195K Bitcoin Transaction 167
First time accepted submitter saidi writes "The Washington Post reports that yesterday a truly massive Bitcoin transaction occurred, from the article: 'In this particular transaction, bitcoins from 15 different Bitcoin addresses were consolidated and sent to address 12sENwECeRSmTeDwyLNqwh47JistZqFmW8. The size of the transaction? 194,993 bitcoins. Given that one bitcoin is worth around $800 right now, the transaction is valued at more than $150 million.'"
A researcher did a bit of digging, and it appears that this was the Bitstamp exchange moving their balance around (business appears brisk).
Ghost transactions (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an excellent example of traffic analysis and how you can leak your identity based just on the nature of the transaction. It makes me wonder why bitcoin users do not routinely engage in 1:1 transactions simply to frustrate traffic analysis.
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Wouldn't traffic analysis easily cancel out normal 1:1 transactions? You gonna have to go the extra mile if you really want to stop traffic analysis. And why would you do that? Paper currency is still way better for anonymous transactions.
Re:Ghost transactions (Score:4, Insightful)
Wouldn't traffic analysis easily cancel out normal 1:1 transactions? You gonna have to go the extra mile if you really want to stop traffic analysis. And why would you do that? Paper currency is still way better for anonymous transactions.
Paper?
In regards to the referenced transaction, $150 million in $100 bills weighs over 1.5 tons.
Hate to say it there Mr. Cash Anonymous, but that ain't gonna fit in your carry-on.
And you might raise a few questions as to why you're filling half the cargo hold. National headlines is hardly a way to keep the transaction anonymous.
In the meantime, this public-broadcasting test of the Bitcoin transcation network has been a success. Hardly anyone noticed.
Now is when the real money starts getting pushed through.
Re:Ghost transactions (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you mean "hardly anyone" noticed? It made a Washington Post article, plus a front-page Slashdot story. I'm pretty sure that anyone who anyone might worry about noticing has noticed aplenty (obviously, this transaction was not trying to avoid notice).
For Big Cash transactions, there are of course monetary vehicles in larger than $100 denominations --- all sorts of bonds/cheques/etc. that are good for deposit by bearer at any of the major financial institutions for the convenience of their mafia customers. Cash money laundering, or electronic equivalents like the several billion dollars worth of South American narco-cartel money that Chase Bank assisted in moving around, is still an option in wide use.
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there are 500 and 1000 dollar denominations as well.
heck, there are even bigger bills too...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_denominations_of_United_States_currency [wikipedia.org]
feel free to factor the weight...
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However, these were discontinued a long time ago, and are now collector's items (worth more than face value). From the page you linked, there are only 165k $1k bills known to exist --- so a transfer of this size in $1k bills would require cornering the market to collect basically every single $1k bill in existence (which would be rather difficult, I expect).
There are, however, various non-US-legal-tender bank certificates / bonds / etc. that can represent very large sums "payable to bearer" by big financial
Re:Ghost transactions (Score:4, Insightful)
500 Euro banknotes are readily available.Wikipedia notes [wikipedia.org] "Approximately 580,593,400 €500 notes in circulation around the Eurozone.[61] That is approximately €290,296,675,500 worth of banknotes."
Interestingly, there only "Approximately 188,575,200 €200 notes in circulation around the Eurozone.[61] That makes it the least used banknote of the Eurozone. That is approximately €37,715,031,400 worth of banknotes.[61]"
My guess is that the 500 Euro note has special value among those who habitually exchange briefcases of currency.
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> My guess is that the 500 Euro note has special value among those who habitually exchange briefcases of currency.
500 notes are like 2% of tie issued notes. And the quote above is the reason there's talk to abandon it: It's basically only used by people who exchange large amounts of money in cash, i.e. things you do not want tracked, money laundry etc. 500 bills play basically no role at all in daily life and all you can do with them you can also do with 200s. Apart from bringing massive amounts of cash
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A while ago they were trying to get rid of one of the large denominations - I think it was the 500 euro note - because it was used mostly for money laundering. I'm not sure what ever happened though since they apparently still exist.
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Indeed. And they're quite popular [www.snb.ch] compared to 100 or 200 CHF notes.
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In regards to the referenced transaction, $150 million in $100 bills weighs over 1.5 tons.
Hate to say it there Mr. Cash Anonymous, but that ain't gonna fit in your carry-on.
Perhaps. But a $150 million sealed physical Bitcoin token with a public key and private key printed on it, doesn't even weigh 1 ton.
