myPlanetGanja.com

I dont understand how it gets valued !???? right now 1 bitcoin is worth £145 sterling.

how does it get valued again, its so confusing..

who generates bitcoins !??, its a virtual currency !!!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24818975" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

mint new coins.

Typically new Bitcoins are generated by getting lots of computers to tackle a complicated cryptographic puzzle. At any given moment thousands of computers are involved in tackling this puzzle.

Roughly every ten minutes one group involved in solving this puzzle is rewarded with Bitcoins. The process is known as "mining" because, like miners, those who take part have to sift a lot of dross before they find a valuable nugget. As soon as the new coins are found, the news is circulated and everyone starts working on the next puzzle. One Bitcoin is currently worth about £145.

why are they playing crypotographic puzzles !???? i dont get it

Makes at least as much sense as the Fed, the BoE or the ECB creating debt-based currency out of thin air. There's a BitCoin ATM in Vancouver BC now where you can buy and sell BitCoins.

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/bitco ... 8C11496324" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

You and me both dill.

Chingas, I ‘m total confused now. I first heard of bitcoins when Silk Road was busted.
Did not understand how a coin could be back with real world assets and be anonymous.
It smells like a bad hack or a worst a scam.

Now with dill’s post, more questions!?! I get the fun part of solving puzzles, but where does the value come from? Are they cracking encrypted info in a back market chop shop for sensitive stolen encrypted data.
And haysus’s post the subject seems worlds apart … wtf?

So many questions…

my last roomie told me to get into bitcoin three years ago...

a 100 dollar investment THEN could have bought me a house today

Historically I thought bit coins were pieces of eight...coins that could be broken into 8 pieces.

8 bits to a byte. Synchronicity! Wow man, trippy,

.

The value of Bitcoin virtual currency has increased 20-fold in the past year and hit an all-time high of $309.68 on Mt. Gox, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange. Growth sustainability is at risk as new 'Silk Road' makes it a target of the US government.

Bitcoin’s extraordinary rise has garnered attention from investors from Cyprus to China wanting to get in on the soaring prices. But its success on the online 'Silk Road' has made it, along with drugs, a target for the US government.

The re-launch of the illegal online drug operator Silk Road could threaten the ‘Bitcoin boom’ as the FBI continues its crack down on Bitcoins used to barter for contraband products.



http://rt.com/business/bitcoin-boom-silk-road-364/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

.

$309 for 1 bitcoin....

i should have bought some when i had the chance just like ben ages ago....

$400 dollars to 1 bitcoin

$600!!!!!!

you could have doubled your money in 9 days!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As China Looms, the U.S. Ponders Ways Not to Destroy Bitcoin
By Robert McMillan11.19.13


The U.S. government believes that some scary people are using bitcoin. But here’s another scary prospect: If the government goes overboard with a hard-line approach on bitcoin and other emerging digital currencies, it may merely push them overseas, where they will surely flourish outside of its control.

On Monday, in a hearing held by the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, various federal regulators and law enforcement agencies said that digital currencies and internet anonymity presented serious challenges, but no one is interested in regulating them to the point where they wither here in the U.S.

That’s good news not only for bitcoin, but for the future health of the U.S. economy. Bitcoin is thriving across the internet, particularly overseas, and it could become as important to everyday life as the internet itself.

When the Senate Committee’s chairman, Tom Carper (D-Del.), compared digital currencies to the internet in its earliest days, Jennifer Shasky Calvery, the director of the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FINCEN, said the analogy was an apt one. “So often, when there is a new type of financial service or a new player in the financial industry, the first reaction by those of us who are concerned about money laundering or terrorist finance is to think about the gaps and the vulnerabilities that it creates in the financial system,” she said. “But it’s also important that we step back and recognize that innovation is a very important part of our economy.”

The feds have been worried about digital money for years — at least since they shut down E-Gold, an early digital currency provider that operated until 2007 — and recently, the scrutiny has intensified. Last year, the FBI created an inter-agency task force to tackle criminal use of digital currencies, called the Virtual Currency Emerging Threats Working Group. But regulators realize that virtual currency is more than just a means of facilitating illegal activity.

“These virtual currency services are not in and of themselves illegal so long as they comply with our applicable money laundering laws and our money transmission laws and regulations,” said Mythili Raman, acting assistant attorney general with the Department of Justice. “It is our duty as law enforcement to stay vigilant about the criminal misuse.”

The government is also careful to distinguish between the various types of digital currency. Bitcoins were the default currency of the Silk Road — the online drug-and-mayhem marketplace that federal agents shut down last month — and this is partly what sparked today’s hearings. But bitcoin itself has not been the preferred currency of cyber criminals, according to law enforcement’s top digital currency investigator, the Secret Service’s Edward W. Lowery III.

“The high-level international cyber criminals that we’re talking about, have not — by and large — gravitated to the peer-to-peer crypto currency such as bitcoin,” he said.

Instead, they have preferred to use a centralized digital currencies such as Liberty Reserve — the digital money site that was shut down earlier this year. This is a very different animal from bitcoin. Created by an anonymous programmer — or group of programmers — bitcoin is controlled by thousands of machines spread across the internet, not by a central bank.

That said, the feds are looking to regulate bitcoin as well, and this has certainly affected the progress of the popular digital currency here in the U.S. In May, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began seizing US bank accounts belonging to Mt. Gox, a Japan-based bitcoin exchange. The DHS says Mt. Gox had not properly registered itself as a money transmission business, but the seizure has had a chilling effect on U.S. businesses working in the bitcoin space.

Since then, a number of bitcoin startups have had their bank accounts suddenly closed by U.S. banks, presumably to avoid regulatory problems. “It looks like most of the leading bitcoin companies will be outside of the USA due to the USA’s unreasonable financial licensing requirements,” said Roger Ver, an early bitcoin investor who lives in Japan. He spent part of Monday night at a bitcoin meetup in Shanghai.

“Nearly 100 people showed up, and there is a huge amount of interest from the Chinese people,” he said. “China may be the country with the most early adopters.”

Last month, the world’s first Bitcoin ATM opened up for business. Although the machine, called Robocoin, was designed in Nevada, it got its debut in Vancouver, Canada, where regulators have taken a softer approach toward bitcoin.

Meanwhile, the value of bitcoins have surged, topping $750 on Monday. But exchanges such as Mt. Gox and Bitstamp, which, although located overseas, have traditionally be driven by US traders, have taken a back seat to the Chinese exchange BTC-China, which has now become the world’s most popular bitcoin exchange. “It’s quite clear to me that Bitcoin prices worldwide is now being led by the China market,” said BTC-China CEO Bobby Lee in an e-mail interview.

For regulators here in the U.S., the trick is to control Stateside use of this wildly popular digital currency without choking it all together. Otherwise, the bitcoin world will continue to evolve at expense of our domestic economy. Regulators still have a long way to go in this regard. But at least they understand what’s what.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/20 ... n_hearing/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Arghhh!!!!!

I still don’t get it. Where does the value of a bitcoin come from. Who decides how many bitcoins exist? Names, I want names.

“bitcoin is controlled by thousands of machines spread across the internet, not by a central bank.”

If no central processing system or persons regulating exchanges then what keeps counterfeit bitcoins being circulated?.

Is it possible to “cash” in by exchanging ethereal bitcoins for gold or real american paper dollars?
If not, then just yet another fake wealth thingies. it works cause there is always a bigger fool that also believes. That is wealth/value is derived from solely from speculation.
Getting people to salivate over investing/owning bitcoins is a scammers wet dream.

If bitcoins are exchangeable for hard cash and no central bank then Just who gives hard currencies for a anonymous personal check? Names I want names?


You can’t cheat an honest man.
There is no free lunch.

Bitcoin has been called a cryptocurrency because it is decentralized and uses cryptography to control transactions and prevent double-spending, a problem for digital currencies.[8] Once validated, every individual transaction is permanently recorded in a public ledger known as the blockchain.[8] Payment processing is done by a network of private computers often specially tailored to this task.[10] The operators of these computers, known as "miners", are rewarded with transaction fees and newly minted Bitcoins. However, new Bitcoins are created at an ever-decreasing rate.[8]

Thanks ben, that addresses they're protection scheme against counterfeits.
Whomever "they" are.


Still I’m guessing no one is paying out gold for bitcoins but the sheep errr investors.

i am still fucking confused......

Intrinsic wrote:Arghhh!!!!!



Is it possible to “cash” in by exchanging ethereal bitcoins for gold or real american paper dollars?
If not, then just yet another fake wealth thingies. it works cause there is always a bigger fool that also believes. That is wealth/value is derived from solely from speculation.
Getting people to salivate over investing/owning bitcoins is a scammers wet dream.



You can’t cheat an honest man.
There is no free lunch.

you can buy and sell bitcoins for american dollars, or any currency as far as i can make out.... you can do this online or through smartfones..

i was watching this programme were a dozen Americans were hanging around a street corner selling and buying bitcoins lol

ive heard charities are just now beginning yo use bitcoins because it eliminates the need of a middle man, thus the whole funds go to the end user without any % fees for middlemen...

Thanks Dill. Curiouser and Curiouser.
Prehaps this is where the value of bitcoins come from?

Cryptolocker infects cop PC: Massachusetts plod fork out Bitcoin ransom
Police learn about crypto-currency and AES256 crypto the hard way
By Iain Thomson, 21st November 2013

Massachusetts cops have admitted paying a ransom to get their data back on an official police computer infected with the devilish Cryptolocker ransomware.

Cryptolocker is a rather unpleasant strain of malware, first spotted in August, that encrypts documents on the infiltrated Windows PC and will throw away the decryption key unless a ransom is paid before a time limit. The sophisticated software, which uses virtually unbreakable 256-bit AES and 2048-bit RSA encryption, even offers a payment plan for victims who have trouble forking out the two Bitcoins (right now $1,200) required to recover the obfuscated data.

On November 6, a police computer in the town of Swansea, Massachusetts, was infected by the malware, and the cops called in the FBI to investigate. However, in order to get access to the system the baffled coppers decided that it would be easier to pay the ransom of 2 BTC, then worth around $750, and received the private key to unlock the computer's data on November 10.

"It was an education for [those who] had to deal with it," Swansea police lieutenant Gregory Ryan told the Herald News. "The virus is so complicated and successful that you have to buy these Bitcoins, which we had never heard of."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/21 ... ters_back/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The way director Alex Winter sees it, Napster, WikiLeaks and Bitcoin are just threads in the same yarn – a story of a deep divide growing between the internet that everyone can see and a more mysterious web where peer-to-peer pioneers rule. He should know – he’s a time-traveler.

