The main advantages of Bitcoin over other types of "real" money:
* it's censorship resistant (can't be shut down, just like bittorrent)
* it has low transaction costs and low barrier to entry (freedom of economic transaction)
* it can be transmitted via the internet globally in short time (max 1 hour)
* it's cheap and easy to secure against theft and loss
The additional advantages of Bitcoin over FIAT currencies:
* the supply is limited
* it's open source and not controlled by banking cartel or government, open to anyone
The disadvantages of Bitcoin:
* its acceptance is very low, to say the least
* it's hard to understand and therefore hard to trust
* it offers an ideal playground for criminals and scammers
* you can add your own criticism here
There have been anonymous digital cash systems before.
The main point of bitcoin (the innovation, so to speak) is not anonymity (which you can actually achieve with bitcoin pretty easily if you want, but it's not built-in), but censorship resistance: it cannot be shut down by nuking some server.
With the introduction of using ASICs for mining, nowadays the large chunk of the cost will be upfront for the hardware anyway. A "jalapeno" from BFL (no ASIC is being delivered yet, btw) will deliver 4.5 GHash/s using around 5 Watts of power. Compare that to about 2000 Watts for a CPU rig of same hashing power.
Gold has actual mechanical uses (electrical contacts.) It also has bauble value.
BitCoins have zero intrinsic value, and they require electric and Internet connectivity to be used. Gold requires a civilization level just a step above pure anarchy to be useful.
IMHO, it is sort of suspicious that there is this ramp where early adopters get these bonuses, and people hopping on late end up having to put a lot more resources in for the same coins... that combined with the value of the currency going up/down in insane swings, makes it useless as anything other than a novelty.
I find it pretty unfair that the early gold miners got such large bonuses. It's much harder to mine gold nowadays. No more standing by the river with a sieve will do it:-(
By following the money. Server logs show which online personas bought and sold what, intercepting packages can tie those to physical addresses and identities, and comparing bitcoin IDs on suspects' computers with the block chain provides irrefutable cryptographic proof that the transactions took place. They could probably even wind everything up into one big RICO case, and then everyone who used silkroad is potentially on the hook for every transaction that took place there.
That doesn't work at all. You can't "follow the money" to the recipient. Silkroad uses a tumbler. Also: "Bitcoin IDs" are made up freshly for every transaction. Probably most bitcoins in circulation have been silk-road-tainted (much like many bills have cocaine on them). Do you arrest everyone with a bill in his wallet that has cocaine?
Do you think the DEA cares about going after kids who buy $100 worth of LSD?
To turn that question around for a minute, if the DEA had a chance to put literally thousands of dealers and users in prison for life, and take a huge number of bitcoins out of circulation, do you think they would pass it up?
Taking a huge number of bitcoins out of circulation doesn't harm bitcoin at all. It makes the remaining bitcoins more valuable.
The problem with this approach: you can use it to catch the consumers. However: that's not what you want, you want the merchants.
Pro-side: as with dragging copyright infringers to court en-masse, this method will instill fear and dampen use of the marketplace. However: that's also not what you want, because that can't be measured and therefore doesn't help your promotion.
Well, you aren't going to be able to grab hundreds of thousands of dollars in bitcoin in the trunk of a car on its way out of the country. That's one of their favorite tactics -- prove it's drug money and you get to keep the cash.
That's also part of the reason why they don't attempt to catch the drugs entering the country, they just wait to bust the dealers leaving with the cash. Confiscated drugs aren't much use....
"decrypt" is surely the wrong expression here, no? it's more of a "man-in-the-middle"
while I don't connect unless the hostkey matches, this still makes me feel uneasy.
I can totally see why you want to prevent it as a company, though, since I've "snuk out" quite a bit while I was working at a big company (never to its disadvantage, usually to fetch data from own machines).
I keep important stuff (spreadsheets, letters, vector graphics, coding projects) in a subversion repo on my "home-server" which I keep synced with my laptop and desktop. That way, I always have backups of this stuff and I can update/commit from remote locations.
Now for the stuff I don't want in the svn because it's just too big and I don't really need a history (photos, videos), that just resides on the server, cifs-mount.
