How Do we bring the value of BitCoins back up?

[superpc]

Anyone have any ideas on bringing the value of BTC back up?

[1715043305]

1715043305

[1715043305]

1715043305

[Bitcoin Swami]

Nope.

[superpc]

Nope.

There must be some way.  If there was some media coverage, it might come back up.

[MelMan2002]

Nope.

There must be some way.  If there was some media coverage, it might come back up.

Bribe the media then 

[CoinMan]

Anyone have any ideas on bringing the value of BTC back up?

Buy $40,000 USD worth of Bitcoins - that should do the trick instantly.

[nmat]

Buy $40,000 USD worth of Bitcoins - that should do the trick instantly.

Now that would be awesome  (and stupid at the same time I know)

[Littleshop]

Sell less coins.  

[Bitcoin Swami]

You could make up a fake media story, like "Brad pitt uses bitcoins".

[onesalt]

"Yeah how can we manipulate the price of a market driven commodity??"

You people are cockroaches. It shit like this which is why the price of wheat went up something like 40% in the last year. The free market doesn't motherfucking work if parasites like you are gonna game the fucking system. goddamn.

[Meatpile]

"Yeah how can we manipulate the price of a market driven commodity??"

You people are cockroaches. It shit like this which is why the price of wheat went up something like 40% in the last year. The free market doesn't motherfucking work if parasites like you are gonna game the fucking system. goddamn.

If bitcoin were a market driven economy then I would agree with you. But right now its just a gambling game, so this is standard practice.

[onesalt]

If you're going to treat it as a gambling game it's never going to achieve legitimacy as currency.

[arsenische]

solution is banal: create new bitcoin services and invite people from outside the forum to use them

[molecular]

Buy $40,000 USD worth of Bitcoins - that should do the trick instantly.

Now that would be awesome   (and stupid at the same time I know)

Not necessarily stupid. It might start a rally, then it would've been genius in retrospect.

[d.james]

You can bring the value of BitCoins back up by inventing a time machine.

[guywhogotgoxed]

This kind of greed is the reason behind all the drama attached to bitcoin. $10 is a nice number by the way, makes calculations easy. I wish it could stay at $10 for half a year, it might lead to more confidence in actual trading of goods with BTC.

[CoinMan]

onesalt: Take a chill pill and help the Bitcoin economy while you are at it!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=16880.0

[adamstgBit]

Its not easy...
1) More poeple have to use bitcoins (buy stuff with bitcoins and then buy back bitcoins)
2) More sites have to accept, there are lost of site now a days... but there's still a BIG problem... these sites will accept bitcoins and then SELL the bitcoins they make right away, they need to do this to buy more supply for there sites since the suppliers they deal with DO NOT use bitcoins.

we need this situation in all bitcoin markets:

customer buys stuff with bitcoin
the bitcoin store buys its supply with bitcoins
the supplier pays employee in bitcoin!
this way the bitcoins are never sold for USD (or wtv) and they are never bought with $, they are earned from work.


if just 1 small county uses this currency... bitcoins will be worth a hell of a lot, of course you'd need to do a full days work to earn 1 BTC.

The the first county to do this switch will be fucking rich, because as more counties join in the value just keeps going up!

if a country uses nothing but bitcoins... they actually have a fighting change at paying back the loans from the banks!

if i was in power of a small country i would take a 1 billion $ loan from the bank to setup the infrastructure needed to use only bitcoins.
and then slowly pay back the loans.

the banks loan every dollar at interest!
bitcoins only cost what they are worth!

wake up and smell the bitcoins!

[Vod]

solution is banal: create new bitcoin services and invite people from outside the forum to use them

Agreed.  Our marketing campaign is targeting newspapers and other mainstream media, to bring in new users to bitcoin.

[adamstgBit]

we need to THINK BIG

[Spacy]

Buy some SCs with BTC, then when SCs has 100%+ more value, sell them for BTC ;-)

[adamstgBit]

Buy some SCs with BTC, then when SCs has 100%+ more value, sell them for BTC ;-)

SCs?