And after the exchange.... the "traffic analysis" will probably ignore the following 1:1 transaction to move it to a newly generated sealed paper wallet... just like you said.
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TFS is being a bit misleading, though: 195k BTC is *currently* valued at $US150M, but depending on how much each original transaction was worth in USD when it took place, the total value could be one hell of a lot less. Early on when a bitcoin wasn't worth much, each transaction could easily have involved anywhere from 'multiple' to 'several dozen' bitcoins, so those exchanges could add up to a pretty substantial percentage of the 195k without being worth anywhere near even one million US dollars.
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Re:Ghost transactions (Score:5, Interesting)
Was this transaction really intended to be secret? "Leaking" the identity seems like a positive PR move for the exchange --- "look how much BTC we handle, and how hot bitcoin transactions are!". Normal sized transactions are already obfuscated by the traffic of normal sized transactions. How many users have $1e8 bitcoin balances to shuffle around just to provide "cover" for this size of transaction --- as though doing so would improve their ability to keep a low profile?
Re:Ghost transactions (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand why people keep assuming Bitcoin is designed to be anonymous. It isn't.
Re:Ghost transactions (Score:5, Insightful)
Even more than not designed to be anonymous, it's specifically designed to have a global, completely public transaction ledger. That is more or less the core of the design. How do you have "accounts" without a central server keeping track of them? The Bitcoin solution is a public ledger that all clients agree on. This public ledger then has an update mechanism designed in a way that's intended to make it so you can add transactions to the public register iff you have the private key of the account the transaction is "from".
Of course, you can try to keep your RL identity from being associated with a particular account number, but Bitcoin's design makes no specific effort to help you do so: the transaction graph is public, for anyone to do any kind of analysis they want.
Re:Ghost transactions (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed on all points, and I'm still trying to figure out why people keep making the assumption that identity protection or obfuscation measures of any sort are part of the protocol. Maybe it's the "crypto" part of "cryptocurrency" that causes some kind of automatic correlation, although if that were the case one would think that the widespread use of cryptographic mechanisms for identity verification might encourage the opposite assumption.
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Indeed, fortunately a fix will soon be available.
http://zerocoin.org/
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Even more than not designed to be anonymous, it's specifically designed to have a global, completely public transaction ledger.
However; if you have sealed physical Bitcoin payment tokens, from a trustworthy issuer, e.g. a "1 BTC token", AND you trade your tokens in person with people, without entering any transactions in the block chain ------- then in that case, the ledger will record nothing, because there are no BTC transactions on the network associated with physical trade of bitcoins.
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That's true, but if you're trading physical tokens in person with people, you could just as well be exchanging USD.
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That's true, but if you're trading physical tokens in person with people, you could just as well be exchanging USD.
Not unless you want to wire funds bank to bank; which will incur transaction fees, or write a check.
The US federal reserve has created barriers against exchanging USD currency; mainly by not providing large denominations. The highest denomination in circulation is the $100 bill.
There used to be a $1000 note, but it was removed from circulation, to help limit restrict/prevent peopl
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I guess if you're exchanging $100k or something it could get tedious, requiring movie-style briefcases full of bills. But is this a practical problem for most people? If you want to transfer $1000, that's just 10 bills, which fit easily in a wallet or envelope without even being conspicuous. I don't do it regularly, but I've exchanged cash in those amounts without it being much of a hassle, usually for mundane reasons (one time I was being reimbursed for a trip to Taiwan, and the organization just handed me
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actually much easier than you think. $100k is only ten of these stacks (three pictured):
http://www.officialpsds.com/10000-Stacks-PSD63355.html [officialpsds.com]
Assuming all US$100 bills, an average sized briefcase (25" x 18" x 4") could theoretically fit about US$2,400,000. An average attache case (18" x 12" x 4.5") is good for about US$1,000,000.
Calls in mind the scene from Dodgeball where they show a suitcase of $100k, namely:
http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/dodgeballmoney2.jpg [tvtropes.org]
(although that's comically unders
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The "accounts" analogy doesn't go very far when you can create and empty a bitcoin wallet with no cost and no penalty. There are "mixing" services which take the bitcoins from multiple sources and redistribute them.
Although the mixing service seems to be analogous to going to a back alley and meeting with a dozen shady guys, all with suitcases full of money and traced serial numbers on their bills, dropping your $100k into a trash bin with all the other guys's $100k, where some guy then takes the bin int
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well, you don't need to register your name anywhere to have them.
in that way it's anonymous.
transactions however are public.