On some sundays (maybe about 4 times a year) I hook up a external sata drive, put an encrypted filesystem on there and do manual backups (not always the same stuff and not all of it, because I dont want to afford that many big drives). That drive then gets transported to alternating familiy members places for safekeeping.
It is very much a stretch to think that money can exist without government backing.
Money can very well exist without government backing. Maybe FIAT money can't, but various commodities (gold, sheep, salt, silver) are used as money today (commodity money) and have probably been used before any governments have even existed in the past.
If the black market stopped using national currencies, they would be forced to switch to a currency backed by some other large, powerful organization to enforce payments, and that organization would be a de facto government.
again, you are probably talking about fiat money, like the us dollar, the british pound or other such stuff. There are other types of money. The gold dinar that was planned by Gaddhafi together with other African countries, for example, would've worked quite well without any large, powerful organization enforcing it.
Money is only valuable within some enforcement structure, which is the role that a government plays; even when banks issue currency, they rely on governments to enforce debt payments.
If this is true, how is bitcoin valuable? (if you don't believe it is valuable, try buying some gardening supplies on silkroad)? How is gold valuable?
Scratch debt-based, government enforced fiat money, it has never worked sustainably and has regularly screwed up economies.
Allow currency competition by allowing contracts to be made in anything (not just USD). Remove legal tender laws... wait... see world prosper and real wealth emerge by the power of a truly free market economy.
To reduce bitcoin to its transactional features is short-sighted. This is being done as a marketing spin.
Bitcoin is many things, firstly, bitcoins are "precious bits". You can "own" certain amounts of bitcoins merely by being the only one to know the private key to a bitcoin address that had some coins transferred to it.
These precious bits are being used as money (and therefore are money), for direct payment of goods and services, without exchange to any of the established fiat currencies. I've done it many times. I've been payed to write code in BTC and I did not exchange them for anything, neither immediately nor later, I still hold on to these coins (store of wealth) and will someday buy something with it (maybe pizza, but I hope it'l be more than that). Additionally bitcoins are easily divisible and recognizable and therefore bitcoin is a money.
Is it a commodity money? That depends on wether these "precious bits" (which don't actually exist), are a commodity. I'd say no, but in the end: who cares?
Bitcoin is obviously money.
Bitcoin competes against VISA/PayPal/Google/Apple, true, but it also competes against USD/EUR/SDR/Gold/Silver/ChickenFeet/Salt/Sheep.
I say let there be competition! Currency competition will probably become a necessity after of our paper money has collapsed (don't think it'll collapse? read here: http://papermoneycollapse.com/ [papermoneycollapse.com]). We will need some sound money at some point, otherwise we're back to barter, which is highly inefficient. I'm not saying bitcoin is our saviour, but it should be allowed to compete. (It will compete without permission, regardless, but that may make it a little harder)
Just because its value has been bootstrapped (and is still being bootstrapped) by way of exchange to/from FIAT, doesn't mean bitcoin is merely a payment processing mechanism.
Whoever says bitcoins have no value by themselves, should try the following for educational purposes:
* actually acquire BTC 10 somehow.
* visit silkroadvb5piz3r.onion and buy some gardening supplies
* hold on to 1 bitcoin for 1 year (this is called "saving" and makes sense only when using sound money (as opposed to FIAT money which is constantly being inflated))
Oh, by the way: still mad about not having been an early adopter in the Summer '11 bubble? Well, here's you second chance.
To reduce bitcoin to its transactional features is short-sighted. This is being done as a marketing spin.
Bitcoin is many things, firstly, bitcoins are "precious bits". You can "own" certain amounts of bitcoins merely by being the only one to know the private key to a bitcoin address that had some coins transferred to it.
These precious bits are being used as money (and therefore are money), for direct payment of goods and services, without exchange to any of the established fiat currencies. I've done it many times. I've been payed to write code in BTC and I did not exchange them for anything, neither immediately nor later, I still hold on to these coins (store of wealth) and will someday buy something with it (maybe pizza, but I hope it'l be more than that). Additionally bitcoins are easily divisible and recognizable and therefore bitcoin is a money.
Is it a commodity money? That depends on wether these "precious bits" (which don't actually exist), are a commodity. I'd say no, but in the end: who cares?