OK, not really. He just played one in a movie. He was Bill S. Preston in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But in recent years he’s become a documentary filmmaker adept at finding the connective tissue between what happens in the back-channels of the internet and how it affects everyone IRL, even those that don’t understand how it works. His last doc was Downloaded – a thoughtful look back at the growth and impact of Napster – and his latest will go even deeper, looking at Bitcoins, the uber-popular digital currency that he first became fascinated with while still working on his file-sharing film.


“With Downloaded I was less interested in the implications of music or file-sharing… and more concerned with what peer-to-peer architecture meant in terms of creating global community, which could be used for good or ill,” Winter told WIRED. “What’s going on with [Bitcoin] is just the evolution of peer-to-peer architecture – this is just an outgrowth of the story I started to tell with Napster.”

The director’s latest effort is also striking while the iron’s hot. Bitcoin has had a lot of tongues wagging of late. Last month, the FBI arrested Ross William Ulbricht, whom they allege ran the online black market Silk Road that used Bitcoins for transactions involving anything from LSD to heroin.

Bitcoin sprang up in 2009 after a paper by someone (or perhaps a group of people) writing as Satoshi Nakamoto proposed the concept of a peer-to-peer digital currency. Now, it seems to be in the news almost every day, whether it’s a story about Bitcoin miners, new ATMs, or theft-by-hacking. However, Winter said he wants his doc to go even deeper than the headline-grabbing moments and get at Bitcoin’s wider implications. “This isn’t a Silk Road movie,” he said. “I’ll make that really clear.”


Winter has already been working on the documentary – titled Deep Web: The Untold Story of Bitcoin and the Silk Road – for a few years already using funds from private investors and launched a Kickstarter today to raise $75,000 to complete his reporting and finish the doc.

Although he won’t reveal names, Winter said he’s “connected to everybody of significance” in the Bitcoin world. He’s also looking to speak with Ulbricht and hopes to track down the person – or people – behind Satoshi Nakamoto. But mostly, he wants his film to relay that we’re now living in a time of “technological Prohibition” where the gap between those who understand the backchannels of the internet – the places the birthed WikiLeaks and Bitcoin – and the people who don’t is growing at lightning speed.

“It’s like something out of a William Gibson novel,” Winter said. “We really do now live in a world where there is a very stark divide between the people who are in these gigantic technology-based communities that are totally outside the law and the rest of the world, which is either trying to destroy or dismantle these architectures or doesn’t understand them or is scared of them.”

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/11/ ... cumentary/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[quote="Intrinsic"," Swansea police lieutenant Gregory Ryan told the Herald News. "The virus is so complicated and successful that you have to buy these Bitcoins, which we had never heard of."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/21 ... ters_back/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;[/quote]

Massachusetts cops have admitted paying a ransom to get their data back on an official police computer infected with the devilish Cryptolocker ransomware.

Think I'd fire the whole IT dept. fer not maintainin their backups.

It's based on trust.

And an accepting market

Here... take this US dollar which is being printed day and night to destroy its value ....


for 1 bitcoin I can buy a pound of weed in the Nigerian region of darkest African where Jane's white lilly skinned comrade gets raped by a giant AFRIKAN! OILED UP FOR CEREMONY!"

Many storys have been told of the tent raisings that night.

Many attribute it to the steam from the black mans penis steaming out the white bitches ass.

reminds me of one of my favorite jokes... ..

My lawyer friend Jose went to the races in Kentucky a lot and one day he bet on this horse and it he said to the horse. "I'm betting money on you. How many races have you won?"

The horse perks its ears up and prances they raising its tail real high goes " a pheew..."

paypal on steroids

credit cards electronic transfers

electrons zooming around and around

Can VISA stay in business if it screws its customers? What is VISA its trust that you can charge something and the retailor trusts VISa to pay them for your charges.. units. of exchange.

ViSA

BITCOINS
but bitcoins has a flexible market rate and are not credit.

You buy a "UNIT OF VALUE" on an electronic exchange trusting in the market value.

Ponzi scheme or ... Pool of Insurance?

Risk vs Reward

If the US and UN clamp down on credit card transfers and cash exchanges a new market arises from the ruins.

If the US and UN clamp down on credit card transfers and cash exchanges a new market arises from the ruins. Problem arises if you make nation states and the world government your enemy.

Thats a lot of firepower coming down on yo ass bro.

Russia and China spying on your naked faces bitches

as ex spy on Russia China and Vietnam why would anything change after 50 years?

we all spied and do spy on each other all the time

You don't think the brits are not spying on that stupid clueless blacky?

static.... ckrisp... " break in call "we need more fritters..." break in call "WHY WONT YOU FUCK ME I BOUGHT YOU THAT 2 X 6 and ROpe to tie to y our skinny ass so you don't fall in what more do You WANT?" signal loss..

\squittch .. squi.l.ssssss

I will give you 2 .357 magnum rounds for 3 real dog meat hamburgers or 1 for 4 catburgers.

Elite of course gets to eat the elite cow burgers in the slave state.

First a follow up tangent about cyberLocker:

Bitcoin bubble prompts 'generous' cybercrooks to slash their demands
By John Leyden, 25th November 2013

The soaring price of BitCoin has prompted the cybercrooks behind the infamous CryptoLocker malware to reduce the levy they impose on victims from 2 BTC to 0.5 BTC.

The reduced price scam was spotted in variants of the malware, which encrypts personal files on infected Windows PCs, spotted earlier this week by security firm F-Secure.

The price of Bitcoin has been wildly volatile lately. And that type of commodity volatility affects Bitcoin's ability to act as a currency because prices are quickly driven out of whack. Even for ransomware such as CryptoLocker.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/25 ... ion_price/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Stewardess first to book $250k Virgin Galactic 'space trip' with BITCOINS
We'll now take the crypto-currency, beams beardy Brit billionaire Branson
By Jack Clark.

"Why not?" he said. "It's a new exciting currency. A lot of people who got into Bitcoin quite early on have made quite a lot of money and are already interested in going to space."

A bitcoin is currently trading for around $763, versus $10 at the start of the year. You'll need to pony up $250,000, or 327.7 BTC, to spend about 10 minutes weightless on the edge of space.

The first customer to have paid in Bitcoins is a stewardess in Hawaii "who made quite a lot of money by getting into Bitcoin early on," Branson said.

Branson has confidence that Bitcoin will go higher, as the systems controlling the crypto-currency limit the total amount of Bitcoins in circulation. This prevents the money printing (excuse us, "quantitative easing") that central banks indulge in to doom subsequent generations to crippling inflation ("stabilize markets").

"I think one day [Bitcoin] will settle at a price that will be higher than the prices it's at today," the beardie billionaire said. However, upon receiving the stewardess's funny money, Virgin Galactic did immediately transfer it into clammy, green US dollars, he said.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/22 ... s_bitcoin/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Some resources I’ve found in helping get a grip on bitcoins:

First the original white paper on bitcoin
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Download the PDF:
http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
By Satoshi Nakamoto, AKA Shinichi Mochizuki, A Japanese mathematician research professor of mathematics at Kyoto University. Has not taken credit for it tho,

Another less mathematical but technical analyses of bitcoins:
Bitter to Better —How to Make Bitcoin a Better Currency
http://crypto.stanford.edu/~xb/fc12/bitcoin.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


A layman synopsis of bitcoins:
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/0 ... -plunging/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

And the bitcoin site itself:
http://bitcoin.org/en/how-it-works" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Mining is a complete misnomer how bitcoins are generated and new links in the ledger are added. I’d suggest to Ignore the analogy.

Also note when they say the “Miners” have to solve a hard math problem to create (mine) a new bicoin and transaction node in the linked list (ledger), they mean a trivial math problem that requires a lot of numeric calculations to solve, it would need to be trivial or computers couldn’t number crunch it. Design to take about 10 minuets to solve, no matter how fast tech computing muscle evolves. Interesting point and NOT a trivial math problem to solve in intself, needed a human brain to figure that one out.

And for some reason I ain’t figured out yet, GPUs (graphical processing units) are more suited for this then a CPU (centralized processing unit). ??

An real interesting site, fascinating, go check it out:

I Each trade results in a bitcoin being sent from the currency counter in red to the country on the map. The value in BTC is listed in green and plotted across the map. The last exchange rate for each currency is listed in @purple and updated for each trade.

http://fiatleak.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


from this it is obvious china and the US are nearly the only palyers,

And more important china is outpacing buying bitcoins hands down.
Id like to hear any speculation Why China or groups in China are hoarding/buying bitcoins, What up with that?

Bitcoin Is Flawed, But It Will Still Take Over the World


Zambelich/WIRED

The Pink Cow is the first restaurant in Tokyo that lets you pay with Bitcoin, the world’s most popular digital currency. In some ways, this California-Mexican cafe — a hangout run by an American expatriate who believes in new ideas — sits at the center of the Bitcoin universe. The digital currency was created by an anonymous computer programmer who many assume is Japanese, and the first big Bitcoin exchange — the web service where so many people bought their first bitcoins — is operated out of a Tokyo office not far from this wonderfully quirky bar and restaurant in the city’s Roppongi district.

But when the Tokyo Bitcoin Meetup Group holds one of its weekly gatherings at the Pink Cow — bringing together Bitcoin enthusiasts from across the city and beyond — only about a third of them actually pay for dinner and drinks with bitcoins. People like Marco Crispini, an expatriate from Britain, and Aya Walraven, who moved to Tokyo from Canada, very much believe in the digital currency. And they own bitcoins. But they prefer not to spend them because their value just keeps going up.

In other words: What they would have spent on a $20 Cal-Mex meal is now worth about $90 You can see their point. In the month since Crispini and Walraven declined to spend their bitcoins on burritos at a mid-October meetup, the value of the currency rose from about $160 on the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox exchange to well above $700. In other words: What they would have spent on a $20 Cal-Mex meal is now worth at least $90.

The trouble is that this sort of bitcoin hoarding leaves many questioning the future of the currency. If economic incentives encourage people to hoard their bitcoins rather than spend them, the thinking goes, the currency will never fulfill the extravagant promises laid down by the biggest believers, who say it will streamline monetary transactions, free the world from the financial manipulation of big government and big banks, breakdown the financial walls between nations, and, well, remake the worldwide economy.