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Please read what I said again, and then read the rest of the thread beneath that comment.
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Quoting the original text:
Was this transaction really intended to be secret? "Leaking" the identity seems like a positive PR move for the exchange
I don't think the poster was intending to imply that BTC transactions are anonymous. In reply to his/her post, reiterating the oft-missed point that the protocol has no design attributes intended to enforce anonymity isn't splitting hairs; it's more a conversational response referencing the GP above that post. Also, an entity doesn't have to directly link itself to BTC transactions to be revealed as a participant, given sufficient analysis of all transactions. 1-1 transactions don'
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I don't understand why people keep assuming Bitcoin is designed to be anonymous. It isn't.
Because all the loudest BTC backers constantly repeat this mantra: anonymous, no service fees, no chargebacks. Repeat a lie often enough and it starts to sound like the truth.
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Now that we know the nature and value of this particular transaction, it can be used as an anchor to help identify and trace other more questionable transactions by others. It's like a sudoku puzzle. There are many events in the life of bitcoin that are effectively known, and so the problem of identifying some other unknow
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That's one approach. I think most people who are actually concerned use a mixing service.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mixing_service [bitcoin.it]
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I think that would only make things worse.
They know that you have taken money out of a mixing service. They know that you have put money into a mixing service. They know where that money came from, and they know that you must want to hide something.
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well doh, that's why many users should do it.
nobody is refusing to take euros because they have cocaine traces in them..
taking it out to your usual account kind of defeats the purpose though? I mean, putting them into a mixing service and taking them to the same account serves no purpose.
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If done correctly, this can effectively "launder" bitcoins. However, the likelihood of some of these services being traps is quite hard.
I think that people who believe that bitcoin is great for tax evasion of criminal transactions are there for a surprise. It is but one brick in
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If that's the case, why is no one able to identify the people (person) receiving all of the CryptoLocker ransom payments? Which, by the way, that person made a crap load of money with the value of bitcoins going from roughly $100 a month ago, to $800 today.
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For that matter, why is no one able to identify "Satoshi Nakamoto", the creator of bitcoin? Whoever that is holds about a million bitcoins, because they were mining back before anyone else was, and the difficulty of generating a block was trivial. The block chain shows those original coins have never been moved. So unless they tossed away the wallet file, their balance is worth nearly a billion dollars. Thus identifying Satoshi to beat the password out of him would be a financial gold mine, plus the new
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The block chain shows those original coins have never been moved. So unless they tossed away the wallet file, their balance is worth nearly a billion dollars.
The odds are fairly good that the wallet files were lost. There's no way to know for sure until and unless someone spends them, but keep in mind that while those bitcoins may be worth a billion dollars today, at the time they were only small change. This was even earlier than the time one lucky user spent 10000 BTC on a pizza, which at the time was a reasonable exchange. For that matter, they probably predate the earliest exchange services. Bitcoin was an interesting experiment at most, and the developers w
Um, this isn't as amazing as some might think... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is simply good stewardship. One of the largest exchanges (actually not, Bitstamp, rather another ahem Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange site) had a rush of buy orders, so they decided to redeem an address they kept in cold, offline storage to meet demand.
This is a good thing(tm), as it means that there isn't any fractional deposit factoring going on.
Re:Um, this isn't as amazing as some might think.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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you cannot have fractional deposits with bit coin because you cannot get more bitcoins. So there is no interest.
You can. Essentially; your deposit of Bitcoins to mt.gox your bitcoin balance would be a debt on their books.
Mtgox does not necessarily have as many bitcoins as the sum of users' deposits.
The only way you could prove that would be with audited financials, or if everyone cashed out theit BTC successfully. They would likely greatly increase fees, long before that could happen.
Neither form o
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I thought you could fraction it up to 1 million fractions.
so mister ac are you just full of shit?
(I don't own any bc, but that's as much as I've gathered from slashdot)
Hypothetical Question (Score:1)
Basically, should I be kicking myself for NOT doing just that, or would it have flooded the market and crashed the price before I could have gotten the full value out of the transaction?
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That mainly depends on whether you would have found someone willing to buy that many bitcoins. As far as I know, something like this never happened, that someone wanted to get out of the market big time.
As soon as someone actually wants to, we'll see whether it's a stable market.
Re:Hypothetical Question (Score:5, Informative)
I know what would happen to my bank account, but would that have thrown the entire system into chaos if I cashed in that many at once?
