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Mt. Gox Gone? Apparent Theft Shakes Bitcoin World
mendax was one of many readers to write with news about the apparent shutdown of Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, in the wake of massive theft. "The New York Times is reporting that Mt. Gox, the most prominent Bitcoin exchange, 'appeared to be on the verge of collapse late Monday, raising questions about the future of a volatile marketplace.' 'On Monday night, a number of leading Bitcoin companies jointly announced that Mt. Gox, the largest exchange for most of Bitcoin's existence, was planning to file for bankruptcy after months of technological problems and what appeared to have been a major theft. A document circulating widely in the Bitcoin world said the company had lost 744,000 Bitcoins in a theft that had gone unnoticed for years. That would be about 6 percent of the 12.4 million Bitcoins in circulation.' Maybe the U.S. Dollar isn't so bad after all." Forbes goes further, and says flatly that Mt. Gox has shut down; Wired calls it an implosion. Reader electron gunner links to the alleged leaked document which outlines the exchange's crisis strategy. Watch this story for updates, since there are bound to be new developments.
Waiting for the libertarians here to demonstrate why this shows how Bitcoin is such a wonderful idea.
Still the most clever and insightful internet comment of the last year (i didnt come up with it)
https://blockchain.info/address/1Drt3c8pSdrkyjuBiwVcSSixZwQtMZ3Tew?offset=0&filter=0
Oh, that's right. Unregulated currency free from government interference. Enjoy!
Mt.Gox is like a bank, it's not because one big bank fail (Lehman Brothers for instance) that the whole currency is bad. Mt Gox was poorly managed, bad software code, bad PR, often DDOS. They couldn't stand the #1 place they hold for too long. I'm very sorry for everyone who lost money with Mt. Gox but don't get me wrong. Bitcoin ecosystem still exist and many other exchanges services will emerge as of that. Users and investors will have to be very careful about where they hold their money. In my case, I trust my on own encrypted devices.
The index document on https://mtgox.com/ looks like this at the moment: MtGox.com
I thought the take-home message from Lehman Brothers was "the whole [economy] is bad".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I've never personally been part of a Ponzi scheme collapsing before. But as the proud owner of a fraction of a Bitcoin, I guess this may be my big chance.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I've been reading about this since yesterday. Good to see /. is as current as ever with its news. Those Dice $$$ being put to good work.
View source on their blank web page:
Many people seem to forget, bitcoin is not inherently an investment vehicle. It is a currency. Using it as an investment is risky.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
What I'm saying is there is a slew of non-tech money out there about to prop up the price.
Even gold is worthless in a famine, but if enough people covet something it will hold value.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
A programmer who would implement an ssh server in PHP may be part of the problem?
BTW, the article linked from that reddit comments thread really is beautiful. In the absence of the later disasters, I might have speculated that this was parody.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
From mtgox.com:
<html> <head> <title>MtGox.com</title> </head> <body> <!-- put announce for mtgox acq here --> </body> </html>
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
Most people around me say it's better to keep your coins in an online wallet because it's easier to set-up, but I didn't do that, because then it would be the exchange that controls my money.
If people had kept their bitcoins in offline wallets, Mt. Gox wouldn't have been able to take them.
Hello!
Bitcoin is as safe now as it ever was!
If you compare MtGox to a bank then helping the fraudsters take suitcase after suitcase of money from the bank and wishing them a nice day every time this happened. To me this appears to be gross negligence in handling customer funds.
The transaction malleability problem required active assistance from MtGox support staff in order to initiate a second transaction of a withdrawal, after the original transaction seemingly failed to go through. Why did no one at MtGox ever have a closer look at the block chain to examine if and why the first transaction had failed in the first place? Why didn't they notice the decline of their cold storage wallet balance? This should have raised so many red flags.
If it's risky as an investment, how useful is it as a currency? I would expect a currency to be one of the least risky forms of property to be useful.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Mt.Gox is like a bank
Where do you need a bank for when you have Bitcoins?
The principle behind Bitcoin is that it is a distributed system, and payments can be made in a "peer-to-peer" fashion.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
For some reason only Slashdot reported no money was lost. In the phantom transactions obviously bitcoins were transferred, yet cancelled before cash could come.
On other sites like neowin it is reporting the values are sinking below $300 a coin!
http://saveie6.com/
MONEY ALLTOGETHER is not a good idea. Think for yourself, instead of waiting for some authority to think for you.
I for one would like to sign up to your newsletter.
Do you charge more than one chicken?
Sounds to me like someone was running a long term con here. Act like a legitimate business for a few years, get people to trust them. Maybe think of them as a bank and a safe place to actually cash, not bitcoins. Then once that trust is built up and you have a nice supply of money sitting in some off shore bank. Vanish like a thief in the night.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Kind of sad that a new currency - whose main idea was that it should be easy for private people to transfer money over the internet, free of charge - actually need these big "exchange-places" who not only takes out a charge (=makes money on your transaction) but actually becomes more and more as a regular bank. What's the point then? If the current usage continues we will have big online bitcoin-banks, who then will employ traders and whatnot, and start speculating on/with the currency, and, yes, we'll be in the same place we are now. Call it USD or BTC, same thing. It would be nice if the currency actually was so easy to use, and understand, so that people would feel comfortable to actually run the necessary software themselves, and take own - private - responsible for their.. yes.. wallets.
They said Bitcoin was just like currency, only better.
/sarcasm (C'mon mods. Mark this post as troll again. It doesn't change the reality.).
Does anyone still think bitcoins are worth anything more than Monopoly money? HAHAHAHA!
He obviously thinks a "currency" whose actual value against other currencies regularly swings 100% or more in a day is useful. Frankly I want to hear about the guy who sank money into Bitcoin ATMs and how he's doing at the moment...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Mt.Gox is like a bank
Where do you need a bank for when you have Bitcoins?
Well, some people apparently thought they needed one in Japan.
Well, you can't say it was unexpected. There have been problems with Mt. Gox for months now, ever since dollar withdrawals were stopped, so anyone using them was doing it at their own risk.
Cautious people would have sold their trapped dollars at a discount while they still could, and taken out all their bitcoins, so they wouldn't have lost too much. The unwary... well, they'll pay some stupid-tax.
Depends on what it's being used for. For small-scale transactions in time and value - e.g. turning $7 into BTC to immediately buy a CD - a relatively unstable currency is fine. Frankly, the while decentralisation of bitcoin made me assume that's the only way it would ever be used.
For anyone holding any significant amount of cash for any significant amount of time - e.g. a Bitcoin exchange - the instability is a nightmare.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
A thousand times this.
Bitcoin isn't a currency and never will be until the price is as stable as actual money. At present it's just an investment like buying shares is.
1. new currency emerges, becomes significant
2. reigning system of currency/government considers it a threat.
3. coordinated attacks on the stock exchange
4. bankruptcy, uncertainty, disappearance
5. 'Maybe X currency isnt so bad after all!"
the fact stands that shifting major trade away from the dollar is dangerous, but the bitcoin midel would be catastrophic. its a world where international financial sanctions cant work, and in which America would need to do more than just show up to security council meetings in the UN for a rubber-stamp vote against $evil_dictator. Iraq and Iran serve as real-world examples of this in action. both countries have in the past attempted to shift oil trade away from the dollar. Nothing says monetary supremacy like de-stabilizing the competitions government.
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/...
http://www.projectcensored.org...
Good people go to bed earlier.
Now is an excellent time to buy bitcoin.
I am Audience.
Pity it's nearly useless as a currency. The wild swings in value on a minute-by-minute basis make it impossible to use as a currency for anything other than black market goods.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
You are right, which is the fundamental problem with it, right now, and the reason why it is floating on such an enormous bubble. Until it stops being speculated, it won't be stable, and if it isn't stable, it won't be a practical currency, and if it isn't a practical currency, it is subject to speculation. That is the cycle that is keeping prices high, and once the trigger is big enough, (or someone starts dumping the currency, which there are lots able to) the cycle will reverse. And it will reverse, given how many people were throwing their money into it thinking BTC would keep climbing to 10k-100k/coin, not thinking about the what a 1T total value digital currency would mean. And then, 'hey, I put real dollars into digidollars and ended up with way fewer real dollars that I can buy stuff with', crash ensues.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Sounds like bitcoin is more useful as a payment method (like a check or credit card or Paypal) than as a separate currency.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
That's a face palm. He mentioned he wrote his own half-ass DNS server so that he could use MySQL as storage too. Apparently he didn't take five minutes on Google to discover PowerDNS. Pdns is used by major sites like Wikipedia, has a MySQL backend, and takes security seriously. I found and reported a security flaw in Pdns once and their response was textbook perfect.
