Investor Tim Draper Announces He Won Silk Road Bitcoin Auction 115
After some speculation yesterday about the winner of the auction for the first block of bitcoins seized from the Silk Road, the winner went ahead and made his identity public. Tim Draper has won the U.S. Marshals bitcoin auction and is partnering with Vaurum to provide bitcoin liquidity in emerging markets. ... Tim offered this in a statement:
“Bitcoin frees people from trying to operate in a modern market economy with weak currencies. With the help of Vaurum and this newly purchased bitcoin, we expect to be able to create new services that can provide liquidity and confidence to markets that have been hamstrung by weak currencies.
Of course, no one is totally secure in holding their own country’s currency. We want to enable people to hold and trade bitcoin to secure themselves against weakening currencies.”
How to make an opinion a fact (Score:2, Insightful)
"Of course, no one is totally secure in holding their own country’s currency"
Just put the words "Of course" in front of any opinion and people will accept it as fact.
Weak != Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Bitcoin frees people from trying to operate in a modern market economy with weak currencies.
No it does not. A currency that is "weak" is a relative valuation of exchange compared with other currencies. Weak does not (necessarily) equal bad. A "weak" currency benefits exporters and hurts importers. China has purposely been keeping their currency weak for some time now to facilitate their manufacturing exports. Whether bitcoin is "strong" or "weak" depends entirely on what you are comparing it with. (Never mind the fact that bitcoin is ridiculously volatile which doesn't help either) Furthermore unless you plan to actually hold bitcoins instead of using them as a fancy money order spending little time holding them, the relative strength of bitcoin as a currency is irrelevant.
With the help of Vaurum and this newly purchased bitcoin, we expect to be able to create new services that can provide liquidity and confidence to markets that have been hamstrung by weak currencies.
What a load of malarkey. Bitcoin is no where near stable enough nor widely accepted enough to serve this function.
Of course, no one is totally secure in holding their own country’s currency.
I'll take my chances with the US dollar thanks. I trust it FAR more than I do bitcoin.
Re:How to make an opinion a fact (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, it helps that what he's saying is a fact; no one is totally secure against anything. It's just a meaningless fact.
Re:Gambling with exchange rates (Score:2, Insightful)
I expect exchange rates to move in my favor, but that's just a side benefit. The real advantage of abandoning the Dollar for Bitcoin is that my liquidity and savings are no longer tied up in murder-based blood money.
Bitcoin is a human rights movement.
Re:inflation is not related to economy growth (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope because bit coin is primarily a pyramid ponzi currency. Accruing it's value by the work now required to generate it, whilst those at the very top who created by far the bulk of the bit coins did very little to create those bit coins (the bulk of their effort was in marketing the creation of the illusion). This illusion of later effort has not relationship at all to earlier effort and the main driver that keeps bitcoin going is use in criminal activity. How ever that use in criminal activity also drives theft of bit coin. This is why so many crypto currencies have now appeared, other scam artists trying to be at the top of their pyramid, creating the bulk of their crypto currency prior to release to the public.
So how many coins are there, who holds the most, what effort was required to generate them and, how many were generated prior to release to the public. Crypto currencies are ponzi schemes, you generate value by selling the idea to others who must put more value in, in order for your investment to be worth more, this obfuscated behind the principle that earlier players can far more readily generate coins than later players. So pretty much legal authorities have failed to act on activity that really runs on the border of being a blatant ponzi scheme.