Bitcoin won't ever fail because of how it's previously and currently being used. A means to anonymously and easily/quickly transfer money across the internet without big brothers involvement.

Will it fail to make people rich? yes. Will it fail to hold $100? probably. But it will never completely fail unless it's succeeded by a better more secure and anonymous form of digital currency.

in this stage, they are both considered experiments. who knew in 1992-95 how or where the internet would evolve, same with btc, it's an experiment, who knows where it will go, most likely it will blow up, like most experiments, but the infrastructure will remain.

speculate in an experiment prior to it proving any value whatsoever and the risk/reward ratio is much more extreme than entering into it after it has proven any kind of value.

The average and stable price of bitcoin was originally around the $10-20 area both before and after the great pitfall to 50cents/coin. It only shot up when mass media got all these crazies to invest in it. I personally agree that it will go back to that price range. But you never know now that all these big wig investors (besides the mafia) have dumped money into it.

well it will 'fail' to be what all the hypers claim it will be if its just used for anon sending. like i've said before, no one needs anonymous transactions except people doing shady shit. i love paypal and use it daily but i don't see the benefits of using bitcoin over it. i don't need it to be anon. i don't need it to be non reversible. while there may be no fees in sending bitcoins in order to buy them it costs money, time and you lose the anonymity with all the verification.

true. people like yourself and mikeroth are more grounded regarding the future of bitcoin. then you have hyper fools like mayabong who think bitcoins will make be the end of the irs and the banking system.

this goes to the evolution of experimental tech, the anonymity wasn't really part of the original experiment, from the white paper

the anonymity is simply a part of the solution to the above problem:
http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

I dont have any predictions about the future. I do think if it because widespread enough possible the tax in the US would change from income to some kind of consumption tax.

The main reason I don't think it would work in the mainstream is because it's too easy to scam and be scammed. Would local police get into bitcoin theft? Would there be a new form of digital currency police agents highly trained in bitcoin chain tracing?

There's been a ton of people over the last year that have scammed people out of $100,000 or more. InstaWallet could be one of the people scamming (claiming they got hacked when in actuality the owner stole all the bitcoins for mass profit). There's multiple cases where online retailers became highly rated then one day stopped sending product while still collecting bitcoins then just vanished.

I don't think it was designed to be a mainstream currency and I don't see how it could become one. But for illegal activities it's the bees knees.

It was a poor analogy on many levels.

I didn't write the definitions for the word "hacker." Ask your grandma if she knows what a ddos is. She won't know. But chances are she knows what a hacker is because that is the word used over and over again in the media. They do this all the time, that is how they reach a broader audience.

"Hacker" is indeed a sensationalist term, but it is also the best term to use for the lowest common denominator when describing something like this.

The Bank Of America could go out of business tomorrow and the USD wouldn't be phased. All the banks could have problems and you wouldn't see a 20% drop in the USD. The Bang Of America could be robbed every hour on the hour and you wouldn't see any movement in the USD. A bank having trouble is not the same as a bank bailout. And yes, just about everyone knew what a "bank bailout" was. That was already as dumbed down as it could get. The term "bailout" is pretty cut and dry. Perhaps we didn't know the scope of it all, but everyone knew what it meant.

google? pffft ....LOL . we've already got yahoo

No offense, but you're completely delusional thinking it could have any impact on US taxes and the IRS. You have to first know what the IRS is and why we are taxed in the first place, then you will understand none of it has anything to do with anything bitcoin could solve.

Make all the money you can. I hope you and everyone else (even Franck) riding the bitcoin train get filthy rich. But you are pretty ungrounded when it comes to some of the comments you're making about it.

Hard for us to imagine now, but how long do you think it will be before someone unseats Google and Facebook?

my grandma wouldn't know what a hacker is, my mom didn't know, my dad described it as someone breaking into your computer and grabbing files. many non-sensationalist reports described it accurately as an attack, certainly that describes it better than hacked and more people would know that term over hacker.

either way, i think the media as irresponsible and over-sensational, you think they were accurate. we'll never know.

and no, many many people were confused about the bank bailouts. what is tarp, what is asset relief, what is too big to fail? all brand new terms and concepts.

there were many questions and a lot of people didn't understand it, including me.

hopefully soon :2 cents:

I think it was was accurate enough for the average person to understand, and that is the target audience of most of the media outlets.

Having said that, I believe a headline of "Bitcoin is under attack!" would have been equally effective. But we're talking about sleazy mega corporations who spread lies to help the government start illegal wars and further political agendas, so anything is possible.

Hey now, it has common uses. Drugs, child porn, hit men, gambling...how can it go wrong?

that's prolly the gist of it eh. + not investigating it in the slightest. i've noticed many of the mainstream articles quote each other- a lot. sure, they all have their "what you need to know about bitcoin in 30 seconds" articles but i'm realizing they prolly just read some other 30 second overview on it all to write their's.

it's too bad because it truly is a fucking fantastic experiment. doomed to fail? prolly. still a few years away though, but, just like the dotcom crash, investors took the hit, the infratructure remained and now here we are.

i'm glad you mentioned fb, btw, i've been fascinated with the comparison b/w it and btc. it's why i've posted a pic of zuckerberg here and there in these btc threads.

fb was touted as the next big thing, a new paradigm in social whatever. legitimate wall street ultimately valued it for us at $100 billion based on its potential. people all bought the hype and wanted a piece of $100b fb.

i'm not saying fb is bad or that btc is good. but i do find the difference between how the 2 are accepted/perceived to be....hmm....not sure what to think of that yet.....:1orglaugh

ATM theft and fraud is HUGE, in the BILLIONS - the only reason ATM's are around is because the banks are so fucking rich that they can absorb the huge losses.

