http://bitval.dorphern.dk/
Big suprise, a worthless non-currency backed by nothing ends up being speculated on until it destroyed itself. Those guys who generated some and got like, 10k are laughing though. The guys who paid out the 10k... not so much. Now they have thousands of a worthless currency.
If you have any, now is a good time to cut your losses and get out.

E: For a more longer term look:http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60zvztgMzm1g10zm2g25
Note the surge at 09 and the plummet afterwards.

In this thread tubby doesn't understand how bit coin works.

I do, however, understand how it doesn't work.

I keep reading this thread title as "Remember b****in'? Well it collapsed"

Also I only found out about bitcoins a few days ago so this is kind of funny. Oh them pyramid schemes!

The fact that you think it's collapsed says otherwise. There was a large spike due to speculation, and it rapidly crashed back down to normal levels. Also, I like how you think the fact that it's not "backed" is some sort of problem for a currency.

It is? Bitcoin is utterly worthless because it isn't attached to anything of worth. The USD is guaranteed by the US Government, Gold has value by itself, bitcoin has... nothing. It's literally a ponzi scheme and I kinda feel sorry for the guys that bought in.

Do you even know what makes something have worth?

Demand.

Supply and demand.

So what's wrong with bit coin in regards to supply and demand?

I would point out that investors are not very fond of things that increase in value tenfold in two months (from what had been the average value throughout its existance and plumets all the way back down, as it is a sign that consumer confidance is too erratic, not to mention that one reason for the spike in the first place was illicit drugs.

There is no demand, no sane person would actually spend any money on a bitcoin when they can just use a currency that is backed by governments and major banks. Add to that the fact that bitcoin is artificially generated by server farms, and the fact that rampant speculation drove up the price and then tanked it. It's worse then betting on a slot machine.
If I write "10 USD" on a piece of paper, and nobody wants to pay 10 USD for my paper, it's not worth 10 USD.

Uhh, CM, without major places taking bitcoin (and with a major spike that lasted such a short time, confidence in it may have been damaged, leading retailers that were considdering it to possibly back off), and it being online only (not to mention that government agencies probably wont want to deal in an unproven virtual currency that they have no control over), it is far less useful as a currency. Not to mention that they have to compete with things like paypal and regular online purchases with credit cards (which are backed by currencies that are far less likely to crash, and if they did, there would be bigger problems than managing prices of online goods) which have been around for ages.

TL:DR currencies tend to be valued much more complexly than supply and demand.

The point of bitcoins is that they will inflate at very low and predictable levels until they are at their intended volume, at which point they will not inflate.



What's your point? U.S. currency is fiat too. 95% of it is digital. The point of contention between the two currencies is how it is created.



Bitcoins themselves are stable, and are only able to be produced in small quantities. That people are using other currencies to speculate is rather irrelevant in the long term.



On this we do agree.

The only place I've seen bitcoin even mentioned as being taken is in black market dealings with the news on the 'deep web' thats been cropping up lately. Hell, I barely recognize hearing about it until very recently.

It seems to be something popular amoung the libertarian crowd, mostly cause the "advantages" it has vs the disadvantages (mostly to do with its newness, and the fact that few people accept it, especialy since paypal dropped it due to their anti virtual currency policies) are of the type that are libertarians' wet dreams.

Also Hipsters cause its not mainstream.

I've totally got a vision of a bunch of guys in skinny jeans, smoking hand-rolled American Spirit blues while tapping away at an amber terminal, lines of currency conversion rates reflecting from their enormous sunglasses. Also I think part of me died while imagining that.

But seriously? Is there really a hipster market for bitcoins? (Does it come with an iphone app even?)

Also, I dont see how the bitcoin is supposed to be able to survive an economic meltdown of a currency, as it is traded online, but if you arent able to afford to access the internet, then you cant get to your bitcoins. Not to mention that in a total economic collapse, things like food and fuel will be extremely valuable. People have also mentioned that quite often, the cost of obtaining bitcoins by processer power (electricity costs) outways the purchasing power of said bitcoins. Not to mention that it was people discovering they could buy drugs with them that led to lots of people buying bitcoins, which made the speculators go nuts over them in a classic bubble.

So in all, bitcoins are way overambitious in what their plans for use were.

By the way, has anyone managed to create a laymans explanation of how exactly bitcoin transactions work (as in, the mechanics of what happens to the bitcoins during the transaction), because I highly doubt that it will be popular amoung the general public if it is many times more complex than simple addition and subtraction mathamatics.

This covers it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Technology

Edit: I don't really buy your point, though (so to speak), people use SSL to connect to their banks constantly without even knowing what the letters mean, let alone the math behind it. It's not like when you make a bitcoin transaction you have to solve the equations and compute the signings yourself.

Woah, you can buy drugs with bitcoins? Besides the anonymity factor, is there any other reason to accept a highly speculative, unbacked currency?

Tibby: The currency has grown immensely since it was first started. It wouldn't have gotten anywhere at all if people weren't using it. Just because it isn't immediately accepted all over the place doesn't invalidate it as a currency. For instance, the EFF takes bitcoins for donations.

Yep, there are quite a lot of places to spend them:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

I remain unconvinced based on Tibby's charts. Many major currencies have undergone similar 'collapses' and have recovered. I'm sure it would be fairly easy to argue the US dollar is in a state of collapse right now.