The concerns are justified. Even some of Bitcoin’s most ardent supporters — like Fred Friis, one of the Tokyo Bitcoiners who regularly spends his digital currency at the Pink Cow — say that the consistent increase in the currency’s value is a “legitimate issue.”

But Friis also says — and rightly so — that the issue shouldn’t be exaggerated. According to many economists who have closely followed the progress of the digital money, Bitcoin’s recent ups — and downs — are to be expected from a currency so young, a currency that is just now attracting major attention from the mainstream population. The bottom could fall out of the market, but the currency could just as easily stabilize and reach a point where its value is consistent enough that people no longer hoard the stuff.

Yes, Bitcoin is what some call a deflationary currency. Because the system was designed to allow the creation of only a finite number of bitcoins (see our “Bitcoin Survival Guide“), there will come a point where, as demand rises, the value of the currency will only go up (making the price of goods and services fall, hence the term deflation). And that could lead to hoarding on an even larger scale.

But that moment is a long way off, and it won’t necessarily prevent the currency from flourishing, says Peter Rodriguez, a professor of economics and senior associate dean at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. After all, many deflationary currencies have flourished in the past.

“The analogy is gold,” says Simon Johnson, a professor of entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “Gold is a finite resource, and until the big South African discoveries in the 1890s, there wasn’t that much gold. But people were happy to make payments with it. The whole idea that people won’t make payments with something that’s finite and held as a store of value is not correct.”

Bitcoin Deflated
Matthew Yglesias, an economics journalist and pundit who currently writes for the online magazine Slate, has long questioned whether Bitcoin can survive in the long term. “If you have persistent deflation, then simply holding the cash becomes a way of earning a return,” he tells WIRED. “If that’s the case, your economy will be starved of funds for investment and won’t be able to grow.”

‘I wish Bitcoin had more inflation built in, to encourage people to spend money and create a healthy economy’

— Adam SahThe main issue here is that the worldwide network of computers that controls the digital currency only creates a limited number of bitcoins every so often and will one day stop making bitcoins entirely. This will happen in about the year 2140, and as some people manage to lose their bitcoins — misplacing the digital keys that control them — the supply of the currency will actually drop.

In theory, this means that, if demand for the currency continues to grow, the value of bitcoins will necessarily continue to rise. The result, according to Yglesias and many others, is that people will have little incentive to spend their money — and the bitcoin economy will come crashing down.

This limited-supply issue is the most common argument against the viability of the new currency. You read it so often on the web. It comes up time and again at Bitcoin meetups like those at the Pink Cow. And it’s a very real concern for merchants who accept payments in the digital currency. “I dislike the pure deflation model,” says Adam Sah, the founder and CEO of Buyer’s Best Friend, which accepts the currency. “I wish bitcoin had more inflation built in, to encourage people to spend money and create a healthy economy.”

But this issue shouldn’t be confused with what is currently happening in the Bitcoin world. Yes, we’ve seen a steady climb in the value of the currency, and yes, this has slowed spending at some merchants. Michal Handerhan — the CEO and co-founder of BitcoinShop.US — says that his sales have dropped 20 percent in recent weeks. “People are holding their bitcoins,” he says, “and won’t let go.” But that has little to do with the limited-supply issue. It’s just that the currency is experiencing some very normal growing pains as more and more people jump on board.

The limited-supply issue won’t really come into play for many, many years, and even if it does cause problems, there are good reasons to believe that these problems can be alleviated — reasons that go to the heart of the Bitcoin architecture.


At the Pink Cow, a patron pays for his meal in bitcoins. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED
Portrait of a Bitcoin as a Young Currency
Bitcoin is still so very young. It arrived little more than four years ago, when a programmer or group of programmers under the name Satoshi Nakamoto released an open source software platform onto the internet and others jumped on board, helping to develop the system and expand it to an ever-growing number of online machines. Driven by this distributed piece of software, the currency is just now beginning to reach the mainstream. The recent spike in value is only natural. It just means a large number of people are suddenly embracing the currency.

‘Theory would predict that, as the currency grows in value, people would tend to hold it rather than spend. But all the empirical evidence we have shows precisely the opposite’

— Jeffrey Tucker“In a strange way, this is a necessary moment to establish the validity of Bitcoin,” Rodriguez says.

Yes, the current price volatility could become a problem. “On the one hand, these huge price increases may lead people to buy bitcoins for speculative purposes and hang on to them to make capital gains,” says François Velde, a senior economist in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago who recently penned a widely-read public primer on bitcoin. “And then other people might see the volatility and think: ‘Whoa. If this is going up like that, it could come down just as quickly. I’m not gonna use this as a currency. The value is just too unstable.’”

But this won’t necessarily keep the currency from succeeding, and at the moment, it doesn’t seem to be a huge issue. Even though the value of a bitcoin is on such a steep climb, the number of worldwide bitcoin transactions continues to increase as well. People are not only willing to invest in bitcoins. They’re willing to trade them and, in some cases, spend them too. For Jeffery Tucker, an economist who writes about the intersection of economics and technology, this is proof that hoarding is not the problem many say it is.

“Theory would predict that, as the currency grows in value, people would tend to hold it rather than spend,” he says. “But all the empirical evidence we have shows precisely the opposite.”

Separately, the system may run into a problem when it stops producing new bitcoins — way off in the year 2140. But this is only really a problem if Bitcoin begins to replace federal monies — if it becomes what’s called “the unit of account” in countries like Japan and the U.S. This means that goods and services would actually be priced in bitcoins.

As it stands, our goods and services are still priced in currencies like yen and dollars. At merchants that accept bitcoins, like the Subway sandwich shop in Allentown, Pennsylvania, prices are merely converted from federal currencies into the digital money. But if bitcoin becomes the unit of account and then a depression hits, it could be difficult to turn the economy around.

“In a depressed economy, when there’s not growth in price levels, deflationary expectations do encourage a collective retreat of spending behavior, and in order to push out of that, you have to reverse those expectations,” Rodriguez says. “If you had no discretion to expand the currency, you couldn’t necessarily reverse those expectations.”

But it’s wrong to think that deflation will necessarily be a problem. Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago economist Volde cites what is called The Friedman Rule. Proposed by economist Milton Friedman, the rule essentially says that a certain amount of deflation is actually preferred. “This idea has been around for decades,” Volde says. “Deflation doesn’t mean that a currency won’t be used.”

Bitcoin Is More Than Bitcoin
But let’s say Bitcoin does take over the world. Let’s say that in some distant future it does become the unit of account in Japan and the U.S. and elsewhere. Let’s say deflation does become a problem. There are still ways around it.

The bitcoin system runs on open source software, and that means it can be changed. It’s just that the change must be approved by a majority of those participating the system.

‘Bitcoin is a software program. People can upgrade it’

— Joshua Kroll“Bitcoin is a software program,” says Joshua Kroll, a computer science researcher at Princeton University who has closely studied bitcoin alongside various Princeton academics who deal not only in technology but public policy. “People can upgrade it.”

Some have argued (in the pages of WIRED in fact) that bitcoin should be updated to include some form of central control, a means of manipulating the value of the currency. But this runs counter to one of the main ideas behind Bitcoin. For many, bitcoin is a way to remove money from the grips of big governments and big banks. “It is always the government paper fiat money that gets corrupted throughout history,” says Ken Shishido, who helps oversee the Tokyo Bitcoin Meetup Group. “Bitcoin is not just a new digital currency. It is actually about liberty.”

The historic problem that monies have, says MIT Sloan economist Johnson, is that governments promise not to mint more of them, but then they do. The inevitable result: inflation. “The basic problem with money is not limited supply,” Johnson says. “The basic problem is that once you create it, it’s valuable, and if you’re the person who created it, you have an incentive to create more.” Bitcoin was designed as a way around this problem.

It’s more likely that the massive community that runs Bitcoin would upgrade the system so that it consistently expands the supply of bitcoins into the very distant future. That would alleviate the deflation problem without giving anyone central control.

Joshua Kroll believes that the system will have to be modified in some way. It’s not just that it needs a way of fighting deflation, he says. It needs a way of encouraging people to operate the machines that make up the worldwide bitcoin network.

Today, when the system creates new bitcoins, it automatically doles them out to people who run the hardware that drives the system. If you take this away, Kroll says, there will be no incentive for people to keep contributing processing power to the system through what are called bitcoin miners. “If the miner reward goes to zero, people will stop investing in miners,” he says. “And this is a problem.”

The system does allow bitcoin holders to include transaction fees when they send and receive money, and the idea is that these fees — which go to the miners — will provide the needed incentive. But Kroll says that isn’t enough. You have to enforce some sort of standard payment to the miners, he says. It follows, then, that if you change the system so that it keeps creating bitcoins, you solve not only the hardware problem but the deflation problem.

What Bitcoin Really Is
That may or may not happen. But the larger point is that the system will be what the people want it to be.

Bitcoin is a currency, like the dollar or the yen. And it’s a means of processing payments over internet, like PayPal. But it’s also a piece of technology controlled by the masses, like Linux, the increasingly popular open source computer operating system, or the internet itself. What history has shown is that, once they get going, things like Linux and the internet take on lives of their own.

It’s not just that people across the world use the internet. They also help run it — not because there’s an immediate monetary payoff but because the internet can help fuel so many other endeavors, many of which can generate money on their own. You could certainly argue that people will continue to run bitcoin miners even if they don’t get paid for doing so. They may run them just to keep the Bitcoin system going, knowing that the system will reward them in other ways.

But if the system needs change — if it can’t survive unless it continues to make new bitcoins — people will change it. Like the internet, Bitcoin has its limitations, but it’s something that anyone can modify. What that means is that any problem with the currency can be solved, including the limited-suppy problem. We could even see a “fork” of the Bitcoin system, where someone takes the open source code and creates a new system that then exceeds the popularity of Bitcoin.

This phenomenon has value in its own right. As Peter Rodriguez points out, Bitcoin can generate consumer confidence simply because it isn’t controlled by a single, central authority. People trust things that they have control over.

The point is not that Bitcoin is a deflationary currency. The point is that it can be anything.



http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/20 ... ation/all/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Bitcoin Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know About the Future of Money



The price of a bitcoin topped $900 last week, an enormous surge in value that arrived amidst Congressional hearings where top U.S. financial regulators took a surprisingly rosy view of digital currency. Just 10 months ago, a bitcoin sold for a measly $13.