BTW, who broke into /. and replaced it with this Wordpress blog????
ike render onto.... stuff like that. putting our spirits on hold whilst collecting imaginary well being which appears then unappears in the cosmical wink of an eye leaving us both materially & spiritual bankrupted again. goal done http://www.youtube.com/results...
'l walk a mile in your shoes, now i'm a mile away, & i've got your shoes' kol
slashdot only allows...... per day
but they need to be heavily regulated by the government, obviously
it seems like the entire story of bitcoin has been heavily propeled forward by naive, enthusiastic free market fundamentalist types. ideological children
and now they are learning what the rest of us know from economic history, but apparently their gullibility means they have to learn the simple lessons of history the hard way
the free market fairy does not actually solve all problems. that's a quasireligious statement of faith, and is in complete contradiction to our simple experiences with markets throughout human history
sorry libertarians
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For small-scale transactions in time and value - e.g. turning $7 into BTC to immediately buy a CD - a relatively unstable currency is fine.
Stability of currency is absolutely needed for a vendor. If you had to change your pricing every 10 minutes how would you ever advertise anything? Would restaurants have dynamic menus with pricing that changes throughout the meal?
Maybe people will think twice before hiding their money with a company named after a card game.
Maybe this will be an object lesson for the libertarians (a very expensive lesson, for some of them). In the real financial world, we used to have "bank panics" all the time. People could lose their life savings if a bank was run poorly or crookedly. Worse, if there was a recession, people were more likely to need their money immediately, so they'd go to the bank to withdraw it – but of course a large portion of deposits had been loaned out and weren't immediately. And since people knew this could happen, they'd rush to withdraw their deposits at the first sign of trouble, since they didn't want to be the one left out in the game of musical chairs. These "bank panics", then, could happen even to well-run banks, and they made recessions far worse than they might otherwise have been. During the 19th century, the U.S. economy was repeatedly devastated by bank panics.
Finally, after the Great Depression and the mother of all bank runs, the government stepped in, because the "free market" obviously wasn't working well in this area and really never had. The answer was to create the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), funded by insurance premiums charged to banks. This ensured that even if a bank did go broke, the FDIC would reimburse depositors up to a certain amount (originally $2,500, but now a quarter of a million dollars). Stockholders might be wiped out, but depositors would be made whole. As intended, this reform restored confidence in the U.S. banking system. There have been quite a few failed banks that went broke, but people with checking or savings accounts at those banks still get their money back.
But didn't that lead to "too big to fail"? Not really. The whole point of the FDIC is that you can let a bank go broke, let the stockholders be wiped out, sell the bank assets at auction, and the federal insurance will make sure the regular depositors – who didn't sign up for extra risk – will get their money back anyway. So why didn't that happen in 2008? It's extremely complicated, but it basically has to do with the repeal of Glass-Steagall. This was legislation passed in 1933 that basically said because banks are federally insured, risky investment activities have to be cordoned off into separate businesses from ordinary consumer banking. In other words, you weren't supposed to be able to run a bank, gamble on risky high-yield investments with the deposits, and then go running to the federal government for a bailout when things went south. They didn't want bankers privatizing profits and socializing costs. But that law was repealed by Phil Gramm in the 1990s. As a result, everything got intermingled – we had massive insured deposits being used to gamble on derivatives that no one understood, and everything was linked to everything else in such a way that one false move would bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. The fear was that if there was not a general bailout for the investment banks (not covered by FDIC) then the whole economy would collapse. Whether that argument was sensible or just self-serving, it's what happened. Since then there have been several attempts, only partially successful, to rein in the exuberant activities of Wall Street to try to stop this from happening again.
Now back to Bitcoin. People in Mt. Gox thought they were keeping their money in a bank. Well, they were – a pre-1933 bank, with no insurance and no guarantees. There was a de facto bank run on Gox a couple months ago, and now it's gone bust and everyone has lost everything. And the libertarians didn't see this coming because they thought FDR was the devil and that all banking regulations are unnecessary.
The new meme on Reddit seems to be that you need to keep your coins in "cold storage" – if you keep them on an exchange and something bad happens, you have only yourself to blame. Imagine the financial papers saying that you can't trust the banks, so y
You don't need a bitcoin IF you have bitcoin, but the exchange service like Mt.Gox is doing exactly that, changing your cash to bitcoin and bitcoin to cash. Once you have Bitcoin you should remove them from the exchange service and store them on your own device to avoid any potential lost.
In my case, I trust my on own encrypted devices.
So, you're doing the equivalent of putting your money in your mattress.
I'm setting up a new exchange. It used be a Pez dispenser trading site but I'm sure it can be adapted to securely manage millions of dollars worth of financial transactions.
.... why I was just talking to my friends that work at DEC and Control Data. Ooops oh darn, yea, those companies got crushed by the PC market's rise to power
It's the nature of the beast. This won't be the last although it's arguably the most dramatic of the firsts. In the end it will be one of the better things that happen to crypto currencies as the weak and crooked will fall by the wayside but it's not for the feint of heart as things transition.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
Can these coins be taken out of circulation?
The other exchanges could create a blacklist of stolen blocks.
It's almost like there's a reason that currency is a "government" thing.
(Not that "quantitative easing" and perpetual deficit spending isn't a form of deliberate theft in its own right, but that's another discussion.)
-Styopa
I have a goat
nobody likes a braggart.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Do you take credit (unhatched chick)?
Yes, but I can make a backup encrypted copy online or on another computer so I my house burn I don't lose them. To spend bitcoin all you need the private key of the public key. The public key is your address. So you can even write it down or print it on a piece of paper if you want. If someone get to your private and transfer to money to his address your screwed because when you will try; the bitcoin network will detect the double spending and will reject your transaction.
It seems too much of a coincidence that it happen after a mexico drug cartel was arrested. Could it be money laundering with bit coins?
Out of my mind. Back in 5 mins.
that could go up or down most likely up then down or visa versa
"When will the gullible finally wise up?" was a question I presented a week ago which was answered with ridicule.
Apparently not quick enough, since we now have the final stage of any Ponzi schema. The collapse.
Bitcoin isn't a currency and never will be - it's just a gambling scheme like playing roulette is.
> It is a currency.
No it isn't. It's a security.
> Using it as an investment is risky.
That's *why* it isn't a currency.
I am actually hoping that at least that part of BTC survives. As a payment method it is fantastic, so much better then giving a merchant your account information and having them pull from it.
Real banks have insurance. So no, Mt Gox failing is not like a "large bank fail".
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
One of the recurring pitfalls even good programmers run into is that it is often more fun (and affirming) to write their own implementation then to figure out how to use someone else's.
Ding! We have a winner. Anyone who uses an exchange as a bank didn't grok the point of a distributed P2P transaction log in the first place. I would have thought it would be a key point for all those libertarians as well - personal responsibility n'all.
Keep your own wallets, keep your keys backed up, and keep them offline unless you need them. ALL these Bitcoin theft stories have one thing in common - the wallets were accessible from a public server. You would have thought that all the Bitcoin banks would have crashed right after the first story as people transferred their balances into personal wallets, but apparently people really do value their convenience much more than their hard-earned Bitcoin.
At a minimum, have a "current account" wallet that you maybe carry around on your personal devices like a phone, and a "deposit account" which you keep the wallet for OFFLINE. You can still transfer TO it any time you like - you only need the keys to transfer FROM it. Store multiple redundant copies of the keys somewhere secure - you might even want to go as far as storing a paper wallet in a real safe deposit box, but a USB memory thumb in your desk drawer and a backup thumb somewhere else is probably secure enough - you do remember your passphrases, right? And they're not the same for each copy of the wallet, right?
Recharge your current account from currency exchanges, or from your deposit account. Transfer any balances that are too large for comfort to your deposit account. Now the only thing that can destroy the value of your coins is... oh, everyone else who's still dumb enough to value convenience over personal responsibility. Que sera.
There is no good reason to trust an exchange with large amounts of money/bitcoins. You can encrypt your bitcoin wallet and keep duplicates, so there isn't a need to put the money in a bank. I don't know why so many people were keeping such large amounts of coins on their servers.
the number of people jumping up and down hollering “HA HA! BTC BAD!”
when for the past several years everyone has wet panties over BTC.
