Celerity Posted June 28, 2013 Report Share Posted June 28, 2013 In the reddit links you sent me, it was a problem of overseas large wires (subject to special gov. regulation) into an account that was marked suspicious (again, on the the US gov's list: On 15 May 2013 the US authorities seized accounts associated with Mt. Gox after discovering that it had not registered as a money transmitter with FinCEN in the US.). All wires above an undisclosed amount (usually 3-5k) need to be checked against the special list and require additional approval as required by FDIC regulations. Had they used their credit card instead of a wire, those people wouldn't have had the same problem. This is still a problem of the gov over-regulating international wires! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inscribed Posted June 28, 2013 Author Report Share Posted June 28, 2013 I'll concede the 'banks are against bitcoin' point for now. But, you can't use credit cards to fund a bitcoin exchange, unfortunately. At least, not that I've found. If you are interested in buying any, the most efficient route I've found is to make an account on Coinbase. You can then transfer those bitcoins straight to other exchanges without worry. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inscribed Posted June 28, 2013 Author Report Share Posted June 28, 2013 AMD is watching Bitcoin, considering building mining hardware. http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1h3zdh/amd_rep_says_the_bitcoin_mining_market_is_too/ Our Radeon cards are still more than sufficient for Mining, but until the interest is deemed sufficient enough from the mining community, the prospect of a specialized mining card will remain a prospect. This may change as more retailers start accepting BitCoins, but for now there is no plan to release a dedicated mining card. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inscribed Posted June 30, 2013 Author Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 Slightly off-topic, but can we teach other species to use currency? Why, yes, it turns out we can. What follows is a whole lot of jello purchasing, a 'bank' heist, and the first known instance of monkey prostitution. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pali Posted June 30, 2013 Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 Slightly off-topic, but can we teach other species to use currency? Why, yes, it turns out we can. What follows is a whole lot of jello purchasing, a 'bank' heist, and the first known instance of monkey prostitution. Hah, that is great stuff. Thanks for the link. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inscribed Posted July 1, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 1, 2013 http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2013/06/30/dethroning-the-dollar-the-yuan-the-bitcoin-and-other-usurpers/ What we are left with is this: well within the next ten years and probably within five, America’s creditors – mainly China but also Japan, Russia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Korea – will have to bite the bullet and move to a new currency system. It will be as big a moment as the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. The betting is that the dollar will be replaced by a basket of currencies. The dollar will retain a role but a much shrunken one. It will be a similar story for that other perpetual sick man of the currency markets, the British pound. http://qz.com/98045/chinas-ghost-cities-epitomize-the-problem-with-printing-money-paul-krugman-style/ The banks receiving the cash in exchange for these doubtful securities are not lending it to the private sector. As shown in the next graph, they are depositing it back in the Federal Reserve (banks net claims on the Fed) in what seems to be a purposeless exercise: The Fed creates money and gives it to the banks, and the banks deposit the money back at the Fed. The Fed insists that there is a purpose—that is, encouraging credit—but credit to the private sector remains $820 billion lower than in 2008, even if the money created by the Fed is $1.7 trillion higher. What could be the purpose of this? The banks are exchanging doubtful securities for good cash deposited at the Fed. That is not liquidity creation, it is a transfer of wealth. While the author of the first article reaches a different conclusion about bitcoin (based off a quote from Krugman, HAH!), it's articles like these that really reinforce what serious trouble fiat currency is in, and that cryptocurrency is here to stay. For a technology that hasn't changed much in over 1000 years, the next ten years will be an interesting time for currency, and just like the the early entrepreneurs of the internet, the people who can read the writing on the wall are going to have numerous opportunities to stake out a small fortune. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pali Posted July 1, 2013 Report Share Posted July 1, 2013 Interesting articles. Thanks for the continued links. P.S. Also, props for including articles that include parts that disagree with you. Promoting thoughts one doesn't entirely agree with isn't done enough these days, in my experience. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inscribed Posted July 3, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 3, 2013 http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/first-name-in-the-first-fund-for-bitcoins-winklevoss/?smid=fb-nytimes&WT.z_sma=DB_WTP_20130702&_r=0 Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twins best known for their part in the history of Facebook, filed a proposal with securities regulators on Monday that would allow any investor to trade bitcoins, just as if they were stocks. The plan involves an exchange-traded fund, which usually tracks a basket of stocks or a commodity, but in this case would hold only bitcoins. This is huge news. This means opening up bitcoin investment to anyone with a brokerage account. You will be able to invest your 401k in bitcoin. I will still prefer to have 'physical' bitcoin versus paper, but it has it's drawbacks, just like buying physical gold versus investing in paper gold. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inscribed Posted July 3, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 3, 2013 Interesting articles. Thanks for the continued links. I wouldn't have found out about the existence of bitcoin myself when I did if it weren't for someone starting a similar thread on another forum I frequent. Just trying to pay it forward. It'll still be viewed as a scam or another Tulip mania by a lot of people for now, but if it were easy for the masses to jump on board with it today, I wouldn't be making any money. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pali Posted July 3, 2013 Report Share Posted July 3, 2013 I wouldn't have found out about the existence of bitcoin myself when I did if it weren't for someone starting a similar thread on another forum I frequent. Just trying to pay it forward. It'll still be viewed as a scam or another Tulip mania by a lot of people for now' date=' but if it were easy for the masses to jump on board with it today, I wouldn't be making any money. [/quote'] Not saying you've convinced me, but new ideas are always worth listening to, at least to some extent. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inscribed Posted July 3, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 3, 2013 Not saying you've convinced me' date=' but new ideas are always worth listening to, at least to some extent. [/quote'] If you've got questions, feel free to ask. I had to do a lot of research on it myself before I jumped on board, but it's been an exciting ride so far. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inscribed Posted July 8, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 8, 2013 Really great article on currency, Bitcoin, government, and cryptography. So few great articles are written about Bitcoin, it's definitely worth reading when they do show up. http://www.cato-unbound.org/2013/07/08/jim-harper/its-just-money Brief snippets below: The math underlying bitcoin is brilliant. Assuming it continues to work as it has at higher scale, it controls the rate of new bitcoin creation and it immunizes bitcoins from counterfeiting. This makes it equal or superior to government currency by most people’s accounts. (A significant number see bitcoin’s fixed, unmanaged growth rate as a liability.) But bitcoin is hard to secure. Its holders have suffered routine shocks when exchanges have been hacked, and the probability is high that Internet worms designed to steal this form of money will become widespread. Banking and payment systems denominated in dollars are also exposed to hacking, but these risks seem relatively well contained. Digital currencies suffer from low acceptance compared to other, more popular forms of money, obviously. Criticisms of bitcoin based on its price volatility are really a proxy for its small, illiquid market. But because its digital protocols are available worldwide, its potential market is the entire world. If it became a worldwide currency, it would make dollars and Euros—to say nothing of guaranís—look volatile and unreliable by comparison. Because of the massive seigniorage available for those that do so, governments have routinely created fiat money in excess. Such action undercuts the value of currency in circulation, causing serious economic dislocation. More money chasing other valued goods and services causes prices to rise. This means that stored money—savings—loses its value, unjustly depriving savers and people on fixed incomes of wealth while unjustly enriching debtors (including governments). By one measure, the U.S. dollar has lost more than 95% of its value since 1913. Unsophisticated savers and investors who have held U.S. currency may retain the same number of dollars—even earning modest investment earnings that create the appearance of greater wealth—but the value of their money has been stolen fair and square by inflation. The “crypto wars” in the United States began in the 1970s, when publicly available encryption technology began to rival the government’s ability to break cryptographic codes. The U.S. government treated cryptographic algorithms and software as munitions, going so far as to investigate cryptographer Phil Zimmermann for violating the Arms Export Control Act when he released a free version of software he wrote called PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). In the early 1990s, as the Internet rose to prominence, the Clinton administration tried to get industry to adopt the Clipper chip, an encryption chip to which the government would have back-door access. When this failed, they tried to introduce key escrow, the policy of requiring all encryption systems to leave a spare key with a “trusted third party” who could make it available to the government. The government rightly lost the crypto wars because the benefits of having strong encryption in the hands of good actors—for privacy, commerce, free speech, and so on—exceeded the costs of trying and failing to keep strong encryption out of the hands of bad actors. This history illustrates the choice before policymakers and financial business strategists with regard to digital currencies. Like cryptography, digital currency cannot be bottled up if a community truly wants to use it. The entire article is fairly lengthy, but very much worth reading. It'll give you something to do while training. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inscribed Posted July 12, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 12, 2013 Police STEAL $160,000 from man during traffic stop. Bitcoin user unaffected. :tongue: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pali Posted July 12, 2013 Report Share Posted July 12, 2013 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0 Bitcoin's not exactly immune to thievery. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aulian Posted July 12, 2013 Report Share Posted July 12, 2013 Ah... Can someone explain to me in layman terms what a bitcoin is? I just dont get it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pali Posted July 12, 2013 Report Share Posted July 12, 2013 In short, it's an experimental online currency. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Celerity Posted July 12, 2013 Report Share Posted July 12, 2013 A bitcoin a unit of electronic currency that is encrypted to an electronic key. They have no physical form. Like all currencies, you can trade them for goods and services. To get them, you can either buy them using other currencies or create them by spending time and energy using a miner. They are notable because they aren't run by any government. The discussion in this thread is largely centered around their value, future value, and security. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aulian Posted July 12, 2013 Report Share Posted July 12, 2013 What is a miner? Thats whats throwing me.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Celerity Posted July 12, 2013 Report Share Posted July 12, 2013 It is a program you can download to have your computer create (mine) bitcoins. Since no government produces or prints bitcoins, this is how they are made. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Forsaken Posted July 12, 2013 Report Share Posted July 12, 2013 You think people were playing minecraft for the enjoyment value of it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inscribed Posted July 12, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 12, 2013 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0 Bitcoin's not exactly immune to thievery. There's a difference between being scammed out of money, and having it stolen, at gun point, by an arm of the government. Every one of the incidents listed in your link was preventable. There isn't much you can do to keep a cop from stealing your cash, though. Bitcoin can't be stolen at gunpoint if it's properly secured. Hell, no one can even tell if you have any bitcoin. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inscribed Posted July 12, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 12, 2013 What is a miner? Thats whats throwing me.... Mining is a complicated matter and isn't really something that the average user of bitcoin needs to worry about. "Mining" is the term given to the minting of new bitcoins. Basically, every bitcoin address and transaction ID is stored in this global ledger called the blockchain. The block chain is basically an extremely complicated math problem, with a limited number of possible solutions. Every solution represents a block of 25 bitcoins. Mining involves using computers or other dedicated hardware to solve for the next solution. Every time one solution is found, the next one becomes that much harder to solve. The more computers attempting to solve the next solution also increases the difficulty (to throttle the amount of bitcoins being created). The current global hashing power of the bitcoin network is more powerful than the top 20 supercomputers in the world, combined, which is pretty impressive. But, mining isn't something you necessarily need to understand to use bitcoins. The way I described it above isn't completely accurate, but it's a 'layman's' explanation of it. The link I posted earlier in the thread is the best summary I've seen of what a bitcoin is, the pros and cons of using it, and the current importance of it's existence. http://www.cato-unbound.org/2013/07/08/jim-harper/its-just-money Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inscribed Posted July 12, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 12, 2013 While Bitcoin has a significant number of users here in the US, it's easy for some of us to forget that its a world wide movement. It began in Japan, and has received significant news coming out of China, Spain, UK, Greece, Cyprus, and several African countries. Argentina is also now showing a large rise in bitcoin transactions because their money is no longer considered safe with their banks. http://reason.com/blog/2013/07/11/bitcoin-a-refuge-for-argentines-tired-of Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pali Posted July 13, 2013 Report Share Posted July 13, 2013 There's a difference between being scammed out of money' date=' and having it stolen, at gun point, by an arm of the government. Every one of the incidents listed in your link was preventable. There isn't much you can do to keep a cop from stealing your cash, though. Bitcoin can't be stolen at gunpoint if it's properly secured. Hell, no one can even tell if you have any bitcoin.[/quote'] Yes, there's a difference. Most of the Bitcoins stolen were not retrieved. The man in that story got his money back, though it took a year, and in many similar cases that does not happen. Don't get me wrong - the police case is certainly outrageous, but to pretend that there are no channels through which such wrongs can be addressed (such as courts, and calling media attention, etc.) is rather absurd as well. And while I agree that by my understanding in many ways Bitcoin and similar currencies can be safer than cash, to pretend that they are immune from cyber-crime is also absurd - it's own history shows that to not be the case. Yes, properly securing it certainly helps, but the simple history of theft shows that in many cases, exchanges do not properly secure their transactions - a tricky thing to do, as proper security is a term that has to be constantly redefined as new methods of lockpicking get invented to deal with the new locks. I'm coming across here as more strongly opposing your point than I want to be. I'm tired, and not able to come up with better, less combative phrasing, so my apologies for that. It just seems to me that you are overselling your case here a bit. I find Bitcoin a fascinating experiment, and I look forward to seeing how it and similar currencies evolve... but it's not perfect yet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inscribed Posted July 13, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 13, 2013 I think you misunderstand what I meant by there being a difference. The bitcoin portocol itself is 100% secure. It cannot be hacked or spoofed. In the list of bitcoin scams and thefts you linked, each one of those was due to user error. Granted, bitcoins can still be a complicated subject and takes some time to learn how to properly handle them (as the technology evolves, so will the safeguards for laymen), so user error existing is to be expected, but equating user error to a fault of the bitcoin protocol is disingenuous. On the other hand, carrying your wealth in the form of a large stack of USD (or gold bullion, in the case of another recent story), and having that stolen at gun point is not something you can as easily attribute to user error. Sure, you can say he should have had it deposited with a bank, but in that case, you are still trusting your wealth to third parties, and would not have it available for an immediate transaction (which, in the case of the video, the gentlemen was looking to do). With bitcoin, you have the option of securing your wealth with you and you alone, and it can be secured in a manner to make it completely, 100% immune to theft, while still having it immediately accessible at any time, and in any location. Sure, he will have the option of pursuing legal means of possibly getting his cash back, but that in itself will take time and resources to even have the chance of getting some of it back. With bitcoin, it's much harder to get back stolen btc (often times impossible), but on the flip side, if you lose your btc, in every case, it boils down to user error and was preventable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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