[Spacy]

Buy some SCs with BTC, then when SCs has 100%+ more value, sell them for BTC ;-)

SCs?

SolidCoins...

[casascius]

Easy, tell other people that the bitcoin price is low, and that you're holding some long term, and if they're interested in to holding some long term too, offer to acquire and deliver some bitcoins for them.

It works for me - I deliver on paper wallets.

[Anonymailer]

It's easy to get impatient but there's so much development going on at the moment that I think is crucial to the BTC economy as a whole (as far as merchant apis/plugins and exchanges are concerned) and the economy should grow pretty well on it's own for the next year at least.

But really I think we need more merchants with competitive prices so people are compelled to buy and spend BTC to drive the price up.

[onesalt]

It's easy to get impatient but there's so much development going on at the moment that I think is crucial to the BTC economy as a whole (as far as merchant apis/plugins and exchanges are concerned) and the economy should grow pretty well on it's own for the next year at least.

But really I think we need more merchants with competitive prices so people are compelled to buy and spend BTC to drive the price up.

No merchant is going to accept btc when people have confessed it's a gambling game, and given the horrific breaches of security bitcoin has. You know like mtgox being hacked and all the money in mybitcoin "being stolen".

[bitplane]

Using Bitcoin for gambling is a good idea, the more people that use it as play money the better

[FlipPro]

Get to work! Thats the best way to bring it back up.

I have something good that you guys might like, it's a little idea called Bitwal.

It will be an instant payment system, with fraud protection, and charge-backs very similar to Paypal. I know alot of you here despise Paypal, but guess what normal people need the kind of services they offer. I know for a fact that this community has bright enough minds to come together and make something much more convenient, and affordable to use than Paypal.

I am willing to put my time and money where my mouth is. I am willing to organize a team of this magnitude but it is going to take bright minds coming forward and other investors taking some risk along with me. I have the Idea there, and it really doesn't take that much monetarily to make a reality, however it does take a serious amount of money, and some of the best profesionals to make Bitwal the standard for Bitcoin micro-payments.

[robbonz]

You could make up a fake media story, like "Brad pitt uses bitcoins".

hahaha Brilliant!! +1

[stryker]

just spend a few coins on goods and services.... thats what gives them "worth".  If noone spent them and there was nothing to buy with them, then they would be worthless

[The_Duke]

Why do you want the value of bitcoin to come up? Bitcoin should be used to pay things with, to buy things with and not as a speculation object, right? So who cares what the value is in dollars?

[bitrebel]

kill everyone who wants bitcoin to go down in value!

Then, when they are all dead, we'll have only people who want the price to rise.

Then, we'll have to make sure they are not killed shortly afterwards.

The victor will have bitcoins, and nobody left to buy them. 

[arsenische]

...or we can just sell all the bitcoins and try to make the price unreasonably low... if it doesn't kill bitcoin, people are likely to start buying it to become early adopters-2, thus growing a new bubble and soaring the price far beyond 32$/bitcoin.. though wouldn't be much fun to look at it having all bitcoins sold out cheap

[TechCF]

I agree withbitplane. (Online) casinos are a big industry, with big established players. Recently they have had a hard time because various countries forbid their citizens to use their debit/credit cards for gambling. It is difficult to get funds in/out of casinos. If BitCoins where widely accepted, I think it would show in value of BTC. Just like we saw with all the media hype around silkroad.

[Anonymailer]

No merchant is going to accept btc when people have confessed it's a gambling game, and given the horrific breaches of security bitcoin has. You know like mtgox being hacked and all the money in mybitcoin "being stolen".

Smaller merchants will and that will help establish stability. Risk can be removed to a large extent if you immediately convert your costs back in to fiat on sales and keep profits in your own secure wallet!

[ttk2]

It's easy to get impatient but there's so much development going on at the moment that I think is crucial to the BTC economy as a whole (as far as merchant apis/plugins and exchanges are concerned) and the economy should grow pretty well on it's own for the next year at least.

