There seems to be an intermittent problem with this. Try setting it to the Bitcoin symbol for a few days. Then a new jpg.

The only thing needed is the police and judicial system. The rest of government could remain shutdown indefinitely. The economy would really grow fast without a vast bureaucratic cancerous lymphoma suffocating it.

A better question would be "Is Ripple stagnating?"

If it is going to go mainstream then it should be gaining market share for bread-and-butter activities like facilitating BTC/Fiat exchanging, especially with MtGox on its knees. Yet, BTC volume on Ripple seems to be declining rather than growing. Less than 75 BTC traded in the last month!

http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/currency/USD.html

Ripple has just gone open source. Perhaps that will help it.

Someone cancelled their low bids and just slammed the asks for 8k coins. Worried about missing the train, so next worry: btc withdrawal..

First-mover status. 99.9% of the merchants which accept cryptocurrency will take bitcoins and not alt-coins. The public do not want to see dozens of alt-coins which are a confusing duplication. So, basically, the alt-coins are not recognized as currency outside the cryptographic community.

Bitcoin is money, virtual gold, gold 2.0, currency, a payment system,  but it is not debt.

No. That's totally unfair and unwarranted.

The payment request changes are imminent and these will take Bitcoin to the next level:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=300809.0;topicseen

A lot of merchants want this - and what's the major difference in success between Bitcoin and the 100-odd alt-coins? Apart from LTC no merchants accept the alt-coins.

While the Mastercoin progress is impressive it is only one area activity.

You are putting the cart before the horse. Money is a product substitute to make commerce easier. Those immovable stones enabled single product transactions by representing a product on one side of the exchange. With many food products it is rare to find a buyer with the exact item the seller needs. That is why the concept of money developed - to resolve the product matching problem.

Debt was originally one of labor, for example, where a tenant performed farm-work in exchange for accommodation and food. Only later did it become monetary. A 30-year mortgage is effectively monetizing 30-years of future labor.

Debt does not require money, but it can be monetized and represented by currency. Bitcoin is a currency which has no debt component. It is in no way debt backed.

A fundamental of economics is that only products can buy products (labor, goods, raw materials). A debt is simply a promise of future product delivery.

Money is a place-holder, it facilitates exchange of products by temporarily replacing one product in a transaction. It makes commerce far more efficient because barter relies upon two products in a transaction, whereas money allows for just one. Money needs to be a store of value for future use.

Currency is a structured form of money to make storage, accounting and exchange easier. Government debt can be declared to be fiat currency by government diktat. Bitcoin is a revolutionary currency as it comes with an inbuilt payments system, scarcity, and supports long-distance transactions.

Gold makes good money, as it can't be counterfeited, and might seem intrinsically valuable. However, a kilo of gold can be worth less than a litre of water. It all depends upon the price (desirability) of a product as how much money is needed in a transaction, so products can be arbitrarily expensive...

On the 3 day chart it does look like a base is forming for a massive breakout, both on Bitstamp and MtGox. There is no unease that the market is overvalued at this level, like there was a few months back.

Good info and good to hear they are doing well.

What is interesting about the Bitcoin news lately is how many stories are about successful start-ups and businesses.

Newsflash: KimCoins are welcome at the Hotel of Doom.

OK. So its been over a year. How is this working out?

"Coinbase Wants to Be the PayPal of Internet"

Data storage of the blockchain is not the limiting factor. There is enormous potential with just this glass technology alone:
"The storage allows unprecedented parameters including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1000°C and practically unlimited lifetime."
http://www.southampton.ac.uk/mediacentre/news/2013/jul/13_131.shtml

The limiting factor is ISP bandwidth for block propagation. bandwidth is also increasing fast, but if not fast enough then fees will steadily rise and the Bitcoin blockchain will be mostly for higher-value transactions. This is not ideal, but not a disaster either, and not a reason for a takeover by central bankers. The network hashrate is rocketing and would seem to be enough to protect the blockchain long-term if that continues.

I suspect that if low-value transactions are priced away from the blockchain then off-chain solutions will develop which handle the micro-payments with just end-of-day transfers done on-blockchain. However, if bandwidth keeps increasing, as it is to support HD video streaming and other services in many countries, then Bitcoin capacity will scale too.

Do you think MtGox's biggest clients are waiting 2 or 3 months for their money?

Ah, OK. Then you did exactly the right thing. Good spot.
In fact it should be merged with the first line which has the XBT/USD example.

It says proposed ISO code for Bitcoin.

BTC is an informal code, so is XBT at present. No disinformation there.

I checked the Bitcoin article itself, and XBT has reference 5, the usage seen on xe.com
http://www.xe.com/currency/xbt-bitcoin

I really like the new changes!

Clark, can you make a Bitstamp version as well please?

A metal garden ornament, though in close-up it looks like someone has darkened the shape with three photoshop brush-tool marks