If you're not aware yet, Bitcoins are crashing. Be careful, guys!
fucking bogomoney
Well, I don’t know about ‘crashing’ They appear to still be hovering around $15-$17 USD. They dropped about $5 when the accounts at Mt. Gox got leaked. http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/
Dave, you mentioned bogo money before in regards to bitcoins but I still have no idea what you mean. I’ve only heard the term BOGO as Buy One Get One…is this in reference to fiat currencies?
Here’s my opinion - we won’t see anything other than speculation until a real economy is established. If I can pay my rent, buy fruit, and pay my cable bill, and get paid in bitcoins, it won’t matter how many USD they’re worth. Just like a real foreign economy. Until then the value (and psychology) is directly tied into conversion rates.
Blaine
I’m sorry, bitcoins seem like more of a bad joke than anything. I can’t take them seriously.
I think the issue is that this ‘currency,’ like Federal Reserve Notes, is not directly backed by anything, right? Trading one fiat currency for another doesn’t really solve the bigger problem, huh?
Did you know that every DaveCoin is worth a dollar. I have 8 trillion DaveCoins, want some? If you get a bunch of idiots to buy some, I’ll charge them $1.10 a DaveCoin and your currency will appreciate, really.
I’ll stick to the barter system until people are willing to kill other people for their BitCoins. Can you buy drugs? Can you pay for sex? Is someone willing to kill you for what you have?
This is an excellent test of the value of a currency, if you ask me.
I think it is a niche currency. It’s a decentralized crypto currency. I don’t see it replacing the USD. It does however have real value. The market value from exchanges is a real value for it. I have made $90 USD, real money, in 3 weeks from playing that market. Because that is the real value of the bitcoins I sold. I will also take bitcoins as payment for services. If you bring me 3 bitcoins to the Hive, I will trade you an arduino 
I believe it is already past it’s tipping point and can only truly crash if there is a problem with the encryption. Honestly it’s probably the ‘bad’ things that keep it alive. Because you can use it over the internet w/o regard to country and for things like gambling, etc will keep it active. If somebody (say a politician) tries to shut it down and can’t it will only go up in value.
I wouldn’t invest my life savings in it, but I am absolutely interesting in participating in it
–Craig
Did you simply ask those questions because you are aware that you can indeed buy those things with bitcoins?
i think bogomoney is a nod to a made up figure, like the bogomip,
which was the linux kernel's totally unscientific way to calculate
processing power.
i say totally unscientific because it treated pretty much all x86
processors get the same score.
i was going to point at the mt gox hack + market crash and yell "aha!
pump and dump scam!" only my gmail account went into paranoid mode
some time yesterday, presumably because one or more kiddies tried
using my mt gox account details to attempt to access to my email.
i've also gotten moderately creepy bitcoin spam as of today, so i'm
confident my details are out there.
on a related note, i've been meaning to turn on two factor
authentication for gmail for a while now and today seemed like a good
day to do that.
Didn’t the govt just recently get involved because they found out people were buying drugs with them … and if there is something out there that allows people to buy drugs launder money … then the govt /must/ waste money on its suppression? lol
I recently read a great article on the finer points of the ‘currency’ … like the automatic accumulator or whatever it is. the Graph they use to sell you on the increased ‘valuation’ plateaus after so many million bitcoin. Unfortunately I can’t find the darn article.
in a related article on the Economist … I stumbled upon:
“Creating the doctored block and having it validated and attached to the official log would thus require outpacing the network’s combined computing power. This can only happen if a fraudster controls more than half of the network’s total number-crunching capacity, which is possible, but extremely expensive for any one person.” (http://j.mp/jCvj2K)
As simply the technical architecture of the ‘network’ this was the first thing that caught my eye – And it’s seemingly very similar to how speculation works in ‘real’ markets. I mean … you get enough people to behave a certain way and out comes your desired result. Moreover, I can think of plenty of people (or groups of them) that would certainly see this as a chance to turn over some cash / rake money off people’s backs.
I agree with Dave on the merits of it as ‘currency’ … you have to be able to buy things. This is something the creator(s?) say on the site, even. But that acknowledgement doesn’t mean much - it’s comfort food for those on the fence, thinking about speculating.
Perhaps there is so much negative fuss because it puts a very simple & testable face to a previously faceless practice that is adopted across all facets of our ‘real’ economy? (not necessarily ‘conscious’ fuss for those reasons … but reflecting on it … seems plausible. and there are certainly more areas for concern on top of the whole architecture of the system, which play into its viability - for good and bad)
So on one hand, I think it should be kept around and allowed to flourish. But I don’t want t to buy in on it. On the other, I don’t want to be 5 years down the road regretting that decision. I suspect most other people would be the same. I don’t see people running to this currency because they can buy stuff with it easier, more securely, with less overhead. People are flocking to it to make a buck. In that sense, perhaps the ‘market’ should be encouraging slow and paced growth, to avoid a racing speculation bubble and subsequent crash (or equilibrium forced through adoption and thus subsequent devaluation - but that’s a pipe dream, imho. The fiscal morality of people involved in bubbles and crashes defies a healthy equilibrium …)
// blah sorry for rant … back to programming
"I believe it is already past it's tipping point and can only truly
crash if
there is a problem with the encryption. Honestly it's probably the
'bad'
things that keep it alive." -- Craig
true, and hopefully not unfortunate, story.