Using cash as an investment is "risky"?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
That's priceless.
One of the key "benefits" of bitcoin is one of the biggest problems with it in situations like this, the inability to reverse transactions.
If someone digitally steals a shit ton of cash for a regular bank, there's a good chance those transactions can be reversed and, at least some, or the money can be recovered.
Not so in bitcoin world where you would have to find the perpetrator and get his private key.
Not Invented Here syndrome is a terrible thing.
Why the HELL would you want to write your own DNS server, much less want to run it on MySQL.
If you want easy analytics from SQL reports, use a proper DNS server (my instant thought was one that uses LMDB - which PowerDNS supports, apparently) and write a program that dumps the data you want into a MySQL instance, which is the Unix philosophy - tools doing one thing well.
Last summer I was looking to convert my Beanie Baby portfolio into BitCoin. Ultimately I chose not to.
I was kicking myself when BitCoin values soared to $1200 but now I'm glad I held onto my Beanie Babies.
Someday I'm going to make a fortune with my Beanie Babies.
Bank failures often drag their insurers down as well.
I'm glad that I was cautious. Put magic words like "distributed network", "open source" and "against big corporate entities" there and Linuxbots will use anything, even if the system actually had serious flaws in its design.
Considering bitcoin is a psuedoanonymous currency favored by anarchists and libertarians what the hell did they expect? No government is going to be able seize the assets of those who stole the coins, make them return the coins, or insure the loss. Their fellow anarchists/libertarian compatriots stole the money for themselves and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Think about it, this is why libertarian and anarchist societies cannot exist in real life as someone is going to have to fill the role of government because people don't like their shit getting stolen.
A currency is used as a store of value. If the value fluctuates as wildly as it does in BTC it's useless.
Ponzi Schema is copyright & patented by Oracle, owners of MySQL.
This Schema will replace the current schemas in 2015, you can migrate now by encouraging 5 friends/colleagues to purchase MySQL Enterprise from Oracle, you will receive a disc in the mail.
NB: Oracle is not involved in or associated with Ponzi Scheme scams.
claws paws jaws they took everything... with no remorse (psychocorp). likely the btc flumbdumbs feel at least something by way of responsibility? if not so what back to square won?
> why ... much less want to run it on MySQL
Because the customer table links to the account table, to the server table, to domains, to host records.
MySQL / MariaDB is a good choice for running a hosting service, especially one with a PHP front-end for customers to manage domains, etc. Why put one table in a separate database system when Pdns, which is very much a "real DNS server", supports MySQL / Maria.
That's what we do for Clonebox, which has a database that looks like a hosting company, the difference being all the servers are hot spares for servers normally hosted elsewhere.
I knew something fishy was going on when I saw my mt.gox logged into (by someone else) despite having a very long random character password.
With repeat bad press and slander you can fell any bank in existence. If I told you $bank was on the verge of bankruptcy and if I not only repeat it often enough but also have some kind of reputation in financial circles, $bank IS bankrupt.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It seems you can buy anything with Facebook stock and it's value only goes up, so it's like gold
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Something something cloud something network something something wizards.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The redacted part (a business plan) can be recovered from the leaked PDF by mere copy/paste in Acrobat Reader, after downloading the PDF from scribd (registration required)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-Strategy-Draft
Gross technical incompetence comes to mind when it comes to leaving the malleability hole unplugged long enough for sizable exploitation (if that's the true story).
It extends to that redaction of an internal memo before letting it leak (if the leak and poor redaction is accidental).
Yep. The only good time to write your own is if it doesn't exist or the db is specific to you, only you, and will never be available to the not you - and you require high velocity. Otherwise, let those who have designed and improved their interface for years sell you one and then buy whatever hardware you need to overcome any processing bloat.
How do international vendors deal with this issue now? The value of currencies fluctuate against each other (except where pegged by fiat) every day. If you are saying it is the degree of instability that is the problem, that's true enough. Aside from illegal applications, how are BTC being used today? It seems a lot of people are finding some use for it outside of speculating on exchange rates.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
So how do you explain the growing list of perfectly legal vendors that are accepting payments in BTC? Just a marketing gimmick?
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Btw if you were thinking MySQL would be suboptimal for performance, there are three levels of caching between the socket and the tables, so busy domains are no problem. Pdns caches packets, so identical queries are answered immediately with no database query. That's over 99% of queries in most cases. (Almost everybody asks for the IP of Wikipedia.org or www.Wikipedia.org, so those are instantly answered from the packet cache.)
If www is a cname or something, the packet will be different but it'll end up running the same query. That's what the Pdns query cache is for.
If neither the Pdns packet cache nor Pdns query cache already has the answer, there's the MySQL query cache. In summary, for a busy site, it might do one database read for ten thousand DNS queries.
MySQL query caching, PDNS query caching, PDNS packet cache.
Didn't work so well for the Weimar Republic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic
You advertise them both to sell for Bitcoin. Your first buyer complains that his cow won't download. Before the second cow sells, the feds swoop down and arrest you for money laundering. Meanwhile, both cows disappear and later mysteriously turn up in Nigeria.
Presumably you'd advertise your prices in a more-stable currency, and then do an automatic/fast conversion to BitCoins at the moment of the sale.
Whether or not it would be worth the hassle to do that, I don't know. Life would certainly be simpler if/when BitCoin matures and its valuation becomes less erratic.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
How do international vendors deal with this issue now? The value of currencies fluctuate against each other (except where pegged by fiat) every day.
They deal with it by padding their prices to account for instability of currency vis-a-vis the nations in which their suppliers are located. And then they are uncompetitive and often go out of business. They also deal with it by making investments in a stable currency, whether that's their national currency or not.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Correct, but it's not great for that. The value is much too unstable. I once lost $200 in the minutes between when I bought some bitcoins and made a purchase with them.
The US financial system is not a safe place for your money.
Right, that's why the world regards it as the safest place for their money and the dollar is the world's reserve currency. Need evidence? All you have to do is look at the popularity of treasury bonds. If the dollar was regarded as unsafe the US government would have to pay a LOT more interest than they do. The only people who actually believe what you claim are those who hide their money in a tin can in the back yard.
BitCoins aren't a Ponzi scheme, they are an asset bubble. A Ponzi scheme would be Mt. Gox promising crazy interest rates on BitCoins and absconding with the deposits.
Instead, BitCoins are today's Beanie Babies.
It's not always the case though, it depends what the "thing" is. I've encountered plenty of situations where there's an existing library or selection of libraries for a problem but that frankly the options available have all been terrible such that I knew without question I could create my own better.
For something like a DNS or SSH server you're absolutely right though! Some problems are common enough to have been solved near perfectly a thousand times over, others however are still not common or advanced/solid enough that there is always a better option than writing your own.
Would you similarly suggest that diamonds are worthless if your neighborhood jeweler got robbed?
Do you store your diamonds at your neighborhood jeweler? Do you try to pay people for things in diamonds? Do you use diamonds as a currency? Care to try for a better analogy?
Just sayin'.... it may not be a total loss except for people who thought it would be a good idea to buy some while the price was sitting at around $1k/bitcoin last november.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
But it was going UP UP UP! The reason why people held on to it was the deflationary nature of the currency guaranteed that in the long run the value of your account would appreciate, at least until the whole thing imploded and became totally worthless.
Frankly, I'm shocked it has gone on as long as it has. I thought it was going to be a flash in the pan scam, with the original guys selling their horde of early mined coins and then leaving the suckers to hold the bag, but it seems like the suckers were much better at finding other suckers than I expected.
I read the internet for the articles.
As someone who accepts BTC for transactions, and also pays suppliers in BTC, it's simple: advertise in BTC.
Payment services (like bitpay for example) offer you the choice to "accept BTC" and get paid in your currency of choice. If you want to hold USD (or another currency), you pay your bills in USD, and you have things you want to do with USD, then you advertise your prices in USD.
Consider this: most of the world doesn't post prices for goods and services. They expect people will haggle based on what they are willing to pay for something in person. This helps to prevent a "race to the bottom" on goods, allowing small businesses to pop up and offer competitive service at higher prices. (among things!) This ends up meaning people with more money are generally willing to part with more of it (they feel something is worth more to them) and people who need things end up being able to haggle a great deal (leaving them with more capital to do other productive things with)
Bitcoin payment processors such as Coinbase and Bitpay protect the vendor from this already.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
No, banks are protected by the FDIC. Mt.Gox is like leaving your money under the mattress in a hotel and then expecting it to be there when you come back again.
