Bitcoin Hits $400 Ahead of Senate Hearing On Virtual Currency 276
An anonymous reader writes "The value of bitcoin has surged through the $400 barrier for the first time, as unprecedented growth sees the virtual currency's value quadruple in just three months. Meanwhile, on 18 November, a Senate subcommittee is scheduled to hold a hearing on virtual currencies like bitcoin and its lesser-known competitors litecoin and altcoin. The hearing comes after a unit of the Treasury Department earlier this year issued guidelines stating virtual currencies should be subject to the same anti-money-laundering laws as traditional currency-transfer businesses like Western Union."
Posting (Score:2, Funny)
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Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
The value of bitcoins is up at the news of a hearing that is probably going to make it illegal to do 95% of what is done with BTC?
That makes sense.
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It might be a good time to short bitcoin stock though.
BC, the currency of choice for evil people... (Score:3)
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.... BTC largely used for legitimate purposes. You live in fairy tale world with villains and no real data.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
BTC is largely used for speculation and you know it.
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I don't see how any government can regulate the idea of "worth." People give items worth, not governments. Though it's probably too much to ask the poor leadership we see all around us to understand this.
Congress can say, for instance, that a pound note can not be used on US soil and create all kinds of problems, but they can't say a pound note has no worth. I wonder if they even have an inkling that there is a difference.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
That’s not exactly the issue.
There have been various schemes to avoid taxation and/or for criminal use. I.O.U.s, scripts, payment-in-kind, coupons, assets swaps, forward contracts, loan forgiveness gifting techniques, etc. Each of these techniques have legitimate purposes but at times are just way to circumnavigate the law.
If I swap my services for goods – US Dollars, BitCoins, an old car, credits towards baby-sitting – I have earned income that I need to declare at fair market value on my income tax. Now determining the fair market value for some of these goods are easier than others but the principal remains the same.
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Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Gold is a physical good that they can confiscate though. Bitcoins are more or less just an idea, and ideas are bulletproof.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
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True, but it's worth pointing out that "good" isn't a prerequisite.
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Ideas are prone to thermorectal cryptanalysis.
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Actually, the government can confiscate bitcoins.... Go ask SilkRoad.
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Government does give items worth, just when they do so it turns out pretty badly. Wage floors and price controls are classic examples. In the 70's the US government said how much it thinks gas should be worth, and that led to a disaster.
Venezuela is currently telling its citizens and the world how much it says the bolivar is worth with their official exchange rate, and just yesterday they began to see the fallout from that (we'll see how it actually turns out in the end, but I think it is basically going to
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Wage floors and price controls have worked. And some haven't.
BTW 1% refers to the US, not the entire world. Fuck, apply the math correctly.
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I think the issue is yo don't know what worth is, or you can't apply that knowledge to context.
Government are made up of people, btw.
Are you saying corporation can assign worth?
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People are about to get a good lesson in how government can take something government-less and make it better.
EVERYTHING is under control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUSUJHmamtQ [youtube.com]
Some brief points (Score:5, Insightful)
The value of bitcoins is up at the news of a hearing that is probably going to make it illegal to do 95% of what is done with BTC? That makes sense.
1) It doesn't matter what the US government decides, if people want to use it it will be used. Reference: drugs, prostitution, illegal immigration, abortion, illegal guns, and other world countries.
2) People don't act because they have no alternatives. This is an alternative, but not many people know about it. High-profile senate hearings publicize BitCoin, so that more people will realize how useful it is, and this spurs demand.
3) There are no valid argument against BitCoin. There are economic "story telling" arguments, and predictive "doom and gloom by story telling" arguments, and false equivalences with closely related things (fraudulent exchanges, Silk Road, &c), and outright lies ("it's a Ponzi scheme!!!"), but no actually valid arguments.)
4) All the standard aphorisms apply: buggy-whip manufacturers, the invisible hand, liquidity, privacy and freedom.
BitCoin will become a game-changer (oh, that phrase!) simply because nothing can stop it.