The spike was big news across the globe, from Washington to Tokyo to China, and it left many asking themselves: “What the hell is a bitcoin?” It’s a good question — not only for those with little understanding of the modern financial system and how it intersects with modern technology, but also for those steeped in the new internet-driven economy that has so quickly remade our world over the last 20 years.

The spike was big news across the globe, from Washington to Tokyo to China, and it left many asking themselves: ‘What the hell is a bitcoin?’Bitcoin is a digital currency, meaning it’s money controlled and stored entirely by computers spread across the internet, and this money is finding its way to more and more people and businesses around the world. But it’s much more than that, and many people — including the sharpest of internet pioneers as well as seasoned economists — are still struggling to come to terms with its many identities.

With that in mind, we give you this: an idiot’s guide to bitcoin. And there’s no shame in reading. Nowadays, as bitcoin is just beginning to show what it’s capable of, we’re all neophytes.

Bitcoin isn’t just a currency, like dollars or euros or yen. It’s a way of making payments, like PayPal or the Visa credit card network. It lets you hold money, but it also lets you spend it and trade it and move it from place to place, almost as cheaply and easily as you’d send an email.

As the press so often points out, Bitcoin lets you do all this without revealing your identity, a phenomenon that drove its use on The Silk Road, an online marketplace for illegal drugs. But at the same time, it’s a system that operates completely in the public view. All Bitcoin transactions are recorded online for anyone to see, lending a certain transparency to the system, a transparency that can drive a new trust in the economy and subvert the anonymity sought by those on The Silk Road, which the feds shut down last month.

Bitcoin is much more than a money service for illegal operations. It’s a re-imagining of international finance, something that breaks down barriers between countries and frees currency from the control of federal governments. Bitcoin is controlled by open source software that operates according to the laws of mathematics — and by the people who collectively oversee this software. The software runs on thousands of machines across the globe, but it can be changed. It’s just that a majority of those overseeing the software must agree to the change.

In short, Bitcoin is kind of like the internet, but for money.

Birth of the Bitcoin

Click to enlarge. Illustration: T.A. Gruneisen/WIRED

What does that mean, specifically?

About five years ago, using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, an anonymous computer programmer or group of programmers built the Bitcoin software system and released it onto the internet. This was something that was designed to run across a large network of machines — called bitcoin miners — and anyone on earth could operate one of these machines.

This distributed software seeded the new currency, creating a small number of bitcoins. Basically, bitcoins are just long digital addresses and balances, stored in an online ledger called the “blockchain.” But the system was also designed so that the currency would slowly expand, and so that people would be encouraged to operate bitcoin miners and keep the system itself growing.

When the system creates new bitcoins, you see, it gives them to the miners. Miners keep track of all the bitcoin transactions and add them to the blockchain ledger, and in exchange, they get the privilege of, every so often, awarding themselves a few extra bitcoins. Right now, 25 bitcoins are paid out to the world’s miners about six times per hour, but that rate changes over time.

Why do these bitcoins have value? It’s pretty simple. They’ve evolved into something that a lot of people want — like a dollar or a yen or the cowry shells swapped for goods on the coast of Africa over 3,000 years ago — and they’re in limited supply. Though the system continues to crank out bitcoins, this will stop when it reaches 21 million, which was designed to happen in about the year 2140.

The idea was to create a currency whose value couldn’t be watered down by some central authority, like the Federal Reserve.

When the system quits making new money, the value of each bitcoin will necessarily rise as demand rises — it’s what’s called a deflationary currency — but although the supply of coins will stop expanding, it will be still be relatively easy to spend. Bitcoins can be broken into tiny pieces. Each bitcoin can be divided into one hundred million units, called Satoshis, after the currency’s founder.

The Key to the System
How do you spend bitcoins? Trade them? Keep people from stealing them? Bitcoin is a math-based currency. That means that the rules that govern bitcoin’s accounting are controlled by cryptography. Basically, if you own some bitcoins, you own a private cryptography key that’s associated with an address on the internet that contains a balance in the public ledger. The address and the private key let you make transactions.

The internet address is something everyone can see. Think of it like a really complicated email address for online payments. Something like this: 1DTAXPKS1Sz7a5hL2Skp8bykwGaEL5JyrZ. If someone wants to send you bitcoins, they need your address.

If you own some bitcoins, what you really own is a private cryptography key that’s associated with an address on the internetIf you want to send your bitcoins to someone else, you need your address and their address — but you also need your private cryptography key. This is an even more complicated string that you use to authorize a payment.

Using the math associated with these keys and addresses, the system’s public network of peer-to-peer computers — the bitcoin miners — check every transaction that happens on the network. If the math doesn’t add up, the transaction is rejected.

Crypto systems like this do get cracked, and the software behind Bitcoin could have flaws in it. But at this point, Bitcoin has been tested pretty thoroughly, and it seems to be pretty darned secure.

For the ordinary people who use this network — the people who do the buying and the selling and the transferring — managing addresses and keys can be a bit of a hassle. But there are many different types of programs — called wallets — that keep track of these numbers for you. You can install a wallet on your computer or your mobile phone, or use one that sits on a website.

With these wallets, you can easily send and receive bitcoins via the net. You can, say, buy a pizza on a site that’s set up to take bitcoin payments. You can donate money to a church. You can even pay for plastic surgery. The number of online merchants accepting bitcoins grows with each passing day.

But you can also make transactions here in the real world. That’s what a mobile wallet is good for. The Pink Cow, a restaurant in Tokyo, plugs into the Bitcoin system via a tablet PC sitting beside its cash register. If you want to pay for your dinner in bitcoins, you hold up your phone and scan a QR code — a kind of bar code — that pops up on the tablet.


How to Get a Bitcoin
If all that makes sense and you wanna give it try, the first thing you do is get a wallet. We like blockchain.info, which offers an app that you can download to your phone. Then, once you have a wallet, you need some bitcoins.

In the U.S., the easiest way to buy and sell bitcoins is via a website called Coinbase. For a one percent fee, Coinbase links to your bank account and then acts as a proxy for you, buying and selling bitcoins on an exchange. Coinbase also offers an easy-to-use wallet. You can also make much larger bitcoin purchases on big exchanges like Mt. Gox or Bitstamp, but to trade on these exchanges, you need to first send them cash using costly and time-consuming international wire transfers.

Ironically, the best way to keep bitcoin purchases anonymous is to meet up with someone here in the real world and make a trade.Yes, you can keep your purchases anonymous — or at least mostly anonymous. If you use a service like Coinbase or Mt. Gox, you’ll have to provide a bank account and identification. But other services, such as LocalBitcoins, let you buy bitcoins without providing personal information. Ironically, the best way to do this is to meet up with someone here in the real world and make the trade in-person.

LocalBitcoins will facilitate such meetups, where one person provides cash and the other then sends bitcoins over the net. Or you can attend a regular Bitcoin meetup in your part the world. Because credit card and bank transactions are reversible and bitcoin transactions are not, you need to be very careful if you’re ever selling bitcoins to an individual. That’s one reason why many sellers like to trade bitcoins for cash.

The old-school way of getting new bitcoins is mining. That means turning your computer into a bitcoin miner, one of those nodes on Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network. Your machine would run the open source Bitcoin software.

Back in the day, you could do bitcoin mining on your home PC. But as the price of bitcoins has shot up, the mining game has morphed into a bit of a space-race — with professional players, custom-designed hardware, and rapidly expanding processing power.

Today, all of the computers vying for those 25 bitcoins perform 5 quintillion mathematical calculations per second. To put it in perspective, that’s about 150 times as many mathematical operations as the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

And mining can be pretty risky. Companies that build these custom machines typically charge you for the hardware upfront, and every day you wait for delivery is a day when it becomes harder to mine bitcoins. That reduces the amount of money you can earn.

This spring, WIRED tested out a custom-designed system built by a Kansas City, Missouri company called Butterfly Labs. We were lucky enough to receive one of the first 50 units of a $275 machine built by the company.

We hooked it up to a network of mining computers that pool together computing resources and share bitcoin profits. And in six months, it has earned more than 13 bitcoins. That’s more than $10,000 at today’s bitcoin prices. But people who got the machine later than we did (and there were plenty of them) didn’t make quite so much money.

Online Thievery
Once you get your hands on some bitcoins, be careful. If somebody gets access to your Bitcoin wallet or that private key, they can take your money. And in the Bitcoin world, when money is gone, it’s gone for good.

This can be a problem whether you’re running a wallet on your own machine or on a website run by a third party. Recently, hackers busted into a site called inputs.io — which stores bitcoins in digital wallets for people across the globe — and they made off with about $1.2 million in bitcoins.

In the bitcoin world, when money is gone, it’s pretty much gone for good.So, as their bitcoins start to add up, many pros move their wallets off of their computers. For instance, they’ll save them on a thumb drive that’s not connected to the internet.

Some people will even move their bitcoins into a real physical wallet or onto something else that’s completely separate from the computer world. How is that possible? Basically, they’ll write their private key on a piece of paper. Others will engrave their crypto key on a ring or even on a metal coin.

Sure, you could lose this. But the same goes for a $100 bill.

The good news is that the public nature of the bitcoin ledger may make it theoretically possible to figure out who has stolen your bitcoins. You can always see the address that they were shipped off to, and if you ever link that address to a specific person, then you’ve found your thief.

But don’t count on it. This is an extremely complex process, and researchers are only just beginning to explore the possibilities.

Bitcoin vs. the U.S.A.
Bitcoin is starting to work as a currency, but because of the way it’s built, it also operates as an extremely low-cost money-moving platform. In theory, it could be a threat to PayPal, to Western Union, even to Visa and Mastercard. With Bitcoin, you can move money anywhere in the world without paying the fees.

The process isn’t instant. The miners bundle up those transactions every 10 minutes or so. But today, payment processors like BitPay have stepped in to smooth things out and speed them up.

The feds have stopped short of trying to kill Bitcoin, but they’ve created an atmosphere where anybody who wants to link the U.S. financial system to Bitcoin is going to have to proceed with extreme caution The trouble is that federal regulators still haven’t quite figured out how to deal with Bitcoin.