Says the RNC Shill
The list of robbed Bitcoin exchanges is long and growing. In almost all cases the stolen coin can be traced (since all transactions are public thanks to the protocol). I wonder if the running exchanges have some sort of blacklist that detects whether previously stolen funds get moved to their wallets and if they will confiscate those.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
there will be others.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
" Obama administration stole 25% of all the money that the federal government was spending in 2009-2011"
nonsense, you twit.
". the "stimulus" was about $1 trillion dollars that Obama administration stole in 2009-2011"
do you not know what the word 'steal' means?
So tired of you idiots. I Mean, since you can only result to lies to say anything bad about President Obama, he must be doing a pretty damn good job. If he wasn't you could actual use facts instead of lies and misinformation.
I like how you ignores the fact that under his plans everything has improved. deficit? better. Market? healthier. Jobs? unemployment continues to decline.
And so on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Some update exchange values on a daily basis, some offer their goods in a single currency (dollar, euro) and expect the buyer to deal with the exchange rate to those currencies from whatever their local currency is.
At a multinational corporation level it's probably a mix of all of them, with a little speculation thrown in. It's a finance guy's wet dream because they can mix in all kinds of shenanigans to reduce taxes, hide profits, etc.
The problem with Mt Gox was that it was not an exchange service. Being allowed one payout in two weeks with a processing time of six weeks, and a processing time depending on the size of the payout
After a few years of this with their turnover, it was clear that this was either incompetency, or it provided them with temporary funds for speculation in order to offset their losses.
But their losses were losses in Bitcoin. So when they speculated with their own customers, they were able to purchase "MtGox Bitcoins" at nice prices. But then they had to pay out real money in exchange for Bitcoins that did no longer exist in the MtGox kept wallets. And you can't sell those non-existing Bitcoins to anybody but customers of yourself. And at some point of time, those wanted to transfer them out of MtGox.
Really, the processing conditions were a flashing red light. That was the main reason I never exchanged anything at MtGox. At bitcoin.de, I can sell a Bitcoin once its transfer to the escrow account has been verified. And when I ask for someone with the same bank, the whole money transfer may be completed online in 5 minutes (with money going bank to bank without ever touching Bitcoin.de) and the Bitcoin be paid out the next minute (absent the 1% transfer fee split between sender and receiver).
The only extended opportunity for bad things is when I put Bitcoins up for sale at higher than current market price. Then they are going to stay in the escrow account until a buyer turns up. That time period is when you don't want to have the exchange go broke.
In summary - once the DNS information is changed in the database, the DNS server continues to serve out stale information for the next 10,000+ queries.
Just a marketing gimmick?
Yes. And also a way to gain some "geek cred" amongst the cryptocurrency fans.
Not a libertarian. Libertarians are, in my opinion, quite stupid.
Here's why I think BitCoin is a great idea. Disclaimer: I have 0 bitcoins, or any other cryptocurrencies. :(
Money is a proxy for value. That is, you work or do something worthy, and you get something in return, or if you have something to trade. You know this, you're probably not that stupid. Here's the key thing: in order for money to be a good proxy, it shouldn't be easy to counterfeit it. Ideally, it should be next to impossible. You need to have some real skills, some real tools, to make money that you can't just duplicate. Generally, this is the domain of governments, but we see some companies do this as well. Next, money shouldn't grow on trees. It shouldn't be something that you can just pick up off the ground. It should be scarce then, so that the value you store in the currency stays there.
Cryptocurrencies address both of these issues. You can't generate a fake bitcoin, or in other words you can't spend the same bitcoin twice. Bitcoins are scarce, so any value you put in it should remain there, aside from the normal fluctuations (the crazy flux that we're seeing in crypto currencies should be expected, as it's such a new thing that people are getting a handle on, and learning what not to do - eg store any amount with someone else).
Cryptos, not requiring a government to back them, also have another advantage. They can't be devalued ad-hock by whoever is in charge of the currency. The government can't print more, and banks can't magically generate more through the power of "fractional reserve banking" (eg leverage their capital by lending out $10, or however much, for every $1 in the bank). In fact, by taking the control away from a government who might devalue the currency on a whim (or through poor monetary and fiscal practices), you've increased the security of your stored value. And by taking the control of who can transact that currency (the bank robbers that are in charge of all the banks right now), you can decrease the fees you pay for transactions. These are some serious wins.
To sum up - crypto currency solves two very big problems. Scarcity and counterfeiting. Without these, it's impossible for any currency to store value. They rip control away from those who might devalue your money either through poor governance, or gauging you with fees.
If you understand this - then you might see the potential. Imagine cryptostocks. Being able to buy a real, actual investment into a company directly from that company, without having to go through a third party in order to validate the investment as valid (eg, you buy a stock, you have bought an actual stock vs some toilet paper with the words "this is stock" scribbled on it). You could dramatically reduce the fees for these sorts of things, and wrest money, and thus power, away from Wall St.
As for MtGox - good grief, who the fuck was dumb enough to store *cash money* (think of BitCoins as cash) with a third party, when it takes all of what, 0 seconds to transfer the funds? (1 hour to confirm, with practically no fees?) I hope some people learnt their lessons!
Obama administration stole 25% of all the money
what exactly ws stolen, please show your work.
wow...
Look up G Edward Griffin.
It's short for "acquiescence"
Dear MtGox Customers, In the event of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly. Best regards, MtGox Team
Not content with fleecing their customer once; the new strategy is to fleece the die hard supporters once again.
On a freshly branded static homepage, post a letter from Mark KarpelÃs stepping down as CEO of MtGox, bringing in transition advisors, and citing poor organization and technology. Moving to a new country (Singapore?) could be helpful.
Looks remarkable like Phoenix Company Fraud
When a company goes bankrupt a second company can start up overnight ... but without any obligation to pay for the failed company's losses. This is so they appear to be different entity.
No. Really. If it gets down to a dollar for say... 100 bitcons... and you get a certificate you can hang on a wall...
I'd buy that.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Depends on what it's being used for. For small-scale transactions in time and value - e.g. turning $7 into BTC to immediately buy a CD - a relatively unstable currency is fine.
Of I could just use the $7 and buy the CD directly.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
You could just advertise it with a price tag in a more stable currency. And show your conversion rate and the price in bitcoin on the side to show that you use a fair rate.
Add to basket 7$ (0.007BTC, rate = 1000$/BTC)
Mt Gox is not a bank - it is an exchange - an unregulated exchange - they lost people money for years
and now people's bitcoins dissapear because of insider theft and what not.
So you're going to trust some fly by night - non regulated, non FDIC insured, no government - some MAFIA
style of exchange for a Bank ?
A sucker born every minutes !!!
Money abstracts the value of good and services. It is an intermediary for trade. It can be aggregated to build huge enterprises. It can be stored for future use. It motivates people to work harder.
Of course all of his was possible before money. For example the Pyramids will built from stored agricultural and precious metal surpluses. But money makes this a lot easier for everybody.
No one has massively hacked bitcoin cryptocurrency so far itself. (Maybe the NSA can.) However the banks storing bitcoin for exchange seem to have been vulnerable to hacking.
Are we really surprised that the currency designed for and primarily used by drug addicts and drug dealers is unstable?
So tired of you idiots. I Mean, since you can only result to lies to say anything bad about President Obama, he must be doing a pretty damn good job.
Let me fix that for you: "since his opponents can be dismissed by mere insults, it's profitable to be on his side if you want to be a criminal."
I like how you ignores the fact that under his plans everything has improved. deficit? better. Market? healthier. Jobs? unemployment continues to decline.
Clearly, this pure nonsense. The only reason this President (who is criminal in such obvious, brazen and obnoxious way) has not been impeached is that given a history of past racism, impeaching the first black President would be unthinkable. He has carte blanche to commit crimes and he is charging it to the fullest. Hopefully, the country can still survive after he is done. Because, believe you me, immigration is a pretty damn hard undertaking.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Every single dollar spend on the "stimulus" was graft. Done.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Uh, you advertise your prices in dollars, because that's what you want. When people go to pay you, you quote them the equivalent price in BTC good for 15 minutes which is long enough to immediately convert the BTC to dollars. There are merchant services that will do all of that for you. This is a nonissue. Clearly you haven't thought about this much and are just posting questions from the top of your head.
. . .Pop! goes the bubble.
