Ironically, Bitcoin serves as a pretty good argument that there should be substantial regulation of financial service providers since people that don't know computers keep losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"an FBI document (PDF) about Bitcoin found it way onto the internet. It seems they're worried about the virtual currency's potential use in criminal activities."

During the televised SOPA hearings with the House Judiciary Committee, Jared Polis - after introducing the song "The Internet is for Porn" into the Congressional Record - waxed poetic on the underground economy, Bitcoin, drugs, TOR and Silk Road.

Those watching on /g/ were aghast. "OH GOD HE KNOWS!" was the reaction.

Yes, folks, they've known for a while.

Bitcoin, when it's not a scam, is a method of money laundering.

--
BMO

I wonder how many Apple shares the mods own because they keep posting Apple stories. I wonder how many Microsoft shares the mods own because they keep posting Windows stories. I wonder how many Cisco shares the mods own because they keep posting networking stories. I wonder how many Red Hat shares the mods own because they keep posting Linux stories.

Etc etc. You're a retard.

Bitcoin was an interesting experiment.

I was one of the lucky ones- I got in before Bitcoin hit prime time for its 15 minutes of fame. Back then mining actually got you something worthwhile when you could dedicate a couple of GPUs and one or two computers to it (back then FPGAs weren't even being discussed that much). It managed to pay for four separate computers, which I later overhauled and replaced the motherboards on so I could stuff three GPUs in each. A few months ago I decided to shut it down (after witnessing random things like the rollback of an entire market because someone sold too many BTCs and it pissed off the big guys who lost a lot of money because they didn't see it coming) and started to cash out. At the end of it all (after I sold my equipment- though that only accounted for ~10% of my total catch), I'd made enough to pay off my car and both me and my fiancee went on a nice trip to Maui for two weeks.

A friend recently "discovered" BTC and came to me for information on "how to get rich quick". It took me over two hours to convince him that it wasn't worth it anymore, that he could probably pump a good $10K into equipment and not even make back the money power would cost him to run it all. You'd have to invest ten times that into exotic FPGA hardware just to make any reasonable amount of income, and even then I doubt you'll ever pay for the hardware itself before the system completely crashes.

BTC is, ultimately, a failed experiment. Now that the system has gotten rolling there is little reason to use it for anything other then illegal goods, and nobody wants to be associated with a currency that is predominantly used to move dirty money or pay for black market items. I suppose things might be a bit better if we actually had reasonable exchanges running, but for the most part what is out there right now (including MtGox- which formerly stood for "Magic the Gathering Online eXchange") is just about as untrustworthy as the people using it.

If you're a potential miner, my advice is to stay away from BTC. If you weren't there when it started, then you're basically not going to make any money. Those few elites still making money off the system will soon leave as the entire thing becomes unprofitable for even them, and then when they cash out the entire system will crash hard- and any BTC you might own will be worth nothing.

-AC

It's not kudos for bitcoin even if the design itself is proven perfect, because bitcoins are useless without practical implementations and real markets, and if those real-world applications continually fail for external reasons, the bitcoin economy will never take off.

Put a little differently, it doesn't matter how perfect bitcoin is on paper. If it can't be made to work in real life, it's useless. And if the computing infrastructure on which bitcoin transactions occur is fundamentally un-securable, then it can't be made to work in real life. It's like deploying an uncrackable ATM in a crime-ridden neighbourhood. It doesn't matter that you can't break into the ATM if you just have to wait for someone to withdraw cash and then rob them.

I agree. Anyone who thinks Bitcoin is about "making money" should stay away. It's a monetary agent. It's as much for "making money" as using Western Union is, without anyone being able to say "no" to whom you want to send money.

I've used it to donate to Wikileaks, among other things (all legal, incredibly enough).

They are only useful if you can spend them, and if people do spend them. Money is just a theoretical construct to facilitate trade, nothing more. It has no magical powers. As such it only works if people can spend it on things they want, and in fact do spend it. If they can't spend it, they have no reason to hold on to it or obtain it. If they don't spend it, then it isn't performing its purpose of facilitating trade.

This is why, all other issues aside (and there are a number of them) bitcoins fail as a currency. It has built in deflation which means that people would have an incentive to hoard, not to spend. That makes it fail as a currency. When there's an inherent deflationary setup in a currency, it will never function well.

Also you can see it doesn't actually function as a currency because to the extent people use it these days it is two main ways:

1) Mining/speculating. They just trade in and out of it to try and make money. While all currencies have trading and speculation it is not the major activity. With bitcoins, it is by far most of what happens. That means it isn't being used as money, but as a commodity.

2) To hide payments. People get bitcoins, pay someone they don't want to have it tracked to, and that person/company turns it right back in to an actual currency. That makes it no more a currency than Paypal. It is just a means of payment, and only being used to try and launder the money. At both ends the actual "money" is a regular currency.

Money isn't money because of some magic reason, or some special thing backing it or any of that. Money is money when people use it as such. When people are willing to accept it in trade for goods and services and willing to spend it on the same, you've got money. Doesn't matter what it is, just that you can spend it and you do in fact spend it. Gold coins, printed paper, bits in a computer, big rocks, all can work (and all have worked).

Because the sentiment here on slashdot is so against bitcoin that I felt it would be viewed as spammy.

I use bitcoin for trades, I do not care if it is 50 cents, $5 or $50. I do not hold large bitcoin. But as you can see, others see a vested interest in 'pumping' the price and THAT is a downside to bitcoin. It is not a pump and dump, it is a working currency. The problem is that it is so thinly traded that people who want to pump and dump push it, as well as the true bitcoin fans who have no vested interest other then thinking bitcoin is a great project. It is hard to tell those people apart.

Bitcoin is truly revolutionary and does things that no other online currency has done.

Buying shit you don't need is not a virtue. It is wasteful and at the root of many problems that face our society. I don't understand why more people don't see this.