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  1. #1
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    Bitcoins anyone using them?

    Bitcoins the new digital currency. Seems to be catching on globally, but the US governemnt wants to shut them off as they claim it can or is being used to purchase illegal drugs. So what, i-phones are doing that as well? Cancel your i-phones? Not!

    Anyone here using Bitcoins yet? See article in todays Fox on-line news.

  2. #2
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    Quote Originally Posted by ltnt
    Fox on-line news.
    FFS

    TRY : Bitcoin

  3. #3
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    You may as well use WoW money.

  4. #4
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    Quote Originally Posted by ltnt View Post
    the US governemnt wants to shut them off as they claim it can or is being used to purchase illegal drugs.
    My dealer just wants hard cash

  5. #5
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    Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy's Last Safe Haven

    Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy's Last Safe Haven
    Paul Ford
    March 28, 2013


    Illustration by Steph Davidson


    One of the oddest bits of news to emerge from the economic collapse of Cyprus is a corresponding rise in the value of Bitcoin, the Internet’s favorite, media-friendly, anarchist crypto-currency. In Spain, Google (GOOG) searches for “Bitcoin” and downloads of Bitcoin apps soared. The value of a Bitcoin went up to $78. Someone put out a press release promising a Bitcoin ATM in Cyprus. Far away, in Canada, a man said he’d sell his house for BTC5,362.

    Bitcoin was created in 2009 by a pseudonymous hacker who calls him or herself Satoshi Nakamoto (and who might be several people). It’s a form of virtual cash used to buy goods and services online. Even by Web standards, it’s a strange and supergeeky phenomenon. This is what happens when software and networks meet the concept of currency, when you take peer-to-peer networks and advanced cryptography and ask, “How can I make a new economy?”

    There are 10,952,975 Bitcoins in circulation. (With a digital currency you can be specific.) Bitcoin isn’t about to replace hard currency—with a market cap of $864 million, all of it is worth less than what Facebook (FB) paid for Instagram—but it’s bigger than anyone expected. And many people will tell you that the emergence of a virtual global money supply beyond the reach and control of any government is very real and that it’s time we take it seriously. As long as the Internet remains turned on, Bitcoin will be there—to its adherents, it’s the Platonic currency.

    A dollar bill has a serial number and travels from buyer to seller. A Bitcoin’s not so much a thing as an understanding, a balance in a decentralized general ledger, or “account log.” Bitcoins are created as the side effect of a great deal of meaningless computational work. That is, the computer could be working on protein-folding, or processing images, or doing something else with its time, but instead it’s being used to “mine” Bitcoins—searching for mathematical needles in a networked haystack. Once the needle is found, a “block” of Bitcoins is born. Bitcoins live in a bit of software known as your “wallet.”

    How did they get there? Perhaps you minted them by mining, or bought them on an exchange, or received them as part of a barter transaction. Now those Bitcoins are burning a bithole in your bitpocket, and you want to buy something. How do you spend them? Clicking around your wallet app, you set up a payment and put in the Bitcoin address of the recipient—something memorable and fun, like 1Ns17iag9jJgTHD1VXjvLCEnZuQ3rJDE9L. A few minutes later, after the peer-to-peer network has authorized the transaction as legitimate, the recipient’s wallet, wherever it is, will show that you’ve paid up.



    How is this different from PayPal (EBAY)? In theory anyone could run his own version of PayPal on a server and use that to transfer funds between parties. But he’d also need to handle world currencies, deal with security, and handle regulations. Similarly, physical banks promise protections above and beyond stuffing cash in a mattress or dropping it off in paper bags. Financial institutions commodify trust—it’s not their money, after all. It’s yours. Yet you trust them more than you trust yourself.

    Bitcoin shrugs all this off. It’s not pegged to anything, and there are no regulations. It’s a supercomputer-size chore to counterfeit. The key thing to understand is that there’s no bank, no Federal Reserve, in the middle. It’s not unlike an exchange-traded fund (for example, FORX, from Pimco)—a mix of non-U.S. currencies—designed as a hedge against the dollar. Bitcoin is a hedge against the entire global currency system. And no exchange is needed, unless you want to convert your Bitcoin into an actual hard currency.

    Bitcoin is no more arbitrary than derivatives or credit default swaps. Given that regular folks, if they’re nerdy and interested in Bitcoins, can use the currency for all manner of things, including illegal things, it’s arguably a far less arbitrary instrument.