This isn't MTGox's fault, bitcoin's fault, or anything else you're probably thinking. The originator of this problem is the fact that open source coders did a crap job again. The volunteers who wrote the major exchange bitcoin base code left in a HUGE vulnerability that was so blatantly obvious, a kindergartner could have spotted it. Don't use non-unique values for a transaction ID in a financial system! Welcome to database coding 101. It was careless and not reviewed just like a bunch of other open source code.
So never forget that MTGox was killed by careless open source programming volunteers.
When bitcoins dropped below $200 and even knowing no-one could transfer anything out of Mt Gox, I transferred in some money to my Mt. Gox account (about $1500).
I knew it was a massive risk but the potential gain was correspondingly high too.
The money should have hit my Mt.Gox account about 8 days ago but never did. Of course I went through the formality of filing a support ticket but pretty much had already figured the money was gone.
Since I saw MtGox website is now just a message that clearly translates to "Goodbye and thanks for all the fish" I will waste nothing on guessing if I will ever see the money again, as losing it is OK too. I went in with my eyes open, knowing this was a massive risk and therefore only spending some play money that I could afford to miss.
Perhaps the most surprising thing to others may be that this won't change my positive view of Bitcoin itself one little bit, nor will I stop making other high-risk investments with amounts of money that I can easily afford to lose.
You all probably think I'm nuts, especially for even sending that money to Mt.Gox in the first place, but Grestsky said it best: you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
For small-scale transactions in time and value - e.g. turning $7 into BTC to immediately buy a CD - a relatively unstable currency is fine.
The problem you run into is that the bitcoins don't disappear after the CD is purchased. The CD vendor now has them, and to avoid the issue with instability it has to get rid of them relatively quickly. Likewise with the person they pass the bitcoins onto. It's a game of hot potato/musical chairs, and you don't want to be the one who's holding the BTC when the music stops, especially if you're not in the financial services sector.
What ends up happening once you take the whole chain into effect is that people who change bitcoins into hard currency know that it's risky to be holding onto bitcoins long term. Which means they charge a premium for converting bitcoins to money, and a comparative discount for converting money into bitcoins, but the two won't actually cross, as the investors doing the actual exchanging want to make money (in actual hard currency) from the deal, and are risking a lot by having a large number of bitcoins on hand that they can exchange. (Note that person-to-person transactions don't really help things. In this scheme, you want to obtain and get rid of bitcoins as fast as possible. You can spend a lot of time trying to find the best rate on a person-to-person transaction, but the longer you take, the more risk you run. In practice you'd go with the institutional exchangers, who know they have you over a barrel. Besides, what's the advantage of buying the CD with bitcoins instead of dollars if you just have to turn around and purchase bitcoins with those dollars from some random yahoo on the internet?)
This means that a person selling a product in bitcoins has to bump the price a bit to account for the premium in converting bitcoins back into hard currency, and you as a consumer don't actually see a corresponding bonus when converting dollars into bitcoins. So you'll find that you can buy a CD for US$10, or for $10.50 worth of bitcoins. The extra $0.50 going to those people who are treating bitcoins as an investment opportunity, running arbitrage schemes, and risking their shirt to make big bucks as the price of bitcoins swings up and down.
TL;DR: Downstream effects mean that even small-scale transactions in time and value for unstable currencies don't work, as people alter prices across the economic chain to compensate for the added risk.
What exactly is the convenience of using an exchange to store your money?
They aren't regulated like banks. It's like giving some guy on the street your money and him promising you can always get it.
Can't imagine it is a major financial gain or risk for them. Considering the number of people using BitCoin, and then the number that would use a specific vendor, is vanishingly small risk for a vendor.
Just now website says: Dear MtGox Customers, In light of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly. Best regards, MtGox Team
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Suppose my wallet was with Mt Gox, and I did not have any recent trasactions. My wallet would have been immune to transaction malleability (no transactions, no problem). Therefore it should still have the number of bitcoins in it that I think it does.
What good is my wallet to Mt Gox now, since they don't have the crypto key to use it? Why don't they transfer it to another exchange?
Good time to invest in bitcoins in 3...2...1...crash.
This will have to go down as the best example of a self contained "long con" in the history of separating fools from their money. Certainly the best example that didn't use governmental power to do the separating. And of course, as with essentially all cons, it works by preying on the inherent greed and biases of the mark - in this case, a libertarian fascination with deflationary money.
Excellent response. You beat me to it.
Beanie Babies. This bitcoin stuff is just KRAZEE!
There are many ways. One, you simply price yourself to cover potential fluctuations. E.g., if you expect the currency to vary 10% over the year, you price it 10% higher. This is the most common method, and it leads to problems if the spread between currencies narrows, or if the spread widens faster than predicted. Hopefully the currency is stable enough so when this happens, you either choose to eat the difference for a few months, or reduce price etc.
The second way, done for large vendors, is hedges. Basically they hold enough investments around that they avoid immediate currency conversion and instead hold onto it for better times. E.g., US$ to BTC. If BTC is low, you charge more, and you hang onto the BTC, drawing down the US$ reserves you have. When BTC rises, you convert it. Which can mean buyers may pay going rate, but when you actually cash out, you gain money just by waiting. (Hedging is related to hedge funds and other such instruments).
With a currency as volatile as BTC, either you have a payment processor guarantee you a fixed exchange amount, or you simply charge more BTC than a straight exchange would be.
Everything the government has was stolen. The government produces nothing, it only confiscates.
The value of the USD changes thousands of times a day as well. It is not as volatile as bitcoin, but there have been days when it has changed by several percent. Restaurants don't change their prices when this happens. They change their prices when the value of the USD remains fairly consistently at a new level for probably several months.
If restaurants decided to take Bitcoin, they would probably do it in the same way, except that there would probably be a "bitcoin premium" to cover the risk due to the bitcoins being more volatile.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Mod parent up
If you had to change your pricing every 10 minutes how would you ever advertise anything?
Ask an airline.
Probably due to the fact convenience is how currency came to be.
I'll trade peter my chickens for his pottery, then trade the pottery to hank for the butter vs sell chickens for coins, use coins to buy butter. Hank buys peters pottery with the coins.
You're correct. Using c ash as in investment is idiocy. Almost every single cash currency is inflationary. The USD specifically, claims about 3% inflation, meaning that if you put your dollar in your sock drawer, and go try to spend it the next year, it won't be able to buy as much. For example, last year's dollar would have bought you a McDouble at McDonald's. If you had insteadput that dollar in your sock drawer, you would NOT be able to buy a McDouble with it now, because now McDoubles are $1.19. (note that although the U.S. Government claims 3% inflation, most items, including McDoubles have gone up by about 20% in the last year. Sometimes the CPI index tries to hide this fact by claiming that a "Case" of soda still costs the same this year, even though a "case" of soda is now 20 cans instead of 24. Similarly, girl scout cookies cost the same as last year, but the box has gotten smaller.).
So yes, using cash as in investment is sheer idiocy. In fact, with the real inflation rate being what it is, it makes more sense to borrow money and spend it now, because the dollars you use to pay it back will be worth far less in the future.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I this was an interesting article. It touches a little bit on the day to day practical reasons people are using BTC. Will it ever settle down to the point where these uses are practical enough to see wider adoption? I don't know.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Wait, now it says:
"Dear MtGox Customers,
In light of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly.
Best regards,
MtGox Team"
Insane. And insofar as acquisitions go... obviously a red herring. Nobody running this sort of business just locks their customers out without notice in order to perform a sale of the company.
Either MtGox have enough bitcoins and cash under their control to reconcile against their customer's accounts, or they don't. It's that simple. And they have refused to answer that one question.
-Matt
"Stole".
That word doesn't mean what you think it means. Are you a non-native English speaker, or a jackass?
Keep on trading your seashells, fools. Mr. Ponzi would LOVE you.
And when you get ripped off (and you will get ripped off), who are you going to cry to for help?
Only novice users would hold bitcoins in Mtgox. The rest of the community took theirs out months ago.
They also deal with it by negotiating in a derivatives market, or by absorbing the fluctuations in a way that they cancel each other.
And some deal with it by making bets and taking risks.
Bitcoin may add yet another option to the mix: getting rid of the currency faster than it can fluctuate. But it's not liquid enough, so currently, this won't work.
Rethinking email
Some moron moderated him downward. /. moderation has turned into complete crap. So often you see +5 troll posts from registered users, and great posts from the standard unregistered users are -1. It's as if the moderators are trying to destroy the site.
When you have a local cache as opposed to a distributed cache, you invalidate entries (or entire pages) when the underlying data changes. All cpus made in the last 25 years manage their on-die caches this way, so this is something I'd think you'd be familiar with if you have any knowledge of computer systems.