Those owning and operating Bitcoin ATM's won't last long, they won't be able to eat the losses to fraud/theft.

Converting bitcoins to cash safely and easily will be a huge obstacle. Putting your trust in 'exchanges' that are totally unregulated is about as high risk as you can get.

What happens when/if bitcoins really do take off - when there are thousands of retailers online who accept them for expensive hard goods like computers? For example, I buy a $2,000 computer from some online merchant with bitcoins and get scammed, they take my bitcoins and don't ship me a computer. With a credit card I can do a chargeback, with Paypal I can do a dispute and win, with a check or wire I at least have hard evidence to use in court - what does the customer who uses bitcoins show in court to prove he sent $2,000 in bitcoins - is there a printable proof of transaction that will identify the user I sent the $2,000 in bitcoins to?

I got interested in bitcoins because I could see its' place as an anonymous digital currency for the underground online economy. This hype we're seeing now is about going far beyond that and there are going to be huge pitfalls along the way.

Also, I am pretty sure that ATM's would fall under some regulation in any country. You can't even operate a hotdog cart without a license and inspection. So with a stroke of a pen any government can shut down the bitcoin ATM industry.

It's like Alex Jones quoting his own website InfoWars.com as it being the truth, when it is the only source for the information. Somehow, in the craziness of it all, people believe it. If the mainstream media paints a bad picture of bitcoin, telling everyone who is thinking of using it how unstable it is, it will more or less be over for the majority of people as they believe what they are told. Perhaps that is the point.

The death of bitcoin doesn't necessarily have to come directly from a government. There is more than one way to skin a cat. :2 cents:

hundy bitcoins

Of course. Unless a real bank gets behind it, it's just a pen stroke away from being a memory. You can't just plop down ATMs around the world to transfer "untraceable" money or exchange your cash for another untraceable currency. That's called money laundering. Unless those using the ATMs give up their anonymity, the odds of this being successful are very slim. I can't even fathom the red tape involved in doing this. And kudos to them if they do pull it off.

The people who will make money are the ones who bought when it was low and sold a week ago. it might peek again i dunno. but who are these retards buying it at its peek? FUCKIN IDIOTS LOL

Correction, they use it to misinform a broader audience.

Sensationalism is used to sell the story, a newspaper isn't going to let things like facts get in the way of a story :pimp

This is just my opinion from what I've read about Bitcoin but it's clearly in a speculative bubble but right now it's in a speculative bubble based on real demand from actual users unlike every other Ponzi Scheme that the bankers have created by using fraudulent CDOs and such to create demand that was never there so IMO this bubble has a long way to run before it implodes.

The thing that may change this will be if it generates mainstream usage in online business within a short space of time. I'm surprised most porn sites are not offering it as a signup option, it's perfect for porn or any micro payment system.

I think it's a real shame that it's ended up in such a speculative bubble, there is no doubt at some point it will crash in value. There has been flash crashes in the past so when that happens again, even if only temporarily you can bet your ass the media headline will be "Bitcoin Crashes In Value"

When it does drop through the floor that's what will destroy confidence in it, and if a lot of people get burnt on this they probably won't ever use it again :2 cents: A bit like porn customers who where victims of card bangers etc

TBH I don't see this as the peak, or anywhere near the peak for that matter.

Bitcoin is only starting to get mainstream attention. With any speculative bubble (Ponzi Scheme) it crashes dramatically once you run out of suckers to invest, this thing is just getting started IMO :pimp

It'll be interesting to see if the Bankers get involved, once you start seeing it discussed daily in the media and front page headlines about Bitcoin, that'll be the time to cash out or when the taxi driver starts talking about how Bitcoin is a good investment LOL :winkwink:

Granted if I had bought Bitcoins around $1 or $2 I'd be cashing out 95% of them and laughing my way to the bank right now.

this is something i've been wondering about too, the lack of being able to chargeback has been pitched as a good thing, it's not. obviously as a buyer i want to be able to chargeback but as a merchant my potential shoppers are more inclined to purchase from me knowing they have that safety net, i.e., i make sales due to customers being able to chargeback.

in fact, i think this would have to be upgraded for the next level of adoption- merchant support.

qftttttt

i'm with you. this will blow over, the price will settle to who knows where, i'm pretty stunned it's staying at $140~ for not only, what, a week now, but coming back after the attacks.

but, yes, exactly eh, real bubbles take years to develop, drunk post so i'll make a prediction-

this will settle to some degree, the hype will hit again for btc, rinse and repeat until
1.most the coins are mined in 3.5 years, which i would think lessen the craziness and then we can all see if it can work as a currency

or 2) a serious security breach fubar's the whole thing totally or 3) wall street/the government fubar it.

so a few more years, which is pretty quick eh.

You got that right.

Titcoins. I'm all in.

Euro is better. Rocksolid. :thumbsup

Is that sarcasm or are you serious?

Make a smart guess.. :1orglaugh

Even if all the gov'ts in the world fight against BTC, it cannot be shutdown if it has people support imho. It's peer to peer and encrypted. If people in general find it worth something, value it for whatever reason, it will always have a worth $ amount imho.

the nsa developed the encryption. couldn't they hack their own code?

On this board, no idea. :upsidedow

They probably already have.

sha-3 for btc?