    Maybe Bitcoin’s devotees are right, and it’s the currency of the future. Or perhaps it’s a ridiculous joke—a speculative, hilarious enterprise taken to its most insane conclusion. Given that the founder is nowhere to be found, it feels like a hoax, a parody of the global economy. That the technology used to implement it has, so far, shown itself to be impeccable and completely functional, and that it’s actually being exchanged, just makes it a better joke. The truth is, it doesn’t much matter if it’s a joke or not. It works.

    The Internet is a big fan of the worst-possible-thing. Many people thought Twitter was the worst possible way for people to communicate, little more than discourse abbreviated into tiny little chunks; Facebook was a horrible way to experience human relationships, commodifying them into a list of friends whom one pokes. The Arab Spring changed the story somewhat. (BuzzFeed is another example—let them eat cat pictures.) One recipe for Internet success seems to be this: Start at the bottom, at the most awful, ridiculous, essential idea, and own it. Promote it breathlessly, until you’re acquired or you take over the world. Bitcoin is playing out in a similar way. It asks its users to forget about central banking in the same way Steve Jobs asked iPhone (AAPL) users to forget about the mouse.

    I have an intense memory from the early 1990s, when I was just out of college. I was seated alone in a diner. Suddenly a loud man behind me pronounced, “Internet time is like regular time but seven times faster.” I turned around to see a well-dressed adult, a serious person. I was mystified. How could he believe something so facile and arbitrary? On and on he went, expounding on the magical number seven.

    Having been through one or two bubbles, I’ve learned that people can believe exactly what they want to believe. That’s one of the privileges of being a human with money to spend. When you compound utopian wishfulness with the anxiety of being left behind, you’ll have a bubble. Then again, we may be at the forefront of the coming Bitcoin revolution. There’s no way to be sure. I’ll admit to having run the Bitcoin mining software a few years ago for a week until I became convinced it was a poor use of limited computer resources. I had work to do. I expected Bitcoins to remain in the background with all of the other anarchist crypto-chatter that makes up an essential substratum of modern network thinking.

    But Bitcoins didn’t go away. And I’m increasingly convinced there’s one thing that Bitcoins do that’s genuinely interesting. They decentralize trust. Trust is hard to earn; verifying transactions is a brutal problem, which is why PayPal locks down your account when there’s too much money flowing into it. Creating trust is traditionally the work of federal governments and branding agencies. Trust is also an easy thing to squander. Just close a beloved service, à la Google Reader. Or allow your banks to fail, causing an entire country to suddenly realize that the value of their deposits, the fundamental integrity of their financial selves, was arbitrary all along.

    Along comes Bitcoin, a currency in which every transaction is stored by the entire network and every coin has its own story. There’s nothing to trust but math. Suddenly an idea that sounded terrible—a totally decentralized currency without a central authority, where semi-anonymous parties exchange meaningless tokens—becomes almost comforting, a source of power and authority.

    That’s where Bitcoin thrives: where people would prefer to throw in their lot with anonymous strangers instead of the world economy. It’s gold-bug thinking reinvented for an age of fluid transparency and instantaneous transactions. And as such it’s an excellent indicator of anxiety. Where you see Bitcoins in action you find a weird and heady mix of speculative angst, a fear of being left behind, and people who appear to have lost faith in institutions, who feel most left behind. These are people who’ll trade in purely arbitrary tokens, willing to forgo the comfort of banking systems for the weight of mathematics and the Internet behind it.

    Bitcoin isn’t tied to any commodity—besides trust. As a statement on the global economy, Bitcoin is hilarious. As a currency for the disenfranchised and distrustful, it’s as serious as can be.

    businessweek.com

  6. #6
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    Cant see them taking bitcoins in the night market in Chiang Mai

  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by Necron99 View Post
    You may as well use WoW money.
    It's all basically based on illusion anyway, isn't it?

    If mangoes were considered legal tender, we'd be floating on clover.


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    The US govt wants to shut it down because it is a threat to the "Federal" reserve's control of the currency markets. It is basically a universal currency or rather could be if it ever caught on. As most world currency's continue to become digital rather that tangible Bitcoin is seen as a threat because it was designed to be digital from the start. It would put control of a universal digital currency into the hands of normal people.

    It would be like if a small town in the USA tried to make it's own currency and that currency started to be legal tender in other small towns effectively cutting out the "FED". A scenario like this would be dealt with ASAP and ended and the media would be required to not cover it as well.

    Thats why most normal people have not heard of Bitcoins yet. Media ignores it because the Govt and "Fed" don't want people to know about it. Then if people still manage to get wind of it and it picks up momentum THEY figure out a way of shutting it down before it becomes too big to stop.

