51–60 of 84 posts
The most interesting part in that text for me was "Released in 2009 by an anonymous creator known as Satoshi Nakamoto" It was news to me that the creator of the bitcoin technology is anonymous. Heard the name several times before, but never knew it was a pseudonym for an anonymous person or group of persons.
This is a really sad moment but let's hope it teaches everybody lessons. One very nice thing about cryptocurrencies is that they can be kept safe in cold storage without too much trouble. Some people kept all their coins there. It's a shame, but too bad. Otherwise, I really hope Gox dies, in a darwinian business sense. Forest fires destroy big trees but makes way for new shoots.
I wonder if law enforcement is already questioning him; I am sure FBI has eyes on him already. Yes. I want him to come out and explain to us. Any employees should come out and give us insider stories. Whoever took advantage of this (whether it's criminal or Mt itself) should be punished.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to be nitpicking but a common criticism of China is that they manipulate their currency to _increase_ the value of dollar not devalue it.
Yes, the Chinese are hard at work to give Americans ever more manufactured goods for ever fewer green pieces of paper. (Or to be more accurately, entries in a data base.)
hypothetical question for someone who is knowledgeable about bitcoin: since bitcoin is an experiment, what happens if it completely fails? what does a total failure scenario even look like, in terms of symptoms? where does all the 'real' money go? i don't understand how 6% of bitcoin can disappear when one of the supposed selling points is that you can verify all the transactions.
Hardware makers who accepted dollars for graphics cards and ASICS would still have dollars. Electricity companies would still have dollars. VCs who invested $100 million of OPM in Bitcoin companies would still have dollars. Employees of those companies would, one hopes, have been paid in dollars. And then the biggie: people who sold before the pump-and-dump hit "dump" would still have dollars. Who loses? People holdi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I came late to the Bitcoin party, so when I started mining other coins mid-last year the first thing I did was download the wallet client and encrypt, and backed it up. And I still didn't fully trust that my coins were safe, and that there wasn't some other bug in the protocol that could result in my coins getting stolen somehow (or at least confusion arising as to who owns them). I don't understand how people put so…
I think people (perhaps rationally) believe that the people running the exchanges know more about keeping bitcoins secure than they themselves do. The analogy would be that you're a lot safer putting your money in a bank than trying to keep it safe in your house. And certainly a company whose entire business is trading in bitcoin should know how to keep them safe. Unfortunately the reality is obviously sometimes diff…
There was nothing rational about this assumption. Banks are bonded and insured with teams of very, very good security professionals auditing their stuff. Mt fricking Gox? Not so much.
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No. Its a closed system. For every dollar that someone spent on a bitcoin, that dollar was received by someone else. Now, you can certainly say that the money was spent on things like electricity, or GPU hardware, that has little/no value now. But thats irrelevant - the money most certainly spent, rather than "evaporate" into thin air.
Just because I can buy a bitcoin from somebody for $1000 a few months ago doesn't mean that same person is willing to buy it back from me for $1000 dollars today. The value in that bitcoin has evaporated, disappeared, gone up in smoke. Bitcoins are only worth how much people are willing to pay for them; what was spent on them in the past does not convey to them any value today.
This is a really sad moment but let's hope it teaches everybody lessons. One very nice thing about cryptocurrencies is that they can be kept safe in cold storage without too much trouble. Some people kept all their coins there. It's a shame, but too bad. Otherwise, I really hope Gox dies, in a darwinian business sense. Forest fires destroy big trees but makes way for new shoots.
I thought big trees generally fared the best in forest fires...
This is a really sad moment but let's hope it teaches everybody lessons. One very nice thing about cryptocurrencies is that they can be kept safe in cold storage without too much trouble. Some people kept all their coins there. It's a shame, but too bad. Otherwise, I really hope Gox dies, in a darwinian business sense. Forest fires destroy big trees but makes way for new shoots.
Yeah, lessons are what people need. http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yv26o/gox_horror_s... "But too bad."
I stupidly had my life's savings in bitcoin, and when the
price started to fall, I converted to dollars and watched
the price plummet. I lost $357,000.
Harsh words, but you can't reason yourself out of such a bad decision as that he made. He should have used cold storage, period.
Luckily I have no money in BTC at all - other than 2k for mining equipment(scrypt) - and the coins earned from my small operation is only about 1 BTC so far -- which I'm planning on holding onto till it rallies, WHICH it will (too much investment money in too many companies) for it not to.
Lots of companies have spent a lot of money to integrate it, and there will be a vacuum for a few weeks, maybe even months, but trust will come back into the market and it'll grow...
One thing I'd like to see is some sort of P2P exchange service where exchanges don't happen on any network --ie all funds remain in wallet until time of exchange, -- of course this wouldn't work for usd necessarily, but for coin to coin exchanges it would, unless it was also tied into some sort of site like coinbase where they can store a fiat currency value like a bank for deposit at a later date.