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Well, firstly, you can, of course, convert to Dollars (Or Euros) and use those.

Second, there are online site that you can buy groceries from. Even a trivial amount of research (like typing "bitcoins groceries" into Google) will show this.

Third: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=73712.0
"Topic: Las Vegas Property Management Co Accepts Bitcoins for Rent Payments"

Forth: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1867.0
"Topic: Reloading a pre-paid gas card via bitcoin"

So... as per your request, I'm letting you know. HTH. HAND.

I'm not exactly sure how it happened and the only person who's admitted to taking advantage of this isn't either: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152348.0 As far as anyone can tell, enough mining nodes forgot their transaction history due to being shut down and restarted on 0.7 that some transactions only confirmed on the newer 0.8 side of the fork, allowing the attacker to submit a conflicting transaction that would replace their payment transaction after it had already been confirmed and after they'd already withdrawn the funds. (There were probably other ways of doing it, such as taking advantage of the rules on when fees are required on transactions.)

Sigh, I was hoping that guy had remembered enough of my posts to quote my rebuttal to that argument - I guess I'll have to add the link myself.

You laugh, but some of the developers, the lead developer Gavin, and another core developer Mike Hearn, are pushing really hard to get the current 1MB limit (7 transactions/second) on blocks lifted so Bitcoin can directly scale to VISA-like volumes.

Never mind that Bitcoin is inherently an unscalable O(n^2) network - every transaction has to be broadcast to every node - and the issue they ran into was also a problem scaling. Mike's solution is to just throw thousands of dollars worth of hardware at the problem. Never mind that for Bitcoin *any* issue the means that some nodes can process a large block, and some can't, turns into the same hard-fork we just saw. Never mind that it will make Bitcoin centralized, and lead to perverse incentives for large miners to attack smaller ones.

You'd think they'd say "OK, hold on, how about we just use ways to transfer funds that don't have to go into this shared state ball of mess?" but no, they're desperate to take the easy way out at any cost.

I really wonder if my Bitcoins will be worth anything in a few years.

The people already doing this would qualify as prior art, and it is obvious to anyone educated in the field:

Transfer data over audio (download the code) (2009)

Sound for mobile communication ala NFC (2011)

Transferring data using audio in android.(2012)

He probably got the idea by reading about what Bitcoiners are already doing.

Lots of people are being caught offguard by Bitcoin.

The negativity seems to stem from an inner conflict struggling with issues surrounding the foreign concept of monetary freedom.

It is like you open the cage door on a chimp that has been locked up for decades, basically they go nuts ... they look at the door and their eyes tell them it is open but their brain cannot comprehend it because it has never seen the cage door open. Soon the will poke their noses out of the cage (buy a saotshi or two), run around a little and them run back inside the cage (USD) ... observing it makes for great lolz, the big, bold freedom campaigners confronting a possible freedom they never really believed in, just like to talk about.

You talk here about theft worth only 300 BTCs or 12 000$

Well, I can only conclude that overall BTC security maybe has improved. Recall previous thefts worth of 25 000 BTC or 500 000$ (at that time) or 18 547 BTC or 87 000$ (at that time).

Why such conclusion? Well, if those evil people started to go after such low-profile target, it *can* mean that all high profile targets have adequate security.

a side note about bitcoin: ASIC mining is starting now. I guess this is why bitcoin price rised recently. asicminer has currently 2TH, and prepares for next 12TH. 2 avalon units have been shipped, and one of them is reviewed by Jeff Garzik (bitcoin developer). Nobody knows when other 298 avalon units will arrive, etc. But slowly asic mining becomes part of the history.

read this thread
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=101748.20

And you will understand why it is a bad currency. The price fluctuated ~50% in about 2 days. Thats not a "problem" its unviable. If that happened to the USD, Im not really sure what the ramifications would be but it would be "dire".

Not to mention that "unregulated" means "government cant do jack when someone pulls a massive ponzi and drops the value of everyone's BTC". Starts to look a lot less good at that point.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=101748.0;topicseen

Call me when the USD experiences a 50% loss of value in a 2 day period.

