351–360 of 474 posts
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>between two entities usually consists of a heavily guarded, insured, physical shipment of cash or gold. Err, life isn't a james bond movie. For money transfer like this we use bank wires. We dont buy gold and ship it on gunships anymore.
Not true: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-31/venezuela-receives-... http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2013/01/16/germany...
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The difference is Bitcoin can be secured much more cheaply than gold. You can't encrypt gold, setup "n-of-m" multisig transactions, etc. Unless you want to transport gold yourself you're always going to have to trust someone. Hardware wallets should help immensely as well.
From where I stand, this seems to be true of Bitcoin as well. I've never had any Bitcoins personally, but don't you have to store them in a wallet, which you're either going to have to worry about backing up, keeping secure, etc on your own. Or you're going to have to trust someone else to do it for you.
Adding a BTC to a transaction doesn't really require any additional infrastructure. But once you've packed your first tanker with gold, you kind of have to hire a second boat.
Given the way each scales, it seems that BTC transfers are easier, at least at some values.
Well, this is just another reason why bitcoin will not work - you can track money changing hands.. Certain three letter agencies would have not trouble tracking most of the transfers, all over the world.
i love this this is just another reason why bitcoin will not work 5 years later; several orders of magnitude later, so many arbitrary "milestones" met (parity with dollar, can i buy airplane tickets with it?, well we'll see when the government recognizes it) when do you decide that bitcoin 'works'? i mean; it is absolutely undeniable 100% certainly no-matter-what-you-say currently working RIGHT NOW; the mental disson…
Yes, you can! An air travel agency announced today they started accepting bitcoin (cheapair.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6784265
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While that is true, Bitcoin is far from a bulletproof preserve of wealth. Gold has other uses if it isn't used as a currency anymore. Bitcoin on the other hand can be made completely useless if some critical flaw is found, or the wealth is too concentrated in a few users and the majority decides to switch to a newer crypto-currency.
Gold's other uses wouldn't make gold worth much on their own. "Legitimate" uses of a commodity that trades more for its properties as money should be thought more of a really crappy put option, that is it sets a low price floor. For example, it's been estimated that gold's industrial uses would only allow it to be traded in the low double digits per ounce if people didn't desire it for other reasons. It's just in the…
People have been using gold in some form for thousands of years - I don't see that changing anytime soon.
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It's well-known that you can at least secure your bitcoins as well as you can secure gold, if you use cold wallets. The advantage, however, is you don't have to worry nearly as much about the security of a transaction (moving it from one place to another)
Not really. It is much easier to lose or make illegible a piece of paper or data than it is to lose large heavy gold or to damage the gold to a degree that severely reduces its value.
Hardly. If you tried to sell 195,000 coins you'd wipe out all the exchanges and cause a crash. Talking numbers, you could sell them all on BTC-E right now, bagging you just $7M, and take the price down to ~$36. You can spread that around the exchanges of course, if you're quick, but you're still nowhere near $147M at current market depth.
That's the case with anything in large amounts. I can say I have $147M in Microsoft stock, but that doesn't mean I can sell the stock suddenly in one minute without making the price tank.
Actually you can. Bill Gates sold off over $700M of stock over the course of a week at the end of Oct/beginning of Nov[1] and took a price that deviated by only $0.16 (~0.5%).
[1] http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=MSFT
But you're actually agreeing with me anyway. Absurd valuations for quantities not readily absorbable by the market can't be priced until someone actually tries to sell/buy that quantity. There's no doubt however that if someone want to cash this volume out today their not looking at the market price. Who's going to buy at $700 when someone is trying to rid themselves of 2% of the entire currency base? To put that in perspective, Bill Gates currently owns only 0.4% of MSFT and wouldn't be able to (publicly) sell that much in a day without crashing the market.
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That's one, and banks hardly help with inflation at today's 0.01% interest rates.
True, but other than the recent years it was necessary and effective to put your money in a bank to counteract inflation. Sorry about the fencepost error. (Perhaps I was originally intending to say "inflationary finance"?)
Consider this: They paid $0.00 for the transfer of $150 million dollars. A direct (i.e. not based on third party credit, regulations, etc.) transfer of wealth of this magnitude between two entities usually consists of a heavily guarded, insured, physical shipment of cash or gold. Depending how safely you want to make the transfer, and how far the entities are on the globe, it can cost hundreds of thousands to million…
Unfortunately for me right now bitcoin has zero value. Until I can use the millions in coins to pay off my house, buy a car easily, pay my taxes and go out to eat with them, or hassle free convert them to cash in my bank, it is still funny money.
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Not only is Bitcoin sent frequently, it's also stolen frequently: http://rt.com/news/bitcoin-hacking-stolen-million-417/ http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/250-000-worth-bitcoins-sto... http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/czech-bitcoi... edit: unrelated, someone should make an index of how many Bitcoin threads hit the front page of HN per day.
Your point stands, but most thefts occur on third party sites/applications where the address of the coins and their private key are stored in a central location. Owners of the bitcoin should transfer their coins to a private wallet. I don't understand how so many sites can't use password hash generation to secure the private keys, or something to keep it more secure. The first link you posted was a site run by an 18…
Think of them as like keeping your change on the bar - the security relies _purely_ on social conventions encouraging the bar owner, bar staff, other customers, and your friends to not take your money.
You would no more store your weekly pay, your rent money, or your new car savings on the counter at a bar - why the hell are people storing those sorts of values of bitcoin in other people's webservices?
Sure, online wallets might be _useful_, but anyone keeping any more value than they can afford to lose in one is insane (or, less critically, very poorly informed).