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Either way, I suspect it will not be much of a game changer. It is easier to use then something like gold, but various places ha
Re:Some brief points (Score:5, Insightful)
BitCoin will become a game-changer (oh, that phrase!) simply because nothing can stop it.
Apparently it already IS a game changer. Why else would they be calling meeting about it in congress?
Re:Some brief points (Score:4, Funny)
Why else would they be calling meeting about it in congress?
Because "somebody needs to do something!!!!1!!11"
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"BitCoin will become a game-changer (oh, that phrase!) simply because nothing can stop it."
Except a Tier1 ISP router edge firewall rule to block TCP port 8333.
*POOF* all bitcoin transactions in USA go to ZERO, and price soon follows.
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Except a Tier1 ISP router edge firewall rule to block TCP port 8333.
*POOF* all bitcoin transactions in USA go to ZERO, and price soon follows.
A workaround would be published within the hour. The protocol doesn't rely on any particular port. For that matter, you can already join the network via I2P or Tor.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the same thing. The US government is about to tell a bunch of nerds they can't have something, so they want it even more now.
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It's the same thing. The US government is about to tell a bunch of nerds they can't have something, so they want it even more now.
I don't agree that they will say you can't have BitCoin, but the net effect may be the same.
What the government seems likely to do is regulate the exchange of currency in and out of BitCoin to make it reportable. This will mean that you will have the same reporting requirements of services like Western Union, Pay Pal and the like. They are not going to prevent you from buying and selling BitCoin. You will still be allowed to own them. You, and the exchanges who buy and sell BitCoin, will be legally requ
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Anyone remember that South Park episode [wikipedia.org] where all the YouTube stars were bragging about how much they were worth in THEORETICAL dollars? That's what I think of every time I hear about bitcoin's supposed value. Yes, a bitcoin is now worth 400 theoretical dollars.
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That would be Perceived value then, and it has little to do with actual value.
"The worth that a product or service has in the mind of the consumer. The consumer's perceived value of a good or service affects the price that he or she is willing to pay for it. For the most part, consumers are unaware of the true cost of production for the products they buy. Instead, they simply have an internal feeling for how much certain products are worth to them. Thus, in order to obtain a higher price for their products,
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Perceived value also known as market price.
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If your hypothesis leads to predictions that disagree with observed reality, then the logical conclusion is that your hypothesis is wrong. Perhaps you should tell us where you got your "95%" statistic, so that we can analyze what, exactly speaking, went wrong?
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No trading "makes sense". It's all about those irrational emotions, not logic. Would Vulcans have a stock market?
Alternate Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
and then bought some MDMA via Sheep Marketplace for a trip to Vegas.
Announcement from your friendly NSA :
We would like to inform you, that the following keywords: "MDMA", "Sheep Marketplace", "trip" and "hearings" (*)
have triggered our system to send you to our "fake slahsdot [slashdot.org]".
A javascript exploit has been injected into you browser to help track you down and burst your door,
but we wanted to inform you that we detected that the chinese were already in your computer trying to steal your private keys.
(*): Don't ask.
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I'm American and if your statement was true my 401k that is largely in foreign markets would have tanked when the banks collapsed and the stock market took a shit. Instead it nearly tripled in one quarter.
Says to me the worlds monetary system is not US-centric.
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It is US centric, though not in such a way as to contradict your claim.
For example, even though most of the world really hates the US dollar at this point, when they trade amongst one another they tend to prefer to do it in US dollars. OPEC will only accept dollars as a form of cash payment. The only alternative is actual gold.
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Actually it sort of is, and that's coming from somebody who doesn't want it to be even though I am American.
By the way, did you know that Latin Americans hate when people refer to US denizens as American? It really pisses them off...even though our country is the only one with the word America as part of its name. They accuse us of being so ethnocentric even though it also offends them when a European calls us Americans.
I have a solution (Score:2)
Repeal all the anti-money-laundering laws. Problem solved.