Actually one of the more serious projects(ASICMINER) DO plan to use the first batches of chips to compensate the IPO investors by using them for mining and later to possibly help fund more R&D and production runs. Additional and future income will be based on sales of the hardware

And since this is /. Preliminary chip info:
Built on 130nm node process (approximately comparable to the Pentium III generation)
It'll use a 15 x 15mm BGA package.
It's expected to run at around 200-300Mhz
It'll be a couple orders of magnitude more power efficient than GPUs and serveral times more than current FPGAs at hashing the SHA256 algorithm.
More info here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.980 and older (but more geek bait): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91173.0

Project is only about 2/3rds of the way through the foundry process, so atleast a month left till these chips could be active on the BTC network.

Actually one of the more serious projects(ASICMINER) DO plan to use the first batches of chips to compensate the IPO investors by using them for mining and later to possibly help fund more R&D and production runs. Additional and future income will be based on sales of the hardware

And since this is /. Preliminary chip info:
Built on 130nm node process (approximately comparable to the Pentium III generation)
It'll use a 15 x 15mm BGA package.
It's expected to run at around 200-300Mhz
It'll be a couple orders of magnitude more power efficient than GPUs and serveral times more than current FPGAs at hashing the SHA256 algorithm.
More info here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.980 and older (but more geek bait): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91173.0

Project is only about 2/3rds of the way through the foundry process, so atleast a month left till these chips could be active on the BTC network.

That's been done, it's not profitable

OMG you're right. I can't believe all the people who've been working on this project for the last three years missed these numerous fatal flaws.

Please, go onto the Bitcoin forums and let them know what you've discovered right away so they all know it's time to give up and go home.

I probably read about Freicoin on slashdot. They've got a proposal for a fix to BitCoin that defeats hoarding. I'm pessimistic. The whole premiss of BitCoin is people don't trust each other. To "mine" bitcoins, we burn real resources to power all those machines computing SHA-1 hashes. Someone said that mining bitcoins was like burning real money and getting a fake bitcoins to replace it. No, "real" money is just stupid paper. It's amazing that we still use dead tree money. Burning it doesn't hurt the economy, other than reducing inflation. Wasting electricity and all those machines computing bitcoin hashes... that's real harm.

I know Ripple has not caught on, but I like the basic premiss. In Ripple, I create money by giving people I trust coupons with dollar values in proportion to how much I trust them. This gives us a way to generate cash out of nothing but trust, while eliminating incentives for hoarding.

The whole point of Bitcoin (not "BitCoin" - where did the camelcase orthography come from?) is to transfer value from place to place and person to person, not to be used as an actual currency (keep using domestic currencies for that) or a store of value (that's what gold and silver are for).

The whole bitcoin community disagrees with you. Here, take a look.

It's true that "Coins" are only a unit of measurement in the BitCoin system, but transactions can be tracked just the same:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=241.0

It's an insecure landscape to be sure - but would you expect anything less from a young and revolutionary idea?

No, it's exactly what I'd expect from a young and revolutionary idea -- not yet fully fleshed out, missing a lot of things it really needs, and nowhere ready to be trusted with anything which has real value. In other words, something I'd steer clear of, which is all I'm saying.

It sounds more like a proof of concept than something I'd entrust money to.

And, being on the internet, people either don't think critically of it, or don't understand that you've more or less handed a bag full of money to someone you don't really know and have no business trusting in the first place.

The difference between the real world analogy and the internet one, is I don't walk into a store in a strip mall with a hand-painted sign which says "Bob's Happy Fun Bank" and hand them my money. Apparently, on the internet, that's exactly what we do -- even if Bob didn't rip you off directly, he left the money sitting around in a big heap in the back room and didn't lock the door.

If I have my cash in a bank, well, it's insured and covered under a lot of legal regulations. Since these guys aren't doing any of that, you're asking an entity to hold onto your cash for you, without any safeguards.

I've no doubt that BitCoint is cryptographically sexy and secure. But that's kind of moot from a practical measure if this is something which keeps happening.

I'm sorry, but "the system" is so ad-hoc as to make trading in "the currency" insecure by design. It could be made more secure, but it hasn't yet. And since it's not covered under any regulations nor is it being monitored for shady stuff ... I fail to see how people can act like it's "secure", and that if it's not secure, it's the fault of "the system". There's just too many gaps that you need to leave up to someone to get it right.