I saw a mention in the mt gox announcement that they were working with Google to require reconfirmation on any gmail accounts linked to a mt gox account - so between that and the spam, I’d say yes your address is certainly out there.
I’ve been an alt currency geek for longer than bitcoin has existed and I have to disagree and say that bitcoin is definitely something serious.
Bicoin is getting a lot of attention and a lot of activity because people see the price fluctuating and think they can get rich. However, this is not, nor should it be, the most interesting aspect of the currency.
It’s not useful to think of bitcoin as a system that you buy into or not. As someone said before, it is a useful currency if you can buy stuff with it, and yes, you CAN buy stuff with bitcoin.
Bitcoin is not unlike dollars or other symbolic “fiat” currencies in that it is not backed by anything. However, there are a few major differences that make it better than dollars for some purposes. What it boils down to is that a bitcoin is digital and can be transacted by software. It is native to the internet and it is anonymous. This means that it can be used without any intermediaries whatsoever. This is useful. On the other hand, bitcoin is totally new and unique in that bitcoin money cannot be copied (unlike mp3s or what have you). You can’t just make more. It’s a fiat currency like the dollar, but the USA can always issue more dollars. No one can ever make more bitcoins without forking the bitcoin pool, or breaking the encryption scheme. This is so weird that even most currency theorists don’t know what will happen to it in the future.
So, bitcoin should be thought of as a digital, anonymous cash. You don’t keep all your savings in cash in a big box buried in your backyard and there’s no reason to put all your money into bitcoin either. It is useful for doing certain kinds of transactions, and as long as it is useful for doing certain kinds of transactions, people will use it.
Even if the bitcoin market is forked or cracked or eventually fails for some reason, bitcoin is still important and worth paying attention to. The idea of a digital, anonymous currency is out there and millions of people are now exposed to the idea. Think of Napster. If bitcoin fails, there will be other projects in the future that will try to make up for its flaws.
And finally, bitcoin is an extremely valuable system to study from a technical standpoint. There are already proposals out there to create other non-currency-related completely decentralized systems based on the underlying ideas from bitcoin. For example, there is a serious decentralized alternate DNS proposal called NameCoin. The idea of creating digital “tokens” that are tradeable but not copyable is so weird and so useful, that bitcoin is worth paying attention to for that reason alone.
IMO, if you don’t think bitcoin is extremely interesting, then you’re just not paying close enough attention.
~Dave
i don't want to go into it too much in a public forum, but BTC, or its
successors, will be way to evade the "dissent tax":
that's important, because sometimes free speech and criminality look
really similar:
http://www.thecontrarianmedia.com/2011/02/pirate-box-vs-freedom-box/
Also, if you are interested… you can reclaim your mtgox account now. https://claim.mtgox.com
At the time of this writing it appears trading on mt. gox has not been re-enabled yet.
It’s a long story to read to understand the point, but Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson gives a pretty good context for the interest of many parties in truly digital (and anonymous) currency.
Don’t be fooled. Just because you can’t “hold” a bitcoin doesn’t make it any less something that a human will exchange with another human for goods or services: and when the equivalent of secure bluetooth really becomes developed (although the algorithms in bitcoin are supposed to prevent errors arising from multiple transactions attempted on the same coin, etc.), hookers will accept your bitcoins (or their nextgen equivalent) and muggers will hurt or kill you for them. No It’s not there yet. As Chris mentioned above, the lines between privacy, anonymity, and free speech (for the honest and dishonest alike) are not simple to sort out. But the technology and this particular application of cryptographic algorithms is a fascinating outgrowth of cryptography and privacy-centric software.
Will there be a bitcoin bubble and crash? Probably inevitably. But I admire the creators for the thinking that must have gone into this.
The best kind of bubble, would be one that forces you to buy greater and greater amounts of real hardware to mint your own bitcoins…Intel and the FPGA makers must be kicking themselves for not thinking of it first.
As for me, I’m thinking it’s time to bring back Josiah Warren’s Cincinnati Time Store idea - you could use “time store notes” to buy commodities and services, or bushels of corn. [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cincinnati_Time_Store]. Once people get used to the idea of labor equivalency, interesting things could happen.
Cincinnati and the former community of Utopia both benefited from Warren’s involvement.
Funny you should mention Josiah Warren and the Cincinnati Time Store. I’ve been reading some of Warren’s writings and have set up http://www.cincinnatitimestore.com/ for just that purpose.
~Dave
I'm in. Anything that allows us to exchange services and/or goods
without the messy involvement of money sounds good to me.