There is a liquidity problem with BTC. You probably would have great trouble trying to cash in that many, AND get actual US dollars for them.
Sure... you could switch from a BTC balance to a USD balance at Mtgox... do you think they will be sending you your check anytime soon?
Can someone explain bitcoin banks to me? (Score:2)
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This isn't a bank but an exchange, which I presume buys bitcoins with real currency. Thus they may build up large amounts of bitcoins that they sell for cash when they think the market timing is right. So they would own those bitcoins, since they bought them with money. In other words, that is their own giant private wallet and someone noticed the bitcoins (a lot of them) had been moved around or consolidated in some way.
Re:Can someone explain bitcoin banks to me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are people trusting their coins to a bank?
Well, here are the reasons that we have to keep national currencies in the bank:
1) Because it's hard to guard your cash all day and all night.
2) Because the bank pays you interest.
3) Because the bank gives you the ability to send and receive money using checks, transfers, money orders, cards.
All these reasons (except #2) are valid in case of BTC. The more backups of your wallet you make, the more likely it is that one of them gets exposed to a thief. The fewer backups you make, the more likely it is that you will lose your wallet forever. A bank does not keep your money in a wallet, though they have deposit boxes for other items. If you deposit your BTC into an account, the record states that the bank owes you so many BTC. You have a copy of all transfers of that money, in or out. Loss of wallet is immaterial. Theft of wallet is immaterial. If the paper says you have 10 BTC in your account, that's what you will get. If someone sends you 20 BTC, you do not need to fiddle with blockchain and confirmations - as soon as your bank says you have the money, you have the money. The bank isolates the customer from the technicalities of running BTC clients. Add credit cards and checkbooks, and you can pay with BTC just as you pay with USD or GBP. Credit cards will be swept instantly (and not in 15 minutes.) The latter is, actually, very important because the raw BTC is ill-suited for small, numerous transactions that have to complete within seconds.
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In theory, BTC quantity will cap at some point and the expected increase in economic activity combined with the very gradual loss of coins to things like hard drive failure will make BTC act like a slowly deflating currency. This amounts to approximately the same thing as interest.
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Premise #1 relies on a bank that is better at security than you are a target. Since these outfits are 0% legislated at this point, I wouldn't put credence on their assurance that your money is safe there. Remeber, if one bank gets ripped off and stolen, there is literally nothing that they can do to get your money back. Hope you're enjoying the ride.
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Remeber, if one bank gets ripped off and stolen, there is literally nothing that they can do to get your money back. Hope you're enjoying the ride.
I personally don't own BTC, and consequently don't store them in banks. But as the OP indicates, quite a few people do both. I believe they will be eventually separated from their money - in part because these "banks" are not regulated, and in part because extremely fast deflation of BTC (currently caused by speculation) makes BTC useless as a stable coin. IMO
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2) Because the bank pays you interest.
Oh yes, a whopping 0.05% that I get from my credit union. That's not even enough to keep up with inflation. Keeping your money in the bank means that you are losing purchasing power every year.
a skeptic says "wow bitcoin is serious ". Hope thi (Score:4, Interesting)
I've poo-pooed Bitcoin before. If it's now at the point where there are $150 million transactions, that's significant. I sure hope the operators of that exchange don't disappear with the money, get hacked, or any of the other nastiness that seems to happen every couple of weeks. A $150 million heist would be a big deal, and damn few internet-connected systems are secure enough to thwart even moderately skilled crackers. For example, a certain national agency I'm familiar with that does cyber-security training is wide open to SQL injection and other attacks. I sure hope these bitcoin exchanges have better security than the agencies that set security standards have. If not, somebody's going to steal $150 million in bitcoins any day now, and that'll be a big deal.
Re: a skeptic says "wow bitcoin is serious ". Hope (Score:2)
The market will correct itself, and all this nonsense volatility will leave a handful of people wealthy, but 99% of every other speculator losing their hides.
Plenty of time and reason to poo-pooh
Especially now that it has become ineffective as a currency and it isn't being backed by cost of production (vast amounts are produced by botnets, effectively for free to the p
Yes, a bubble for sure. Don't laugh it off (Score:3)
I don't disagree, it sure looks like a major bubble, so on that point I still think it's very risky to get involved in. Where my perception has changed is that it looked like a toy, something tin-foil-hat people play with. I laughed it off. It seems it's now big enough that one shouldn't laugh it off. As an example, with over $150 million in a single exchange, an unlicensed bank, it probably makes sense to seriously look at appropriate consumer protections.
