The Currency Revolution - With Bitcoin

[qwertyuiop]

Are Bitcoins tied to a free-market libertarian agenda? The diversity of users and uses alone would suggest that it would be difficult to tie them to any particular agenda, so if that is the case, what would be the dangers of a 'bitcoin revolution'?

Yes, very much so. The ideology behind Bitcoin as a form of exchange is as follows.

What money is and what value is entirely subjective. This means that each person should be free to choose what they wish to trade with. Of course somethings trade better than others as mentioned in my prev post. Eg. bread has utility as food, metal as xyz.

Each person should be free to pick what they hold as a means of storing and transacting their wealth.

Having an issuing authority give arbitrary value to something by decree, then enforce its usage by way of requiring citizens to pay taxes and other govt programs solely in it.

This allows them to inflate that fiat money. If there was only $10 total, gum cost $1 then another $10 is printed - Gum costs $2(or twice as much because your spending power has halved)

This is what is currently occurring. You lose about 2% of your held value in $ each year through inflation. And only those who print it get anything benefit from using it. This is an invisible tax / theft without actually taking anything form your wallet.

If you think its better to hold your wealth in something not so easily corrupted or something that is valuable for reasons other than 'it is because we say so' See: 'Having utility'. Then Bitcoin, metal, shells, tinned food, ammo, finger nail clippings etc are all possible alternates.

The dangers of Bitcoin existing with an authoritarian-esque gov still around is that Bitcoin is free money, where there are still heavy regulations on things like drugs guns, etc. So it bypasses these regulations and bans much easier than being on the black market just with cash in hand. This is bad because it creates value in something that really isn't. Legal drugs = $1 while Illegal = $100. Thus facilitating a more liquid transfer of funds to those people or groups willing to break the law for that excessive markup value on initial cost. But this is scratching the surface of just one of the problems stemming from a corrupted and controlled monetary system.

I'm kinda rambling so Ima stop now.

[Bigred]

I think bit coin has a amazing future. The big fluctuations are causing it to seem really unstable I am not to worried.

But a fact is Bitcoin is here to stay. It is to engrained in the younger generation and we love it and we are the future.

Would be good if we could buy with the petrobitcoin rather than the petrodollar

encourage oil producing countries to take bitcoin and ditch the petrodollar

[Slocombe]

The big fluctuations are causing it to seem really unstable I am not to worried.

1 BTC is now worth over $1000 AUD on the Mt.Gox exchange... I really wish I invested in bitcoin when it was virtually worthless.

[teonanacatl]

Im kinda gutted, last time I dropped I had all the paperwork to mt gox, took them till yesterday to validate it all! I missed that bus!

[qwertyuiop]

Save on the AUD->YEN->USD->AUD exchange fees and buy from Australia.


2% buy fee 1.4% sell. Get bank account verified for online transactions and be able to buy and sell and have that money back in your account within the week. They also sell pretty cheap based on market prices elsewhere.. $944~.

https://filler.coinjar.com/

Edited January 31, 2014 by LUWA

[ThunderIdeal]

^ ...... which means potentially coinjar uses should look outside of coinjar to cash their BTC into AUD. i'm not sure where though! i can confirm that coinjar will consistently offer BTC several percent cheaper than whatever the current value appears to be.

[teonanacatl]

Can anyone recommend places to buy/sell BTC other than Mt Gox and Coinjar. I cannot get verified with moneypolo. Whats with all the odd ways to buy BTC, no paypal, no creditcard!

[qwertyuiop]

In person is the safest of these.... I'd steer away from bank transfers etc with randoms. (if using localbitcoins)

May I ask what issue you've had with Coinjar? I've found it easily the simplest method to buy by farrrrrr ( and with e very good commission rate 2%) https://localbitcoins.com/


or this (but probs more costly. less risk though)

I've had experience with spendbitcoins too. (Cash deposit at a bank branch after setting up a quote on their site) - 10% commission rate though :/ https://spendbitcoins.com.au/

As I understand the current situation, right now is a pretty good buying opportunity. MtGox, previously the highest volume exchange...Is fucking up basically. Their method of transaction accounting was flawed and did not cross reference the blockchain. I cbf writting up an indepth explanation to the intricacies and implications of this... Personal reaseach is the best, but remember there's also a lot of dis info out there of people wishing to cause more fear in the market to buy in after an even larger drop. TL;DR MtGox is no longer a good price reference point. Don't look at it and think 'oh that's what they're worth now' (Because that's only what they're worth on the exchange where btc are locked up Nd disabled from withdrawing from the site, so people are selling heavily on there to get it into $ and cashing out that way...In fear of getting nothing.

Edited February 13, 2014 by LUWA

[teonanacatl]

I cant do a deposit at a bank and coinjar has to manually verify me and its taking ages. I just want to buy some BTC now !!!

[qwertyuiop]

This general pm is probably suited to be plonked here too for everyone to view and get another perspective.
--

haha, yea I'll give you a quick run down on how I'm seeing the current situation. But bear in mind, that my advice holds no water - as I'm not a 'real' financial adviser -

I'd also like to remind you that, if your financial position does not allow you to put away $x for a year minimum without you needing to dip into it, BItcoin is too risky for you to apart of your investment portfolio. Not to say you can't earn btc... Selling things on this site, working, etc...Just let it be know that you're also willing to accept btc alongside $..