But you seem insistent on discussing this as if it takes place in a vacuum from the method of exchange, which it clearly doesn't.

I really do think BitCoin is a cool idea. But, like so many cool ideas, it has a little growing to do before I'd assign any level of trust to it and actually use it for my own stuff. In fact, it would have to be as robust and secure as the actual banking system itself for that to happen. I'm just not hearing that it's anywhere near there.

Bitcoin can scale actually. Take a look at some of the latest calculations here.

LOL, like I said, "Bob's online brokerage" ... why should I trust them? They're completely unregulated, outside of the normal banking system, and not really accountable to anybody. What could possibly go wrong?

That's actually not correct at all.

Firstly, Bitcoin exchanges are regulated, that's why Mt Gox requires you to do ID verification and other such things. Not that regulations are a magic wand - US banks routinely get pillaged due to their pathetically weak (often single factor!) security systems. And whilst many European banks at least use dedicated 2-factor calculators, that hasn't stopped massive bank runs in Spain and Greece as people fear different kinds of failure mode.

Secondly, they are not outside the normal banking system. The whole point of a centralized exchange like Mt Gox is to interface with the banking system. They have bank accounts, accept and send bank wires, etc.

Thirdly, they are accountable in the same way any company is accountable. But they go further, publishing transparency reports that detail exactly how their business is operating. You'll note that Mt Gox is very different to Bitfloor. It is a real company (albiet a small one), not a one-man operation anymore. They have staff processing support tickets. They have redundant datacenters and the ability to withstand 100Gbps DoS attacks. Most crucially 90%+ of their Bitcoins on deposit are stored in offline wallets in various places that can only be accessed physically. Bitfloor (with a whopping 2% of the market) was a one-man job that ran on Linode, a provider that has been completely rooted in the past! That right there should have been an indication that maybe he wasn't really serious.

Let me be clear, anything Bitcoin related is risky right now. That's not because of some inherent flaw of Bitcoin, it's because it's very new and so the ecosystem is immature. In particular the fact that it's an open system with open APIs means a lot of programmers just jump right in and start creating services without fully thinking things through. If you're going to run an exchange you need to have your shit together and there are just way too many people who don't. Now is that their fault, the fault of people who then hand them money, or both?

The Bitcoin economy is immature. At present there are no real standards and best practices for security surrounding
major trade in the Bitcoin economy. To a certain extent lack of certifiable means to prevent fraud has been fostered
in the the Bitcoin community. Total monetary freedom, an idea to which its repercussions are open to interpretation,
is a common theme in the Bitcoin world.

The desire for total monetary freedom, in terms of both fluidity of instantaneous transactions and latitude afforded by
anonymity, is ideological and lacks the pragmatism necessary to entice wide-spread adoption. Bitcoin, in absence
of high level controls, enables anonymous, instantaneous fraud. Bitcoin as a foundation for value exchange is not an
inherently bad idea. Ultimately, the legitimacy of Bitcoin as a major means of exchange hinges on the marketplace’s
ability – not the Bitcoin infrastructure – to establish effective means to counter fraudulent activity. Bitcoin’s
decentralized infrastructure all but mandates that marketplaces and edge nodes take independent action to further
a common cause of fraud prevention and help ensure Bitcoin’s viability in legitimate spaces. Limiting exposure to
fraud from an entire economy is too great a task for the individual; it must be a collective effort. To quote quite
possibly the most well-known Bitcoin personality aside from Bitcoin’s creator.

“Major investment will not occur in Bitcoin. Major investors require accountability.”
-PirateAt40

This wonderfully ironic quote from the perpetrator of what is shaping up to be the first of large scale fraud in the Bitcoin
world contains a simple truth applicable for both the individual and institution.

Nefarious individuals and black markets facilitating fraud will always exist in any system. Bitcoin is a
proven goliath for underworld dealings . Now it’s time for Bitcoin to mature and show Bitcoin non cultum
how it can survive in the legitimate world. Or not.

This may not be a ponzi scheme. pirateat40 seems to be still around: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=101339.0

The main bitcoin protocol has been hacked once that I'm aware of. The cpu-majority of miners took care of it by abandoning the main hashchain and forking a new one with a patched client.