But really I think we need more merchants with competitive prices so people are compelled to buy and spend BTC to drive the price up.

No merchant is going to accept btc when people have confessed it's a gambling game, and given the horrific breaches of security bitcoin has. You know like mtgox being hacked and all the money in mybitcoin "being stolen".

its a million times easier to keep your wallet secure when you do not have to have authomatd payouts. Thats why banks like mybitcoin and MTGox where targeted, they had to be able to send as well as reviece coins. If you only have to reciece coins you can keep the wallet you are sending them to off site, making them almost impossible to steal.

[FlipPro]

kill everyone who wants bitcoin to go down in value!

Then, when they are all dead, we'll have only people who want the price to rise.

Then, we'll have to make sure they are not killed shortly afterwards.

The victor will have bitcoins, and nobody left to buy them.  

Everything you say can and will be used against you in the court of law .

[mintymark]

I agree that if a small country started to use bitcoins then this would make a big difference. What stops that right now?

Well many small countries with serious money problems also have dire political situations that would prevent this. Lets put those aside.

Next many governments would not want to cede their currency to one they had no control over. After all you can always print more pound notes, or green backs if the economic situation gets bad, but what can you do with bitcoin? Nothing. So A country that already had any control over its finances could not or would not do this.

Lets imagine we have a country wanting to do this. HOW would they do it? First thing is how does the man in the street get coins? Normally introduction of a new currency is go to the bank and exchange iold currency for new one. That could work, but for many people lack of a physical embodiment would be an obstacle. I mean, for us netizens, its great we never look at a piece of paper, and want our money to be the same, but for your average sheep farmer who doesnt have a computer, much less understand the difference between hash and a random number how can it work?

Perhaps we need a physical currency built on bitcoin, as was discussed in these forums some while back. The idea here was that the actual coin contained a sealed hash that could be broken open and redeemed or could be exchanged still sealed. This is, of course exactly the same as a fiat currency, you are relying on the promise on the coin/note that there is a bitcoin behind it. Just like a Uk £5 note which has a promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of five pounds, once upon a time this was five pounds weight of silver.  Its a bit better than this because the promise can be verified and and "expert" could check if the coins really exist in the bitcoin chain. I'd say your average sheet farmer would be happy with that. But the problem here is that the cost of making the money would be high, would involve new, possibly unproven  and unfamiliar technologies. I mean look at the notes circulating in turkey, libiya or malasia. Some of these are so old and worn to be hardly reconisable.  The physical bitcoin must be tough!!

Is this possible? I do not know.

[ThomasV]

Anyone have any ideas on bringing the value of BTC back up?

Whenever you need to buy something, check if you can buy it with bitcoins.
You can buy a lot of things with bitcoin, see for example spendbitcoins.com

Spending bitcoins does not mean that you cannot hoard some; just buy back the coins that you have spent if your goal is to keep a constant amount.

[bitlane]

SilkRoad + Oxycontin = Current BTC value x3

Wasn't the big bump to over $25 USD/BTC was due to speculation of drug availability ?, we should embrace the subculture, as it directly benefits us.....lol

[film2240]

I was actually hoping that people would show an interest in boosting the value of BTC and now i've found my kind of thread :-)

Anyways I'm thinking that maybe if all of our respective websites that we own (I do own 2 forums in addition to my blog,plus mining,filmmaking and investing businesses online.At least I own multiple ways to make use of bitcoins as well as traditional money,$,£ e.t.c) made use of bitcoins,then perhaps the reputation would get better (of the currency) and more widespread use of bitcoins would make the value rise massively (I hope).

I want the value to rise as well as I mine.Will there be another bubble where we have high value bitcoins or are those days behind us now?

thing is, what factors can change bitcoin's value?

Perhaps a film could help?