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I've poo-pooed Bitcoin before.
I'll keep poo-pooing it.
How can anyone set prices in bitcoins? You might offer to sell some good or service for 1 bitcoin. Then, a week later, your potential customers are laughing at you saying "one bitcoin for THAT? WOW talk about over priced, thats ridiculous!" and then they will buy from someone else.
Bitcoins simply cannot be used as a medium of exchange for goods and services.
If you look at how much a good or service costs in bitcoins you are probably and reasonably going to make a mental conversion in
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The seller has a choice; post a stable price in bitcoins or post a (constantly adjusted) realistic price in bitcoins.
And it's basically a no-brainer; set the prices in dollars or other local currency and do real-time conversion to bitcoin prices using the recent exchange history. It's almost certainly going to be converted to another currency at that exchange fairly quickly anyway. Bitcoin will be a payment method and not a stable currency for, in my guess, quite a long time to come. If not because of the speculation but because of its tiny market cap compared to global markets. As such, bitcoin will never become usel
Re:a skeptic says "wow bitcoin is serious ". Hope (Score:4, Insightful)
Thats kind of what I mean; you can't set prices in bitcoins. That impacts the bitcoins utility as a practical unit of currency.
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In your mind, are gold or silver money? I mean, they change price all the time, so I guess they're kind of worthless.
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Bitcoins as money (Score:2)
Bitcoins as Money
(and Gold as Not)
keywords: gold, silver, petrodollar, bitcoin, us government, dollar, cryptocurrency
Objecively, gold and silver are commodities. Some cultures have a system of coinage involving these metals. Gold with sufficient proofs to its purity might be exchanged at something equivalent to its spot price on the open exchange, perhaps if you were a pirate? I'm sure it happens, but trading e.g. krugerrands must surely be easier.
Gold and silver are commodities. Money, in the context of th
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It is also quite obviously in the middle of a massive bubble. If you look at the movement of the price, the shape of the curve, it is moving just like any other commodity that is being thinly traded and having massive speculation. That sort of thing might be good if you like to play the market and try to make a quick buck, but it's really really bad for anything trying to be a currency. It also is almost inevitably followed by a crash. Hence why bubbles are called that because they pop.
I suppose it is there
Re:a skeptic says "wow bitcoin is serious ". Hope (Score:4, Insightful)
Right, which is what I'm getting at; the bitcoin is useless as a 'coin' that you can buy and sell goods and services for. Its only use at the moment is speculation.
You can't set prices of goods and services in terms of 'thinly traded commodities subject to massive speculation'.
You can't put bit coin price tags on things, this would be completely impossible. Yet I see this often online.
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How can anyone set prices in bitcoins?
Like this: https://www.bitcoinshop.us/ [bitcoinshop.us]
Yes, the price is different every time I visit.
And, although I admit I have not bought anything from that site, I can tell you that I *have* used bitcoins to buy Humble Bundles [humblebundle.com], which are another thing you can buy directly for bitcoins (optionally). There's just less overhead (complexity, time, effort, security, fees) in my perception of a bitcoin transaction over, for example, a paypal or credit card transaction... at least if you have a mobile device containing bitco
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Try pricing in Zimbabwean dollars - you'll see the same problem. Hell, there's a mini-rush on every vendor whenever they mis-price in Euros because the Euro jumped and the dollar didn't, or vice versa.
And every business I've ever run or been a part of has to update its prices every few months anyway. If you work in a fast, competitive market, you are literally changing prices every day (e.g. large grocery chains, electronics suppliers, etc.).
The way you compensate is by "over-pricing" as much as everyone
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Try pricing in Zimbabwean dollars - you'll see the same problem.
Well, you won't anymore because the Zimbabwe dollars were discontinued and the country now uses US dollars as its currency because price volatility made continued use of Zimbabwe dollars as a currency effectively impossible.
Now Zimbabwe had inflation not deflation, but the issue of volatility is the same: it makes things ultimately unworkable if it gets too high (even if it moves in a predictable way). When prices change significantly* by the minute and transactions take several minutes to complete then tro
The south sea bubble was serious business as well. (Score:2)
Bit coin value chart [wsj.net]
Classic Market 'Bubble' chart/graph [thereformedbroker.com]
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American dollar (Score:1)
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Perhaps we should start exchanging goods and services with the exchange of WELL FUCK I DONNO goods and services?