The currency is doing OK in China, Japan, parts of Europe, and Canada, but it’s getting its bumpiest ride in the U.S., where authorities are worried about the very features that make Bitcoin so exciting to merchants and entrepreneurs. Here, the feds have stopped short of trying to kill Bitcoin, but they’ve created an atmosphere where anybody who wants to link the U.S. financial system to Bitcoin is going to have to proceed with extreme caution.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security closed the U.S. bank accounts belonging to Mt. Gox, which has generally been the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange. Mt. Gox, based in Japan, let U.S. residents trade bitcoins for cash, but it hadn’t registered with the federal government as a money transmitter, and it hadn’t registered in the nearly 50 U.S. states that also require this.

The Homeland Security action against Mt. Gox had an immediate chilling effect in the U.S. Soon, American Bitcoin companies started reporting that their banks were dropping them, but not because they had done anything illegal. The banks simply don’t want the risk.

Now, other Bitcoin companies that have moved fast to operate within the U.S. are facing the possibility of being shut down if they’re not following state and federal guidelines.

Even if the feds were interested in shutting down Bitcoin, they probably couldn’t if they tried, and now, they seem to understand its promise. In testimony on Capitol hill earlier this week, Jennifer Shasky Calvery, the director of the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, said that Bitcoin poses problems, but she also said that it’s a bit like the internet in its earliest days.

“So often, when there is a new type of financial service or a new player in the financial industry, the first reaction by those of us who are concerned about money laundering or terrorist finance is to think about the gaps and the vulnerabilities that it creates in the financial system,” she said. “But it’s also important that we step back and recognize that innovation is a very important part of our economy.”

It is. And Bitcoin richly provides that innovation. It just may take a while for the world to completely catch on.



http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/20 ... guide/all/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Thanks for the reads,

I’m still wrapping my head around why the Fed seem to be cozying up to it. Tho not exactly scientist or tech haves or logic boffins. Maybe power greedy Ignorance?

Anyhoo

But if the system needs change — if it can’t survive unless it continues to make new bitcoins — people will change it. Like the internet,

Hmmm I disagree. Not about change per se but the surviving part of need to change it so bitcoins are an infinite resource.

I think the author fails to grasps the finite limit is bitcoins strong point for long term survival. Despite what wreakomist think, the planet’s resources are finite. Bitcoins acknowledges that fact in its model. Thus it would kill the deflation control built in. it should represent the real world. Not as some fake wealth scheme such as wall street misrepresents.

If unlimited bitcoin production then it is just like any other system of being able to print infinite money regardless of finite phiysical resources, as the Fed do. Dumb Dumb Dumb.

Bitcoin enables Beijing to perpetrate some mischief of its own. Already, one Iranian store, back-ally Persian Shoes, evades financial sanctions on Iran by accepting Bitcoins. Bitcoin payments would also be perfect for Beijing to surreptitiously undercut American financial sanctions on, say, payments made through Iranian financial institutions. Bitcoin gives Beijing one more avenue to support regimes and groups that the rest of the world shuns.

A China Triangle: Bitcoin, Baidu And Beijing
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang ... d-beijing/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

you cannot make a currency finite when labor and production are infinate


thats why currences linked to resources like the gold standard are a scam.
theres no more frontier,
we live on a globe,

the understanding of that is what forced fiats into dominance and thus what propelled humanity into civilization

no labor is finite, sinice finite beings and/or finite energy,
production is finite since raw materials aree finite. else not production but recyling.

In realty it is a in a closed system, as a planet with the only viable input in the suns energy. there is no formtier economically in the real world (not the wreakonimist idea of economy)

labor is infinate compared to ANYTHING a detractor of fiat currency would suggest money be associated to

labor is infinate ANYWHERE money has a chance of being concidered of value

Why do think bitcoins was design to be a finite amount, remember since the $value of a bicoin is arbitrary, the total any-other-cash system can always be divide among the bitcoins. an infinite BTC ( or any cash system) could ... would drive inflation infiinit over time (or crash). that is what were in now, that is the attraction of the finite crypto curriencies.
hard to create fake wealth, fake wealth keeps the powerful in powoer and the rest as working taxpaying slaves.

gotta run, be back later

"Infinite compared to"

Something is either infinite or not, you can't compare one thing to another to determine if something infinite or not.
Universal law(s) say labor is extremely finite. So does basic math....7 billion x 24 x 365 = 6.132e+13 = The maximum amount of labor this year..... take out the sick, young and old and time for people to sleep and the number is much smaller. Currency no matter if it's fiat or backed by a commodity can be multiplied or divided an indefinite amount of times making it infinite.

I'll give you half an atom of gold for that car.

labor in relation to wealth is infinate IN THAT when labor runs out,
there will be no more wealth because there will be NO ONE LEFT to determine it

If labor ran out (lol) what would the Mona Lisa be worth...?

How do robots and automation fit into the equation?....if I had a robot that could role blunts, give head and wipe my ass I would never get out of this chair.

robots and automation cant feed themselves... yet

get back then.

The singularity is fast approaching.

Bitcoin was born the day in 2008 some anonymous computer geek using the unlikely Japanese pseudonym Nakamoto posted an algorithm (on some obscure listserve website) that made something remarkable possible: It could generate a string of zeros and ones that was unique, ensuring that, before it could be transferred from one computer or device to another, a minimum number of other users had to trace its transfer and verify that it left the device of the seller (of some good or service) before moving to the device of the buyer. Moreover, the algorithm was written in such a way as to guarantee a steady ‘production’ of these strings—or bitcoins—over time, which, along with the computing power devoted by users in order to help track transfers, could collectively to maintain The Ledger. Lastly, to cap the supply of bitcoins, and thus safeguard their value, the algorithm guaranteed that the maximum number of these strings could only grow (given the algorithm’s structure) to 21 million units by the year 2040. Once it reached that quantity, its ‘production’ would cease and the users of bitcoins would have to do with these 21 million units. Meanwhile, before that date, and before the maximum bitcoin supply is reached, the ease with which users could ‘mint’ or ‘dig up’ fresh bitcoins (by making computer power available to the bitcoin community) would be inversely related to the total quantity of bitcoins already ‘created’ or ‘extracted’ from the algorithm.

In a sense, the designer of the Bitcoin algorithm (who has, by the way, dropped off the radar some time ago) seems to have designed the new currency on the basis of faith in the crudest version of the ‘monetarist’ Quantity Theory of Money—the idea that the value of money depended solely on the quantity of money supplied to the public. Thus, they aimed at creating the digital equivalent to… gold. Come to think of it, Bitcoin was, indeed, modeled on gold.



http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/bit ... 20131226//" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

bentech wrote:you cannot make a currency finite when labor and production are infinate


thats why currences linked to resources like the gold standard are a scam.
theres no more frontier,
we live on a globe,

the understanding of that is what forced fiats into dominance and thus what propelled humanity into civilization

So now are you saying with the truthdig article
there is value in having a limited fiat system such as the gold standard would supply. A plus for bitcoins
Or the fact it models after the Gold standard indicates a non workable system, if one believe using the gold standard is bad. A negative for bitcoins

It all eventually boils down to an optimization problem with population limit as a constraint; Population control. No system will stabilize if the ratio of people per resources is continually get larger. One can not change that with just using a different (limited or unlimited) fiat system to model an economy.

A sin or a good idea?

As of 2013 no country used a gold standard as the basis of its monetary system, although some hold substantial gold reserves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

nope!

not saying that...
merely passing along all im reading on the subject... all sides


after reading THAT article my feelings about bitcoin has turned decidedly for the worse PRECISELY because of the further questions that caveat their illuminating brings up...


found this,
lots of nuts and bolts most of this other editorials completely miss


http://bitcoin.org/en/faq" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

heres of interest,

an explaination of how terrible libetarian ideals forced into policy are
using bitcoin

i dont follow the tie-in
you?

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-r ... s-and-anti" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

bitcoins being "captured" i.e. taken world wide by government agencies chasing down world wide criminal empires.

search it.

bit coins are currency


but wut if de inner net goes down?

after SHTFan

here I will sell you 1 zillion innernet coins.
for the gold in your teef.

pulls out gun shoves it in your face!

hands you a pair of pliers.

then he grits his few teef and cocks the trigger.

" ah needz dem gold teef so hard way or dead way."

everything is going tracking.

temporary skin implants tattoos whatever.

world wide control would seem to be most efficient but its not

Central control doesn't work because it doesn't allow for human nature to want to avoid being fucked up the ass.

GOVERNORMENT MAN/WOMAN/TRANS SHOWS UP AT DOOR WITH RUBBER GLOVES ON

"Don't panic." as your are surrounded by black rubber encapsuled beings with weapons of some kind.

you go for the .45 1911 on your cross draw shoulder and your instantly stunned with a shotgun. *BullButtSlug. right up in the ass .. hole.. talk about instant loss of virginity .... talk about the PAIN! no lets talk about violation of our.. anal rights!

This is much more than a violation of moral laws butt.

Ok I know I kinda starting smiling there a bit but its cause getting shot in the asshole is so painful its kinda funny in a awful way.

smirk.. sorry..

hits button

transfer complete

oh wait.. duh its SHTF they ain't no inner net.?

where's my pliars?

do you take credit cards?

oh right.

EMP

sunspots

terror hacks

electric grid is down

nothing is free

someone is the bank.

there is no real "dissappearance" of wealth. It's just transferred.

The 2 r's in transferred are deliberate.

*ok its 4 now.

**oops now its 16

*** multiplies

** hides bank account from prying eyes for obvious purposes

**** FBI and enquireing minds want to know .. try to decode

The true magician waves his hands and mesmerizes the audience out front on stage while talking and waving his hands and in back behind the building the treasury is being looted.

da dah


They be gone... good luck any one walking into dis' empty office.

mindless fool clown leaves office empty and distrewn... "my prediction"

bentech wrote:heres of interest,

an explaination of how terrible libetarian ideals forced into policy are
using bitcoin

i dont follow the tie-in
you?

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-r ... s-and-anti" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Well, first we have Rand Paul, Worst he then quotes an economist. No meaningful info can be expected there. Witness:

Placing a ceiling on the value of gold is mining technology, and the prospect that if its price gets out of whack for long on the upside a great deal more of it will be created.

Oh give me a break! That tired old “we can always make more”. Implies gold is infinite. Better tech can always get more. Sheesh!

More important that is not what happened at all, they (everyone in the world) did not keep finding more gold to mine to compensate, they just abandoned the gold standard and are making more money out of nothing.

Wreakonimist are idiots, this one just demonstrated it again.

