Bitcoin

[sevenofnine]

Is it the currency of the future,

Sorry I am not up to speed on it all, but it seems perfect anonymous money,
Which means no taxes.

I heard Vancouver is getting its own bit coin atm machine.

I think that is what scares the powers that be. Loss of tax revenue. Underground economy.

 

[VanessaofBC]

I believe they used Bitcoin while operating the Silk Road. I also saw something about Bitcoin on BP the other day when I was paying.

 

[Aleister Crowley]

its growing fast , you can tranfer large amounts of cash (more than 10,000.) without all the bullshit.
the yank banks will soon put a stop to it , but its wide open now.

 

[Sonny]

its growing fast , you can tranfer large amounts of cash (more than 10,000.) without all the bullshit.

"Large amounts of cash" - I don't know if I'm comfortable relying on a "distributed system of trust", without any ultimate legitimate assurance basis, with large amounts of cash.

If fraud and bad stuff exist in the normal world, then how much more will it be in a dubious environment, populated by criminals?

Pros and cons from the esteemed Economist magazine, part of my regular read.... (future time, from Nov 30, tomorrow's issue)

"ALL currencies involve some measure of consensual hallucination, but Bitcoin, a virtual monetary system, involves more than most. It is a peer-to-peer currency with no central bank, based on digital tokens with no intrinsic value. Rather than relying on confidence in a central authority, it depends instead on a distributed system of trust, based on a transaction ledger which is cryptographically verified and jointly maintained by the currency’s users."

"The system is now straining at the seams. Its computational underpinnings have collectively reached 100 times the performance of the world’s top 500 supercomputers combined: more than 50,000 petaflops. Bitcoin’s success has revealed three weaknesses in particular. It is not as secure and anonymous as it seems; the “mining” system that both increases the Bitcoin supply and ensures the integrity of the currency has led to an unsustainable computational arms-race; and the distributed-ledger system is becoming unwieldy. Will Bitcoin’s self-correcting mechanisms, and the enlightened self-interest of its users, be able to address these weaknesses and keep Bitcoin on the rails?"

"most current implementations of the Bitcoin protocol fall short of the level of anonymity that is theoretically possible"

http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21590766-virtual-currency-it-mathematically-elegant-increasingly-popular-and-highly

 

[amigo67]

I still don't really understand Bitcoin. Why would people pour thousands into something that has no value and no store actually accepts? Plus, doesn't it debase your hard work when someone from, say, Mexico can now have an equal currency to Canada?

Because it is completely untraceable... popular with drug lords, arms dealers, the black market.

 

[Sonny]

Because it is completely untraceable... popular with drug lords, arms dealers, the black market.

Not really.... again from The Economist....

"The researchers exploited a current weakness in most Bitcoin personal and server software, which generates single-use addresses to store change from transactions. This allowed them to follow the movement of Bitcoins across hundreds of transactions from large sums accumulated at single addresses, including ones suspected of being controlled by Silk Road and stolen funds from exchanges. One of the authors, Sarah Meiklejohn, says that the same technique could easily be used to provide the basis of warrants to serve against exchanges or other parties. Law-enforcement agencies would regard this as a good thing, but to advocates of a completely secure and anonymous online currency, it represents a worrying flaw."

 

[Sonny]

I think Bitcoins will eventually blow up, with a very few anonymous persons becoming billionaires... cautiously, skillfully, step-by-deliberate-step unloading, so they can complete their mission.
Maybe then a few millionaires will be created, but followed by those left holding the bag of "digital coins", unable to convert them into anything, who will number countlessly.

The mathematical intelligensia have bought into it... (from a comment thread on the Economist article) " If you do not understand ECC (elliptic curve modular fields) or Merkle trees, you should urgently refrain from making stupid comments on bitcoin. If the underlying math is too hard for you, then please, why don't you just shut up? Not everybody is equal in this world, and we really do not need the idiots nor their ridiculous, unfounded opinions"... but they are good at math and perhaps not so much at other area reasoning. Just writing "we do not need the idiots" speaks volumes about certain folks' view of elites and "the rest".