On the other hand, the DNS protocol anticipates, and generally uses, distributed caches at the ISP and the client. Those cache entries are valid for TTL, typically about an hour. Therefore it wouldn't matter if the server DID serve up cached replies for several seconds - the client and their ISP already be using data from 30 minutes ago anyway.
No it isn't. A payment method (unit of exchange) absolutely needs to be stable, because you do not want the transaction costs of converting it to and from other currencies. If you incur those costs anyway, then what is the point of having it as a unit of exchange. You would otherwise be taking a risk each time you transact that the value will drop (significantly) while you hold the bitcoins, so that doesn't work either.
Now: which police? You mean there's no police force, no traceability whatsoever in the beautifull bitcoin world? Nodoby will ever run after the bad guys? Is at least anyone sure that Mt. Gox Ceo hasn't fled with the stolen coins in a pocket? Too bad there's no state to guarantee anything there.
So I'll invent something new! For a small amount collected on each transaction, I promise I shall setup "bitcoin cop". Of course its use will be mandatory for all bitcoin users and enforced through closed source addons to the free client. And centralized too.
It won't cost much! I accept dollars or Euros to provide this service. Thanks for your attention, and your money.
P.S.: do not worry for all those cumbersome extradition and cross-border investigation procedures: bitcoin world does not care, neither do we! And send me the money, please, a modest 10% transaction feee will provide insurance : libertariancops@virginislands.freeasinburbon.kp
I am not Remy Mouton, unfortunately: http://remy.mouton.free.fr/art/
Nice. Creature from Jekyll Island!
And nevertheless we don't see you investing in african currencies or east europeans, or?
Investing into a currency is plain stupid if you have not lots and lots of money *and* a huge grasp about economics and trends or you don't plan to use it to influence economics your way.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Not when the insurance company has an army.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
So just because one big bitcoin bank... Which is what they are steals and defrauds their members, you abandon the entire currency? If anything this makes bitcoin worth more once the dust settles... Only morons think this is the end of bitcoin altogether, or any other crytocurrency for that matter.
For small-scale transactions in time and value - e.g. turning $7 into BTC to immediately buy a CD - a relatively unstable currency is fine.
Stability of currency is absolutely needed for a vendor. If you had to change your pricing every 10 minutes how would you ever advertise anything? Would restaurants have dynamic menus with pricing that changes throughout the meal?
The las vegas casino that accepts bit coins prices everything in dollars. When a customer wants to use bitcoins they convert the dollar amount to bitcoins at the time the bill is printed, accept payment in bitcoins and then immediately convert the bitcoins back to dollars.
Let me fix it for you: you're fucking idiot.
It's people like you who have undermined this country out of pure tribal association. You don't give a damn about the US.
The reason Obama hasn't been impeached is because he's done nothing to rise to the level of impeachment....and anyone with a fucking living brain cell knows that. The unfortunate problem is people like you don't have any living brain cells. Even the most braindead fucking conservative asshat has to be able to understand that, given the number of terrorist teabaggers in the House, if they could impeach Obama, they would try; and only a fucking clueless moron would think that they'd stay their hand just because he's black; that hasn't stopped them from being KKK clones so far.
You're not being dismissed because you hate Obama, you're being dismissed because you are a fucking idiot that doesn't have a fucking clue what they hell your saying, using words that obviously are too big for you to understand, while lying like a little bitch to try to get people to agree with you. Hint: only other fucking idiots are going to agree with your fucking stupidity.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
If you are a US citizen then sure you have. It is called Social Security. The only difference being it is legal. Wait, there is one other difference, you are forced into the Social Security Ponzi scheme.
Conservative, mod down for violating
So how do you explain the growing list of perfectly legal vendors that are accepting payments in BTC? Just a marketing gimmick?
To a small degree, yes, bit coins enthusiasts give them some publicity and referrals. However the main motivation is to pocket the swipe fee that credit card vendors would normally charge. This swipe fee is built into the price of goods and services. Vendors typically immediately convert the bit coins back to dollars, euros, etc. They don't hold bit coins.
I like how you ignores the fact that under his plans everything has improved. deficit? better. Market? healthier. Jobs? unemployment continues to decline.
Clearly, this pure nonsense. The only reason this President (who is criminal in such obvious, brazen and obnoxious way) has not been impeached is that given a history of past racism, impeaching the first black President would be unthinkable. He has carte blanche to commit crimes and he is charging it to the fullest. Hopefully, the country can still survive after he is done. Because, believe you me, immigration is a pretty damn hard undertaking.
It would help if people remembered that the economic crash, and massive government debt load was caused by conservative thinking and a useless war.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment steadily declined from 6.3% in June 2003 to 4.4% in May 2007..
Between May 2007, and the end of Bush's term in December 2008 unemployment steadily rose to 7.8%, an increase of 2.9%.
That trend continued until October 2009 where it peaked at 10%.
So yes, in the first 9 or 10 months of Obamas administration unemployment rose 2.7%. However a steady decline in unemployment then began, declining from a peak of 10% in October 2009 to the current 6.7%, 1.1% lower than when he took office.
In otherwords the situation began to improve within 10 months of Obama taking office.
So we see a net increase in unemployment under Bush from 4.1% When he took office in January 2001, to 7.8% when he left, an increase of 3.7%.
Again, under Bush an increase of 3.7%, under Obama a decrease of 1.1% DESPITE the financial crisis caused by his predecessor.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
That is precisely the scam of BitCoin.
It has pretended to be an "alternative currency" when in fact, it just was an investment scheme based on theoretical nothingness.
Otherwise educated folks bit on it as a "get rich quick" scheme hook, line, and BitCoin - because a bunch of techno-babble and theory that sounded like smart folks knew what they were talking about lured them in, coupled with the "The Man" view of the government held by (mostly) young and inexperienced people who think the sky is going to fall at any moment.
What the parent of these replies is still buying into is that the "eco-system" will somehow survive and balance this out, when the only thing BitCoin had going for it was the confidence (or wishful thinking) of the folks who bought into it had. That has now been shattered. The "eco-system" has been exposed - and it's not what was sold by all the fancy talk about open-transactions and how secure it was - in theory.
When they say "...will have to be very careful about where they hold their money" he is precisely correct - but he still misses that his money is in someone elses pocket who is higher up on the pyramid - it doesn't matter how "secure" you think encryption makes your BitCoins as the bottom is falling out of it as we type. I can lock up $1000 in cash in a fireproof, buried safe - and while the value of what that $1000 can buy me over time will depreciate, it's not going to suddenly turn into a stack of 1000 pennies.
You're just not seeing this all the way through. It really is all smoke and mirrors. FDIC might say they guarantee your funds, but consider how much money we are borrowing just to keep the country afloat currently. What would happen if the music stopped and everyone wanted their money right now? How secure are we really? FDR did was create the equivalent of the TSA for banks. It looks good on the outside and gives people a sense of security, but in practice does nothing to address the actual issue. A true bonifide government solution if there ever was one.
You can use a volatile currency. Silk road had some kind of hedging system where they insulated buyers and sellers from price fluctuations. It doesn't really matter if I need to use 10 bitcoins to buy drugs today and only 1 bitcoin tomorrow, and 5 bitcoins the day after that, if I only had to pay $1000 to get that amount of bitcoins each time.
I believe the economic term is "unit of cost". You can use bitcoin as a currency without using it as a unit of cost.
Even after this crash, bitcoin has only dropped in value to it's value from november 2013. Anyone who invested before then is still doing fine. Anyone who only uses bitcoin as a medium of exchange (i.e. a currency) rather than for speculation/investment is also fine.
All currencies are volatile even when they become defacto standards. Look at the 10 year chart for EUR/USD. The reason we don't notice it as much is because (with many things we buy) the prices up and down the supply chain are denoted in just one of those two currencies, depending on where you live.
To put it another way, 1BTC is always worth 1BTC, but until we can spend 1BTC without converting to USD first, you will notice the volatility.
The price of a 32gb microsd card has fallen from $50 last year to $12 this year. Obviously the REAL inflation rate is negative and money is currently deflating.
Well, at least using your criteria. This is why the CPI samples a vast array of objects; because if you focus solely on one thing, like food, then a drought can make it seem like inflation is much higher than it actually is.