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Sure, which means getting rid of all income tax, capital gains, any form of 'service' as in no government, so buy a lot of guns, because the robber barons that were politely robbing you blind privately will be shooting you in your face for all those gold coins you have packed under your matress.
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No, it means getting rid of stuff like mandatory reporting of transactions over $10,000. Meanwhile your employer would still be required to report your income; you'd still be required to file taxes; etc. It's just that suddenly "suspicious transactions" don't need to go to the Fed, suddenly you're not going to be detained for having $10,000 in cash on hand, etc.
Dude - reallyt? (Score:2)
Sure, which means getting rid of all income tax, capital gains, any form of 'service' as in no government, so buy a lot of guns, because the robber barons that were politely robbing you blind privately will be shooting you in your face for all those gold coins you have packed under your matress.
Really dude?
Is this the sort of argument that rates "+4 interesting" on slashdot nowadays?
Stop story-telling! We're nerds - we're better than that.
Shortsighted (Score:5, Insightful)
This kind of short-sighted answer is the problem with BitCoin backers.
Anti-money laundering laws and regulations are very important because they are what forces the systems that allow law enforcement to determine and sieze the proceeds of crime. Without such siezing, the incentivization of crime increases exponentially.
IE - say I rob a bank. If it is trivial for me to convert the money to bitcoin and transfer to a third party in an untraceable way, then my incentivization for robbing banks is now HUGE, because even if I get caught, I will still be able to keep my proceeds. Get caught robbing bank, go to jail for 10 years, get out, and buy your own island. Sounds like a good deal to me.
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Uh, no. If you are guilty of robbing a bank, you are guilty of robbing a bank. If you are guilty of selling drugs, you are guilty of selling drugs. If the money is traceable, it's traceable.
Money laundering laws make it a separate crime to, say, allow someone to deposit $10,000 in a bank, or $5000 and $5000, or $9950 but "it looks like they're trying to come just under the mandatory reporting limit", without reporting it. It makes it illegal and/or difficult to carry around thousands of dollars of ca
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You seem to be missing the connection that the money laundering laws are what contain the regulations forcing reporting limit in the first place. Without money laundering laws these regulations would not exist, because companies will not incurr the overhead cost for no reason. "If the money is traceable, it's traceable" - but without anti-money laundering laws, it would all be untraceable. That is the whole point of the laws.
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The average _successful_ bank robber in the USA gets less then 10K$.
Very bad risk/reward ratio.
Altcoin is best altcoin (Score:5, Informative)
Yes altcoin is the best of the altcoins, there isnt an alternate bitcoin called altcoin, all alternatives are referred to as altcoins.
Real reason is due to Swiss Banks (Score:2)
Any rise in the value of BitCoins is probably because it's the only way to keep anonymous funds now that the Swiss banks are no longer keeping records confidential.
Re:Real reason is due to Swiss Banks (Score:5, Informative)
That is actually the crux of the Senate hearings. Essentially the FTC is asking congress to pass legislation that says that any service designed to exchange between Bitcoin and cash, be required to follow all the laws that other credit/cash exchanges (and a slew of other businesses) have to follow, a key part of which is properly identifying all the participants in the transaction.
So, MtGox,, etc. would be required to verify your name, address, credentials, etc. when you setup an account, so "You" can be tied to a specific wallet address when the Feds go snooping for illegal activities.
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Once those requirements are put in place, if the FTC gets its way, then Bitcoin will be FAR more traceable than cash.
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So, what you're saying is the only way to use Bitcoin anonymously is to play with the big boys, be a part of great big drug cartels who participate in coin tumblers to obfuscate the inputs and outputs of their coins, who don't submit their identity to exchanges... don't trade your coin for cash, buy a kilo of coke on sheep place and then sell the coke for cash when you need cash.
At least I think that's what you're saying?