[FlipPro]

SilkRoad + Oxycontin = Current BTC value x3

Wasn't the big bump to over $25 USD/BTC was due to speculation of drug availability ?, we should embrace the subculture, as it directly benefits us.....lol

But it's stupid since all online transactions are traceable.

[cepler]

Buy $10,000,000.00 USD worth of bitcoins, then delete your wallet.  That might help.  Let me know when you're done.

[Jack of Diamonds]

SilkRoad + Oxycontin = Current BTC value x3

Wasn't the big bump to over $25 USD/BTC was due to speculation of drug availability ?, we should embrace the subculture, as it directly benefits us.....lol

But it's stupid since all online transactions are traceable.

The way sales are setup on Silk Road you can't trace the buyer or seller.
You also might be forgetting everything is encrypted and goes over TOR rather than the 'normal internet'.

[Xenland]

I didnt read every post so forgive me if this has been suggested. One thing bitcoins is missing that is described in the faq(i believe) is bitcoin has no value. There is only goods and services onlines that are not in high demand(minus irc and forum methods of buying with bitcoin). Also if suppliers accepted bitcoin....it would have tons of more support at a global scale.

I had a conversation with a family members and he stated "i will never use a bitcoin, i cant buy gas with it, and ralphs dosent accept usb-sticks. Bitcoins are not for me" in my opnion Even if bitcoins were worth $100 I doubt people would adopt using them just becuase your tethered through a the internet and lets be honest with all the identity theft going on with credit cards people relate that to "using the internet" and thus think its already unsafe to purchase stuff online. Imagine if we had just 1 gas station accepting bitcoins how much trust that would add not to mention value and free advertisement...

How much does it cost to start your own gas station anyways?

[Shortline]

The solution is simple. We become Somali pirates, capture a yacht with Brad Pitt on it, demand bitcoins in payment, reap the publicity rewards with both Hollywood and the criminal underworld.

Just kidding. Who cares what the price of a bitcoin is in other currencies? I don't. If you're only posting on this forum because you're the dumb money, I hate to tell you but your time here is almost up. This is not an investment scheme and if you treat it as such you'll get burned. The only thing that matters is that we achieve some small level of stability so that merchants can confidently accept bitcoin, suppliers can in turn get paid in bitcoin, and pay their employees in bitcoin and so forth. You know... an economy, they call it.

[Xenland]

...Just kidding. Who cares what the price of a bitcoin is in other currencies? I don't. If you're only posting on this forum because you're the dumb money, I hate to tell you but your time here is almost up. This is not an investment scheme and if you treat it as such you'll get burned. The only thing that matters is that we achieve some small level of stability so that merchants can confidently accept bitcoin, suppliers can in turn get paid in bitcoin, and pay their employees in bitcoin and so forth. You know... an economy, they call it.

I could have not said it any better

*Cough*

[DrYe5]

Anyone have any ideas on bringing the value of BTC back up?

Wait for the market to bottom. Buy. (Could take months.)
$30 will not happen. $20 will not happen.
The price will go lower than it is today.
Sell now. Buy at the bottom.

[stsbrad]

The value will go back up soon enough. There are SO many projects in the works right now.

[Gerken]

The value will go back up soon enough. There are SO many projects in the works right now.

Like what?  What could possibly be big enough to bring Bitcoin back from it's long slow slide?  Or is this just blind optimism (nothing against that, everyone has their flaws)?

[adamstgBit]

I agree that if a small country started to use bitcoins then this would make a big difference. What stops that right now?

Well many small countries with serious money problems also have dire political situations that would prevent this. Lets put those aside.

Next many governments would not want to cede their currency to one they had no control over. After all you can always print more pound notes, or green backs if the economic situation gets bad, but what can you do with bitcoin? Nothing. So A country that already had any control over its finances could not or would not do this.

Lets imagine we have a country wanting to do this. HOW would they do it? First thing is how does the man in the street get coins? Normally introduction of a new currency is go to the bank and exchange iold currency for new one. That could work, but for many people lack of a physical embodiment would be an obstacle. I mean, for us netizens, its great we never look at a piece of paper, and want our money to be the same, but for your average sheep farmer who doesnt have a computer, much less understand the difference between hash and a random number how can it work?

