[deepblueocean]

I wonder how much pressure IA feels to convert its donated bitcoin holdings to cash, given the run-up in exchange rates that has happened recently. Does IA prefer to support Bitcoin as if it were, as its proponents suggest, a real currency with sticking power for the long-term future? Or is there more real and permanent good to be had from converting that money to dollars to support the Archive's excellent programs today?

Clearly the latter must trump the former at some price. I think that price may be well below the $/BTC exchange rate today.

[brewsterkahle]

The Internet Archive is holding on to the bitcoins to keep the currency experiment going. I bought $1,000 worth of coins so I could make the bitcoin converter box at the Internet Archive and be able to give my friends 0.10 BTC when they got an address so they would ahve something to play with. the sushi place might cash in their BTC's into our converter box (honor based ATM), but maybe not. For me, the key to make a currency is to have it trade around before getting redeemed. We are in this for real.

[waterlesscloud]

IA is using bitcoin to support its programs, by paying its staff (in part) in bitcoin. In other words, the institution is getting the services it needs in return for bitcoin.

[MacsHeadroom]

The recent run-up is nothing.

The price will be $300/BTC by next week and $3000/BTC by next year.

[unimpressive]

I need to start recording bold predictions like this in some sort of journal.

EDIT: I meant in general, not just for bitcoin.

[Frozenlock]

Don't! It will take more space than the entire blockchain!

[unimpressive]

The better ones could be added to an extension I was thinking of for the newsreader I still need to write. Basically it would take your karma on HN, and then pick a random (important) event that happened on the year that your karma currently corresponds to. (Years would be common era.)

I was thinking after the current year I could start using stuff like that one XKCD comic that predicts the future based on stupid stuff people google search for.[0]

[0]: https://xkcd.com/887/

EDIT: Oh yeah, I forgot to say what it did with the event. It just displays it somewhere on screen, like in the top corner or something.

[toomuchtodo]

Want me to write a browser extension that submits such quotes to the Internet Archive in their WARC format? :)

[unimpressive]

I'm not really sure what the internet archive would do with them. It'd make more sense from their perspective to just save the whole page.

[gwern]

Does the IA even support such functionality? I thought they only took WARC dumps from outsiders in special cases of big batches.

[gwern]

http://www.predictionbook.com

[MacsHeadroom]

The week just started and the price is already double what it was this time last week. It only has to go up 50% more before the end of the week.

Looks like my first prediction wasn't such a long shot, eh?

[_pius]

http://longbets.org/

[drivebyacct2]

Make sure you record the people a few weeks ago shorting it. And the ones a few months ago.