I think it's perfectly easy to use bitcoin (and completely illegal?) to (tax-defer) inc
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Problem for the US though is that as long as there are countries that allow BitCoin exchanges to *not* report then there will be a way. But, aside from the custom's limit of undeclared cash going in or out of the country, there's no real way to keep you from doing the same thing with cash.
Re:Real reason is due to Swiss Banks (Score:4, Interesting)
The Swiss are continuing to keep the numbered accounts opened prior to 1950 secret.
The Kennedy, Rockefeller and DuPont accounts are safe.
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Any rise in the value of BitCoins is probably because it's the only way to keep anonymous funds now that the Swiss banks are no longer keeping records confidential.
The flaw in your argument is that the government doesn't have to track every BitCoin. They only have to worm their way into the far less numerous exchanges where you turn your BC to fully usable currencies and demand that they require full identification and keep records of every transaction. Tax problem solved --- and you know that what they're working on exactly that step by step.
The flaw in the flaw (Score:2)
They only have to worm their way into the far less numerous exchanges where you turn your BC to fully usable currencies
But who cares about that part? What if I just want somewhere to stuff a ton of money, and then some much later day when I want to access it all, I just take it out in cash and disappear. Then I don't care if it was tracked...
The tax agents want to see how much you are storing away, and if you have a bit coin mining farm purchased with black funds and keep your own wallet they can see noth
2 actual reasons (Score:2)
Commodity, Not Money (Score:2)
In the truest sense BitCoin is commodity, not a currency. You can create, or buy, title to ownership of a piece of information that others have agreed to both recognize your ownership rights, and value it as well. It also, unlike every other currency today, is the ultimate Hard Currency because there is a hard upper limit on its creation. You can mine more gold for your gold backed currency, but the total number of BitCoins under the current rules (a most important distinction) has a hard cap.
It's also the
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We should all like this Bitcoin *concept* (Score:5, Interesting)
Get over the hype and take Bitcoin for what it really is: a fascinating experiment that has, so far, withstood the amazing barrage of publicity, hacking attempts, legal uncertainties, and remains valuable for reasons completely contrary to everyone that says it's worthless. It may become worthless one day, but consider the possibility that Bitcoin is disproving all your wildly oversimplified assumptions about what makes something valuable. It is completely different than anything else we know, and there's plenty of reasons to believe that it could succeed as much as it could fail.
Why does gold have value? Nothing is backing gold (and if it was valued only for its material properties, it would have a value only a fraction of $1,400/oz). Yet it has high value, mainly because of its properties to behave as a transferable store of value: scarcity, fungibility, density, identifiability, etc. Bitcoin is really quite similar but with some different properties. Ease of transfer over the internet, fungibility, scarcity, storage efficiency, near-anonymity and built-in escrow. I don't think it's any more ludicrous for Bitcoin to have value than it is for gold to have value. And in the end, when I want to sell WoW weapons, buy webserver space, or play a few games of poker online, why would I use credit cards or paypal, which all require me to remember log-in creditials, give away personal information to be [improperly] protected by a third-party and/or pay a bunch of fees. There's plenty of value in being able to pay people across the world, instantaneously, without sacrificing your privacy, and without paying any fees. Why is that not valuable?
Anonynimity (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with BitCoin is it is nowhere near as anonymous as people think it is. In fact, it is even less anonymous than current currencies.
Consider the dollar. If I take a dollar in cash and deposit it in the bank, and transfer it to you, and you take it out of the bank - that dollar is now different. Those two dollars have different serial numbers. This is because in the eyes of the government, the law, and everyone under the sun, all individual dollars are the same and interchangeable - my dollar is as good as your dollar. This is what makes money laundering possible and why governments have a hard time battling it - it is pretty easy to funnel money from crime into another medium / person and "wash" the money in a way that makes it totally impossible to tie it to a specific crime, because all dollars are the same.
