BitCoin: "The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen"

Ah. The power of suggestion.

Scarcity is a big part of creating the demand. You can't just "print" the currency; you have to "mine" it with CPU cycles, and that takes time.

Exactly. If Bitcoins have a real world value, they will be taxed as any other commodity would be.

If this gains traction, I think governments could put policies in place to prevent bitcoin capital flight. It's true it will be harder to do, but unless a good chunk of your labor gets paid to you in bitcoins, red flags will probably be raised as soon as a millionaire converts all his local currency to bitcoins. Then he'll get labelled a flight risk, and agents will undoubtedly be looking for him.

Governments pretty much have control of the banks. If I say, deposited $25,000 into my account when my previous transactions were between the 50 and 500 variety, there will be all sorts of alarms raised, and Canada Revenue Service will get a note from the bank to watch out for when this guy does his taxes the next year. This won't happen if the transaction is all in bitcoins. Heck, I don't think it happens with Paypal either. Where it gets dicey is when you want to convert it to real world currency.

It's no help when you need cash, but for everything else, the point is to not have to convert it to a so-called "real-world" currency, because people will accept it.

That didn't take long:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/08/us-financial-bitcoins-idUSTRE7573T320110608

Given the rate of bubble growth now the whole thing is probably gonna crash before any government gets a chance to try and stop it.

Explain. AFAIK it grows logarithmically, not exponentially.

Forgot about this thread, it's certainly been an interesting couple of months for bitcoin.

Never saw this thread earlier. Amazingly enough, I got in on the bitcoin ground-floor somewhat. When I started, was amazingly easy to generate blocks. In fact, was generating 50 at a time and built up over 2000 bitcoins, mainly to use them for my VoIP provider. I actually cringed at how much I gave them early on as I had no idea how much money they would be worth in a relatively short period of time. When the value took off, I cashed in several thousand dollars worth, but even then I acted too soon as they went up over $30 US for a short time. I sold mine at between eight dollars and $20.

I still have something like 6 or 700, but the value has been plummeting over the last few days. Might be time to buy soon.

Hmmmn.

Latest hilarity (that I've seen...I can't claim to be keeping up with all the goings-on): one of the bitcoin exchanges rolled out some untested software that accidentally went nuts while trying to send someone 1 bitcoin and accidentally did the transaction 512 times. So, at the current price, they just sent someone over $4k via an anonymous currency that has irreversible transactions. They're currently trying to shame the recipient into giving the money back and he's openly mocking them.

Hell yea, I'd laugh my ass off at them. I mean, what can they do? Nothing apparently.

If the recipient didn't openly mock the retards under such circumstances then I'd lose what little faith I have left in humanity.

When libertarians--i.e. bitcoin aficionados--try to shame someone into violently anally penetrating his own financial self interest sideways with a giant spiked dildo in order to secure the greater good for the masses of bitcoin users, mocking is the only reaction not worthy of utter contempt.

We don't deal in such minor currencies at bitcoins, now if you've got some quatloos burning a hole in your pocket...

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I've been following the massive BitCoin thread over at SomethingAwful for the last couple of months, that is just the tip of the iceberg of the hilarity:

http://buttcoin.org/ has a good rundown of various dramas in the BitCoin community.

The entire BitCoin fiasco has been an incredible example of how an entirely unregulated market can work, or in this case not. At this point in time there isn't a major BitCoin trading/banking site I know of that hasn't either openly scammed its customers, or lost vast amounts of their BitCoin through hacking or "accidents".

Krugman: BitCoin does the opposite of what a currency should do.

BitCoin and malware.

Well, that's an odd one, all right.

Oh, thought you meant the growth in volume of bitcoins, not the value.

I have to say, I'm impressed that this second bubble has managed to grow so big.

Bitcoin is fucking stupid and will never catch on with the general populace.

Also, RIP dkehler.

/thread

Shiny. I should probably sell the ones I mined a long time ago.

The 'tards are getting antsy about the gold prices and they still think the dollar's about to shit a hyperinflation brick any day now. They've gotta blow up some stupid bubble or another--or several--if they don't trust the gold bubble anymore, so why not this one?

Taking a look at who enthused for it in this thread, I came to the same conclusion without any further data.

Didn't know that

Aye.

You were into this in 2010 right? If you've held onto some coins since then you've hit the jackpot (assuming you manage to offload them before this bubble collapses)

Man offering his house for sale wants to be paid in BitCoins.

More at the link.

I've been following Bitcoin closely for the past couple of years and it's really interesting both for the ways in which it is succeeding as a payment method for illegal activity, as well as the many ways it shows the tendency of a totally free market to quickly collapse into monopolies, exploitation of financial opportunities in ways no anticipated and how defacto rulers and regulators emerge. When I have a free day going to make up a big post.