Perhaps we need a physical currency built on bitcoin, as was discussed in these forums some while back. The idea here was that the actual coin contained a sealed hash that could be broken open and redeemed or could be exchanged still sealed. This is, of course exactly the same as a fiat currency, you are relying on the promise on the coin/note that there is a bitcoin behind it. Just like a Uk £5 note which has a promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of five pounds, once upon a time this was five pounds weight of silver.  Its a bit better than this because the promise can be verified and and "expert" could check if the coins really exist in the bitcoin chain. I'd say your average sheet farmer would be happy with that. But the problem here is that the cost of making the money would be high, would involve new, possibly unproven  and unfamiliar technologies. I mean look at the notes circulating in turkey, libiya or malasia. Some of these are so old and worn to be hardly reconisable.  The physical bitcoin must be tough!!

Is this possible? I do not know.

the best way would be to make a physical currency backed by bitcoin..

the government prints bills, no sealed hash none of that shit ... the bill only comes with a promise, that it can be exchanged at their local public bank for bitcoins.

the bills are cheep to produce
the bills have value because they are backed by bitcoin
more bills are printed only if the country buys more bitcoins.
removing the private bank and replacing it with a public bank.

money controlled by its government, not by greedy poeple who do not give a F%^K

[bitrebel]

kill everyone who wants bitcoin to go down in value!

Then, when they are all dead, we'll have only people who want the price to rise.

Then, we'll have to make sure they are not killed shortly afterwards.

The victor will have bitcoins, and nobody left to buy them.  

Everything you say can and will be used against you in the court of law .

Hey FlipPro,
   Don't be stupid by taking me seriously.
   Don't be an asshole by taking me seriously.
   Now go back to your sandbox and stay out of mine.

[deepceleron]

You could make up a fake media story, like "Brad pitt uses bitcoins".

hahaha Brilliant!! +1

This just in, photos from the Bitcoin conference after-party...

For a worldwide audience who may not know, these celebrities are Felicia Day (of The Guild, Buffy), Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher from Star Trek TNG), and Nathan Fillion (of Firefly, Castle). These would be the kind of celebrities you'd expect to twitter about Bitcoins. Bounty time!

[onesalt]

No merchant is going to accept btc when people have confessed it's a gambling game, and given the horrific breaches of security bitcoin has. You know like mtgox being hacked and all the money in mybitcoin "being stolen".

Smaller merchants will and that will help establish stability. Risk can be removed to a large extent if you immediately convert your costs back in to fiat on sales and keep profits in your own secure wallet!

Smaller buisnesses are less likely to use a highly risk based currency because they can afford to lose the least after being screwed over by exchange fees and volatility.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

The value will go back up soon enough. There are SO many projects in the works right now.

Like what?  What could possibly be big enough to bring Bitcoin back from it's long slow slide?  Or is this just blind optimism (nothing against that, everyone has their flaws)?

Pattaya!


Bitcoin: An Idea Worth Spending

[tvbcof]

No real action required.  Just wait for the alternatives to Bitcoin to go poof.  Bitcoin is not in the 'race to the bottom' which pretty much all fiat currencies are involved in.  So it (and gold and silver) should have a pretty strong long term outlook.  That's my bet...or one of my bets at least.

I have some real questions about whether I even want BTC to go 'up in value' (at this time.)  I would hope to see the maximum distribution.  More and more people are becoming aware of Bitcoin, and if the price is low, the smart ones can snap up more.  At some point, if not already, big money may be Hoovering up everything which turns up for sale I fear.  So there is to my way of thinking a golden time when the price is low to maximize the distribution.  I just don't pretend to know what that time window and price window is.

[deepceleron]

More news!