Bitcoin is obviously money.
Bitcoin competes against VISA/PayPal/Google/Apple, true, but it also competes against USD/EUR/SDR/Gold/Silver/ChickenFeet/Salt/Sheep.
I say let there be competition! Currency competition will probably become a necessity after of our paper money has collapsed (don't think it'll collapse? read here: http://papermoneycollapse.com/). We will need some sound money at some point, otherwise we're back to barter, which is highly inefficient. I'm not saying bitcoin is our saviour, but it should be allowed to compete. (It will compete without permission, regardless, but that may make it a little harder)
Just because its value has been bootstrapped (and is still being bootstrapped) by way of exchange to/from FIAT, doesn't mean bitcoin is merely a payment processing mechanism.
Whoever says bitcoins have no value by themselves, should try the following for educational purposes:
* actually acquire BTC 10 somehow.
* visit silkroadvb5piz3r.onion and buy some gardening supplies
* hold on to 1 bitcoin for 1 year (this is called "saving" and makes sense only when using sound money (as opposed to FIAT money which is constantly being inflated))
Oh, by the way: still mad about not having been an early adopter in the Summer '11 bubble? Well, here's you second chance.
Slashdot Mirror
you analysed correctly. Mining profitability is currently questionable.
Not for most people.
Call me when I can pay for my Amazon.com cart (or other physical items from a well known store) in bitcoins.
I'm sure someone will let you know when the time comes. Keep reading slashdot, that'll work.
The main advantages of Bitcoin over other types of "real" money:
* it's censorship resistant (can't be shut down, just like bittorrent)
* it has low transaction costs and low barrier to entry (freedom of economic transaction)
* it can be transmitted via the internet globally in short time (max 1 hour)
* it's cheap and easy to secure against theft and loss
The additional advantages of Bitcoin over FIAT currencies:
* the supply is limited
* it's open source and not controlled by banking cartel or government, open to anyone
The disadvantages of Bitcoin:
* its acceptance is very low, to say the least
* it's hard to understand and therefore hard to trust
* it offers an ideal playground for criminals and scammers
* you can add your own criticism here
There have been anonymous digital cash systems before.
The main point of bitcoin (the innovation, so to speak) is not anonymity (which you can actually achieve with bitcoin pretty easily if you want, but it's not built-in), but censorship resistance: it cannot be shut down by nuking some server.
With the introduction of using ASICs for mining, nowadays the large chunk of the cost will be upfront for the hardware anyway. A "jalapeno" from BFL (no ASIC is being delivered yet, btw) will deliver 4.5 GHash/s using around 5 Watts of power. Compare that to about 2000 Watts for a CPU rig of same hashing power.
Gold has actual mechanical uses (electrical contacts.) It also has bauble value.
BitCoins have zero intrinsic value, and they require electric and Internet connectivity to be used. Gold requires a civilization level just a step above pure anarchy to be useful.
IMHO, it is sort of suspicious that there is this ramp where early adopters get these bonuses, and people hopping on late end up having to put a lot more resources in for the same coins... that combined with the value of the currency going up/down in insane swings, makes it useless as anything other than a novelty.
I find it pretty unfair that the early gold miners got such large bonuses. It's much harder to mine gold nowadays. No more standing by the river with a sieve will do it :-(
that's why real criminals use bitcoin.
The Number of bitcoins in existance should have no direct influence on the number of bitcoin owners, since bitcoins are highly divisible (8 decimals).
I'd also like to know how udachny arrives at "the number of people with Bitcoins diminishes over time".
I agree with him on bitcoin not being a ponzi and fiat money not having the "store of value" property.
A fool and his money are soon parted.
"The engineers hope someday these tiny motors could help deliver cargo, such as drugs. "
lol. nano-drug-trade. "BTC received, sending off ten billion bots with the coke tonight, expect bell-curve delivery tommorow around noon"
fuck courts, free markets ftw!
bitcoin?
*ducks*
How exactly would your theoretical honeypot work?
By following the money. Server logs show which online personas bought and sold what, intercepting packages can tie those to physical addresses and identities, and comparing bitcoin IDs on suspects' computers with the block chain provides irrefutable cryptographic proof that the transactions took place. They could probably even wind everything up into one big RICO case, and then everyone who used silkroad is potentially on the hook for every transaction that took place there.
