Of course, the complement to this is that people whose knowledge of currency comes largely from Neal Stephenson novels give way too much credence to stories breathlessly championing Bitcoin as the future.
Something that can trace its ancestry in a vague way to Bitcoin? Maybe. Bitcoin itself? Exceedingly unlikely.
I've been wondering about that too. The chances that version 1.0 got it all exactly right is less than perfect. The SolidCoin fork has some interesting criticisms of Bitcoin:
Still some calibration and iteration for Bitcoin to do as new lessons are learned about P2P currency. But the Bitcoin protocol and implementation are under active development, so I wonder to what extent it can still evolve without a reboot.
Mild deflation is the natural state of things - over time, most tasks should take less labor to accomplish because of improvements in technology and organization. Are we to prefer that a man who labors enough to buy four gallons of milk can only purchase a one if he chooses to do so 30 years later, even though the cost of producing milk in real terms (and indeed the price of milk in real terms) has decreased?
Just a wild thought. Is there a way to associate an email with a future-created bitcoin account? The goal is to be able to send bitcoins easily to an email address even though the recipient has not created a bitcoin account. The recipient can create an account later on to pick up the bitcoins. This would make it easier to seed wider usage of bitcoins. That's how Paypal started.
I guess this requires a trusted central third party as an eschew to hold the fund for the email recipent and for verifying the recipent's account via email.
A paypal-style site can create a new bitcoin account on behalf of the new user.
Then the payer can transfer funds to it, using a transaction that requires signing with keys that only the payer knows and can pass to the payee directly. Bitcoin transactions can also have timeouts and have the inputs locked while the outputs are still floating.
Create an account for them, send them the wallet.dat, let them log in and transfer to their own account whenever they want? Or just change password, if that's possible.
I was about to sell my remaining bitcoins this morning when I realized: wait a minute, I don't even know how long the Euro will continue to exist (living in Euro country). As much as it pains me, because probably the price will fall even further, I'll keep some BTC around just in case...
On the other hand I suppose the existence of Silk Road is not sufficient to drive prices up, because most vendors will just convert their BTC to dollars again immediately.
> On the other hand I suppose the existence of Silk Road is not sufficient to drive prices up
Right now Bitcoin has a controlled monetary inflation of 30% a year. Its user base isn't growing. It's actually shrinking if you count the speculators as "users".
I agree with other comments, right now it might be better to hold dollars. Also gold, despite it's depreciation lately.
I think Bitcoin will survive. I can see the African diaspora using it in the near future because it's cheaper. Bitcoin won't go up in US dollars at least until some 1st world country devaluates its currency severely, and people start looking for options.
By 'African diaspora', do you mean Africans in different countries will use BTC to transact with each other across borders? Or is there some wide-scale emigration of African people out of Africa and across the globe I wasn't aware of?
>As much as it pains me, because probably the price will fall even further, I'll keep some BTC around just in case...
Swiss Francs, CAD, and even USD are much safer if stability is your concern. If the Euro indeed collapses as you seem to fear, you may even find yourself making gains.
The Swiss Franc is, from a historical perspective, probably the safest currency in the world.
Switzerland is an ideal banking country in geopolitical terms. It borders with three major economies, but is also an easily defendable mountain fortress. It has remained largely undisturbed because it would simply cost too much to invade.
That's why, for hundreds of years, it has been a banking mecca. Europe has been wracked by war for centuries, during which banking houses are periodically plundered by invading armies. But Switzerland with its defensive advantages and long history of neutrality rises above the noise. If you're a rich European, the safest place to park your money in the past 1000 years has been Switzerland.
Switzerland is a "banking mecca" because of its privacy laws, which encourage the corrupt from around the world to park their money in Swiss banks. I would posit and say that the Swiss system actually _encourages_ (large-scale) corruption around the world.
And what happens to the money when the dictator dies? Do the Swiss banks return the money to the people on their own volition? Of course not.
I admire Swiss privacy laws, but they should be applicable only to the Swiss citizens. Switzerland has no reason to shield non-citizens and criminals from around the world.
The privacy laws are part of the attraction (though they're not unique), but they're not totally impenetrable. Show the Swiss government decent evidence that funds in a Swiss bank are the proceeds of a crime and those funds will be seized. But why should the Swiss do your homework for you?
Requiring citizenship in order to obtain secrecy is, if you think about it, not really going to work. How do you prove that the account holder is a citizen if you don't know who it is?
Neutrality means, necessarily, that you will deal with scum. But it also reduces your chances of involvement with devastating wars. The Swiss have made their choices.
If you open a bank account in the US (and many other parts of the world), you have to show identification. Why not the same in Switzerland? The Swiss can ask for ID when opening an account; if the account holder is a Swiss citizen, give her/him all the privacy you want. If s/he's not, then reveal the accounts when that country's government asks.
Alternately, the Swiss can tell each country how much money their citizens have in Switzerland (in aggregate).
I did a little mining while it was profitable, but running the air conditioning to keep the GPUs from melting cannibalized most of it during the summer. I'll have to check back once things cool down a bit more - perhaps a drop in difficulty could make "free" heating for my apartment viable again. Not holding my breath, though.
Do not expect it to happen soon tho. Before $30+ price difficulty was _doubling_ every two weeks. Today with 90+% price cut difficulty drops 10-15 % every two weeks...
Now, if you really wants to make it right - buy water blocks for your cards, route water pipes outside your building and mine :) AC will thank you :)
I don't think the public is going to understand BitCoin for a long time. Many people don't know the difference between Google and their browser's address bar. Even for early adopters, BitCoin needs a better marketing to inspire confidence.
Well, the article is going to help that. Despite its title most of it is a very shallow overview of the currency in general while mentioning how the rate has fallen and some examples of how it is not universally accepted. Finally, in the second to last paragraph, it offers up the hypothesis that it was a speculative bubble.