Google Trends:


Mtgox:

[Mjbmonetarymetals]

What in theory would happen if every bitcoiner went onto the exchanges and bought  ((?) bitcoins)) at  roughly the same time.( Yes I know it a silly question ) 

[Mjbmonetarymetals]

I'll buy some if you buy some 

[Xenland]

So when should we do this syncronized-bitcoin-purchase?

[Mjbmonetarymetals]

The idea doesnt look to have massive support 

You buy 5 and I'll buy 5 . (it might have ripple effect) 

The old saying about the butterfly wings and a tree falling spring to mind 

[IdeaMan]

The trick is actually to stabilize the value of bit coin - give or take.

The answer is to create a financial entity large enough to back up a certain USD/BTC price throughout the entire bit coin economy.

As an example, let's say you wanted to stabilize the price (ratio) at 1$:1BTC for all eternity - they would simply place a $21,000,000 bid at 1$ on MtGox.  As a result the price cannot go below 1$.

This amount of force in that market would also influence many people to move their prices (bid or ask) towards the super bid at 1$.

Really though, what you would best be served by doing is running a bot that constantly adjusts it's bid price and quantity to:

(The current number of BitCoins @ a price of 21,000,000 / Current number of BTC minted)

To achieve this effect without the interference of big business, we would need to create something akin to a price bloc that acted on the exchange(s).

The bot would have to:
1) communicate to a server how much buying power it contributed to the bloc.
2) poll the server for the tool buying power of the price bloc
3) calculate this instance's proportional share of the price bloc
4) calculate this instance's proportional share of the number of BTC build
5) automatically adjust the user's bids on exchange(s) to reflect these new values as per the above equation
6) do the reverse for ask prices

It would be nice if the bot:
1) polled the instances of the client for a vote on target bid/ask prices, which would be then be determined by the instance's proportional share of the purchasing power in the bloc and the bloc's total purchasing power
2) listed the public value of the bloc in terms of total purchasing power and weighted average price per BitCoin in the user's local currency

It would be nice if the server
1) fed JSON data out on request
2) tracked historical values and displayed them with easy-to-read graphs
3) had an API to access it's data as part of other bots or data modeling systems

Donate to this wallet to contribute to the bounty for this idea:
19CCVDxm53WZuyGvNr4ZaVFgn1kYha4dC1

The bounty will be paid to the best bot (determined by consensus in the thread about the bot, ultimately decided by me, since I'm the IdeaMan) one week after the first bot is posted on that thread.

I keep 1 percent for coming up with the idea (deal with it), the other 99 goes to the developer who can first submit a functional bot to this thread that handles MtGox.  Further payouts will be spread to the development team as a whole equally, again minus my 1 percent. For the sake of transparency, all transactions to and from this wallet will be posted to a new thread regarding this bot.

And of course, my 1 percent of the incoming donations will be used by the final bot to stabilize prices.

[mmortal03]

Wallet encryption is the killer app needed to allow us to convince a lot more people to get involved.

[kokjo]

Stop selling? just hold your bitcoin ,and buy more at the low price.

[aq]

Wallet encryption is the killer app needed to allow us to convince a lot more people to get involved.

What makes things worse is that looking from an average user perspective, it seems that the development speed can only be measured in Bubnoffs. The official client looks like either some still completely unusable pre-alpha stuff, or something that has been abandoned by its developers a long time ago.

The client is full of technological complex things, yet the current developers are unable to add wallet encryption within a few month. For the end users that is - I don't care if someone has this in his private repository.

And think about this: adding wallet encryption is an easy task - if there would be an urgent need to add something more complex, it will probably take years. Maybe we need to search and reactivate Satoshi himself, because if the development process would have been so slow from the start, the first bitcoin software version would not have seen the light before maybe 2040.

Someone needs to convince Gavin that "the user experience is my lowest priority" is probably not the best approach.

[kokjo]

Someone needs to convince Gavin that "the user experience is my lowest priority" is probably not the best approach.

go fix it yourself!