That doesn't work at all. You can't "follow the money" to the recipient. Silkroad uses a tumbler. Also: "Bitcoin IDs" are made up freshly for every transaction. Probably most bitcoins in circulation have been silk-road-tainted (much like many bills have cocaine on them). Do you arrest everyone with a bill in his wallet that has cocaine?
Do you think the DEA cares about going after kids who buy $100 worth of LSD?
To turn that question around for a minute, if the DEA had a chance to put literally thousands of dealers and users in prison for life, and take a huge number of bitcoins out of circulation, do you think they would pass it up?
Taking a huge number of bitcoins out of circulation doesn't harm bitcoin at all. It makes the remaining bitcoins more valuable.
The problem with this approach: you can use it to catch the consumers. However: that's not what you want, you want the merchants.
Pro-side: as with dragging copyright infringers to court en-masse, this method will instill fear and dampen use of the marketplace. However: that's also not what you want, because that can't be measured and therefore doesn't help your promotion.
Well, you aren't going to be able to grab hundreds of thousands of dollars in bitcoin in the trunk of a car on its way out of the country. That's one of their favorite tactics -- prove it's drug money and you get to keep the cash.
That's also part of the reason why they don't attempt to catch the drugs entering the country, they just wait to bust the dealers leaving with the cash. Confiscated drugs aren't much use....
That means they're implicitly selling drugs!
while I like your comment otherwise, "exponantially more" is just meaningless.
"decrypt" is surely the wrong expression here, no? it's more of a "man-in-the-middle"
while I don't connect unless the hostkey matches, this still makes me feel uneasy.
I can totally see why you want to prevent it as a company, though, since I've "snuk out" quite a bit while I was working at a big company (never to its disadvantage, usually to fetch data from own machines).
I keep important stuff (spreadsheets, letters, vector graphics, coding projects) in a subversion repo on my "home-server" which I keep synced with my laptop and desktop. That way, I always have backups of this stuff and I can update/commit from remote locations.
Now for the stuff I don't want in the svn because it's just too big and I don't really need a history (photos, videos), that just resides on the server, cifs-mount.
On some sundays (maybe about 4 times a year) I hook up a external sata drive, put an encrypted filesystem on there and do manual backups (not always the same stuff and not all of it, because I dont want to afford that many big drives). That drive then gets transported to alternating familiy members places for safekeeping.
It is very much a stretch to think that money can exist without government backing.
Money can very well exist without government backing. Maybe FIAT money can't, but various commodities (gold, sheep, salt, silver) are used as money today (commodity money) and have probably been used before any governments have even existed in the past.
If the black market stopped using national currencies, they would be forced to switch to a currency backed by some other large, powerful organization to enforce payments, and that organization would be a de facto government.
again, you are probably talking about fiat money, like the us dollar, the british pound or other such stuff. There are other types of money. The gold dinar that was planned by Gaddhafi together with other African countries, for example, would've worked quite well without any large, powerful organization enforcing it.
Money is only valuable within some enforcement structure, which is the role that a government plays; even when banks issue currency, they rely on governments to enforce debt payments.
If this is true, how is bitcoin valuable? (if you don't believe it is valuable, try buying some gardening supplies on silkroad)? How is gold valuable?
Scratch debt-based, government enforced fiat money, it has never worked sustainably and has regularly screwed up economies.
Allow currency competition by allowing contracts to be made in anything (not just USD). Remove legal tender laws... wait... see world prosper and real wealth emerge by the power of a truly free market economy.
Bitcoin can't compete with Western Union Money Transfer, let alone forex trading, because the total volume in bitcoins is tiny.
This post wont be read by anyone because its score is too low.
To reduce bitcoin to its transactional features is short-sighted. This is being done as a marketing spin.
Bitcoin is many things, firstly, bitcoins are "precious bits". You can "own" certain amounts of bitcoins merely by being the only one to know the private key to a bitcoin address that had some coins transferred to it.
