ISK can't legally be converted to money, so there's no real crime in the transfer. The only crime would be breaking into someone else's account, but that would be mostly up to CCP to take care of. The police aren't going to know what you're talking about, or care.

I also wonder if the govt. would deliberately say that they will not help in a case if bitcoins were taken (or ripped off in some way with a purchase), they would deliberately stay out of it, reasoning that if they didnt want the government to interfere with what they were doing, then they obviously wouldnt want help either.

Also, the reasoning of bitcoins being able to help people in opressive reigeimes makes me sick, as it seems to imply that these people will only help out if there is some monetary gain to be had in helping (instead of, you know, giving them the help they need with online stuff for free like a decent human being).

I also wonder what would happen in the case of a purchase if it were to be confiscated by customs, lost (or stolen in the mail). These innocent (to the person who is selling the items at least) setbacks also seem to be something that could lead to issues with sales if one of the people is an *******.

I find it amusing as well that people commenting in the article seem to have the idea that in a societal collapse, that gold will have any value. I say this because most industrial uses of gold are in electronics, or in major industries that probably wont be anyone's priority in the event of collapse.

Yeah, just like how gold had no value before we invented electronics. All those poor deluded medieval people, if only they had hung onto their gold instead of throwing it away.

Gold will still have value, for the same reason it had value in the first place. It's relatively rare, doesn't tarnish, and is shiny. When governments fall, the paper money and steel coins backed by them are worthless, but gold is still gold. A roman coin minted two thousand years ago doesn't have value because the roman government backs it up; it has value because it's gold. And also because it's really old, and we like that for some reason.

But how exactly will gold help a person to survive in a situation that would render currencies worthless? Why would I accept gold as a payment for something instead of say, food, water or medical supplies.

I would also point out that a lot of places that sell gold to the general public will seriously overprice their gold, especialy those who target the survivalist types.

So, stock up on all the gold you want for the end of civilization, those with real plans will do things that will be much easier to barter with. After all, you wont want to give up an amount of gold for less than a week's worth of food, and I dont think that anyone will give you everything they have for some gold, especialy if they are self sufficiant with their supplies (which would no longer be so if they gave you a "fair" trade for your gold).

Because the gold can be traded for other things that you might need in a separate transaction. If you are looking at a barter system then the two people involved in a transaction each have to have something they don't need that the other person does. If person A has some spare wheat and needs wool, person B has some spare wool and needs wood and person C has some spare wood and needs wheat, then in a barter system someone has to make a non-beneficial trade to get things moving (and run the risk that the commodity he now has isn't needed by the person who has what he needs, whereas the commodity he originally had to trade with was needed). If a non-fiat currency is around (such as gold), person A can use his gold to buy wool from B. B can then use the gold to buy wood from C and C can use the gold to buy wheat from A.

Humans didn't develop money for fun.

Ah, because gold is a currency with intrinsic value created by scarcity. It cannot be rendered "worthless". You are assuming all currencies are "fiat" - that is, worth what they are worth because someone says that's what it is worth. (In fact, I recall some definition of fiat money being money that a government accepts as payment for taxes... indicating specifically that it is a government's say-so that makes a currency fiat, implying you can have some currencies that have no intrinsic value that aren't truly fiat - like bitcoin I suppose)

So they got hacked and now it's worth pennies.
GG bitcoins.

back up your claimz plz?

A large number of Mtgox users' hashed user data was leaked, resulting in accounts with easy passwords being compromised. This in tandem with a 1000 dollar attack on a high profile account has caused the bitcoin to fluctuate rapidly, but to generalize it so simply as TE did would be idiotic...

So in reality they got scammed. This has NEVER happened to a regular currency!!!!11

Exactly. One of the things I've seen articles about bitcoin trojans fail to report that the very same sorts of attacks are how bank accounts are hijacked, and that proper security would adequately defend against these kinds of attacks in either situation, the only downfall with bitcoins being the lack of fraud control. That said, you're trading security for anonymity.

If I didn't generalize things absurdly you guys would never have anything to talk about.

^ The lad has a point there.... ^

AND, with the rollback, they have basicly ruined any chance they ever had at being considdered an actual currency. While things like stocks can be subject to rollbacks, this is usualy only in the case of errors of price. There was no real error here, all the selling that happened there was intended by the person who did it (even though they stole those coins). This also shows the problem of there being no automatic halting of trade, or even investigations of large transactions.

I am also laughing at the extreme anti-taxation libertarian attitudes in the comments. It also confirms my theory that these people probably would demand money in exchange for helping people fight opressive reigemes (why else would they want people in those countries to use bitcoin?).

[edit]Though, I will seriously laugh if it drops again with people ragequiting from that website, and then they WONT be able to rollback, because those trades would have been official.

and even more hilariously, the vultures are circling the comments, spamming referral links to other bitcoin sites, some pretending that it is a lifetime discount code instead of refferal code that gives the person who does the reffering a small bonus.

Also, it seems that the massassi spammers now seem to be waiting for a couple of months before they actualy post.

Whatever happens, it's a good experiment nonetheless. http://bbc.in/ifeACp If it recovers, then that's one step toward making people believe in it. BitCoin doesn't have to succeed though, really, it's just a way for people to believe such a currency could work or not. Although I've read an article on a guy who turned all of his savings into BitCoin and his claim was, if much of the illegal deals are turned into BitCoin trades, then theoretically the value could raise by 1000 times...

As an engineer I only think about how it can be turned fool proof. So far the original idea was good enough to sustain a small market for a period of time, which is rather astonishing.

People will try until it works, if the benefit is just that high about how an anonymous trading can make life better.