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Bitcoin hits US$ 4, after being mentioned on CNN yesterday

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Re: Bitcoin hits US$ 4, after being mentioned on CNN yesterday

#61

Post by Unseelie »

borism wrote: post #58
gwern wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link for those not familiar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market Personally, I think assassination markets could be a net benefit (think of the bounties on someone like Kim Jong-Il), but then, I like them enough that I write stories about them so I'm biased: http://www.gwern.net/fiction/The%20Ones%20Who%20Walk%20Towar...

think of the bounties on someone like Kim Jong-Il Now think of the bounties on average folks like you and me in comparison. That's right, our lives will instantly be worth pennies and there'll instantly many folks around with incentive to murder.

Pennies is a bit extreme. The risk in the enterprise is pretty high, expert assassins rare, and amatures likely to get caught.

While an expert assassin may take a job on a random Joe for on the order of a hundred dollars, an amateur with any sense will not, and therefor the price will be rather high.

And, even if assassinations of pedestrians becomes realistically common..On the order of car crash mortalities, its at least a cause of death that may make people consider how they act toward one another.

Re: Bitcoin hits US$ 4, after being mentioned on CNN yesterday

#62

Post by Unseelie »

forensic wrote: post #56
JulianMorrison wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mining is supposed to fade away in importance - it was just a way to bootstrap. And huge computing power applied to mining means that it's so much harder for a hostile entity (hello, US government) to plug in a supercomputer and steal control.

Right now it is trivial for a government, botnet owner, or even a sysadmin with access to several thousand machines to completely corner the bitcoin market and actually use a cartel to "steal" bitcoins from others. Bitcoin is not controlled by a central authority. Instead it is controlled by any specific individual or group that is able to get about 30% of the computing power of the network. While this is very expens…

That's the case with any currency or stock..It doesn't stop IPOs.

Re: Bitcoin hits US$ 4, after being mentioned on CNN yesterday

#63

Post by sadfsa »

arohner wrote: post #47
sgornick wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the SEC regulate baseball cards? If bitcoin were an equity, then the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission might be looking at it. But even if they did ... if you are in Brazil, Russia, India, China, or wherever, ... how would what the SEC does be relevant? (yes, I'm being purposely obtuse, but remember that bitcoin is data, and as such it knows no borders.)

There are lots of kinds of data that are illegal to possess. Classified documents, insider information, copyrighted music, etc. And remember certain US agencies have huge power outside the US. The DEA and the IRS come to mind. I don't know which US agency will flip out when bitcoin becomes popular, but I'm quite certain one of them will, once it becomes widespread to exchange for illegal items, and used for money lau…

It's already widespread enough to use for some forms of money laundering. If you want to secretly move money from the US to Europe, just buy BTC in the US, deposit them on Mt. Gox (whose domain is registered in Japan, so I assume the servers are also in Japan), and from there sell the BTC and deposit the resulting money in your Swiss bank account.

It's also widespread enough to use instead of a Swiss bank account to hide money. Just move the money into a Bitcoin wallet, encrypt the wallet, and store copies of it on as many computers, in as many countries as possible.

Re: Bitcoin hits US$ 4, after being mentioned on CNN yesterday

#64

Post by Unseelie »

JCB_K wrote: post #46
zbanks wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the same happens in the stock market: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_stock#Artificial_Inflatio...

ha! that reminds me of my Economy class in high school. We used to do a weekly game, where in the beginning of the year we'd have a certain amount of money, and we'd have to buy stock. The teacher would every week update us with the latest stock information, and based on that we'd have to make decisions. The person with the biggest amount of money at the end of the year won. So I picked stock of a company which was b…

I did much the same right after WalMart crashed. Bought (hypothetical) shares for $0.02 a share; won the game by at least four orders of magnitude...

Re: Bitcoin hits US$ 4, after being mentioned on CNN yesterday

#65

Post by forensic »

Unseelie wrote: post #62
forensic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now it is trivial for a government, botnet owner, or even a sysadmin with access to several thousand machines to completely corner the bitcoin market and actually use a cartel to "steal" bitcoins from others. Bitcoin is not controlled by a central authority. Instead it is controlled by any specific individual or group that is able to get about 30% of the computing power of the network. While this is very expens…

That's the case with any currency or stock..It doesn't stop IPOs.

the entire point of bitcoin is to be free from government control unlike normal currency

Re: Bitcoin hits US$ 4, after being mentioned on CNN yesterday

#66

Post by geuis »

Just as a quick reminder, since most people commenting don't understand how bitcoin generation works.

It is not possible to "corner the market" by having more gpu power than other people. The btc algorithm was designed to only produce bitcoins at a constant rate. Adding a million more systems trying to calculate the answer to the next hash block only makes it a million times slower.

If the bubble were to pop tomorrow and it went back to being a network with only a few hundred low power systems, the btc network will auto correct to produce new bitcoins in relation.

It is not possible to game the system this way.

Re: Bitcoin hits US$ 4, after being mentioned on CNN yesterday

#67

Post by scythe »

Alex3917 wrote: post #8
kiba wrote: post #3

This is either a bubble or probably the most awesome J-curve of the decade. Either way, I am waiting to see what happens. I have more than enough bitcoin for a black swan hedge. I am also going to be with bitcoin to the bitter end or the ultimate victory over state-controlled monetary system.

"This is either a bubble or probably the most awesome J-curve of the decade." The average American isn't smart enough to understand what bitcoin is, how it works, how to buy them, how to spend them, etc. In five years bitcoin is going to be just another failed standard like i-names or GPG, something that doesn't ever get used except for in very niche enterprise usecases or when nerds are trying to impress other nerds…

If GPG is a failure, I'd say failure is looking pretty good.

Re: Bitcoin hits US$ 4, after being mentioned on CNN yesterday

#68

Post by mmaunder »

There's this received wisdom among sociologists that three prerequisites for a stable country are laws, someone to enforce them and a judiciary. I mention this since Bitcoin is creating it's own economy which is analogous to a virtual country. The major benefit of Bitcoin, it's lack of jurisdiction, may also be a disadvantage. As the first disputes arise, hopefully a body of precedent will be developed that strengthens the currency rather than destroys it.

Re: Bitcoin hits US$ 4, after being mentioned on CNN yesterday

#69

Post by zackattack »

Osiris wrote: post #4

It looks like had I know the article was going to air, I could have doubled my money almost overnight. I would expect the price to stop dropping any time now.

My friend used this strategy to make tremendous amounts of money during the Dot Com bubble.

Re: Bitcoin hits US$ 4, after being mentioned on CNN yesterday

#70

Post by lukev »

rorrr wrote: post #55
gwern wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exchange rates are set by supply, and demand. Bitcoin has through technical means controlled the supply part of the equation, but how can it control demand? So fluctuations in demand will cause changes. In the growth period, Bitcoin can't be stable, and it would be impossible for any currency to do so without extremely precise statistics on how a currency was being used and control over inflation (so you could, say,…

Imagine Amazon starts accepting bitcoins. The rate will probably skyrocket to more than 100 USD. Actually, digital currency is inevitable, it's only a matter of time till there's some global currency not controlled by one government. Bitcoin is a pretty good candidate.

That depends entirely on the rate at which Amazon accepts bitcoins.
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