It near certainty Paul has no idea what he is talking about on any given subject. Bitcoins is just chic to him now and he want use it to sound as if he knows something, Damn good bet he knows nothing but sound bites.
Soooo… looking for a tie in may be futile, imho.

.

noticed this happening over the last week

makes me wonder what could happen if we kiev'd the treasury

At time of this post: bitcoin = 519.9 usd
http://preev.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Password-lifting network converted to cryptocoin-thievery
By Richard Chirgwin, 25th February 2014

Another $US200,000-plus worth of Bitcoins has been lifted, according to Trustwave, which has identified a new Pony botnet targeting crypto-currencies.

News of the heist comes hard on the heels of Mt Gox withdrawing from the Bitcoin foundation and killing off its social media accounts.
“Not only did this Pony botnet steal credentials for approximately 700,000 accounts, it’s also more advanced and collected approximately $220,000 (all values in this post will be in U.S. dollars) worth, at time of writing, of virtual currencies such as BitCoin (BTC), LiteCoin (LTC), FeatherCoin (FTC) and 27 others,” write the company's Daniel Chechik and Anat Davidi.

They continue: “This instance of Pony compromised 85 wallets, a fairly low number compared to the number of compromised credentials. Despite the small number of wallets compromised, this is one of the larger caches of BitCoin wallets stolen from end-users.”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/25 ... o_theives/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

" kiev'd the treasury" what does that mean?

. good example for libetarians of what deregulating monetary policy will sire

i guess bitcoin is a FIAT currency too....

Bitcoin ban row latest: 'Unstable, loved by criminals' Yup, that's the US dollar – Colorado rep
By Shaun Nichols, 6 Mar 2014

Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colorado) said the American dollar bill, much like the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, was "unregulated and unstable," and had been used for illicit criminal activity.

Polis, a former web entrepreneur representing the tech-heavy Boulder area, issued an open letter Wednesday as a send-up of the letter filed last month by West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who asked US regulators to consider a ban on Bitcoin.

Today's letter, a deadpan parody of Democrat Manchin's proposal, suggests that like Bitcoin the dollar is a favored method of payment for criminals and can leave its users vulnerable to fraud and forgery.

"Dollar bills have gained notoriety in relation to illegal transactions; suitcases full of dollars used for illegal transactions were recently featured in popular movies such as American Hustle and Dallas Buyers Club, as well as the gangster classic, Scarface, among others," Polis wrote.

"The United States’ Dollar was present by the truck load in Saddam Hussein's compound, by the carload when Noriega was arrested for drug trafficking, and by the suitcase full in the Watergate case.

"The clear use of dollar bills for transacting in illegal goods, anonymous transactions, tax fraud, and services or speculative gambling make me wary of their use. Before the United States gets too far behind the curve on this important topic, I urge the regulators to work together, act quickly, and prohibit this dangerous currency from harming hard-working Americans."

The letter, of course, mocks Manchin's campaign against Bitcoin. Polis' comments reflect the sentiments of many Bitcoin backers, who have argued that the digital currency, properly managed, is no more dangerous or unstable than its fiat counterparts.

Last week, Manchin argued that the cryptocurrency constituted a danger to the public and as such should be reined in by the Federal Reserve and other institutions. A day after sending the letter he put forth the idea to Fed Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen, who poured cold water on the idea by pointing out that her office lacked the authority to impose any restrictions on Bitcoin

Dill, i don't think bitcoin can be technically considered as fiat money since it isn't authorized/created by any government.
by definition a fiat means a decree from a government.

the use of bitcoin may be latter sanctioned by a government, but no government ever created it by fiat.

Bitcoin bloodbath as China shutters all trading sites
Cash will soon be the only way to pay for crypto-currency
By Phil Muncaster, 28 Mar 2014

China’s central bank has ruled that all banks and payment service providers in the country must cease dealing in Bitcoin.

The ruling, effective from April 15th, basically shutters all Bitcoin trading sites in the Middle Kingdom and means cash purchases will soon be the only way to buy into the virtual currency.

The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) has not officially announced the ruling, although Chinese business site Caixin claims to have seen an internal document stating that any banks failing to comply would be punished.
Said document apparently lists 15 trading sites which are set to be closed.
"The only one way out for Bitcoin websites is moving their servers abroad

Despite China's hardline stance, however, neighboring Hong Kong appears to be taking a more laissez faire approach.
In fact, it was the second location in the world to get its own Bitcoin ATM after an announcement from Canadian biz Robocoin in January
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/28 ... _pboc_ban/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


FWIW at this writing one BTC = 506.8 US$.

The irs has determined that bit coins are propert not currency:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/ ... LR20140325" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

(Reuters) - Wading into a murky tax question for the digital age, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service said on Tuesday that bitcoins and other virtual currencies are to be treated, for tax purposes, as property and not as currency.

"General tax principles that apply to property transactions apply to transactions using virtual currency," the IRS said in a statement, meaning that bitcoins would be taxed as ordinary income or as assets subject to capital gains taxes, depending on the circumstance.

Bitcoin, the best-known virtual currency, started circulating in 2009. Its present market value is around $8 billion, with up to 80,000 transactions occurring daily, according to accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

Recent incidents have brought the currency under new regulatory scrutiny, such as the failure of Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based exchange that filed for bankruptcy after losing an estimated $650 million worth of customer bitcoins.

Unlike conventional money, bitcoin is generated by computers and is independent of control or backing by any government or central bank, which its proponents like, but which also has led to calls for more guidance on U.S. tax treatment.

The IRS supplied that in its statement, which dealt a blow to bitcoin "miners," who unlock new bitcoins online. The IRS said miners must include the fair market value of the virtual currency as gross income on the date of receipt.

This change "is a disincentive to start looking for bitcoins," said John Barrie, a partner with law firm Bryan Cave LLP, who advises charities that receive bitcoins as donations.

NOT LEGAL TENDER

The IRS also said that virtual currency is not to be treated as legal-tender currency to determine if a transaction causes a foreign currency gain or loss under U.S. tax law.

For other forms of gains or losses involving virtual currency, the IRS explained how to determine the U.S. dollar value of virtual currency and said taxable gains or losses can be incurred in related property transactions.

"The character of gain or loss from the sale or exchange of virtual currency depends on whether the virtual currency is a capital asset in the hands of the taxpayer," the IRS said.

If a taxpayer holds virtual currency as capital - like stocks or bonds or other investment property - gains or losses are realized as capital gains or losses, the agency said.

However, when virtual currency is held as inventory or other property mainly for sale to customers in a trade or business, ordinary gains or losses are generally incurred, the IRS said.

Capital gains and losses are taxable and deductible at different rates and amounts than ordinary gains and losses.

Democratic Senator Tom Carper, who chaired a Senate committee hearing last year on bitcoin, said in a statement that the IRS guidance "provides clarity for taxpayers who want to ensure that they're doing the right thing and playing by the rules when utilizing bitcoin and other digital currencies."

MINERS HURT

New bitcoins come from a process called mining. Computer programmers around the world compete to crack an automatically generated code and the first to do so is rewarded with a small stash. This happens about every 10 minutes.

Some online retailers will accept bitcoins as payment. The maximum potential number of bitcoins in circulation is 21 million, compared with around 12 million currently.

On the IRS guidance, William Lewis, a lawyer in Sunnyvale, California, who represents a start-up company creating a platform for virtual currencies, said: "This is going to be unfavorable to bitcoin miners because they're going to have to include in income the fair market value of the virtual currency on the date they mined it.

"It's going to make life difficult for a lot of people who have been mining over the past year, who have to go back and see what the values were on those dates when they mined it."

(Additional reporting by Douwe Miedema; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Not specifically about bitcoin but a follow up on ransomware using bitcoins as payment.

Your files held hostage by CryptoDefense? Don't pay up! The decryption key is on your hard drive
By Iain Thomson, 3 Apr 2014
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/03 ... y_on_disk/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

A basic rookie programming error has crippled an otherwise advanced piece of ransomware dubbed CryptoDefense – but the crap coders are still pulling in more than $30,000 a month from unwary punters.

Whoever coded this made the rookie mistake of storing the decryption key in plain view – that's right, the private key is stored unencrypted on the PC's hard disk. Even though the generated private keys are uploaded to the crooks' server, allowing the crims to send the keys to victims who pay up, a copy is left on the drive by the software. Symantec explained:
As advertised by the malware authors in the ransom demand, the files were encrypted with an RSA-2048 key generated on the victim’s computer. This was done using Microsoft’s own cryptographic infrastructure and Windows APIs to perform the key generation before sending it back in plain text to the attacker’s server. However, using this method means that the decryption key the attackers are holding for ransom, actually still remains on the infected computer after transmission to the attacker's server.

Infected users should check in the Application Data > Application Data > Microsoft > Crypto > RSA folder of their PCs for the private key.

"The malware author’s poor implementation of the cryptographic functionality has left their hostages with the key to their own escape," the security biz noted

**note the location is slightly different on win7 and win8 machines:
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA

Here is the interesting part, if yall missed, it is subtle:
All your private keys are stored in plaintext by Microsoft in a folder on your harddrive if you use their API's ?

ok i checked it out on one of my systems...
.. and i did find a key(long hexadecimal string) even tho i NEVER use any code that uses ms API's for encryption! I little snooping and i concluded the key i found is indeed encrypted.

Good Right? nope not at all:

The machine has to boot at startup. It has to read wherever you've put the key and get the PRIVATE key out of it (in order to be able to decrypt communications encrypted by the PUBLIC key that you give out to everyone and send to them as part of TLS etc.).

So then that machine, when powered on, without requiring passphrases, has enough information to boot, log in at the service account user (e.g. "httpd" or equivalent), read the keystore and get the PRIVATE key out of it.

Game over. It might be more tricky but still game over. Encryption is useless if you're storing the credentials on the same disk and you are booting from it without supplying external information (e.g. dongle, manual login, etc.). It's either storing the key in plain text or it's storing it somewhere where it can get to using no more information than is contained on its default storage devices.