There's already BitCard, from "Global Standard Bank" They're not a real bank. They used to have pictures of their supposed building and offices in Montreal, which turned out to be a Photoshopped picture of a building on the US west cost, with a fake sign added, and a picture of a bank interior in Florida. They're not registered with Canadian banking authorities.

Here's the discussion on Bitcoin forums about them.

As for the new operation, I have a hard time taking seriously a financial institution that announces its products on IRC.

There is a nice counterargument on the Bitcoin forum. To summarize, the card is a great promotional tool, especially for merchants who might consider alternatives to credit card charges.

In a way, the purpose of this card is to make itself obsolete. This is not so strange if you consider many important social movements.

A subsequent RaspberryPi story shouldnt take long now, so strap yourselves in guy's!

Business plan:

1. Mine bitcoins with your Raspberry Pi.
2. Store the bitcoins on your Raspberry Pi
3. Use those bitcoins to buy another Raspberry Pi
4. ?
5. Profit!

The silk road has been running for some time on the TOR network. Ok. Buy some candy or shirt or computer gear

Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme. There may be a few Ponzi scams running INSIDE of the bitcoin economy though. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=94900.0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

Does anyone really know if the site was actually hacked and the site owner did not just do a runner with the deposits held by Bitcoinica?

I posted this link elsewhere in the thread. Myself, I'm pretty convinced it was the guy who made the site. After all, it was a 17 year old immature kid.

Also, many in the community think that Zhou Tong, the buy behind the site, was the one who stole the money in the first place. For instance, after the initial hack and after Bitcoinica shut down, a bunch of money was stored with a legit exchange, Mt Gox. Well those funds got conveniently hacked, and another exchange noticed Zhou Tong trying to transfer the same amount of cash, as well as the fact that an email address associated with the hack was in control of Zhou Tong himself. Source

Ever heard of the term "bucket shop"? That's exactly how Bitconica functioned. Sure you could sell, or sell on margin, your Bitcoins for imaginary US dollars, but you couldn't never withdraw or deposit anything but Bitcoins. What went on was people would use the margin given to them by Bitconica to speculate on the price of Bitcoin, then they'd conveniently lose their whole positions whenever the market went against them, which is quite easy to do if you happen to have everyones Bitcoins to manipulate the market with. This happened so often that a new term was invented for it: zhou tonged, named in honor of the 17 year old kid running the site. (seriously, 17!) Hell, even in the Bitcoin community lots of people were calling them out on this right from the start, for instance here is a post by one of the main devs, obviously concerned about all the other scams that of course have cropped up using bitcoin. Speaking of, wait'll you see the press when the pyramid scheme known as "Bitcoin Savings and Trust" fails, as it of course will given it pays out %3400 a year.

Personally I'd suggest you use your Bitcoins for something reputable, like buying pot, getting cash out of Argentina or donating to wikileaks. All this investment non-sense, as opposed to just using the currency for moving value around digitally, is getting out of hand.

Ever heard of the term "bucket shop"? That's exactly how Bitconica functioned. Sure you could sell, or sell on margin, your Bitcoins for imaginary US dollars, but you couldn't never withdraw or deposit anything but Bitcoins. What went on was people would use the margin given to them by Bitconica to speculate on the price of Bitcoin, then they'd conveniently lose their whole positions whenever the market went against them, which is quite easy to do if you happen to have everyones Bitcoins to manipulate the market with. This happened so often that a new term was invented for it: zhou tonged, named in honor of the 17 year old kid running the site. (seriously, 17!) Hell, even in the Bitcoin community lots of people were calling them out on this right from the start, for instance here is a post by one of the main devs, obviously concerned about all the other scams that of course have cropped up using bitcoin. Speaking of, wait'll you see the press when the pyramid scheme known as "Bitcoin Savings and Trust" fails, as it of course will given it pays out %3400 a year.

Personally I'd suggest you use your Bitcoins for something reputable, like buying pot, getting cash out of Argentina or donating to wikileaks. All this investment non-sense, as opposed to just using the currency for moving value around digitally, is getting out of hand.

Note that on this so-called "exchange" you could never actually convert Bitcoins to any other currency. Sure you could "sell" your coins, but you had to buy new Bitcoins to ever get your money out. Mainly Bitconica was used by people trying to short Bitcoins or dollars. This kind of arrangement is known as a bucket shop and has been illegal for a very long time for very good reasons. Namely the people running the site can always manipulate the exchange rates to clean you out, and therefor pocket all your money.