You have a small business with several employees. It's time to make payroll so you whip out the goods and services box and...
Number of Beast Coins (Score:1)
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21 million times a million fractions to go around...
nothing (Score:2)
Nothing is truly anonymous if you have a big enough wrench.
$150 million (Score:1)
194,993 * $800 is roughly $150 million, indeed.
But try to throw (to sell) these 194993 BTC at MtGox (or elsewhere) at once.
Such a volume would move the BTC price to hell.
Hence the Bitcoin valuation is't real...
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Who in their right mind is going to sell that many bitcoins at once when they could sell them out in a trickle and make millions more in the process?
Thieves perhaps.
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Hence the Bitcoin valuation is't real...
Well, then I guess you don't deal in anythig since nothing has a "real" price.
If you flood the market with anything, the price will dip.
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The same could be said for any commodity whatsoever.
You could take $150m in gold and sell it on the market and realise that such an action causes a dip in the price of gold you are paid. If anything, this proves that Bitcoin is no different to any other commodity or currency.
Uninsured = high risk (Score:2)
We are living the libertarian dream with Bitcoin: a bunch of exchanges, none of them insured.
Libertarians feels that government regulation is unnecessary, but what recourse do those depositors have when one of these exchanges just disappears with their money? None.
I won't be using Bitcoin, no matter how lucrative, until a government agency or large bank insures deposits. It's just not worth the risk.
Frankly, I can't see any sovereign ever backing Bitcoin while they have their own currency, so I don't know h
Re:I think I will stop reading slashdot....... (Score:5, Insightful)
To be honest, Slashdot and http://phys.org/ [phys.org] are by far, my favorite websites for interesting stories news.
However, I am getting tired of fucking bitcoin stories. Enough is enough.
You don't have to read the summary. You don't have to click on the links. You don't have to post annoying comments. In fact, I think slashdot will be better if you do stop "reading" it.
But, yeah, I'll give you that there are way too many bitcoin stories...
Re:I think I will stop reading slashdot....... (Score:5, Funny)
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I will come to your house, put a gun to your head, and force you to read Bitcoin stories much like Unknown Lamer does here. You must read them. This is not an option.
Oh yeah? We'll I'll send their mother a case of Tentacle Grape Soda [indiegogo.com]
with their name on it unless A.C. makes posts on every article they don't like.
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Re:I think I will stop reading slashdot....... (Score:4, Informative)
If you create an account, go to options under your username after logging in, you can set terms to ignore and those stories should not appear on your front page. Setting a term Bitcoin should stop stories about bitcoin from entering your front page.
If you insist on posting anonymously, then simply log out after seeing what stories interest you and opening them in another tab.
I'm personally at a loss to why people think so highly of bitcoin. There are about 80 or so other virtual currency exchanges out there and it seems that none of them are stable in the sense of real currencies. I understand the concept of it being like a credit card with the limitations of a wallet (Ie if you lose your wallet, you lose only the funds in it where if you lose your credit card, it can be charged until it is shut off), but beyond that, I just don't get it.
Re:I think I will stop reading slashdot....... (Score:5, Interesting)
To the average consumer who isn't necessarily aware of being tracked or of the fees paid to payment processors, it probably seems just like a credit card payment. To the person or business on the other end of the transaction, however, the two couldn't be more different. There's no approval process to accept bitcoin, there's no third party to charge processing fees and there are no disputed charges. In a lot of ways, it is more like cash.
Beyond all of that, bitcoin is more interesting as a demonstration of what is possible and an indicator what will soon be possible. It's shown that individuals can cooperate for their own benefit at a global scale, without the need for government intervention. Maybe it's naive to expect that technology can effect substantial change in global politics, but you can't blame people for being excited about the potential to reduce the power of nationalist governments that wage wars and build prisons, and reduce the harm done by stupid, wasteful and corrupt politicians.
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It is the first new currency since the Euro that actually matters worldwide. Its value only is going to go up as China moves into it, so it will be touching part of everyone's life eventually in one way or another. Plus, it can only go up in value as people pour real value into the coins, and there are fewer and fewer coins being minted.
Expect it to hit $10,000 soon per coin.
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I'm sure in the desert you'd be rather annoyed if someone stole your water. However, that can simply evaporate in the sun!
heh, captcha: liquids
Re:Iran/Contra 2.0 (Score:4, Funny)
How do you streal something that disappears after a magnet is passed over it?
Are we talking about Bitcoins, or music?
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