bitcoin have unleashed covert ops against bitcoin.

"If you can't control it, kill it"

that bitcoin was a piece of shit bubble scam that duped a LOT of suckers out of their money.

who just got his large bag of ecstasy and/or hash loves it and doesn't think hes a sucker at all (bitcoins typically get used to buy illegal products so theres no financial trail)

that which can be more easily explained by incompetence.

Bitcoin represents ZERO threat to government currencies. A currency is only as stable as what is backing it. If you have a choice between a currency backed by the "full faith and credit" of a financially strong nation and one backed by the "full faith and credit" of the ghost of Ayn Rand, which would any sane person choose?

Like practically all Libertarian ideas, virtual currency is a great idea on paper, not so much in the real world.

This is the second example of why bitcoins are not a viable currency. Two "virtual banks" have now been robbed of millions in bitcoins. The people who placed their money in these "banks" are pretty much SOL as to ever seeing it again. If their money was in a "real" bank, the damned thing could be robbed 5 times a day and they wouldn't care, since their money is insured by the FDIC (or a similar institution in most Western countries.

through funding terrorist networks, through money laundering, or tax evasion.

a currency that has ZERO backing is not viable. For a currency to be viable it must be liquid, easily exchangeable for any commodity. There is almost nothing on Earth you cannot buy with enough greenbacks. The list of things I can't buy with bitcoin is quite extensive. Bitcon is illiquid and highly volatile in value, qualities that do not make for a stable, never mind threatening, currency.

Last edited Tue Mar 4, 2014, 11:24 PM - Edit history (1)

Can you make money off of it - sure.

In the end if these bitcoin exchanges go belly-up then you're shit out of luck with your investments. Although the government and banks aren't the most trustworthy of folks out there I still see way more protection for my savings than in the bitcoin world.

For those thinking of investing in some bitcoins treat it like a trip to the casino - only spend what you can afford to lose. I'm not much for the casinos but when I go I take about $50 and when it's gone I'm done (probably why I've been gambling at a casino twice in the last decade). That $50 can probably entertain me for about 1-2 hours and if I lose it all I can still afford to pay my rent, utilities, food, etc etc.

I don't have time to explain (at work), but exchanges are to BTC what banks are to dollars... leaving your BTC in an exchange is like leaving a bag of money with Lenny at the bar because he has a safe. Not the best idea.

I don't own any BTC, I just understand it relatively well. It's a nascent technology with serious growing pains, but if I were a .gov I'd be worried.

The exchanges may not have anything to do with how Bitcoins work, but they do have a lot to do with how Bitcoins are perceived, which has a lot to do with which way the speculation winds are blowing, which has everything with Bitcoin's value, since that's all it's based on. Now, the world knows Bitcoins can be stolen and, unlike your "money with Lenny" example, there's virtually no chance of ever recovering them.

And I doubt the government is worried about bitcoins taking over for the dollar but more of the mess they are going to have cleaning up the bitcoin problem when this whole system flops.

At this point a bunch of speculators lost their money on tulip bulbs or gold - there's no regulatory interest or involvement. You put your money in BTC, it's completely outside of the regulatory spectrum same as any other commodity, with the same uninsured risk.

I'm gonna ramble here for a sec, had a couple of drinks after what a LOVELY day at work...I read Cryptonomicon when it came out, being a pretty avid Neal Stephenson fan after reading Snow Crash my senior year of HS ('97, to date myself); if you haven't suffered through the 900+ pages of layered history along with some pretty involved cryptographic and information theory you owe it to yourself to read it. Anyway, when BTC first hit the scene, I read up on the theory behind it and chuckled, with the same feeling I had when I plugged into my 10BT Ethernet freshman year and had the internet at ONE POINT FIVE FOUR FOUR MEGABITS...the same superficially amused, but internally deep and futuristically significant gut twinge.

Cryptocurrency is the the future; it combines the best of fiat and representative currencies and if you ever wished for the "galactic credit", well, BTC is the totally imperfect (to the point where I won't get into it and that says a lot) first step.

Jet packs and colonizing Mars were also suppose to be our future too and yet those things either aren't mainstream enough (yes there are jetpacks out there but just prototypes that are very costly) or have not happened.