    Nothing can be allowed to compromise the world's centralised banking system or should I say "One World Government".
    I'm not saying it was Aliens, but it was Aliens!

  9. #9
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    Can't see them being accepted in soi cowboy either, money down pantys ,down,bit coin doesn't have the same ring to it really

  10. #10
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    Quote Originally Posted by beazalbob69
    The US govt wants to shut it down because it is a threat to the "Federal" reserve's control of the currency markets. It is basically a universal currency or rather could be if it ever caught on. As most world currency's continue to become digital rather that tangible Bitcoin is seen as a threat because it was designed to be digital from the start. It would put control of a universal digital currency into the hands of normal people.
    At last a man who actually is informed. Read this you idiots before you diss a topic.

    Quote Originally Posted by beerlaodrinker
    Can't see them being accepted in soi cowboy either, money down pantys ,down,bit coin
    why not? She carries her own i-phone or i-pad chalks off a few bitcoins to her account, ding! ding! ding- a- ling- linggggg! Beerloadrinkers account is full stop without mamasan, bar fine or messy credit cards or cash disbursement.

    All the beer Lao electronically on demand and no need to call the credit card number over the internet.

    Actually seems sane and sanitary to me. Most US banks want to eliminate those face time clients as do most commercial businesses and bitcoins are the way to do it.

  11. #11
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    So...what is the physical item that backs any such real worth/value of this false bitcoin?

  12. #12
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    ^ faith.

  13. #13
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    There is no physical item.

    It is entirely digital. The transaction system is encrypted and almost instantaneous. Scammers love it because once the mark has transfered funds it can be difficult to tract people down if you do not have there true identity.

    That being said a lot of the more technical members of the bitcoin and litecoin community seem to be very adept at tracking scammers down.

    Mark

  14. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rural Surin View Post
    So...what is the physical item that backs any such real worth/value of this false bitcoin?
    The physical item is the 1000's of specially designed computer farms built to encrypt and decrypt the bitcoin system. There is money to be made in this system alone if someone has the money and knowledge to take advantage of it. The computer farms are designed to make the bitcoin system almost unhackable. Almost making it a very attractive alternative to central banking systems.

  15. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by Necron99 View Post
    ^ faith.
    Fantasy.
    Just as our financial/economic systems and existence are based upon.

    Those whom can't decipher between what's real and what's not are bound for failure.

  16. #16
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    Bit coin will be a viable black market currency while there are viable black marketeers to support it.
    While that have faith...
    At some point someone will,dump and it will collapse.
    Making some very rich and others, mostly criminals, feelings little silly.

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    ^ Probably. It does seem a system perfect for not so above board enterprises doesn't it? Either way it really doesn't have a chance does it?

  18. #18
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    The biggest fault is that you can make them on your PC or server, and that there are a finite amount of them, which to me, points to massive deflation at,some point.

  19. #19
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    ^ the mechanical systems set up to support them might be spanking, but your PC churning useless code to mine them makes them valueless. There is no future potential to bank them against.

    May as well use 4 leaf clovers.

  20. #20
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rural Surin View Post

    Those whom can't decipher between what's real and what's not are bound for failure.
    Err... OK.


    Or to phrase it more elegantly;

    Ja well no fine.
    Last edited by FlyFree; 30-03-2013 at 08:00 PM.

  21. #21
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    ^^ yeah but you cant really mine them on a regular computer or server anymore as the difficulty has gone up quite a bit in the last couple of years making it not viable for small fish anymore. Now they are producing specially designed silicon to crunch the code and produce bitcoin.

    I agree it should hit a wall at some point but there is money to be made in the meantime.

  22. #22
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    I always thought that an alternative online currency that could be used to buy or trade things within that online community would be an interesting concept. You could buy and sell the online currency for real money and also sell items for a certain price based on how what you feel said online currency is worth.

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    The question is, do you want to be the one holding the baby when the thing collapses.
    I think it'll work for small trades as almost a barter system, but I don't think it can be sustained for long and when it collapses there'll be a lot of people out of pocket.
    Meaningless code, backed up, as someone said by nothing substantial or bankable.
    “If we stop testing right now we’d have very few cases, if any.” Donald J Trump.

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    I seem to think that a bitcoin would be as stable in the market place as someone who uses pay-pal or other credit card charging mechanisms?

    Both are a function of both faith and some institution.

    Currencies are not dissimilar in character, no?

  25. #25
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    ^ PayPal has regular bank accounts, is regulated, and will send you real money...
    Bit coin has hackers, card fraudsters, and will send you dodgy goods.

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