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Thoughts On Bit-coin.

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Paczilla, Dec 4, 2013.

  1. Paczilla

    Paczilla Experienced Member Experienced member


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    What do you think about bit coin?
     

  2. Rebellious twit

    Rebellious twit Experienced Member Experienced member


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    the same as any currency it fucking sucks!, and i also hate that ancaps praise this for being anarcho capitalist on teh interwebz
     
  3. Spike one of many

    Spike one of many Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member Forum Member


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    I don't know too much about it, it bypasses the banking system but it's just another capitalist tool to make others rich I reckon.
     
  4. THEBLACKNOVA

    THEBLACKNOVA Experienced Member Experienced member Forum Member


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    [​IMG]
     
  5. waffle341

    waffle341 New Member New Member


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    I agree.
     
  6. Rebellious twit

    Rebellious twit Experienced Member Experienced member


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    [video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRrTKrWnu4g#t=83[/video] MUH MONAY AND MUH PROPATEH
     
  7. predic

    predic Member Forum Member


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    hell yeah, looooong reading for you :lmao:

    1)Bitcoin website says: Instant peer to peer (user to user) transactions; but if you read deeper, they say: Transactions are broadcast within seconds and verified within 10 to 60 minutes. I can say, I waited many times 20 minutes, transactions are not finished in several seconds. And if we add exchangers who transfer money to your bank account in 3-4 days…
    2)Now after they got investor, they stopped to speak untruth that BTC is anonymous currency, now they say Bitcoin is partly anonymous, but potential users should know that MtGox demand verification of identity. So, 80% of users of bitcoins buy and sell BTC through MtGox and they are not anonymous. Other exchangers are similar like MtGox, although you can find people who will give you cash, face to face trade and they don’t ask you for ID. But such exchanger you can’t find in every city on this planet.
    3)They say Bitcoin operate with no central authority (even logo image show: decentralized p2p currency), I would say: central authority are developers and MtGox, they possess 80% of BTC market and they make fictive transactions to decide the value of bitcoin, other exchangers just follow MtGox, so, many of them make fictive buying and selling BTC just to change value of BTC, to make profit for themselves. They (MtGox) behave like government which decide about the value of the currency.
    4)And if government wants to abolish Bitcoins, they would need just to arrest MtGox, they don’t need to confiscate any “central server”. So, peer 2 peer doesn’t mean anything because Bitcoin has central exchanger MtGox and the whole market depend from MtGox. So, word “decentralized” is just mantra, they speak one thing and they do another thing. If the government abolish MtGox, ordinary user can bankrupt if he has all his savings in the form of Bitcoins.
    5)Population don’t care if BTC is opensource or not, only programmers care about it.
    6)Salesmen and ordinary people need steady currency and BTC change its value every now and then, for the benefit of developers who possess millions of BTC. People and businessmen hate to change prices of products every day or more times per day, like in some poor African country where is big inflation. When I see people say BTC is steady currency, it is like ideology or hypnosis, they repeat the same mantra and they believe in that. Anybody can see that BTC is not steady than inflationary speculative currency. That’s good for exchangers but not for ordinary people.
    7) Most of users of BTC are exchangers who enjoy in speculating in order to gain profit, mass of people don’t have capital to become exchangers and speculate anything, therefore Bitcoin will not be used widely by masses/population than mostly by exchangers.
    8)In March 2013 I could read news that two companies invested 500 + 600 thousand dollars in Bitcoin and I understood why it jumped from 17 to 24 and then to 34 and then to 50 euro per Bitcoin. They use this million dollar to make marketing, they pay journalists to publish articles about Bitcoin, the whole March there are many news about BTC.
    9)angel investor Shakil Khan invested $500 000 in BitPay which should be like Bitcoin PayPal. Just one website which will serve as PayPal for Bitcoin market.
    10)CoinLab invested money in MtGox (Bitcoin Exchanger) and now they go to the court for breach of contract. Mt. Gox and CoinLab, headquartered in Seattle, entered into an agreement in November 2012 regarding bitcoin purchase, sale and exchange services for customers in the US and Canada. Under the agreement, CoinLab was to provide Mt. Gox with financial and investment partnerships in the US. In return, Mt. Gox agreed to have CoinLab handle all of its North American bitcoin transactions. In its complaint, filed Thursday in US District Court in Washington state, CoinLab alleges that Mt. Gox continued to market to customers in North America and did not provide CoinLab with the data and service access it needed to fulfill the terms of the agreement. CoinLab was funded in April 2012 by a group of investors including Tim Draper, Geoff Entress, Barry Silbert, Roger Ver and Joel Yarmon. Established in 2010, Mt. Gox currently handles 66 percent of the bitcoin market’s global exchange volume.
    11)bitcoin-24.com is closed by prosecutor and Canadian exchange Virtex got problem with bank. Two-year-old, Calgary-based Virtex was contacted by the Royal Bank of Canada on April 5 and told that its bank accounts would no longer be operating, according to Virtex’s founder, Joseph David. If we can believe to founder, “The problem that the banks have with us isn’t the bitcoin,” David said. “It’s the fact that when you’re accepting money, specifically cash deposits at the bank, you must have a license to operate as a Money Services Business.” David says that MSB licenses are difficult to get. The company had applied for one when it opened its account with the RBC, he said, but it took over a year to acquire.