Oh snap:
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg10zig5-minzvztgMzm1g10zm2g25

Yea, it's rebounding quite fast surprisingly. For a new currency this shouldn't even be a surprise. There's not as many people holding the currency so its much easier for the price to jump up and down some.

I like how Tibby's purpose for this thread was invalidated by bitcoin itself in less than 12 hours.

Hipsters don't use bitcoin, they only use coins and bills from 30 years ago because its "vintage".

It's weird that you guys are discussing it now because I'd never heard of it prior to this week and after reading this article (well, not this one, but a similar one on the topic that I can't find anymore) I've seen it pop up in countless discussions (online and offline), but those discussions haven't been aware of the article. Maybe buzz around the article is driving more people to talk about it in general despite the content of the article not being spread as much its broad topic.

Mainstream media is just catching on the past month or so, yeah.

Does he ever know anything?

In my experience, people who bring it up usually bring it up as a negative and do not understand that this is by design. It is supposed to deter the supply of bitcoins from expanding too rapidly thus causing inflation. Particularly in the beginning, though, they are easier to create and have some room to expand.

To be quite honest, though, I've seen how many bitcoins are expected to be in existence based on the mathematics, and if they catch on at all, I don't see how the supply would be granular enough. There wouldn't be enough for each person in the United States to have one. In that sense, it is self-limiting as a niche currency.

What's important is how much they move, not how many actually exist.

Their wiki explains how this works (among essentially every other question one could have. Tibby would be wise to read it). Basically, it is fully possible to have decimal points of a "bitcoin", just as you have cents on a dollar. Only thing is, it's not just limited to two decimal places, but far more than that.

From looking at that list, most of the stuff seems to be web developer related, or nerd gear (be it shirts or electronic stuff). Most of the donation accepting things seem to be made up mostly of organizations that only hardcore computer nerds would care about.

But, without bitcoin exclusivity, having it catch on will be difficult, because unless one has a major personal interest in bitcoin, it would just be easier to buy with preexisting methods. The annonymity factor might be useful for donating to organizations that could get you into trouble if your regular economic records are found to have relations with it, however, with buying physical items, there is always the possibility that customs will check your item (and if the anonymity of payment was important, it is quite likely that said item is restriced in some way where you live). Heck, here in Australia, I doubt many of those consumable items would be legal to import due to Australian regulations being VERY restrictive when it comes to organic items (and I think that organic items, due to the higher risk of containing micro-organisms, would be one of the least likely items to be able to get a pass.).

As I pointed out before, bitcoin's issue is pretty much that the service they provide already exists in multiple forms (e-commerce is hardly new), and the things that make them unique (mainly the anonymity part of it), are only going to be attractive to a small number of people (relative to the number of people involved with e-commerce).

The craft stores that take bitcoins seem nice, but agian, most of them would accept other forms of money to increase their potential customer base, and the places that take bitcoins exclusively (at least according to the provided list, but if something only takes bitcoins and isnt on the list, it probably wont last long anyway without some form of advertisement) seem to be selling bitcoin themed merchendise, which makes sense, but again, without more general stores only taking bitcoin, there is no inherant incentive to switch to bitcoin.

While I in no way pretend to know the workings of bitcoin, something like it would only be started if its creator thought that there was a large market for a new currency with annonymity being its main feature, the majority of online transfers either don't require anonymity, or are legaly required to be in a certain currency. I also think that the whole transactions not being able to be stopped by a third party scares people off too. Because while the mechanics of the bitcoin system may be extremly secure, the account holders themselves will always be the weakest link, meaning that if someone got ahold of your bitcoin account (and if bitcoins got valuable and popular, you can bet your ass that people would create methods to try and steal peoples accounts through various methods, including social engineering) and spends some of them, you have no way to get them back.

Ah hahahahahaha!

Bitcoin is just a Russian money laundering scheme. It will be shut down by govt.

Be sure to get in on the ground floor of Bitcoin 2.0!

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/06/bitcoin-the-decentralized-virtual-currencyrisky-currency-500000-bitcoin-heist-raises-questions.ars

Bumping a this dead thread. I was wondering if the legal system is even setup to handle this as a real crime.

I highly doubt it.

Also,

TOTALY CALLED ACCOUNT THEFT AS AN ISSUE.

>.> <.<

but yeah, that has to be horrible for the person involved, but I highly doubt that there is anything that can be done, even if the law was on their side.

This brings up another point, the irreversability of bitcoin transactions will also be a barrier for bitcoins being anything more than a virtual currency, as it quite likely goes against consumer protection laws.

There's also no proof that it actually happened.

Yeah, I don't really buy it either. The posts seem kind of fishy.

I also don't think some of the things mentioned in the article are a big problem, either. A corporation can still give a receipt to an individual that can be used to get refunds on purchases. As mentioned, personal security will just be a matter of development and isn't a major inherent flaw.

I'm still perplexed about this silkroad business, and if the black market itself is going to be what stabilizes the currency. Otherwise, I think a drug dealer would get a pretty sour taste in his mouth if he sold a large amount of drugs at an inflated bitcoin rate and has to wait 6 months before he can cash in for a price that even remotely recoups his efforts.

What ever happened with that EVE Online heist? Any legal action?

I wonder if you would legally "Own" ISK, since it's on the server of CCP. Wouldn't CCP be the people who own all the ISK, and thus they would be the ones to press charges? And if the ISK is merely moved from one EVE account to another, is that really stealing?
God that would be a weird case.