bit·stake [bit-
steyk] noun - an error in action, calculation, opinion, or judgment that you would not have made in every day life but was caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, insufficient knowledge, etc. through it's association with Bitcoin
I stole this list of examples from the other thread.
Lets see, "Bitcoin Users" will trust, en mass:
1) Magical Frenchmen in Japan with their bitcoins (single point of failure)
2) 17 year old Exchange operators (untested services)
3) Convicted financial frauds (no need to name names)
4) Unknown and anonymous sites with large amounts of digital assets (mybitcoin)
5) Phishing emails (mtgox/tradehills phishing victime)
6) This forum (cosbycoin anyone?)
7) Exploitable open source software (solidcoin, namecoin, geld whatever it is)
Over The Counter Ratings (seriously)
9) Paypal (many still use paypal for bitcoin transactions)
10) Any new item of the week
Any questions?
And to go along with this I'd like to offer a counter point.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tim_harford.htmlMy point is we as a community have probably made a lot of bitstakes and there probably are a lot of scammers out there taking advantage of that. But that doesn't change the value of Bitcoins as a currency (value being its usefulness as an nonfiat psuedo anonymous medium of exchange, not the exchange rate in USD.) And mistakes aren't bad as long as we keep making them in the right direction.
Just a thought.