BitCoin is not like this. A bitcoin is a unique value and as it is passed from one wallet to another, that transaction is logged throughout the network. For any given bitcoin, you can trace the path of THAT SPECIFIC COIN from the time it was created to where it was today - seeing all of the wallets it passed through and what IP address owned that wallet at the time. All law enforcement needs to do to tie a specific bitcoin to a specific individual, for the purposes of an investigation, is to tie a wallet ID to an individual. Thus, any bitcoins used during the process of ANY CRIME are subject to seizure! I have never had anyone explain to me how to get around this problem with BitCoin. People have weird pseudo-anonymous hacks like "use ToR" or "Use a VPN", but all these things do is make it HARDER to tie an individual to a wallet, it is not impossible. In fact with the proper warrants and wire-taps it is trivial to tie a wallet to an individual.
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any bitcoins used during the process of ANY CRIME are subject to seizure!
I am actually a bitcoin doubter, but I don't think this is a flaw. You are claiming that if law enforcement finds that Criminal Z had a particular bitcoin, and the block-chain says that bitcoin is currently in my wallet, that they can compel me (say by court order) to transfer that bitcoin to the state, despite the fact that the block-chain says that coin was transferred from Criminal Z to person A, then B, then C, then D, then ... then to me. I have a tough time believing that would work in court. Thoug
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You say "I have a tough time believing that would work in court", when in fact IT WOULD, GUARENTEED, because that is how the proceeds of crime works in common law. If I steal your watch, and sell it on eBay, and the police can track down the guy that bought the watch - that watch can be siezed, and the guy who bought it is not entitled to anything in return from the police. If he wants anything back, he has to SUE the criminal in civil court. I see absolutely no reason exact same thing would happen with bit
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This is what makes money laundering possible...BitCoin is not like this
It can be. Services [bitcoin.it] exist that allow you to put your bitcoins in, have them mixed repeatedly with other users bitcoins, and get back different bitcoins. Silk Road had this feature built in, the user didn't have to ask for or configure it.
what IP address owned that wallet at the time
What is the IP address of a piece of paper? [blockchain.info]
Re:Anonynimity (Score:4, Informative)
the coin went from user A to Silk Road and then to a bunch of random wallets and back out to user B, and user C who was the person who sold the item got a different one
Except that Silk Road, or any other user, can create an effectively infinite number of addresses to send and receive the coins. A user doesn't have to give their SSN, drivers license, and proof of residency to get a new address. Knowing how many coins are at any given address is indeed part of the bitcoin protocol. Knowing who controls the keys for that address is not part of the protocol, and it requires additional work to find the data NOT in the blockchain to understand.
So User A sends coins to a unique address at SR, where it gets thrown in the pool, sliced, diced, and chopped, and reconstituted, then goes out from another unique address to User B.
Granted, if you capture a wallet, you now know a group of address and CAN backtrack through the blockchain to understand who some of the players were in previous transactions. Is bitcoin anonymous? No. Does it allow a user to make it difficult to keep track of what they are doing, and with whom? Yes. Does some three-letter agency have a tool that tries to map those associations, I'd bet a bitcoin on yes.
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Thus, any bitcoins used during the process of ANY CRIME are subject to seizure! I have never had anyone explain to me how to get around this problem with BitCoin.
In order to "seize" someone else's Bitcoin, you would have to know the private key of the wallet that currently holds the coin. This would be difficult because coins can be moved from wallet to wallet at any time (that is what a Bitcoin transaction does.) Granted a coin could be flagged as "tainted" and governmental controls could potentially prevent tainted coins for being exchanged for government backed currency at major exchanges, but it would not be practical to prevent "flagged" coins from moving aroun
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None of those things you put in your list will make using bitcoin anonymous.
They can make it HARDER to track, but with the right warrants and taps, it becomes totally possible to track, and in fact can be quite trivial with the right resources at your disposal. Compared to dollars, it is not even in the same ballpark.
If I walk into Walmart and buy something with a $10 bill, aside from in-store security cameras and other such things, there is ZERO WAY that that purchase can legally be tied to me. That is bec
Cost of Minting -- Fascinating (Score:2)
I find it fascinating that as the cost of minting BCs in terms of compute cycles goes up, so does their value relative to the dollar. Is that behavior by design?
