Flattr Adds Support For Funding In Bitcoin

An anonymous reader writes "Swedish startup Flattr, which offers an 'online tipjar' service, has announced it has added partial support for Bitcoin: you can now fund your account with the virtual currency. Furthermore, the company is considering adding the option to withdraw in Bitcoins too, but it first wants to gauge its community's desire for the feature on Twitter."

Comments

Winklevoss twins are trying to get out

[roman_mir]

While personally I view Bitcoins as a great experiment, first step out of many that will be taken that will in fact free the individuals from the oppression of governments by giving many viable, easy to use and very attractive alternatives to all of the things that governments have usurped to themselves as monopoly power, there is currently something else that is happening with Bitcoins.

Winklevoss twins are trying to get out of their gigantic position without crashing the market, they want to make tens of millions of dollars by selling a million or so Bitcoins by offering them via an ETF.

This is one thing that would separate the complete financial nubes from the rest: participating in this ETF.

There is not a single reason to buy ETFs if you want to bet on Bitcoins, all you need to do is buy Bitcoins themselves. An ETF makes sense when it is based around a commodity for example that has other costs associated with it, like cost of warehousing something. Say you want to buy coffee beans, you want 10 tons of them because you think the conditions are good for the prices to go up and you are going to make some money, but you don't want to store 10 tons of coffee beans and you don't want to pay various delivery fees, taxes maybe, etc. So then you can buy an ETF.

There is no such problem with Bitcoins, you store them in a file, the cost is already amortised into you owning a computer and an Internet connection and spending some time learning and installing some Bitcoin software. There is no reason for an ETF like that to exist but for the founders of it to get rid of their large position while trying to prevent market from collapsing in a short time period if they set a large sell order. So instead they create an ETF and have a pool of people buy the Bitcoins from them, it's all in that pool, outside of the rest of the market, that's their idea.

DO NOT FALL FOR IT, it's a stupid thing to do in case of Bitcoins.

Re:Winklevoss twins are trying to get out

[roman_mir]

I'd like to add by linking to my comment from a while back about the need to be able to short Bitcoins in the market to smooth out volatility and increase market penetration. It is possible that ETF could be used for such a purpose, being able to borrow Bitcoins from people because ETF holds all the wallets and so giving the loans back would be centralised because storage is centralised.

However if it were anybody else but the Winklevoss, who hold a gigantic amount of Bitcoins, I would not view it in the same way. If an ETF was set up that had a specific purpose of trading Bitcoins in a centralised way where borrowing and shorting was possible, but the ETF itself did not start with a huge percentage of the entire Bitcoin market that it would be selling to the ETF buyers from its own wallet, then I could I guess see a potential for business there, but with these 2 holding on to a large percentage of all the actual Bitcoins in existence, I can't imagine that it would be a good deal for the ETF clients, it's just not, the twins are setting this up to sell you THEIR Bitcoins outside of the rest of the market.