[aq]

Someone needs to convince Gavin that "the user experience is my lowest priority" is probably not the best approach.

go fix it yourself!

Sorry, impossible. I am not the official maintainer. And BTW, there is already a fix named "bitcoin-qt", but I doubt that Gavin will make it the official client anytime soon. It "only" has a much better user interface (same core), and that has as no priority for Gavin

[ThiagoCMC]

solution is banal: create new bitcoin services and invite people from outside the forum to use them

Absolutely right!

When Bitcoin become more useful,  the price in dollars will increase.

If people think in Bitcoin as a investment, the price will drop, because the Bitcoins will be only on wallets...

Bitcoins is a currency, so, the coins needs to be in circulation. The transactions are slowing down... Right!? This isn't a good thing!!

Take a look here: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38392/?p1=Mag_story0

Bitcoins is not a investment!

So, more people using Bitcoins, better is.

Think about it!
Thiago

[Mjbmonetarymetals]

Well said !! If anybody would like to lighten up there wallet **shameless plug alert** how about buying something really shiny https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=23256.0   

[kjj]

adding wallet encryption is an easy task

Awesome!  Post your pull request (or patches).

[coinhammer]

Continue to create awareness about Bitcoin, tell your friends, spread the word trough social networks, and Buy and Sell goods using Bitcoin. Also, and this may ruffle some feathers, but I believe ixcoin and other forks are a detrimental distraction that ultimately cheapens Bitcoins perception and dilutes its credibility.

[Chris Acheson]

Wallet encryption is the killer app needed to allow us to convince a lot more people to get involved.

What makes things worse is that looking from an average user perspective, it seems that the development speed can only be measured in Bubnoffs. The official client looks like either some still completely unusable pre-alpha stuff, or something that has been abandoned by its developers a long time ago.

The client is full of technological complex things, yet the current developers are unable to add wallet encryption within a few month. For the end users that is - I don't care if someone has this in his private repository.

And think about this: adding wallet encryption is an easy task - if there would be an urgent need to add something more complex, it will probably take years. Maybe we need to search and reactivate Satoshi himself, because if the development process would have been so slow from the start, the first bitcoin software version would not have seen the light before maybe 2040.

Someone needs to convince Gavin that "the user experience is my lowest priority" is probably not the best approach.

Perhaps you might want to contribute to this project: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=29109.0

[mmortal03]

Wallet encryption is the killer app needed to allow us to convince a lot more people to get involved.

What makes things worse is that looking from an average user perspective, it seems that the development speed can only be measured in Bubnoffs. The official client looks like either some still completely unusable pre-alpha stuff, or something that has been abandoned by its developers a long time ago.

The client is full of technological complex things, yet the current developers are unable to add wallet encryption within a few month. For the end users that is - I don't care if someone has this in his private repository.

And think about this: adding wallet encryption is an easy task - if there would be an urgent need to add something more complex, it will probably take years. Maybe we need to search and reactivate Satoshi himself, because if the development process would have been so slow from the start, the first bitcoin software version would not have seen the light before maybe 2040.

Someone needs to convince Gavin that "the user experience is my lowest priority" is probably not the best approach.

Perhaps you might want to contribute to this project: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=29109.0

Thanks for the link. Does that have wallet encryption?

adding wallet encryption is an easy task

Awesome!  Post your pull request (or patches).

I think his point is that it should be easy for the people who already understand the code. You'd think they'd want to prioritize it.  The bitcoin client already uses encryption in other areas, so those who are able to understand that area of the code should have no problem carrying things over to handling wallet encryption.  It doesn't have to be hack-proof (a.k.a. perfect) or anything.  Even simple password protection at the startup of the client -- with the physical encryption of the wallet file only occurring when the client is closed -- would be a huge step forward.

[Chris Acheson]

Perhaps you might want to contribute to this project: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=29109.0

Thanks for the link. Does that have wallet encryption?

It hasn't been released yet, but presumably it will.  He's got a dev blog here: http://bitco.tumblr.com/