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I don't think so. I think the intent was that by allowing mining and then making it harder and harder over time you would enhance the currency's stability. Remember that the miners are really just doing a lot of hard house keeping and then getting paid for their efforts in BitCoin. The point was to get a lot of people processing the transactions to keep the ratio of honest brokers to fraudsters high enough so no one entity could possibly take over and "fake" transactions. I don't think the intent was to s
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I don't think so. I think the intent was that by allowing mining and then making it harder and harder over time you would enhance the currency's stability. Remember that the miners are really just doing a lot of hard house keeping and then getting paid for their efforts in BitCoin. The point was to get a lot of people processing the transactions to keep the ratio of honest brokers to fraudsters high enough so no one entity could possibly take over and "fake" transactions. I don't think the intent was to somehow create or control value, even though it does seem interesting.
This is pretty much it. It takes resources to run the network and this is a way to reward the volunteers willing to do that. At the same time, it is a somewhat fair way to distribute the initial coins into circulation.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the last coin is issued and mining comes to an abrupt end. I have a feeling that if BitCoin is still viable, they will revise their final count and issue more coins to keep the mining industry in business.
There isn't really one last coin, because the fixed reward is halved periodically. However, there are also transaction fees which won't go away -- they are really the long-term point of rewarding people who bother to keep up the network. (Generally, you can send payments without the fee, but t
Cavet Emptor (Score:2)
Money [wikipedia.org] is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given socio-economic context or country.[1][2][3] The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past, a standard of deferred payment.[4][5] Any kind of object or secure verifiable record that fulfills these functions can be considered money.
Money is historically an emergent market phenomenon establishing a commodity money, but nearly all contemporary money systems are based on fiat money.[4] Fiat money, like any check or note of debt, is without intrinsic use value as a physical commodity. It derives its value by being declared by a government to be legal tender; that is, it must be accepted as a form of payment within the boundaries of the country, for "all debts, public and private"[citation needed]. Such laws in practice cause fiat money to acquire the value of any of the goods and services that it may be traded for within the nation that issues it.
The money supply of a country consists of currency (banknotes and coins) and bank money (the balance held in checking accounts and savings accounts). Bank money, which consists only of records (mostly computerized in modern banking), forms by far the largest part of the money supply in developed nations.
Money acts as a standard measure and common denomination of trade. It is thus a basis for quoting and bargaining of prices. It is necessary for developing efficient accounting systems. But its most important usage is as a method for comparing the values of dissimilar objects.
Wikipedia
Bitcoin may be money in nearly every sense of the word but it lacks stability to act as a standard measure and common denomination of trade. Just as money in unstable countries lack the same attributes. It's a medium of speculation and not being tied to a stable market place perhaps overseen by a stable government it will likely never be more than a means of speculation.
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And, you know, preventing financial support for organized crime.
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And, you know, preventing financial support for organized crime.
I'm pretty sure it is not in the Treasury's mandate to prevent financial support for organized crime.
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Yes, yes it is. //Just finished my annual training about this a week ago.
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Yes, yes it is. //Just finished my annual training about this a week ago.
Well, then they should stop printing dollars. That is the number one currency used for organized crime in the U.S.
Also, if they stopped printing dollars, that would also help with the issue of the Dollar devaluing against other currencies and also with inflation.
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Yup, and houses are precious too! You can't make more land! Oh, I better jump onto the bubble as it crests! I can see all the way to ... ugh don't look down, just don't look down.... Oh no, I just looked down. The difference is houses can have SOME value to you personally even when its externally useless, and BitCoins are literally bits on your computer.
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Yup, and houses are precious too! You can't make more land! Oh, I better jump onto the bubble as it crests! I can see all the way to ... ugh don't look down, just don't look down.... Oh no, I just looked down. The difference is houses can have SOME value to you personally even when its externally useless, and BitCoins are literally bits on your computer.