Ok,

MtGox, one of the largest and highest volume exchanges has...crumbled under it's own weight and incompetence. (This is a good thing...In the long run*)

As such, the goto place for determining what the average price for a single BTC was to see what it was being traded for there. Now of course, due to them being heavily locked down and provably a risky platform to do trading on, people aren't trading on there - leading to a perceived drop in btc value. (Which is true - although not to the price it displays on that one exchange... And keeping in mind that its charts to have an impact on other exchanges and speculators that now interpret the price as plummeting when in reality its still moderately stable - only changing by the $100-$200 because of market trends that speculators and trade bots follow somewhat blindly without determining the reasoning for the market moves.


The reason for the failings was improper record keeping. Instead of using the authoritative blockchain as their reference point of validity they simply kept their own record of tx's...And their records were flawed because of a known quirk in the bitcoin protocol code. Nothing that really affected the wider bitcoin user community in any way that compromised security.

* The good the comes from this is that there now will be a higher degree of exchange decentralization. No longer will 60,70,80% of exchange volume be held on one site that - as we're seeing now, when fuck up, takes a lot of toll on the image of Bitcoin. This means the prev users of MtGox...if they still want to use/ trade bitcoin, will have to find alternate means...providing a larger customer base to all these other exchanges..making for a wider and more resilient bitcoin ecosystem.

As far as time goes... This will take a while to recover. 1-2 months for calming the market and allowing for an understanding of what happened and the implications of it..instead of fear mongering and panic buying / selling...then hard to tell if it'll be seeing the 1000 mark within those 2 months or maybe even upto 4 mths.

The future is hard to predict, and there's no doubt going to be more hiccups, speed bumps, red tape and nay-sayers along the way but beside that there is also the growing saturation of people hearing about Bitcoin for the first time, business realizing its money saving advantages and people in general waking up to the damage we're letting be inflicted upon us and our future by continuing to live within and accept the unsustainable and widely non- beneficial debt based economics system we have in place today - Almost world wide.

... I might just post this into the forum discussion. But yea, hope that gave a bit of insight into the current happenings. But by no means is it a full account of every facet that is determining the price and movements and future of Bitcoin. Just an opinion piece.

[at0m]

Gox crumbled awhile ago. It's been shitting itself ever since whilst it hangs from it's noose. It hasn't had majority for months. Thankfully that lesson was learnt.

Everything else is good though. Crypto's been a bit crazy lately in general. It was stable (relatively) for awhile but has just been shitting itself lately at the slightest sound in the distance the last week or so

[C_T]

is at a crazy low, under 400usd...

im sure someone will fill the gap of mtgox, but it will take time.

[qwertyuiop]

on MtGox, that is now a 'tier 2' exchange.

In Australia they're trading at ~AU$735.1957 /btc - Coinjar @ 2% commission.

* Not a plug for coinjar, just reiterating the point that MtGox is not a good source for price average any longer. But other exchanges, that are operating as normal still are.

Try http://bitcoinity.org but in the top middle choose an exchange other than Mtgox

[C_T]

i use http://bitcointicker.co/ to watch btc's rate.

[at0m]

http://bitcoinwisdom.com ALL CRYPTO, ALL THE TIME.

[teonanacatl]

So the fear at Mt Gox is that the coins will go down with the ship? If thats not the case then wow that is low and one only need be patient for them to sort out their problem!

[qwertyuiop]

Exactly, although MtGox already has a dubious past and this may just be the nail in the coffin for them. I'm skeptical gox will be around for much longer...or at least with 1/10th of its market base.

[Bigred]

$100 a coin from mt gox .

.

.

. is this the end of outrages bitcoin prices

Edited February 22, 2014 by Bigred

[Bigred]

I have my popcorn and watching mt gox crass just hit the 97 mark

[at0m]

Try forget gox exists. Bitstamp is still $560 (though that IS down).

Also, why do you think the prices were outrageous? I still don't follow that kind of logic (not just you saying it, I just don't understand it)

[Bigred]

Did not mean the actual price but more the fluctuations in price scares a lot of people of using it.

[Cubism]

As someone who knows nothing about bitcoins, and doesn't have any money to invest anyway I got a question. If I bought a few off Mt Gox, and they folded or whatever, and disappeared, would I still have my bitcoins? Or are they explicitly linked to Mt Gox, and would disappear too?

[Bigred]

Depends where you have them if they are in your wallet on your pc your fine if they are in the middle of processing your order your fucked.

You wallet on your computer is constantly updating the bitcoin system so once you install it you have to let it catch up and can take a while

[Cubism]

Cheers bigred

[DiscoStu]

Australian government tracks every AUD conversion into bitcoin

The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (Austrac), the Australian government agency responsible for countering money laundering and the financing of terrorism, is able to track each conversion transaction from bitcoin into or out of Australian dollars.

"Australia is very fortunate among its international counterparts, in that we are one of the few countries which currently collects all international funds transfers, into or out of Australia," John Schmidt, CEO of Austrac, told Senate estimates today.

"At some point, a person will be purchasing bitcoin using Australian dollars, for example, and then if they are dealing in substances or services, will want to convert those bitcoins back into the legitimate currencies of where ever they are, so they can gain the benefit of them."

"Because we get the international funds transfers instructions, it is possible using other intelligence sources to identify transactions where people are purchasing bitcoins."

read more

Edited February 24, 2014 by bot6