These precious bits are being used as money (and therefore are money), for direct payment of goods and services, without exchange to any of the established fiat currencies. I've done it many times. I've been payed to write code in BTC and I did not exchange them for anything, neither immediately nor later, I still hold on to these coins (store of wealth) and will someday buy something with it (maybe pizza, but I hope it'l be more than that). Additionally bitcoins are easily divisible and recognizable and therefore bitcoin is a money.
Is it a commodity money? That depends on wether these "precious bits" (which don't actually exist), are a commodity. I'd say no, but in the end: who cares?
Bitcoin is obviously money.
Bitcoin competes against VISA/PayPal/Google/Apple, true, but it also competes against USD/EUR/SDR/Gold/Silver/ChickenFeet/Salt/Sheep.
I say let there be competition! Currency competition will probably become a necessity after of our paper money has collapsed (don't think it'll collapse? read here: http://papermoneycollapse.com/ [papermoneycollapse.com]). We will need some sound money at some point, otherwise we're back to barter, which is highly inefficient. I'm not saying bitcoin is our saviour, but it should be allowed to compete. (It will compete without permission, regardless, but that may make it a little harder)
Just because its value has been bootstrapped (and is still being bootstrapped) by way of exchange to/from FIAT, doesn't mean bitcoin is merely a payment processing mechanism.
Whoever says bitcoins have no value by themselves, should try the following for educational purposes:
* actually acquire BTC 10 somehow.
* visit silkroadvb5piz3r.onion and buy some gardening supplies
* hold on to 1 bitcoin for 1 year (this is called "saving" and makes sense only when using sound money (as opposed to FIAT money which is constantly being inflated))
Oh, by the way: still mad about not having been an early adopter in the Summer '11 bubble? Well, here's you second chance.
Merry crisis and happy new fear.
To reduce bitcoin to its transactional features is short-sighted. This is being done as a marketing spin.
Bitcoin is many things, firstly, bitcoins are "precious bits". You can "own" certain amounts of bitcoins merely by being the only one to know the private key to a bitcoin address that had some coins transferred to it.
These precious bits are being used as money (and therefore are money), for direct payment of goods and services, without exchange to any of the established fiat currencies. I've done it many times. I've been payed to write code in BTC and I did not exchange them for anything, neither immediately nor later, I still hold on to these coins (store of wealth) and will someday buy something with it (maybe pizza, but I hope it'l be more than that). Additionally bitcoins are easily divisible and recognizable and therefore bitcoin is a money.
Is it a commodity money? That depends on wether these "precious bits" (which don't actually exist), are a commodity. I'd say no, but in the end: who cares?
Bitcoin is obviously money.
Bitcoin competes against VISA/PayPal/Google/Apple, true, but it also competes against USD/EUR/SDR/Gold/Silver/ChickenFeet/Salt/Sheep.
I say let there be competition! Currency competition will probably become a necessity after of our paper money has collapsed (don't think it'll collapse? read here: http://papermoneycollapse.com/). We will need some sound money at some point, otherwise we're back to barter, which is highly inefficient. I'm not saying bitcoin is our saviour, but it should be allowed to compete. (It will compete without permission, regardless, but that may make it a little harder)
Just because its value has been bootstrapped (and is still being bootstrapped) by way of exchange to/from FIAT, doesn't mean bitcoin is merely a payment processing mechanism.
Whoever says bitcoins have no value by themselves, should try the following for educational purposes:
* actually acquire BTC 10 somehow.
* visit silkroadvb5piz3r.onion and buy some gardening supplies
* hold on to 1 bitcoin for 1 year (this is called "saving" and makes sense only when using sound money (as opposed to FIAT money which is constantly being inflated))
Oh, by the way: still mad about not having been an early adopter in the Summer '11 bubble? Well, here's you second chance.
Merry crisis and happy new fear.
"It has value because we pretend it does."
absolutely true!
fiat currencies are just as much a shared hallucination as bitcoin.
at least bitcoins may provide more privacy...
...and can't be produced out of thin air.
But just using energy to produce it does not input *value* in the same way in which printing a bill [...] does not produce any value.
True. Someone tell the fed, quick!
(unfortunaly the current high value of bitcoins means that under current transaction fee rules this is getting less true).
Fee rules got changed: In the newest client (0.3.23), the default fee is reduced to 0.0005 BTC.