Of course, the 17 year old kid running the whole thing always said that trades went out to real exchanges, but the volume on other exchanges never was anything near what was required for that to be plausible. Meanwhile the whole time people were "zoutong'd" whenever the alleged exchange rate went against their bets.

The whole thing is shady as fuck, although to the credit of Bitcoin people, a lot were asking questions about the thing right from day one, see here and here. (the latter is one of Bitcoins main developers)

Note that on this so-called "exchange" you could never actually convert Bitcoins to any other currency. Sure you could "sell" your coins, but you had to buy new Bitcoins to ever get your money out. Mainly Bitconica was used by people trying to short Bitcoins or dollars. This kind of arrangement is known as a bucket shop and has been illegal for a very long time for very good reasons. Namely the people running the site can always manipulate the exchange rates to clean you out, and therefor pocket all your money.

Of course, the 17 year old kid running the whole thing always said that trades went out to real exchanges, but the volume on other exchanges never was anything near what was required for that to be plausible. Meanwhile the whole time people were "zoutong'd" whenever the alleged exchange rate went against their bets.

The whole thing is shady as fuck, although to the credit of Bitcoin people, a lot were asking questions about the thing right from day one, see here and here. (the latter is one of Bitcoins main developers)

Not a hope. Bitcoin mining is already mainly done by custom-built low-cost FPGA hardware, and in a few months will possibly switch over to custom ASIC's, that is completely custom silicon developed for the task, if the promised ASIC hardware Butterfly Labs is developing actually is shipped.

This post gives a good overview of how much more efficient the custom built hardware is compared to off-the-shelf computers, and even FPGA farms.

Not just financial service providers either. Apparently the #1 seller on Silk Road, the anonymous drugs marketplace, recently did a runner with the Bitcoins he was paid over the 4/20 rush and didn't actually fulfill any of his orders. Turns out that anonymous reputation systems aren't sufficient to protect against scammers. Whoever would have guessed?

Hey there, while you're on the topic of security, couldja not include your session ID in a URL you post? Makes you look sorta stupid. Try this instead, guys.

From https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=a5fdf1db75465f52e9f1ebb06e67b70e&topic=81045.380:

"The root cause of this problem is an email server compromise. The email server belongs to one of our team members."

Really? Does their server really send (unencrypted) emails with root passwords to their entire system? Or did the email server just happend to have root access? I don't even know what possibility is worst.

You *can* pay rent with Bitcoin if you move to Vegas.

In my opinion, the way Bitcoin is implementing multi-signature transactions is scary. They're trying to change the rules of a complicated distributed financial system when it's in active use, which is kind of like trying to rebuild an airplane mid-flight, and it looks like due to some unfortunate oversights by the developers this is going to break stuff like protection against double-spending for the duration of the switch-over period even for users that don't themselves use multi-signature functionality. (It's actually a lot worse than that thread implies; for example it turns out that an attacker can cause the part of the Bitcoin network running newer clients to decide the part running older clients is attacking it by sending invalid transactions and cut off all communications with it.)

Bitcoinica lost 43,554 BTC (valued at about US$200K) in the same incident.

Funny enough, your post was at the bottom of the page when I read it, so I could see the daily cookie right below your post:

But like the Good Book says... There's BIGGER DEALS to come!

How does one destroy a bitcoin?

Send it to a nonexistent address...

That's exactly what happened to MtGox in October 2011. In Bitcoin, you don't technically send coins to an address, you send them to a script which must evaluate true in order for the coins to be spent again. MtGox wrote some code that generated a bogus script, which could never be satisfied, so the bitcoins were effectively destroyed. Oops!

Bitcoinica lost 43,554 BTC (valued at about US$200K) in the same incident.