    Beside it, Online bitcoin exchanges have a failure rate of 45 percent, with customer balances often wiped out, a new study has found. “Bitcoin is expressly designed to be completely decentralized with no single points of control,” says Tyler Moore, one of two US computer scientists who worked on the research study. “Yet currency exchanges have become de facto central authorities, and their success or failure drives bitcoin’s success or failure.” Moore and Nicolas Christin looked at 40 bitcoin exchanges, examining the risk bitcoin holders face from exchange failures. Eighteen of the exchanges studied have gone out of business. Nine experienced security breaches from hackers or other criminal activity, forcing five of them to subsequently close. Another 13 closed without any publicly announced breach. Of the 18 exchanges that closed, there were 11 where the authors found evidence of the customers having been reimbursed. Five exchanges have not reimbursed customers while six claim to have done so. The median lifetime of exchanges is just 381 days, Moore and Christin found. The most popular bitcoin exchange, Mt, Gox, has been breached (hacked) multiple times.

    and some more news:

    Coinbase Raises $25M

    When FBI sized SilkRoad, they seized also 174 000 bitcoins. Today 1 BTC is about 500 euro, so, we can imagine how much money FBI will profit from selling bitcoins. NSA, CIA, FBI are coming in the world of digital currency, bitcoin, through company called Coinbase. This company offer online wallet for bitcoin users, similar to MtGox. Coinbase lets users to create a Bitcoin wallet and start buying/selling Bitcoin by connecting their bank account, now they have about 600 000 online wallets and they say daily 10 000 people sign up. In May they had 130 000 wallets, so, coinbase uses all investment to make marketing, even Serbian B92 publish article about Bitcoin almost every day. Coinbase is created in June 2012 by Brian Armstrong and later Fred Ehrsam became CEO too, Fred worked for Goldman Sachs. In Sept.2012 Coinbase received $600k in Seed funding and in May 2013 received $6.11M in Series A funding. In December Coinbase received $25M in Series B funding.

    When I visited page About at Coinbase website, I had what to see. There is list of investors and I checked just 2 of them and the both worked for NSA.
    Greg Kidd (http://www.crunchbase.com/person/greg-kidd) worked for Booz Allen which is sub-contractor of NSA, Edward Snowden worked also for Booz Allen.
    Garry Tan (http://www.crunchbase.com/person/garry-tan) is a Partner at Y Combinator and earlier he worked for Palantir. Palantir created Prism software for NSA, Palantir is worth $9 billion and in December 2013 they raised another $107.5 million. Their clients are NSA, CIA, FBI and banks. Investment bank Morgan Stanley & Co. earned a $7 million commission on the funding round. Palantir was founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel, the investor and PayPal co-founder, and Alex Karp. Its last funding round, of $196.5 million, was in September. Backers include Thiel’s Founders Fund and the CIA’s venture arm, In-Q-Tel.
    Other investors are: SV Angel, IDG Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator. Adam Draper, Ribbit Capital, Start Fund, FundersClub.