And you can be sure that anyone who with the following experience (from a comment thread on the article) ... "Although I have very little grasp of the specific math, the logic is sound and I believe this is real; not a pyramid scheme nor a p o n z I scheme as the naysayers are asserting. My ten bucks has become twelve in 48 hours and I'm kicking my head out the sand for the last three sleepy weeks with my thumb up my butt." This person is in full denial of a situation that generates 20% growth in 48 hours is somehow not unusual. Just buy in some more, folks.

Ultimately, the only time that bitcoin is really worth anything is when it is converted into a conventional currency. It can, literally, disappear in a flash once it's "consensual hallucination" unravels.
Although world central banker currencies are also fiction, they are legal tender, and simply pulling a plug will not make the issued currency literally vanish from your hand.

I have full complete belief in the absolute greed and the utter disdain for others that the rich and the want-to-be-rich connivers have. Duplicating a world currency with a digital phantom is just the latest, and most clever to date, scam.

I encourage folks to read the Economist article and especially the comment threads to get a lot of further insight. Don't be put off by the difficult technical parts, as you can gleam so much from what you are able to understand.

 

[rexxx]

James Howells searches for hard drive with £4m-worth of bitcoins stored

A Newport man has been searching a landfill site in south Wales hoping to find a computer hard drive he threw away which is now worth over £4m.

James Howells's hard drive contains 7,500 bitcoins - which is a virtual form of currency for use online. It had sat in a drawer for years and he had forgotten it contained the bitcoins, which he obtained in 2009 for almost nothing, when he threw it out.

But this week, a single bitcoin's value hit $1,000 (£613) for the first time. It means Mr Howells's collection is now worth $7.5m (£4.6m).

A few years ago Mr Howells, who works in IT, had dismantled his computer after spilling a drink on it. "I stored a couple of parts away like the hard drive, and the rest of the bits and pieces which were still working I sold for spares," he told BBC Radio Wales. "I kept the hard drive in a drawer in my office for three years without a second thought - totally forgot about bitcoin all together. I had been distracted by family life and moving house.

"Fast forward to 2013 which is when I had a clearout of my old IT equipment - I hadn't used this drive for over three years, I believed I'd taken everything off it... so it got thrown in the bin."

Mr Howells later realised what was left on the hard drive. He added: "I had been hearing a few stories of a chap from Norway who had bought a number of coins for a very low price and had sold them for a high price and that's when I got back into checking the price and seeing what I'd done. "When I found out what the price was, the penny dropped and I realised the coins I have 'mined' were on the drive I had thrown away.

In a letter to the US Senate committee, the FBI said that it recognised virtual currencies offered "legitimate financial services" but added they could be "exploited by malicious actors".

In October, the world's first bitcoin ATM opened in Vancouver, Canada. The machine allows users to exchange bitcoins for cash and vice-versa.

The virtual currency has also been quickly adopted in China, where one exchange - BTC China - is said to be the most active globally. Bitcoin's use in China has been attributed to it being an effective way of reliably getting money out of the country.

Various bitcoin exchanges have been set up around the world, with MTGox - one of the virtual currency's major exchanges - being the most prominent.

Mr Howells added: "I still believe in bitcoin. I believe its value is going to go much, much higher and it's still in its early days. "As soon as access to bitcoin is opened up to the general public I think a lot more people will be using it, hence the price will increase further."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-25134289

Even this story sounds fake to me some dummy buys some back in 2009 when nobody else in the world knew they existed but then forgets about them until he throws them away but he's still a huge fan so go out and buy them folks. I like the description that its a pure bubble currency the value will keep rising right until the bubble pops

 

[kauffman]

NO SUCH THING AS LOSS OF TAX REVENUE. THERE ARE METHODS IN PLACE TO RECOVER TAXES THAT DONT APPEAR TO BE GETTING PAID, What do you think this whole system is for? OUR benefit? lol

 

[VanessaofBC]

I thought I would try to buy some bitcoin today. I treid to buy 1 (one).