What you are describing is "unit of cost". Bitcoin is currently useless as a unit of cost. It is not useless as a currency. This is why black markets use it. There is nothing about black markets that make them able to use useless currency more than anyone else. They just value the anonymity of bitcoin more than the price stability of the dollar (it's ability to be used as a unit of cost). Why? Because they can just use the dollar as a unit of cost and bitcoin as a currency. They still price everything in dollars or euros, and simply perform exchanges in bitcoin at current market values. It's a lot of extra math calculations, luckily the computers do all the work (same as with traditional finance).
What? You mean like all of his nice scandals? What are we upto these days 15? 20? And let's not forget all of that lovely "political protection" that he's been afforded by either stonewalling on the issues, or simply throwing people under the bus. While the media happily ignores it.
I'm glad however that you posted your actual feelings, after all. Who could be a critical thinker when they label someone of the opposite political party as "terrorist teabaggers." So, to run with it, I'll have to ask how much MSNBC or Soros funded media are you inhaling daily?
Om, nomnomnom...
Currency is a medium of exchange that *can* also be a unit of cost. If the value fluctuates wildly, then you need to use something else as a unit of cost. You can use dollars, euros, gold, beanie babies, cans of soup, etc, and just exchange the right number of bitcoins at market rates. This is how we are able to buy goods from foreign countries even though currency exchange rates are constantly fluctuating. This is also how we buy things locally given that there is constant inflation.
Why would you be doing that? Libertarians are known for wanting to revert to the gold standard. You know, the one originally enshrined in the US Constitution that has long since been disbanded.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt outlawed private gold ownership (except for the purposes of jewelery) in 1933. Think about that. Also, realize the Federal Reserve is a private entity not within nor controlled by the United States Government.
The US Constitution: Article 1, Section 10
"No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility."
According to the United States Constitution, the Federal Reserve Note is entirely illegal, unconstitutional and void.
Mt. Gox is an exchange. It is only like a bank in that exchanges in general are kind of like banks. Mt. Gox is where you exchange dollars for bitcoins and bitcoins for dollars. They would coordinate buyers and sellers, provide an escrow type functionality, and take a percentage of the trade volume.
At any given time there was X dollars and Y bitcoins in the posession of Mt. Gox that belonged to traders. This is true at every exchange. One day, Mt Gox couldn't/wouldn't allow withdrawal of these X dollars and Y bitcoins. They claim it was stolen and maybe it was by Mt. Gox, who knows.
You don't need a bank for bitcoins. You do need an escrow service if you want to trade with untrusted people on the internet. You trust amazon to send you a package once you buy it form them. You might even trust ebay sellers (because of the system ebay sets up). You could also trust the guy claiming he will wire you $1000 to your bank account once you transfer a bitcoin to him. Using an exchange makes it so you don't have to trust the guy (or even find him yourself), but then you have to trust the exchange, which in the case of Mt. Gox, seems to have been a bad idea in retrospect.
So with the collapse of Bitcoin graphics card prices will drop meaning I should be able to upgrade my current one shortly...
Man, that is sooo much easier then direct deposit with USD. Thanks.
Bitcoin isn't a currency and never will be - it's just a gambling scheme like playing roulette is.
It's a currency by definition. If you think national currencies like dollars are without risk, you should go read the hyperinflation page at Wikipedia.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
"Maybe the U.S. Dollar isn't so bad after all."
Because the regulated financial institutions that deal in U.S. dollars are so much more trustworthy. Perhaps I should keep my money with these guys. Or this company. Or them perhaps? This guy looks trustworthy, doesn't he?
Here is what government-backed currency banks, lenders, investment firms, and the like have been up to recently. And here is what they're up to now.
Liberty in your lifetime
When I checked at the Seattle Bitcoin ATM this morning, it said I have 750,666 bitcoins, which is a heck of a lot more than I had last time.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You wouldn't. You'd pick a price and then short your position. If price falles below your short option, you can still sell off the bitcoins you bring in at the price you wanted. That way you could print a menu weekly instead.
Now the only thing that can destroy the value of your coins is... oh, everyone else who's still dumb enough to value convenience over personal responsibility. Que sera.
If this doesnt end in total collapse, what it will mean is that the thieves will horde the 740,000 BTC leaving the pool of fungible coins for actual trading small, which will mean its value will be higher. So unless the thieves manage to spend all their loot (that would take forever given how long it takes for cocaine packets to ship) then really the prudent users are better off.
If you had to change your pricing every 10 minutes how would you ever advertise anything?
Hmm, how could that possibly work? Let's ask a Slashdot user...
Would restaurants have dynamic menus with pricing that changes throughout the meal?
Got it in one. Most of it anyway. With unstable currencies, prices are updated rapidly and include a margin for risk. So there's a transaction cost that adds friction to the transaction when performed using that currency. If you've ever visited a small second or third world economy, you'd see it in action. I went to Indonesia during Suharto's last year, prices were volatile, exchange rates were written in chalk and updated all day long. US Dollars and Rupiah were both accepted most places, despite the rapidly changing exchange rate.
Phrases like "absolutely needed" rarely hold in economics. Everything is about relative value. Most supply and demand curves have an intersection, even if it's moving around rapidly. With a wide enough spread, every trade has a market.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Don't blame the wizards! This is clearly the fault of people who do fancy maths with an 's'.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Mt.Gox is like a bank
Where do you need a bank for when you have Bitcoins? The principle behind Bitcoin is that it is a distributed system, and payments can be made in a "peer-to-peer" fashion.
The OP is wrong. Mt.Gox was not like a bank. It was a currency exchange.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Since when the fuck is Bitcoin a currency you goddamn idiot? In your Libertiarian dreams?
Except the continued viability and value of bitcoin is based entirely on user trust, because there is nothing of inherent value behind it (which could be a somewhat uncommon lump of metal, a considered to be valuable rock, or the promise and legal protection of a powerful group of people who run a country).
And this entire Mt. Gox kerfluffle has seriously eroded the general public's trust of bitcoin, even as it was just starting to catch on.
This may not kill the currency, but it's not going to do it any favors either.
I guess young "internet-savvy" so-called "millenials" need to re-learn lessons earlier generations learned, like: phony money backed-up by nobody IS actually riskier than phony money backed-up by a government whose community-organizer-in-chief is running the printing presses on overtime. Another lesson, of course, is that buzz-words do not impart value (no matter how much they might drive temporary speculation bubbles). "bitcoin" and "crypto currency" are just the new "plastic" or "electricity" or "cloud" (i.e. words, often perfectly valid and useful, that some people slap onto things they are marketing/speculating on to drive up the value before they get out)
Bitcoin, meet pets.com
We are going to be in real trouble when people wake-up from the current internet bubble and realize that we cannot all get rich making billion dollar "free" services that generate their revenue spying on people and selling ads while trading in imaginary currency. At least the first internet bubble involved lots of companies that were actually trying to make/sell THINGS...
One of the recurring pitfalls even good programmers run into is that it is often more fun (and affirming) to write their own implementation then to figure out how to use someone else's.
Yes, also more efficient and less full of bloat and better tuned for your purpose.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
That's not the only alternative to money. He could be proposing communism.
Until Gold Pressed Latinum exists.
In the meantime I'll have to manage with Buckazoids.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Good don't use it. More for me. Your grandkids won't know how much I paid for them bitcoins either.
Fuck the Slashdot Beta Bitcoin Exchange!
Posted anonymous cause I used fowl language.... ha ha chicken turkey duck!
Every day I drive over that "graft" that was sorely needed and we've not even made a dent yet in all the structurally at risk bridges in the state. You are full of shit. Oh, and they didn't waste money either - they made driving on 1 whole side of the city a nightmare because it was cheaper to build everything in 1 area at once than spread it out like they used to do. It's not as well planned as before; but then taking low bidders isn't a wise move... It all looks fancy; but then it's cheap to use cement forms that are not flat and produce dull looking results.
Meanwhile the gas company's lines are all worn out but they haven't been fixing them, only repairing leaks as they happen. Every year we have 1-2 gas explosions as a result and sadly the public can't put 2+2 together... Republicans can't even do math, so it just makes things even worse as they bitch about the traffic jams and before that the concrete blocks falling off bridges they wouldn't repair onto the highway... (No, I'm not a democrat; those wimps thing compromising 2+0= 4 is ok even though they know it doesn't add up.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The take home was that all the packaged and repackaged financial derivatives were finally seen to be much higher risk than they thought and the house of cards came crashing down. The failing economy triggered it, but Lehman Brothers were so leveraged in all those debt obligations that the failing economy was magnified many times over on their balance sheet.