And, thus, why most OS's don't try to "obfuscate" access to it, because that's just pretending to actually be secure. Fact is, if you have enough info to boot up and decrypt SSL encrypted with your private key, you have enough information that the key is effectively plain-text.

encryption has always been useless IF they have physical access to the device,
because as youve gathered; in order to authenticate your key, it must have a copy to compare to

encryption is for security during transmission


but once you know this,
you get to be additionally pissed off whenever the fake news comes around to the next story about someone the law is threatening concerning encrypted data

if they have his computer, its a ruse

if they have his computer, its a ruse.

not if you have memorized your passphrases, private key ect, and don't have a hard record of it anywhere. as i was trying to say up there. Do not automate things for convenience as ms wants you to do. game over.

if MS api's did not store any of it any where except in volatile RAM. Then after one turns off the machine it is lost for ever, except for the user which has mesmerized it or stores it completely separate, say safe deposit box. But not on the drive platter with the associated public key! which is common advice and common sense. why ms does it .. well ms has never shown any real concern about users security. And i suspect MS has been in bed with the feds (NSA?) for a long time, notice how law suites against ms are always end up as a slap on wrist and business as usual, as if someone high up is protecting ms's monopoly.

** api = Application Program Interface... subroutines for programmers to use such as drawing windows, refresh, polling the keyboard, ect... so their code should still work when a newer version of windows comes out, sorta like BIOS on steroids.

its ALWAYS has to be on the drive platters

that is IF it want to verify the person logging it has authorization


there is a copy on the drive platters
so if youve physical control of the drive

you dont need to break the encryption
you blunt force a serious shortcut

hell
even bluntforce is an extreme exageration

its ALWAYS has to be on the drive platters
What!? no. It could and should be done RAM. i don't follow you.
look at this way, one could have a ram drive. RAM drive are treated and behave the same as a hard drive to the OS
but is volatile storage and disappears (into the bit bucket as they say) when power is turned off.

unlike the new(ish) NAD solid state drives which are RAM too, but static ram, meaning the retain their state with or without power. dynamic memory needs power.
Hard drive are a static memory too, just not random acess memory,

so you type in private key from yer brain memory, it goes into right from the keyboard into ram even if only at first to a buffer
The public key is uploaded into ram. computation occurres, no permanent record kept.

I'm positive that ms's encryption subroutines work in ram too, that is why it bizarre they would then write the private key to the hard drive afterwards?? AND not tell ya!

that is IF it want to verify the person logging it has authorization.
No that is not how private/public keys work, just for that reason.

Wait unless ya mean a like a single pass word for say opening an encrypted hard drive or file; As opposed to private/public keys.
I was talking about generating and using private keys kind of encryption, the kind the ransomware is using.
They assumed, and rightfully so imo, the important private key wouldn't be save on the host machine IN PLAIN TEXT. who would of thunk.

what im saying is that the server cant authenticate a password unless it has a copy of it
and its copy cant be kept in encrypted space on the disc

so if youve got physical access to the disc
you know that the password is located in a small percentage of allocated disc space

Since I’m new to this game, I cant explain this well, that is I have a hard time myself, but the point I do know that is whole point is not needing to store the private key, just the public half, on the computer jes for that reason But read up on public/private key encryption, maybe you can fare better at it with a layman explanation.

Ya don’t need to store it to check against the public key, verifies cause they are mathematically linked. No need to store the private key, only the public key.

Sorry for the poor explanation

Try this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
and this
http://www.comodo.com/resources/small-b ... cates2.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

by dill786 » Tue Nov 05, 2013 8:06 pm

I dont understand how it gets valued !???? right now 1 bitcoin is worth £145 sterling.

bitcoin value as of today !!
1 Bitcoin equals
5873.27 British Pound

which is $7762.11 (USD)

1 Bitcoin equals
8724.30 British Pound



i had the chance to buy some when 1 bitcoin was £145.00

fuck man i should have listened to my instinct.

no point in crying over spilt milk now !!

I got advised to buy bitcoins back in 11'
and I had some money then too!

but the process was to complicated and I didn't really have much of an urge

mistake

I read that its headed to at least 25,000 in the next couple years

man throws away his hard drive by mistake containing £75 million pounds worth of bitcoins

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... llion.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

According to new research from Chainalysis, a digital forensics firm that studies the bitcoin blockchain, 3.79 million bitcoins are already gone for good based on a high estimate—and 2.78 million based on a low one. Those numbers imply 17% to 23% of existing bitcoins, which are today worth around $8,500 each, are lost.

http://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The twin brothers who gained notoriety for suing Mark Zuckerberg over the claim that they started Facebook have done remarkably well in the wake of Bitcoin's record gains. From a report:
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss won $65 million from the Facebook lawsuit, and invested $11 million of their payout into Bitcoin in 2013, amassing one of the largest portfolios of Bitcoin in the world -- 1 percent of the entire currency's dollar value equivalent, said the twins at the time. Their slice of the Bitcoin pie is now worth over $1 billion after Bitcoin surged past $10,000 last week to now trade at $11,100, according to CoinDesk.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/4/1673 ... ires-surge" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

really simple explanation on bitcoin currency

on $10,000 ( 1 bit coin) it can get you over $80,000 in interest in a year..

fucking madness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QReUkg6EWf8" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

has anyone bought bitcoins on the forum??

is it an easy procedure?

Was advised to in 2010. Heh. Never did though.

well...

1 bitcoin now is worth $56k

anyone heard of NFT crypto ?

non-fungible token,

this is the new big thing,

well i say new, it was new for me

from what i gather its blockchain validation, rather than crypto
that affords the ability to verify the ownership of a single bit of electronic anything

thus allowing its sale for astronomical prices...

like digital art

i wonder how much the next banksy is gonna cost if he just releases his pic with a NFT

coz digital art is a $1 billion dollar industry..

can you belive it people are collecting digital art

I've been ripping off digital art from the internet since 1992. Not really collecting...
It is Just a bit stream.
Used to pretty cool ASCII art pre millennium.

But, nope, first i heard of NFT crypto.

basically, a NFT is a digital certificate as ben mentioned, so if your an artist or just a guy you can with the NFT make your art/pic/vid an ORIGINAL and you can auction it off and sell it on and if it sells further on down the lane as in the guy who bought it off you as an original had sold it on for a profit you will make 20% of that deal and if it gets sold further on you keep picking up the royalties..

the NBA are selling "moments" an NTF, 12-second clips of a historical event is being auctioned off and people are collecting them like Pokemon cards, the more rare something is the more its worth....

its called "NBA top shot"

Basically, Top Shot is an online marketplace for buying, selling and trading digital NBA cards. But, instead of physical pieces of cardboard with players' photos and stats on them, Top Shot's "cards" (which are called Moments) are built around specific video highlights.

i bought some crypto a few day ago..

my first btc purchase was when it was around 10 bucks worth (euro/dollar .. all the same crap)
next buy was when it was 70/80 bucks worth, i still have 0,4 bitcoins inside this wallet, but what i dont have anymore is the username and the password ... doh ... not lol
then i bought some when it was around 1000
and
my last purchase was about a year ago, when it was about 6k or 7k around

first, before you buy some, make yourself clear what you wanna use it for, bc this "dictates" the way you purchase it, legal or illegal activities, onion network (TOR) or not
my last purchase was totally legal, so i went the "easy way" :

made an account at https://www.blockchain.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; , with my regular email account, there you get all infos you need for the next step

log on into your online banking account and transfer your money to the blockchain bank, the amount you specified previously , in my case i wanted to purchase btc for 100 euros
(it is really a matter of minutes, if not seconds while refreshing F5 your both banking account views until you see your deposited funds) ... your money is now in your personal wallet - its not a trading wallet, those a 2 separate wallets/accounts, so before doing anything further actions and/or transactions, you need to open your trading wallet, which you need, of course, to generate, now that you have your btc inside your trading wallet account, you are able to buy things, sell things, swap things, that means you can change your btc to any other crypto currency or to other "real world currencies" , like buying dollars from btc , which were euros previously, or British pounds ; the cool thing about blockchain is, that you have an added stock exchange, which means that you bought btc from a regular bank your first time, but now you can buy btc from private ppl and also sell them to private ppl, which again means that you got other modalities than the bank itself, you can buy em cheaper, or more expansive and also sell them for your terms, you can program the software, like say buy when its below x and sell if its above y , simple but efficient broker utilities - helpers.

i sold those btc i had a month later, and dont forget there are a few fees included for buying and selling and swapping and trading, they arent rly much, but its not to be forgotten, with other words, if you buy for 100 bucks, and you sell em the same minute you purchased some, you would make a loss of about 10%, anyways, a month passed bye and i sold em again and made like nearly 3 euros win, 3% win for a month is - awesome - for just clicking a few times within your browser and/or smartphone, if i had it until today , i would have now about 1000 euros, a win of 1000%, thats insane, but thats real, meaning that one day tax investigation might knock on your door to ask you some uncomfortable questions ... i didnt had the patients to wait for a year .. but you have this - my lessons learned moments - for your good, and free of course :D

ppl dont get one basic thing in their mind, and thats the difference between gambling and trading, gambling - like say horse races or dog races, are what most ppl think of when they wanna invest , but thats the wrong mindset, investment has a time frame that is measured in months and years, while gambling is something measured in hours and days, thats the main culprit why they loose funds, your best bet is to buy some btc, and just leave em be for a year or even two, without your curiosity interfering with that plan, dont worry, btc wont crash within that time frame, thats a guarantee , take it or leave it , your choice

if you wanna buy some things online from the so called dark web, onion markets, you need to act different from the very first moment on , meaing that you first need to run the tor browser, then with it enabled (best in combo with a vpn) get urself 2 different email acounts , 2 different wallets and 2 different trading wallets, all them separated with different exit nodes and different browsing fingerprints, thats the only way to get legal money into the grey area, and from there on , via a mixer, to mix btc up, and use em in illegal activities , without anyone knowing that it is you (your identity) behind the btc transfers, while btc might be called anonymous, its far away from that, bc as the name says, blockchain is a global transfer algorithm, thats for everybody visible and accessible, knowing this dictates the way - your modus operandi - log on , log out, transfer and so on ...



if you have some further questions, let me know, i might be able to help you with this

take care mate

thanks for the write-up

what do you think about polkadot ecosystem crypto ?
and also uni -swap wich is a DE-FI platform

things are moving so fast,

some of these grass roots crypto/platforms coming up, like Polkadot whos platform will be to let all the crypto trade with themselves instead of their own blockchain only,

imagine that all crypto on one platform integrated and seamless....

not now but maybe in a few years time, if you hold onto these new cryptos, i never knew there were over 9000 diff types of crypto

well i bought some crypto....... i did this last week and DOT is on the move, i bought at £22.35 and now it's £33.30

polka ( DOT)
multi swap
chainlink

.

my crypto wallet is looking ok after the slump !!!

how long have you been holding?


i was advised to purchase when they were 9 dollars

it was a cool way to get a pizza delivered...

been hodling for about 3 months now...

made 50% right now on the chiliz coin.. which was pumping when messi joined PSG and took some of his money in crypto, almost overnight i made 50% profit on it...

