Why aren't more people buying bitcoins?

[Minsc]

Governments can't seize your bitcoin.  You can hide it on a flashdrive or you can just turn your wallet.dat into some pattern on clothing to hide it.

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[Synaptic]

Governments can't seize your bitcoin.  You can hide it on a flashdrive or you can just turn your wallet.dat into some pattern on clothing to hide it.

Governments can't seize your gold either, if you aren't a complete moron...

Not that there's any chance of gold being confiscated anyway.

[Minsc]

@Synaptic

There was a Wikipedia article about how the US government in the 20th century forced everyone to hand over their gold, and if I remember correctly, it was for no compensation either.

[Synaptic]

@Synaptic

There was a Wikipedia article about how the US government in the 20th century forced everyone to hand over their gold, and if I remember correctly, it was for no compensation either.

Yes I'm aware.

And those people who allowed the government to retrieve their assets were fools. It's really not difficult to hide a physical asset, especially from an entity as impotent as the Federal government.

[wareen]

It's really not difficult to hide a physical asset, especially from an entity as impotent as the Federal government.

Good luck hiding all your physical assets when you need to take them across borders for some reason.

[Synaptic]

It's really not difficult to hide a physical asset, especially from an entity as impotent as the Federal government.

Good luck hiding all your physical assets when you need to take them across borders for some reason.

Since when does the Federal government intercept private shipping?

You could FedEx yourself almost any nominal quantity of gold directly.

If it's the apocalyptic times the retard anarcho-libertarians here like to jack off about, then melt your fucking shit down into pellets and swallow them or cram them up your ass.

Of course, privately held gold is in no danger anywhere, it's only retards trying to find some kind of imaginary value in Bitcoin that come up with this shit.

[Minsc]

The government will intercept large amounts of cash going in or out of the country.

[kgo]

@Synaptic

There was a Wikipedia article about how the US government in the 20th century forced everyone to hand over their gold, and if I remember correctly, it was for no compensation either.

People were paid for the gold they turned in.

[cbeast]

@Synaptic

There was a Wikipedia article about how the US government in the 20th century forced everyone to hand over their gold, and if I remember correctly, it was for no compensation either.

People were paid for the gold they turned in.

It was FDR, and I'm almost counting on something like this to happen.

[Blackout]

Governments can't seize your bitcoin.  You can hide it on a flashdrive or you can just turn your wallet.dat into some pattern on clothing to hide it.

Governments can't seize your gold either, if you aren't a complete moron...

Not that there's any chance of gold being confiscated anyway.

Governments can and have seized gold. As a matter of fact that's exactly what they did to get to the state we are at now.  It was demanded all gold be turned in way back in 1933, two years after Wilson fucked the U.S. by allowing the Fed in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

There's a bunch of bullshit history and back and forth stuff but the Dollar was fully disconnected from gold in 1971 and is now not even money, it is only currency created by banks as debt.  There in fact is no money in legal existence in the world right now - in the classical sense of the definition of money.

[DrYe5]

Oh Christ...the Gold vs. Bitcoin argument.

Not even going to bother...sorry.

No, I’m serious. I know of some crucial differences which in my opinion makes Gold much less of a pyramid scheme (timespan of thousands of years vs. Bitcoin in the media maybe one year; industrial uses of Gold; elasticity of Gold supply (unlike Bitcoin where the first miners without any competition could snatch >25% of the supply ever) which is actually mildly inflationary, but I’d like to know if I’m missing any argument here.

Well to my mind the one glaring difference is that bitcoin supply is unlimited. Because anyone can split the block chain, you can create an infinite number of bitcoin analogs: Bitcoin1, Bitcoin2... each with an arbitrary 21,000,000 coin limit, but functionally identical. No digital anything is supply limited. As if that isn't enough, the historicity and popular perception is determinant in this kind of thing.

[cbeast]

Well to my mind the one glaring difference is that bitcoin supply is unlimited. Because anyone can split the block chain, you can create an infinite number of bitcoin analogs: Bitcoin1, Bitcoin2... each with an arbitrary 21,000,000 coin limit, but functionally identical. No digital anything is supply limited. As if that isn't enough, the historicity and popular perception is determinant in this kind of thing.

Alternate blockchains would be fools-bitcoin. Actually, the 21M BTC can be infinitely divided to assure endless supply of value as demand increases.