    The newest investment in Coinbase, mentioned 25M in Series B funding, has been led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from investors Union Square Ventures and Ribbit Capital. This money will be used to attract more people to use Bitcoins. But again, partner manager in Union Square Ventures is Brad Burnham who is co-founder of advertising company Tacoda that spies our browsing habits the same as Google and Facebook (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/1 ... y-cookies/), and he is manager at AT&T Intellectual Property which invest in business of interest for AT&T which again cooperate with NSA.
    Last days American politicians started to tolerate bitcoins, if it is not conflicting with anti money laundering policy, it means politicians are now corrupted with help of this millions. The largest bank in the US, JPMorgan, has filed a patent for an electronic currency with many similarities to bitcoin, it means, bitcoin will get competition from very rich bank, JPMorgan doesn’t need to collect millions, they have it already, it means they can kill bitcoin with their new currency, but they will need time for that. Chinese politicians decided to refuse bitcoin although they didn’t forbid it, therefore bitcoin value dropped from 1000 Dollars to 700 bucks. But after this investment of 25M, its value will rise. And when they get more users of bitcoins, investors will profit because they can make fictive transactions at exchangers and they decide what is the value of bitcoin. When they invested 6M, BTC value jumped from 150 euro to 800 euro, we will see now how much it will jump after 25M investment. It will surely jump because in that speculative way, investors make big profit, but they must attract people to buy bitcoins, to use it. But when investors are right hand of NSA, I am sure that bitcoin software developers are paid to make lower level of anonymity of users of bitcoin.
    Beside investors, and people are using BTC more as commodity than as digital currency, it means they keep BTC waiting that it changes its value so they can sell it and make profit. 80% of Coinbase’s 610,000 customers now holding bitcoins in their digital wallets, but not using them for conducting commerce.
    But back to anonymity and NSA. MtGox already long time ago demanded verification of identity. Mt.Gox is a Bitcoin exchange based in Tokyo, it was established in 2009 as a trading card exchange, but rebranded itself in 2010 as a Bitcoin business and was, for a time, the largest-volume Bitcoin exchange. MtGox was originally created by Jed McCaleb in July 2010, and was sold to Tibanne Co. in Japan in March 2011. It is currently operated by Tibanne Co.Ltd. managed by Mark Karpeles. Several traders in the Bitcoin community are reporting severe delays to the point of outright non-payment when requesting withdrawal of funds from Mt. Gox since April 2013. On 2 May 2013 CoinLab announced that it was suing Mt. Gox for $75m for breach of contract. On 15 May 2013 the US authorities seized accounts associated with Mt. Gox after discovering that it had not registered as a money transmitter with FinCEN in the US. Now NSA investors overtook American market for bitcoins, so, people are under control.

    Jed McCaleb (or Satoshi Nakamoto hahaha) is now making an alternative to Bitcoin known as Ripple. Ripple comes with its own digital currency called the XRP. Ripple Labs has taken $3 million in investments from venture capitalists such as Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. They try to find companies willing to act as money transmitters for a brand new digital currency, bitcoin is there several years and they created network which Ripple must create now. Jed split from Ripple Labs back in July (he is still on the Ripple Labs Board of Directors). But he and the other two company founders collectively own 20 billion XRPs, so he stands to benefit a lot if everything works out.
    Andreessen Horowitz is a $2.5 billion venture capital firm that was launched on July 6, 2009. Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, John O’Farrell, Scott Weiss, Jeff Jordan, and Peter Levine are the general partners of the firm. I checked now just one of them and I found out O’Farel had earlier company Silver Spring Networks, O’Farrell led the company’s $90 million Series D fundraising led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers which is connected with NSA. Among others, his CV says that O’Farrell held general management, marketing and consulting positions in the Booz Allen Hamilton.
     
  8. punkmar77

    punkmar77 Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member


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    Holy shit...all of it sounds shady as fuck... :ecouteurs:
     
  9. NoGodsNoMasters38

    NoGodsNoMasters38 Experienced Member Experienced member Forum Member


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    Oct 17, 2013
     
    Funny money.
     
  10. ungovernable

    ungovernable Autonome Staff Member Uploader Admin Team Experienced member


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    Ok, Bitcoin isn't a revolution and it isn't anarchism. Right.

    This is still a form of capitalism BUT if you compare it to other currency, it is very innovative and it is far better than other currencies. This is the future.

    Bitcoin is DECENTRALISED and it doesn't have a central bank or an authority to control it.
    Bitcoin was based on the principle of torrents and peer-to-peer so it makes it impossible to shut down and more interessingly, impossible to control. Which means Bitcoin can be used to make transactions anonymously, making it safer for doing illegal stuff.

    It also has a lot of common points with crypto-anarchism philosophy.

    Problem is that of course it's still a currency inside a capitalist system, so there's still the problem of speculations and making money with money.