How many of them actually take possession of bitcoins? And how many just have a bitcoin middleman that immediate converts it to dollars and gives them dollars?
I been spendin' most my life
Livin' in a libertarian paradise
My bitcoins stolen once or twice
Livin' in a libertarian paradise
You are deranged. Do you think that the fact that he's black would stop anyone from impeaching him if he actually "stole" over $1 trillion from the American People.
Perhaps there isn't as big a consensus that the money was stolen that is preventing an impeachment and not the color of his skin.
You must fail a lot of math tests if this is you showing your work.
i value safety and security over fairness. because it will end up being some moron (like you, who are obviously woefully unintelligent) that decides what's fair.
At least this place would be ok: http://brewexchangeaustin.com/
Dummy! Bitcoin holders would never leave their mom's basements to visit a restaurant. At worst, the pizza-delivery place would have to recompute the bill between when the order is placed and when the delivery guy reaches the door.
...but they will sprout again.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I am accurate and honest. I stand by the usage of the word in that sentence. Oh, and if you as much as suggest that Obama is not a criminal blatantly robbing the country and violating laws faster than he can pass them, then the jackass is you.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Good post, but your paragraph on Glass-Steagall doesn't make much sense. G-S never regulated the products central to the financial crisis: mortgages and mortgage derivatives. To say its repeal caused the exurberant activities of Wall Street requires quite a stretch of cause and effect.
You can test the theory that mixing commercial and investment banking caused the crisis by looking at bank failures. Looking at major financial institutions:
Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Lehman, and Bear Stearns were major investment banks. 2 of 4 failed.
JP Morgan, Citi, and Bank of America were major super-banks (both investment and commercial). 2 of 3 required rescuing
Wells Fargo and Washington Mutual were the largest commercial banks. 1 of 2 failed.
The story is similar with small institutions. Not much evidence in favor of Glass-Steagall being relevant.
Do you really fail to see when you are being mocked? Or just trolling? My money is on you trolling. No one can be that stupid.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Every day I drive over that "graft"
I do hope you are not trying to imply that any stimulus was spent on public works. There is simply no evidence of that. That money just disappeared.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Those words don't even have meaning. "Blantly robbing the country" -- like, moving gold bars from Fort Knox into his personal overseas vaults? What are you talking about?
Theft is unauthorized taking with depravation of use. None of those elements apply to anything you are complaining about: it's not unauthorized; it's not taking; and there's no depravation of use.
The problem is, there's no way to safely STORE large numbers of Bitcoins. Banks can store a trillion dollars with zero risk by depositing it at the Fed. The Fed notes the deposit, backs up the record in multiple places with enormous amounts of redundancy, then shreds any actual currency that was part of the deposit because it doesn't NEED it. It can always print new bills to replace the deposited ones should the need arise.
With Bitcoin, a bank can't do that. If a bank stores a thousand Bitcoins somewhere in exactly one super-secure location, and the medium on which they're stored gets physically destroyed, those Bitcoins are as gone as the money from depositors at a Wild West bank that just got robbed & had its vault emptied. Or boxes of British Pounds on a sunken ship resting in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean circa 1880.
With virtual Dollars that exist only as bookkeeping entries at the Fed, geographically-dispersed redundancy increases robustness and security. With Bitcoins, it increases their likelihood of loss by malware or theft. The only way to protect Bitcoins is to store them in a non-networked environment... but if you're burning a thousand bitcoins to BD-R discs and transporting them to vaults around the country, you'd better have armed security guards watching the discs, because a single stolen disc could be worth literally millions. If you're encrypting them and transporting them over a network, you're gambling on the encryption key not being compromised. If you're printing the base64 hashes to exactly one -piece of paper per Bitcoin and storing them in a vault, you're gambling on the vault not getting stolen or destroyed. And ultimately, you have to transfer that Bitcoin back to a networked computer in order to spend it... and all it takes is one bit of malware at that instant to completely negate everything you did up to that point to store it safely.
There's a reason why businesses don't like to handle large amounts of cash -- it's dangerous. And the danger increases exponentially with the amount. With Bitcoins, everything is effectively a cash transaction, with all the real-world risks that entails.
Not to mention, they only do physical exchanges when absolutely necessary. If Americans with Citi Visa cards buy $2 million worth of Mexican-Peso-denominated goods online, and Mexicans with Banamex Visa cards buy $1.9 million worth of Dollar-denominated goods online, at the end of the day, Citi/Banamex *might* physically buy or sell at most $100,000 (the difference between $2 million and $1.9 million), but in the meantime, it's charging fees and pocketing the difference between the wholesale and retail exchange rates on both sides of the border for $3.9 million, but only incurring those hard costs for exchanging $100k.
That's why multinational corporations tend to prefer to deal with major reserve currencies, like US Dollars, British Pounds, and Japanese Yen. If you buy $100 million worth of Euros from Chase, they almost certainly have enough Euros on hand to balance it out without buying or selling more. If you want to trade $100 million worth of Vietnamese currency for Indian Rupees... well, the banks are going to hit you a lot harder, because they're probably going to end up buying or selling close to $10 million worth of one or both currencies (and will probably end up using one to buy dollars or Euros, then use the dollars or Euros to buy the other currency).
I would expect a currency to be one of the least risky forms of property to be useful.
If you mined a few thousand of them back when the difficulty was so low you could do this with a GPU, or you bought a few thousand Bitcoins when they cost less than $0.10 a piece.
Then I wouldn't see them as very risky. Sure, you could lose 20 to 30% of the paper value on your 5000% gain. But if you rebalance and diversify (buy hard assets).l... It is risky to hold bitcoin or Bitcoin-denominated assets, but not necessarily more risky than other speculative investments.
Stability of currency is absolutely needed for a vendor. If you had to change your pricing every 10 minutes how would you ever advertise anything?
Right now Overstock.com advertises US dollar prices and says you can pay using Bitcoin.
At the time of checkout, their payment provider charges you the buyer the price in BTC according to the current number of BTC's required at that moment to equal the product price.
The payment provider books the vendor's revenue in their own currency, so there's no risk for the vendor.
Since the payment provider is handling both sides of the transaction.... the only real risk now is the payment provider is now having to hold BTC, until someone either buys BTC from the payment provider, or a transaction occurs with a different vendor who has chosen to receive BTC, where the buyer choosing to pay in dollars.
Finally, someone who gets it.
Bit coin is stupid.
Money supply needs to grow and contract depending on the number of users and the value they create.
Fixing the number bit coins made it a type of ponzi, where thee early adopters were bound to make a squillion as the supply side tightened. I have no symapthy for investors.
46137
It is not like dollars can not be stolen or any other currency/stuff of value. Anything can be stolen, and the theft was not bitcoins technology fault.
It was MtGox fault.
Besides i am pretty sure MtGox stole it themselves, how else would they not discover such a huge gap for years? :D
Well, there are payment processors that provide the USD equivalent at the time of sale so the merchant doesn't even have to touch Bitcoin in order to accept it. Coinbase and BitPay.
I'm shocked someone else actually posted this on slashdot. My thoughts exactly.
I'd mod you up if I wasn't already commenting here.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
dumb enough to value convenience over personal responsibility.
I pay taxes for the convenience of a police force so I don't have to hire personal guards, roads so I don't have to make my own, and the country's economic management so I don't have to trade sheep for beer. Convenience over personal responsibility is what allows you to get on the internet and make wild generalisations.
The suggestion is that the price be listed as 7$, but that the transaction happens in bitcoin. The seller and buyer hold the bitcoin only for as long as required to exchange it between them, which should be less than a second. So the buyer has 7 dollars, converts it to bitcoin, immediately sends that to the seller, who then immediately converts it back into 7$ less transaction costs. The stability of bitcoin is then irrelevant as long as it is stable enough that it doesn't often change too much in less than a second.
BITCOIN lacks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Casteism
The essence of a Ponzi scheme involves outsize returns. A business getting themselves in a cash crunch because they have no clue what they are doing is just a poorly-run business. Indeed, exactly what you described is how most businesses that collect payment prior to service being rendered (contractors, airlines, furniture stores, etc.) go bankrupt.
One of these (a Ponzi scheme) is fraud; the other is just incompetence. There isn't enough room in the jails to lock up every business that gets over their head and leaves customers in the lurch when they go under.
The root of currency IS its convenience. Currency is supposed to represent so value of something, like a barter item. Bitcoin will fail as a replacement currency if it's convenience is not addressed.