Update - Bitcoin: Crashes To .01 Penny

Who in the world did not see that coming?

this bitcoin thing is confusing.........its not even real money right?

Bitcoins as such did not crash. It was 'only' an attack on a big trading site. The value of 1BTC was about $12 that time on working marketplaces.

With that said. I was telling some of my co-workers the other day what a shame it was that I didn't buy $50 worth a year ago to sell then. I would have retired.

This is where the discussion of trading your freedoms for more security comes into play. I've worked in IT my whole career with a few jaunts to engineering aside. I get annoyed that everyone everywhere should know how and why I spend my money. I spent much of my career with my name and salaries as part of the public record as required by public trading rules and now that I'm retired and want to dabble in this and that (legal practices) I need to account for every penny back to the public? It makes want to just scream rude things. Yes I keep gold and silver. I also produce energy I don't claim on my income tax. I have a huge attitude about it too as it relates to reporting... as in "go away or shoot me". The public gets taxes from my fiat currency investments... that is enough.

If I want to dabble in a DEFLATIONARY currency as part of a look into an interesting social experiment, then why paint me with the same brush as a drug dealer or buyer? People with cash also buy drugs. Every day. Go down to the local courthouse and sit through a days worth of arraignments - "Suspect was arrested with 500 dollars in small bills in his possession" . In the meantime, I can trade Bitcoins for things like ASE's. That makes it real enough that's it's not play money or a game. I can get a college nerd to "code me up" several thousand lines of PHP (which I hate doing) and pay with Bitcoins. So what if he spends it on something none of us like? He could do the same with cash.

While I pointedly disapprove of any illicit drugs, I'm not naive enough to think that eliminating a semi-anonymous (it can be traced if someone with resources wanted to using statistical analysis) payment system is for the greater good. You know what made the internet such a smash hit? It sure wasn't Google - it was access to adult oriented material previously difficult to get to. There are hundreds of studies on this. Yes, our beloved electronic communication migrated from the BBS era to a fantastic information resource like coin community funded by the appetite for .. well you know. It just happened that social acceptance for this particular media was tipping into the favourable category at that point in time... timing is everything. Imagine if the internet had been banned because of it's POTENTIAL content.

And now, what you saw with that report on Silk Road, that's just a reflection of the real world being mirrored into the internet. This is going to happen more and more as a natural evolution that I believe cannot be controlled. It's like trying to stop people from writing books, while it's been tried many, many times under many political arrangements it's never worked.

In any case, I'm against any effort to shut down Bitcoin. I think that's just a knee jerk reaction from people wanting to stop what they can't directly control.

There's been quite a few links on cryptome.org about bitcoins (site is currently down for some reason) otherwise I'd throw the links up but the whole nature of bitcoin (much like TOR which was mentioned earlier) screams interesting shadow world that has legitimate--as well as--nefarious uses.

Perhaps the very nature of coin generation is what makes folks squint at it. And I really agree with ianmprice on this because when I first heard of this I thought two things: Sure, I could spend months generating coins via dedicated GPU harvesters but do I really want to? Alternatively, do I really want to trade silver for a digital currency that doesn't really have a consistent market? etc. etc. etc.

But on an aside:




That's very similar to something my grandfather told tax inspectors back in the '30s when they wanted to itemize his possessions for tax purposes although it went something like this: "Sure, you can come in but they'll have to be carrying you out."