My one third of a BTC is bits on Mt:Gox's servers, that is assuming they're not doing fractional reserve banking yet. I don't think I'm much different from the average BTC owner.
As always I would advice against investing significant amounts of real money in BTC. If you want to invest real cash, at least invest in a basket of several virtual currencies and do it across several trade sites.
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That .33333BTC is real money now. You might want to move it somewhere more secure, or convert it to cash before the bubble bursts.
The chore of figuring out how and where to put it on my tax form is not worth $133. Maybe if was $1333.
But then I'd miss the thrill in trying to wait until the last moment before the crash happens and the servers go down. I nailed it by about 6 hours margin last time, but then I waited much to long to reenter the market so I only gained 50%. I thought it would bottom out at about $15 then, but it bottomed out at $40 or something like that.
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The chore of figuring out how and where to put it on my tax form is not worth $133.
Really? It's no different than trading stocks, collectables, or other commodities. If all else fails, just write it down as miscellaneous income. You might be able to report it as capital gains if you kept track of the cost basis. If you've ever held a yard sale or sold something on eBay you've gone through the process before.
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Well, I live in Sweden and the tax authority here is still scratching its head as far as I know. The tax is certainly 30% like on any capital gain. The big question is if that is 30% on your net profit when you withdraw money from the market to your bank account, or if it is 30% each time you sell BTC at a market. If it's the latter I and pretty much everyone else in Sweden who has traded BTC have already committed tax fraud (not that the authorities would care about $133 in my case).
Anyway if you ask me it
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The thing is, Bitcoin doesn't HAVE to amount to anything.
You really think that Snapchat is a $2bn business? Bollocks. Same as every other IPO.
The trick is to get in while it's cheap, and out while it's expensive, before it collapses. It can collapse or not. That's not the question. The question is: If you used your brain, could you have made lots of money? And the answer is Yes. At one point there were Bitcoin faucets giving out 0.01's of a Bitcoin for free. They would be worth $4 each now.
And for w
Re:Netcraft confirms Bitcoin is dying.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've said this before, and no doubt I'll find the need to repeat it again in the future.
I'm very happy for you that you made some money from Bitcoin speculation. That's not sarcasm, I am genuinely happy that you made some money. The problem is that is really no way to judge whether it can be a viable alternative currency. People don't sit on their USD and hope to profit, they go out and buy stuff: that's what you're supposed to do with money. Right now all Bitcoin amounts to is a bunch of people sitting around hoping that they're on the right side of the greater fool theory.
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They were already queued. You want to cue them.
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Anybody remember 'Flooze'?
You really thing we need 'major financial institutions' to create a digital currency? Why would we trust the likes of G.S.?
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>bitcoin prices are artificially high because people are essentially hording it instead of using it as a currency.
And are doing extremely well.
$0.10 -> $400 is a good return.
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I would say now is the time to get out. But don't take investment advice from me.
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Dwolla isn't in any way a competitor to Bitcoin. Dwolla, as you pointed out, is an online payment system. It is a competitor to PayPal, Google Wallet, credit cards, and other forms of online payment. Payments in these systems are done in dollars and other forms of currency.
Bitcoin is a currency. It's not competing with Dwolla but the US dollar.
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I sold mine halfway up the spike, thinking it couldn't possibly go any higher.
It'll come back down soon enough.
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But the dollar at least USED to have a defined value in gold and could be exchanged for gold on demand. BitCoin *never* had that.
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Tisk tisk... That's what they are BEST at. Discussing something they don't understand then passing laws which don't fix the perceived problem but make matters worse while patting themselves on the back claiming "progress".
Case is point? The ACA....
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...OVERALL TREND has been up...
...
So please! Keep kai-yai-yaiing about shills and bubbles. Your tears are delicious.
So has said every participant in every bubble ever. One of the hallmarks of a bubble is that no one knows how long it will last. Bubble or not, your reasoning is unconvincing.