I find it odd they call it Cryptocurrency because I see the word 'Crypt' in front of it and I think - dead currency. And honestly without any sort of regulations that's what cryptocurrency is looking like. Sure the Libertarians get a boner thinking about non-government currency but that government is what helps ensure that our current currency doesn't go tanking down the drain (instead it seems like a very slow drip - I am aware the government and feds aren't perfect).

As for the problem the government and/or law officials (perhaps I should have included that) is going to have to clean up is when bitcoins totally fall flat on their face and billions of dollars are lost - someone has to be arrested or at least understand why this was allowed to happen.

Assuming no other illegal activity using BTC as a currency, what crime do you see here? At this point it seems to me to be a speculative bubble, nothing criminal about that. Unless you think the entire concept originated as a scam, but I don't buy that - too decentralized.

Pay your money and take your chance, if it does collapse overnight and bankrupts a lot of people...well, that's the free market for you. Right or wrong, it ain't a crime.

Can someone post the current value?

Of course, it is the average "value" from those exchanges that are still in operation. Individual "exchange rates" can vary widely from exchange to exchange and even from minute to minute.

http://preev.com/

I actually was looking for a trend line, which I found here:

http://blockchain.info/charts/market-price

So the market price jumped from $560 to about $667 (16%), 3/3-3/4. This seems to happen every time there's a "hack" or other failure of the system because, I'm told, supply diminishes.

That's interesting.

Thanks again!

it isn't being diminished-- it's just going to new, untraceable owners.

has stuck out again.

Their webpage says

Flexcoin is shutting down.

On March 2nd 2014 Flexcoin was attacked and robbed of all coins in the hot wallet. The attacker made off with 896 BTC, dividing them into these two addresses:

1NDkevapt4SWYFEmquCDBSf7DLMTNVggdu

1QFcC5JitGwpFKqRDd9QNH3eGN56dCNgy6

I have no opinion on bitcoin being good or bad..

if folks want to use it to avoid paper trails and the what not , so be it..

its not a real threat to any national currency .. nor is it 'complete garbage' as some folks whove probably never looked into the subject beyond an article on news site put it..

just another way to trade. *shrugs*

i know there are a lot of younger people who like to do whats called 'bit coin mining' where your computer is sort of leased out to do calculation work .. and u get paid for it in bitcoins. my understanding tho is that it costs more electricity to keep your computer in full operation than you receive in payment...but if you don't pay your bills (because your young and live at home) , no skin off ur butt

Those are people usually wanting to commit crimes or launder money or avoid paying taxes.

What I perceive is that the regular peons buying bitcoins, low level people like you and I (well not necessarily you and I but people like us) see bitcoins as a get-rich scheme but what I think is happening is using the low level people to spend US Dollars to buy bitcoins so those US Dollars can be funneled out the the 'people who want to avoid the paper trails'

One Exchange CEO was already busted for money laundering.

I've read about all this technology and honestly I think its all advertising - fancy terms to make people feel the technology is safe. I mean high end computers with special processors needed to mine bitcoins by solving difficult math problems. To me I think the only 'difficult math problems' being solved is a need for real money into the system and thus allowing more bitcoins to be mined. You know you can't even mine bitcoins with regular computers anymore but now need to buy special pricey computers with special processors that allow mining. Those computers run several thousand dollars and I'm not exactly keen on having spending $3k-$5k for some pricey computer with a high processor just to mine computers - personally I think it's just leaving my computer open to hackers who now can access those systems.

Just like everyone else here I want to get rich quick. It sucks that these multi-gazillionaires can screw up our country and our economy and still get paid while the rest of us struggle each week to make ends meet. I'd love to find a scheme that could do a minimal amount of work and suddenly find new-found riches. But the age old adage is true - 'if it's too good to be true then it probably is' and another one which is 'a fool and their money is soon parted' - for me I live by those rules. Sure I'm not making raging sums of profit off my meager savings account and a few stocks that I own but I feel that money is in a far safer place than bitcoin technology.

LOL, best practices for running a bitcoin financial service. Bitcoin has "best practices"?