decided not to use Google because I didn't buy any shares at their IPO.

Why is this a surprise?  Processing transactions costs money, and fees pay for that on an open market.  It will always be cheaper than something like PayPal by a wide margin.  Do you know of any other secure payment system that will process a $100,000 transaction for $0.01 ?  Pretty good deal imo.

That is an ingenious application of bitcoins--taking advantage of the fact that they have some value without needing to worry about their specific value.  I hope they're donating the proceeds back to the faucet!  That would be ideal.

Ironically, doood, that was precisely the venture from history I was thinking of when I wrote that last paragraph.  Great minds and all that I guess

Yes!  Usability improvements like this are key!!

The only way BitCoin early adopters make a lot of money is if the uncertainty over BitCoin's viability has caused it to be initially undervalued.  If the concept is proven, any similar system will not launch with that same uncertainty--either prices will start at a high level from the beginning if there is any good reason to believe the new system will succeed, or there will be enough competitors failing left and right to make "early adoption" a very risky proposition indeed.  Either way, there's no such thing as a money machine--no one is likely to make anything on a bitcoin competitor unless it has something fundamentally new to differentiate it.

Don't forget to vote for on- and off-topic questions!

The BitCoin Q&A proposal at StackExchange is nearly ready to move into the next phase.  All that is required are 15 more people to click "follow", indicating interest in such a site being launched, and for people to do some simple voting on the suitability of sample questions for the site.  Then, BitCoin will be ready to enter the "commitment" stage where people promise to either ask or answer a minimum number of questions should the site go live, followed by a "beta" stage and a full site launch assuming sufficient interest and involvement all the way along.

Who should follow this proposal?  Anyone who has ever asked or answered a question on these forums--whether they consider themselves a BitCoin enthusiast, an interested newbie, or just a curious passerby!  A StackExchange site, unlike a forum, is designed specifically to get the best possible answer for a specific question.  It includes a scoring and reputation system so that people who know what they're talking about are clearly identified, is much easier to search for already-asked questions in case you aren't the first one to ask it, and is search-engine friendly so that people don't even have to know the site exists to get their questions answered effectively.

While BitCoin has a strong and active community, both askers and answerers know well the frustration of trying to use the forums here for specific questions.  Askers only get good answers if they're lucky and are willing to read extensively (more often the topic derails into opinion wars and political philosophies), while answerers find themselves repeating the same answers to simple questions over and over.  A StackExchange site will not only be a safe zone for newcomers who don't yet know anything about BitCoin, but it will provide an invaluable service to the forums because of the possibility of linking to specific, quality answers--from anywhere!

tl;dr:  Please follow this proposal now!

learning what people believe > telling people what they believe

@CryptikEnigma you can definitely contact Madhatter via regular email.  He only makes PGP/GPG available so that people at least have the option of being private.  It's not like he doesn't read unencrypted emails.

Yup, the whole world will basically come online within the next two decades.

Todd kind of got all jumped on.  I don't know if he'll be back.

For the rest of you, if a rolling eyes smiley face can't introduce some jocularity the whole internet is in trouble   Let's try again.

  You americans have no sense of humour about yourselves.  Always so serious .

  You americans always think everything is about you.  Why an international project on the internet would be considered an attack on american currency is beyond me.

It is a nice way to explain it, but when you get down to the ultra-technical level it's also a perfectly valid abstraction for what's happening.  The mathematical operation miners are creating does not become a coin until its acceptance by the network.  That acceptance is predicated on the priorly coded coin schedule, and thus the ultra-technical origin of coins is that schedule itself.  Some edge cases that demonstrate this are:
-generate a block with a transaction awarding yourself more bitcoins than the schedule allows, and it is never accepted--you are essentially generating it for a parallel system that contains only you, so you are not the one who "makes there to be coins" in BitCoin;
-generate a block which is a perfectly valid block, only someone else generated one just before you did, and your branch gets orphaned with no ultimate award because the bitcoins are not in your block--they are awarded by the actions of the network according to the pre-coded algorithm, so you are not the one who "makes there to be coins";
-generate a block which takes advantage of an unseen bug to give you billions of coins and get accepted into the block-chain by the code of other miners, and your coins are still not accepted as valid--instead the code is rewritten and the block chain retroactively forked to eliminate your insertion, because ultratechnically speaking even the coded version of the schedule is only an implementation of the actual community agreement that is BitCoin, so you are not the one who "makes there to be coins".

So technically technically technically technically, BitCoins are an idea in the minds of the community who accept them, a specific joint agreement that is implemented in the BitCoin software and network, and via that implementation awarded to certain miners who generate what we all deem to be valid blocks.  Chances are that if someone started processing blocks without including any transactions we would deem those blocks invalid too, for example, and take measures to implement that assessment in the code of our client software.

And as just one last nail in the coffin, the code itself does not create any such thing as a bitcoin--only the right to spend one.

tl;dr: All the ways that we normally think of software are an abstraction--yet someone who says there is no such thing as a mouse pointer is wrong, because the mouse pointer does actually exist as a defined idea in the mind of the user.  The community creates BitCoins, and we award them to certain miners.

Although those are some reasons that people might use BitCoins, they're by no means the only ones.  For me, international usage is one of the primary applications that got me excited about BitCoin and I believe it could be the "killer app" for bitcoin eventually.  I also have very little interest in anonymity, and only like decentralization for its technical value.


@alittlegreen BitCoin will start to become practical for you to use when it starts to be accepted and exchanged in the countries where you work--then it will be a much cheaper way of transferring money to many countries than bank transfers or Western Union.  I'm kind of implicitly assuming here that at least some of those 15 countries you spend time in lack convenient financial access such as either all using the same currency or sharing a common banking system--if they're all EU member countries BitCoin probably won't help you that much for a long time.

But if my assumption is right then I would say BitCoin will probably be quite useful to you if it succeeds and becomes a bit more established.  Based on my own experience I suspect you currently travel with either US dollars or Euros and exchange them in local countries--BitCoin would essentially allow you to do the same thing without having to carry any actual currency on you because you would only have to get to an internet access location within each country and then would have access to unlimited BitCoin transactions.  This makes it a lot safer and could avoid strict currency import regulations that certain countries impose.  It would also reduce the costs of operating because the BitCoin network itself will always be very low on fees and will likely command a premium exchange rate similar to dollars and euros.  If it is even moderately successful BitCoin will probably start to replace Western Union, etc. as the primary method by which money is sent internationally because of the high fees of the latter, so many people will be happy to exchange it wherever you go.

For right now, Paypal is going to be simpler for you because most of your donors don't already use BitCoins.  They would have to convert into BitCoins and have you convert back out, which means the low internal fees don't help you.  But spread the word about bitcoins and how easy to use they are, especially in countries where financial services are harder to access!


You're very welcome!

Never was interested enough in World of Warcraft to pay a monthly fee, but I play on a private server (somewhat infrequently).  It's an interesting game--though I have to admit my style of play is to make a stupidly large income simply by playing the market for a couple minutes each weekend, then every now and then logging in to buy whatever gear and materials I want and play for a couple crazily overpowered hours .