What about the 43,000 coins bitcoinica reported stolen in the same breach? Still overblown? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66979.0

I could have written a much longer description but I think that the Ars Technica article covers it well. The claim that Mt. Gox is the only other exchange is silly though. There are many exchanges and Tradehill was only slightly bigger than Intersango and Cryptoxchange. Both of these exchanges have started to push their marketing especially at Bitcointalk forums, after this incident: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=63941.0 & https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=63877.0

So that everyone clearly understands, Mt. Gox is by far the biggest exchange. Even though Tradehill was the 2nd biggest exchange, it was tiny compared to Mt. Gox. Both Intersango and Cryptoxchange were almost as big as Tradehill at the time of its demise. This information is available at http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/

I didn't pull anything out of my hat but I could have perhaps added a few more links and a slightly longer description.

I could have written a much longer description but I think that the Ars Technica article covers it well. The claim that Mt. Gox is the only other exchange is silly though. There are many exchanges and Tradehill was only slightly bigger than Intersango and Cryptoxchange. Both of these exchanges have started to push their marketing especially at Bitcointalk forums, after this incident: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=63941.0 & https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=63877.0

So that everyone clearly understands, Mt. Gox is by far the biggest exchange. Even though Tradehill was the 2nd biggest exchange, it was tiny compared to Mt. Gox. Both Intersango and Cryptoxchange were almost as big as Tradehill at the time of its demise. This information is available at http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/

I didn't pull anything out of my hat but I could have perhaps added a few more links and a slightly longer description.

Yes.

Ok, so here is plain and simple how I work.

I will sell small to medium transactions to people I feel are trustworthy enough in my mind based on a variety of factors.

I buy

MtGox USD
MtGox BTC
Btc
PPUSD
Paxum
Giftcards

I also buy alt coins and other things at a less than market but decent rate.

I pay in

MtGox USD
MtGox Btc
BTC
PPUSD
Solidcoin
Paxum
Giftcards
Facebook Credits
Eve isk
CashByMail (not responsible for items in transit)
Western Union (You pay fees, Mon-sat 9a-7pm pst, not available at times)
Others

I do not use

Liberty Reserve
Dwolla
MoneyBrokers
Alertpay
Virtual Credit Cards
Virtual Gift Cards with some exception

Message me with what you are looking for and what you would like to trade in, I will contact you back and discuss what my terms are and if I wish to continue. Search my name in the Honest Trader section and rest of forum for rep.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=48285.0

Others have pointed it out, but if you can run this on a GPU, you don't need to look any further than that.

Specifically, check out some of the BitCoin mining rigs people have built, like 4x Radeon 6990s in a single box. For comparison, a single 6990 easily beats a top-of-the-line modern CPU by a factor of 50 (as in, not 50%, but 5000%). You can build such a box for well under $5k.

And what's the Bitcoin Forums response? Denial.

This was posted by a member of the bitcoin forum. I think s/he has a point.
Not me, so I don't take any credit for it.

As best I can tell 35.5% of all bitcoins have already been minted. These 7,473,950 coins are all property of existing bitcoin users. There seem to be about 41,280 registered members of this site. I'll be generous and say there are ten times as many bitcoin users as there are members. That means about 410,280 bitcoin owners with on average 18 BTC each. Clearly BTC ownership is more concentrated than this, but lets be egalitarian for the moment.

If we pretended all bitcoin owners were all Americans that is about 0.13% of the population. It's not of course. Bitcoin is intended to be a world currency. So 0.0068% of the world population own 100% of all current and at least 35.5% of all possible bitcoins.

The view on this forum is that the world will come to their senses, throw out fiat currencies and move to something rational like Bitcoin. This of course means 6,000,000,000 people basically begging to use a resource owned by a relative handful of people. Say we just minted up the remaining 13,526,050 BTC and scattered them to late adopters purely out of the kindness in our hearts. That means about 0.00225 BTC for each of them to use in rebuilding their economy. Sure 18 BTC on average doesn't make us feel very rich. But it is 8,000 times what everyone else would have if we stopped competitive minting today.

But we won't stop competing of course. Sometime around Pearl Harbor Day of next year Bitcoin will hit the 50% distributed mark.

----
By that day, how many active Bitcoin users and daily goods trades do there need to be to make a sustainable Bitcoin economy viable?
----

Because to potential new adopters, after that point Bitcoin is going to look like a new a 21,000,000 coin currency with a 10,500,000 coin pre-generation that went to the creator and his "friends". Certainly people will stop caring about Bitcoin long before they show up on our doorsteps with signs saying,

"We are the 99.9932%!"

Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=48521.0