[Synaptic]

Well to my mind the one glaring difference is that bitcoin supply is unlimited. Because anyone can split the block chain, you can create an infinite number of bitcoin analogs: Bitcoin1, Bitcoin2... each with an arbitrary 21,000,000 coin limit, but functionally identical. No digital anything is supply limited. As if that isn't enough, the historicity and popular perception is determinant in this kind of thing.

Alternate blockchains would be fools-bitcoin. Actually, the 21M BTC can be infinitely divided to assure endless supply of value as demand increases.

Pft...

Bitcoin is fools-bitcoin.

[cbeast]

Alternate blockchains would be fools-bitcoin. Actually, the 21M BTC can be infinitely divided to assure endless supply of value as demand increases.

Pft...

Bitcoin is fools-bitcoin.

I use the term as in a false bitcoin, unless you know of a crypto-currency in use before Nakamoto's bitcoin.

[Synaptic]

Alternate blockchains would be fools-bitcoin. Actually, the 21M BTC can be infinitely divided to assure endless supply of value as demand increases.

Pft...

Bitcoin is fools-bitcoin.

I use the term as in a false bitcoin, unless you know of a crypto-currency in use before Nakamoto's bitcoin.

It was just a joke.

[mmortal03]

Mining is still highly profitable but the writing is on the wall.  $100/month for my two remaining 5830s will likely shrink to $50/month and then $0 a month after power costs over the next 8 weeks.   It's true that difficulty follows price, but IMO price also relates to difficulty.   When the price in power to generate a bitcoin (determined by difficulty) was about a dollar and market price was $32 predictable things eventually happened to both price and difficulty.   If BTC pricing falls into the $3 range (current cost to produce a BTC for much of the US) we may see a similar cycle start to the downside.  See my FPGA theory with 1/10th of current GPU production costs (or 90% gross margin) for what I think might further drive that cycle.

I'm kind of hoping a few more bitcoin bulls show up to buy my last two 5830s before then.  It'd make my bitcoin investment story that much more awesome (325% return and two free games sounds much better than 210% return, 2 crappy video cards and 2 free game codes).

And that money is NOT going back to buy bitcoins directly.  If anything it'd go to Xilinx.

Are you sure it's still "highly" profitable for you? How are you measuring your profitability?

[mmortal03]

Gold has practical value:
* electronics
* decoration on pimp outfits

Bitcoins also have practical value unique to them.

[demonofelru]

The thing that worries me the most and why I've been bearish almost always is,  an exploit for bitcoin could come out tomorrow they could then become worthless.  The closest thing I could think of is if someone finds a way to make gold to where it would be impossible to tell between the natural and synthetic gold.

[Cluster2k]

The closest thing I could think of is if someone finds a way to make gold to where it would be impossible to tell between the natural and synthetic gold.

That has already happened.  A number of Hong Kong gold dealers were fooled into buying fake gold bars last year.  The forgeries were clever alloys of metals such as osmium, tungsten, silver and coated with gold to have the same density, size and weight as a real gold bar.  The bars can be made at less than half the cost of real gold.  Older forgeries consisted of tungsten coated with gold, but this new approach is harder to detect.

Truly synthetic gold can be made in particle accelerators and nuclear reactors from mercury, but it's more expensive than natural gold and also radioactive.  Not very useful and easy to detect.

Could bitcoins suffer a fatal security flaw that makes them useless?  Possibly.  It's all open source and apparently secure, but how many forum participants have downloaded and analysed the source code?  Not many, I'm willing to bet.

As to why I have never purchased a bitcoin (apart from trading and using proceeds of mining to buy bitcoins), the answer is pretty clear.  I have yet to find a product that cannot be purchased easier, faster, and most importantly cheaper in bitcoins than with a conventional currency.  Merchants automatically have to incorporate a large price cushion into their products to help counter the massive volatility of the exchange rate.  Since the products they source are purchased in conventional currencies there is no current way to insulate bitcoins from the real world.

Bitcoins are currently at $8.27 and falling.  My purchase orders at $7.1 look like they'll be filled soon.  Not to use bitcoins, but to trade them on an up tick.

[S3052]

Technicals point down and there is quite some probability to see a crash-type decline before a more meaningful bottom can be put in place.

This crash can go down and slice below 7$, 5$ and even 2$, without endangering the longterm bitcoin trend.