Now trade chiliz for btc alt coins tend to crash after pumps

i have the following, i went with sports and entertainment crypto. tiny bit of diversification too.. made 54% profit on the chiliz so over 1k might scalp and buy more and see if i can find any more gems further down the rankings....

bitcoin
polkadot
theta
tfuel
chiliz
polygon matic

50% gain in days...

congrats

depending on your allowance for high speculation holdings
and how soon you want to shrink your most speculative investments

youd migrate a percentage of that profit out and into sounder holdings

oh and yes

the minor cryptocoins offer even better profit margin potentials than bitcoin


ah but dont forget the departed mcafer said


'bit coin will hit 500k
or i will eat my dick'

the way he carried on forever it was probably a foot long
giving him an out of sorts...

bitcoin has gone past $50k per coin

The first time i heard of bitcoin was the night before i started this thread and the price was £142GBP per coin

“Bitcoin is a USD and Federal Reserve Bank killer. It accomplishes this by starving the dollar of the energy it needs to survive. Not even America’s military can stop countries, corporations and individuals from converting all the energy available to them to mine and hoard bitcoin… this pattern will repeat endlessly until the US dollar is truly dead,” Keiser states.

World’s first ‘Bitcoin City’ about to ariseWorld’s first ‘Bitcoin City’ about to arise
He predicts that the US government will soon have no other choice but to side with crypto.

“Congress will do whatever donors want. Since bitcoiners are becoming hugely wealthy, expect more friendly bitcoin laws in Congress. I expect a bitcoin-friendly president in 2024,” Keiser muses.



Grab popcorn & watch US dollar collapse –

https://www.rt.com/business/542939-us-dollar-is-toast/

RadioShack.com is now showing visitors a new message: "Bringing cryptocurrency to the mainstream..."

With a 100-year-old brand, "we are going to lead the way for blockchain tech to reach mainstream adoption by other large brands."

The RadioShack home page says they'll start with a "symbiosis" with Atlas USV, a community-driven project to build a universal, decentralized/widely accessible DeFi base layer. Atlas USV's "Barter" mechanism lets users purchase third-party tokens and transfer them to Atlas USV's treasury in return for discounted USV tokens. "The Atlas USV treasury can accumulate any crypto asset of its choice with this dynamic...

"Once the liquidity pool surpasses other exchanges' liquidity level in any token pair, our swap efficiency will be unbeatable for that pair...

"Other decentralized exchanges margins on swap fees are our opportunity.... "

Or, as they explain on a more detailed web page, "We intend RadioShack to be the first protocol to pass over into mainstream usage in the history of DeFI," promising that RadioShack DeFi "will become the first to market with a 100 year old brand name that's recognized in virtually all 190+ countries in the world..."

"RadioShack has one objective: Distribution and usage by millions of individuals but possibly more important, by hundreds of blue-chip, large corporations as their gateway into becoming blockchain companies."

Currently there's a sign-up form for a notification when "RADIO token" launches (as well as links to their channels on Discord and Telegram).

Their "Fundamentals" page explains that "It is our hypothesis that the best way for crypto to be more mainstream is for an established brand name in the tech space to lead the way."

The RadioShack brand was purchased In November of 2020 by e-commerce rehabilitator REV, now listed as a collaborator on RadioShack's home page. (Ironically, the "Fundamentals" page also includes RadioShack's Super Bowl ad where there store is taken back by the 1980s.)

The official Twitter feed of Radio Shack now also has the same new tagline: "Bringing Cryptocurrency To The Mainstream."


https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/12/1 ... y-exchange

damn, the whole market is down big time, people lost millions on the FTX exchange that went bankrupt it was a decentralized exchange....

I invested in the CHILIZ coin and it seems to be in the green unlike other currencies it's a sports coin so the world cup in football in Qatar in the end of the month so the coin is going up after a massive slump a few months ago.

going to go up.
Sports coin? Because it's used for betting?
So money generating events like sports fit with cryptocurrency. How do you cash out?

you can sell the CHZ coin on binance, from CHZ>bitcoin>ukpound

I bought them last year when it was pennies, so I have around 5300 coins. as you can see on the crypto list its one of the few that's in the green.

number 34 on the list

https://coinmarketcap.com/

not only football but basketball. UFC, cricket, they keep adding

Thanks.
Can you walk in somewhere and just buy them with hard cash in hand? You know, like money laundering.

Intrinsic wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 11, 2022 6:09 pm

Thanks.
Can you walk in somewhere and just buy them with hard cash in hand? You know, like money laundering.

haha

no

if this guy really is Satoshi Nakamoto, the man who created Bitcoin, then all he has to do is show his Bitcoin wallet because he would have had the most Bitcoin than anyone on the planet...


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... rency.html

Claims that he can't access emails for the satoshi moniker either. Have you ever wondered why he didn't put his real name on the white paper?
And if MI6 was involved, why? The public didn't even start to take BitCoin seriously for years.

i got the tip to get into bitcoins when they were like 8 bucks,
the friend used them to buy pizza's

i think he made out good though
wish id bought a couple hundred and stashed em...

Volatility has been bitcoins best and worst point of attraction.
If you stay connected with the community and gain enough knowledge of what drives trends, you can get rich.
Guess wrong or miss an sell point and you can just as quickly lose it all.

A person put forth the notion that the intelligence communities were taking central bank digital currency for a test drive.
I don't rule that out, but if a super majority of the public were to adopt it into mainstream commerce, it could take down the whole monetary system. I think that the media putting the spotlight on the dark web black market usage and ransom ware anonymity aspect to demonize the coin, prevented the masses from realizing the power that it could bring to the individual.

roller24 wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 06, 2024 6:19 pm

Claims that he can't access emails for the satoshi moniker either. Have you ever wondered why he didn't put his real name on the white paper?
And if MI6 was involved, why? The public didn't even start to take BitCoin seriously for years.

this guy is a DR and has a degree in computer science so not a dumb fuck academically speaking,

I read somewhere years ago that Nakamoto has the most amount of bitcoins I am talking more than 0.5 billion dollars worth, just show the fucking Bitcoin "cold wallet", this will end all the speculation and bollocks

yeah, the mi6 link seems like it's just made up....

In a London court, lawyers for a group supported by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) argued that Craig Wright's assertion of being the inventor of bitcoin is "a brazen lie," challenged by accusations of extensive document forgery to substantiate his claim. Wright's defense disputes these allegations, maintaining that he has presented definitive proof of his role in creating bitcoin. Reuters reports:
Craig Wright says he is the author of a 2008 white paper, the foundational text of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, published in the name "Satoshi Nakamoto". He argues this means he owns the copyright in the white paper and has intellectual property rights over the bitcoin blockchain. But the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) -- whose members include Twitter founder Dorsey's payments firm Block -- is asking London's High Court to rule that Wright is not Satoshi.

The five-week hearing, at which Wright will give evidence from Tuesday, is the culmination of years of speculation about the true identity of Satoshi. Wright first publicly claimed to be Satoshi in 2016 and has since taken legal action against cryptocurrency developers and exchanges. COPA, however, says Wright has never provided any genuine proof, accusing him of repeatedly forging documents to support his claim, which Wright denies. Wright sat in court as COPA's lawyer Jonathan Hough said his claim was "a brazen lie, an elaborate false narrative supported by forgery on an industrial scale." Hough said that "there are elements of Dr Wright's conduct that stray into farce," citing his alleged use of ChatGPT to produce forgeries.

But he added: "Dr Wright's conduct is also deadly serious. On the basis of his dishonest claim to be Satoshi, he has pursued claims he puts at hundreds of billions of dollars, including against numerous private individuals." Wright's lawyer Anthony Grabiner, however, argued in court filings that he has produced "clear evidence demonstrating his authorship of the white paper and creation of bitcoin." Grabiner added that it was "striking" that no one else had publicly claimed to be Satoshi. "If Dr Wright were not Satoshi, the real Satoshi would have been expected to come forward to counter the claim," he said.



https://www.reuters.com/world/self-proc ... 024-02-05/

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/02/06 ... court-told

bitcoin on the way up, up to $56k

again? lol

damn

$68,415.90 for a single bitcoin

What’s weird is gold and silver are going up at the same time as bitcoin.

Solid Gold Butt Plug wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 04, 2024 10:15 pm

What’s weird is gold and silver are going up at the same time as bitcoin.

some crypto coins I bought back in 2001 slumped way down to nearly fuckall

I thought it was a decent bet as there were both involved in IA ( artificial intelligence) recently I looked and both coins "theta network" and TFuel have both shot up by 68% in the last week or so and still climbing so I am nearly made back the money I initially invested, I got them for pennies but according to some investors on YT the Tfuel token will be worth $1 each, I have several thousands of Tfuel coins, and I have nearly £500 worth of theta.

does anyone think Bitcoin will hit $100,000 by Christmas?

it might

69,757.70USD as of today

buy the dips….

damn at one time they cost $2 for one bitcoin

hahahahaha!…

just like gold and silver…..I recall when gold was under $100 an ounce……I finally got in when gold was $300 and silver was $5 an ounce…

dill786 wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 10, 2024 11:42 am

damn at one time they cost $2 for one bitcoin

dont remind me...

71,924.80USD

some so-called experts are saying it will climb to $150k by the end of the year..

I noticed the rest of the ALT coins are going up in value, just goes to show that Bitcoin is the daddy and it dictates what happens.
I have a tiny bit of Bitcoin and it has doubled in value, it is my best performer.

seems you avoid tech and biomed?

this thread was started on Nov 05, 2013, and Bitcoin was worth £145 GBP

so I had to do a little math

Determine how many pence are in £145 GBP

in 2013

£1 GBP = 100 pence, so £145 GBP = 145 * 100 = 14,500 pence.
Use the exchange rate of 63 pence per 1 US dollar to convert pence to US dollars:

63 pence per 1 US dollar = $230.16 USD.

Therefore, £145 GBP would be approximately $230.16 USD.

i really hope that DR Craig white isnt satoshi nakamato because he comes across as a right cunt.