It's the same in Australia, South Africa, Spain, and many other countries, and going that way in the UK soon too.

Bring on Mesh Networking! No SIM needed.

Don't sweat the individual trades or the short-term moves. Look at the all-time chart and see that there's strong underlying interest in Bitcoin.

Anything under a penny per transaction is as good as free, when the nearest competitor is PayPal.

Oh no, Nefario, if you think 1% is too high then you should be very keen to operate your service for 0.9%.

Exactly. In ten years time, my "retirement bitcoins" will either be worth nothing, or will be worth enough for a comfortable retirement.

There's no need to hold a lot of coins, because no-one needs "twice a comfortable requirement", if you know what I mean.

I'm not saying how many I have, but elsewhere on this forum Vladimir suggested 2100 bitcoins (one ten-thousandth of the total amount) for a long-term investment fund, and I think that's a wise suggestion. It's still possible for a determined user to buy mining equipment to gain that many, or to buy that many on the open market with some investment funds. But of course you need to accept the possibility of losing your investment if Bitcoin somehow fails.

It's not worth the electricity, heat and noise. If you have a GPU, don't mine with the CPU.

At the time jgarzik posted that comment (October last year), there was no charge for trades at MtGox. As ptmhd says, it's currently 0.65% which seems reasonable to me.

Take a look at the transactions. Each one has exactly two outputs, one of which is 0.05 BTC. So isn't this just the Bitcoin Faucet dispensing coins to the crowd of people who have just arrived from Slashdot?

Incidentally, I was watching these transactions yesterday, and noticed something odd. Every time a block was generated, there was a pause in these transactions.

Well, there already has been one Bitcoin clone which is the bitcoin test network, and no-one expects it to reach parity with the US dollar any time soon.

But yes, if Google or Facebook created a Bitcoin clone it would be interesting to see how it played out.

Hey Ploum, nice to meet you!

I already wrote about your article at Quezi, back in 2009 before I knew about Bitcoin. Here's the article, which includes an acknowledgement to you and a link to your blog post:

Does DRM (digitally restricted media) make economic sense?

But I see that no-one Flattr'd your blog post yet, so I've done that and sent you a bitcoin. Thanks for your insightful DRM equation.

Right! If only I had a bitcoin for every time this question has been asked.

Slashdotted again.

This will happen around a hundred years from now, by the way.

My hope is that a modest amount of bitcoins now might just be worth a much larger amount later (if I am lucky).

I didn't say how much is in each wallet. But see the discussion How many bitcoins is "enough"?

The payment UI should stay simple. Of course. Simplicity is essential if Bitcoin is to spread to less technical people.

A transaction fee field is already present in the UI (click "Settings | Options"). I don't know whether it has any effect in the current release.

No point worrying about it, casascius, as neither you nor I can do anything to change it.

And what about somebody monopolizing the network's resources with tons of larger transactions (being sent back-and-forth between two nodes)?

Why not keep it simple? Allow the user to specify a fee to be sent with every transaction. In the user interface, set the default fee to zero, but let the user override it "to insure promptness".

Volatility will naturally decrease as more people use Bitcoin, and as liquidity at the exchanges improves (when it gets easier to move money in/out of the exchanges).

The exchange rate isn't going to get "backing value" from anywhere else.

$5 million is just the nominal value of the issued bitcoins. The figure is as hypothetical as when someone quotes the total market capitalization of the NYSE. But you understand that already, as the rest of your post showed.


What you say is correct, but it misses the point. The value of Bitcoin is not to enable 100% of investors to profit from a rise in the exchange rate.

But you need that rise in the exchange rate to enable the other uses of Bitcoin. If the average person has 100 bitcoins, and a pizza costs 100 bitcoins, then the Bitcoin market is fairly useless as each person can only afford one pizza, and people won't buy pizzas.

Now "fast forward" to the point where the average person has 100 bitcoins, but a pizza costs 0.1 bitcoins. Now people will start to buy their pizza with bitcoins instead of fiat, and the Bitcoin economy will become truly vibrant.