    Did you know that you can use your home computer to mine bitcoins and earn money doing nothing while you use your computer's CPU and GPU to mine crypto-currencies ? That's too long to explain how and why it is possible but here's two links to learn more:
    - http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-guid ... -for-20600
    - http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/ ... ines/?_r=0
     
  11. DEADCOP_ONaROPE

    DEADCOP_ONaROPE Active Member Forum Member


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    It's way too late in the game to use a regular pc to mine BTC. The difficulty is far too high, you need a mining rig. You can still do many alternative cryptocurrencies though. You do have to compare the cost of the electricity to the yield and potential growth though.
     
  12. DEADCOP_ONaROPE

    DEADCOP_ONaROPE Active Member Forum Member


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    A guy by the name of Brother John F has been covering bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general for a long time now. Really smart guy with sort of a libertairian perspective, unbiased coverage though of both positive and negative news. Good video series of over 60 'bitcoin report' videos on youtube. Thebitcoinchannel.com
     
  13. ungovernable

    ungovernable Autonome Staff Member Uploader Admin Team Experienced member


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    Yeah i know, but you can still mine alternative cryptocurrencies. If i am correct, the last news is that people are mining LiteCoin, then trading them for BitCoin and selling the coins for money. I have read posts from a guy in a bitcoin forum who was saying he had 2 mining gear and was making 20$ per day out of it. That's 600$ per month, not bad at all.

    I am also well aware of the huge electricity bills. This is the main reason that i have been "turned off" from mining. It is a HUGE waste of electricity, all of this to build a super-network of computing power for no reason... There is no real social use of all the bitcoin gear people are setting up...
    At least in Quebec we have hydroelectricity, so mining doesn't increase pollution, but still....
     
  14. DanSE

    DanSE Member Forum Member


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    I've always sort of rolled my eyes at doing things differently but almost the same as the status quo. For example the anarcho-syndicalists would form unions in which they’d run elections for delegates and hold conventions. Maybe this improves on the model you're seeing to replace. But it's still too close. You're trying to create a “new world on the husk of the old” but you're still using parliamentarianism. May as well save the time and effort and just vote in a real election.

    It's similar for bitcoin, it might improve on current currencies (maybe) but it's still too too similar to the existing model.

    And besides that, there's a reason why libertarians, ancaps, and regular capitalists love the concept. The dude who founded SilkRoad was a fan of Austrian Economics, Mises, Murry Rothbard, and so forth.

    I'm sure radical potential exists with bitcoin, but not our type of radicalism.
     
  15. punkmar77

    punkmar77 Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member


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    It doesn't quite work that way Dan..I think you're a bit disinformed
     
  16. ungovernable

    ungovernable Autonome Staff Member Uploader Admin Team Experienced member


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    It depends. For example in France, the biggest anarcho-syndicalist union (CNT-F) does elect delegates but a lot of members disagreed and the organisation splitted in 2 different groups: CNT-F and CNT-AIT. The CNT-AIT refuses to elect delegates and it is a conflictuous topic among anarcho-syndicalist movement.
    But AFAIK, the general pratice is to refuse to elect permanent delegates.
     
  17. ktttn

    ktttn New Member New Member


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    I'm an enormous fan of Bitcoin. It's potential for wealth redistribution is unequaled. If you look at organizations like Sean's Outpost, Satoshi Forrest and Bitcoin not Bombs, you can see the starting point for something very useful for traditionally oppressed classes. The centralization of LETS is a serious problem I think.
    I'd like to clear some things up.
    Bitcoin is pseudonymous. It uses keys as pseudonyms, instead of names. MtGox is a terrible chokepoint and a pit of speculators, and should be ignored at all costs. The best exchange is localbitcoins.com. As far as anonymity is concerned, the great thing about bitcoin is it's open-sourceness. Zerocoin and Darkwallet are there for that. The number of active altcoins is staggering.
    I'd be overjoyed to see something bad happen to mtgox. The dollar value of a bitcoin is really unimportant. The value and antifragility of bitcoin is the fact that any machine running a full node is the equivalent to a full copy of the blockchain, and it's impractical for a state, or even a nuke/EMP, to eradicate them all.
    Programmers can't be universally dishonest. (Ordinary people, I think should become programmers.) Anyone can look at the source code.
    Ultimately, speculation and daytrading in bitcoin is peripheral to the real benefits of the currency- bitcoin can never be a corporation.
    Thank you, predic, for your thoughtful analysis. Dissenting voices are the only real way to frame an idea.
     
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