• Members of the previous forum can retrieve their temporary password here, (login and check your PM).

Bitcoin

Migrated topic.
elru

elru

Rising Star
OG Pioneer
Someone posted this in the chat yesterday and its pretty neat. It's an electronic currency that keeps everyone anonymous if they want to be and can't be tracked. You can exchange between bitcoins and dollars, euros, ect.

www.bitcoin.org

Bitcoin - Open source P2P money

Bitcoin is an innovative payment network and a new kind of money. Find all you need to know and get started with Bitcoin on bitcoin.org.
www.bitcoin.org www.bitcoin.org

They have an FAQ and a wiki that explain how it all works.
 
Was just looking at this yesterday, downloaded the purse app but not delved too deeply yet. Anyone put Bitcoin into use yet here?
 
So...what I'm still confused about, especially as far as decentralizing everything is how to convert straight cash to bitcoin without going through an agency monitored by the government. It seems to me that there is still a bottleneck or a roadblock to anonymity if you are forced to buy tons of visa giftcards or engage in similar activities in order to convert significant hard currency to bitcoin.

elru, you seem to really get this stuff, can you help me out here?
 
Snozz, Im not really informed on bitcoin, maybe others like elru/house/benz/etc can give more info, but here's what it seems to me: Its not that banks or other institutions cant know you have money, is that they cant know HOW you got that money.. The problem with paypal and bank transfers and what not, is that there will always be a tracking, a connection between who received and who sent. With bitcoin, the money will come from the generic bitcoin pool, its impossible to know if the money came from buying entheogens or buying books.
 
endlessness said:
Snozz, Im not really informed on bitcoin, maybe others like elru/house/benz/etc can give more info, but here's what it seems to me: Its not that banks or other institutions cant know you have money, is that they cant know HOW you got that money.. The problem with paypal and bank transfers and what not, is that there will always be a tracking, a connection between who received and who sent. With bitcoin, the money will come from the generic bitcoin pool, its impossible to know if the money came from buying entheogens or buying books.
Click to expand...
I got you, but even so, theoretically, if you could put cash into bitcoin anonymously (like with a money order) people who work in the service industry or similar arenas would be able to avoid reporting their hard-earned tips and still use them in an identical fashion to cash in the online marketplace (as opposed to having to do everything in real world stores and at offline prices). Having numerous friends in the service/restaurant industries, this is something I would love to tell them about if there is such a way to apply it.
 
You can put money into bitcoin anonymously. If you ask on this irc chat Kiwi IRC you can find people who will trade with you using a variety of payment methods. They have a reputation system if you register so that you can check if the person you're trading with is trustworthy that they will actually send you the coins once you pay them. Also, there are links here https://www.mtgox.com/trade/buy for how to get bitcoins and it includes cash by mail. You could also talk to people you know in person who would want to trade bitcoins for dollars with you.

Ideally bitcoin eventually will be adopted by many more merchants and your friends could even accept tips in bitcoin and use them directly online.
 
I hope it is cool to say I have used Bitcoin several times. I've known about for about a month and half or so, when I first encountered them, there were about 0.4 of them to the US $. Now it is $8 to 1 Bitcoin! There has been a lot of media coverage recently with articles on Time and Forbes and the Bitcoin has definitely been attracting some serious interest. Hopefully the fluctuations and inflation will go down with time. So far though from my experience of it, I think it is something with incredible potential. Being able to send electronic currency to anywhere in the world for free, essentially instantly and anonymously could be of interest to some. Each time you make a transaction your Bitcoin address changes. There was a way of obtaining Bitcoins instantly via PayPal, but a week ago the person running this system had their account frozen by PayPal. To be fair though I don't think they are anyone's pal in this respect, probably for the best. Also it is interesting that the currency is in no way controlled by any government or banking system. With the recent recession stuff I can't help but think that's a good thing. One can obtain Bitcoins discretely via cash in mail and things like Western Union. One needs to know the people they are dealing with in this regard of course but there are definitely legitimate services for this kind of thing out there.


The article in Forbes:

www.forbes.com

Crypto Currency

Want to buy socks or psilocybin without being traced? Bitcoins are for you.
www.forbes.com www.forbes.com
 
easyrider said:
The value/exchange rate is incredibly volatile with Bitcoin. Sticking with Pecunix is safer for now.
Click to expand...
But the lack of anonymity kind of defeats the purpose for those of us interested in bitcoin's anonymity...or did I miss something here?
 
SnozzleBerry said:
easyrider said:
The value/exchange rate is incredibly volatile with Bitcoin. Sticking with Pecunix is safer for now.
Click to expand...
But the lack of anonymity kind of defeats the purpose for those of us interested in bitcoin's anonymity...or did I miss something here?
Click to expand...

Pecunix is pretty anonymous; it even incorporates PGP data encryption. Bitcoin probably does offer more anonymity, but its market is too volatile to place considerable holdings into it.
 
Anyone hear of bitcoin mining? My first intro to bitcoin was reading this from Cryptome.

"Really, it's all like a lottery; and the miners get their systems entering the lottery a billion times per second.

Currently, the bitcoin network produces about 1.5 trillion hashes per second, total. So somebody managing a billion a second, in a mining pool, earns about a 1500th of the total "income" of new bitcoin - 50 every ten minutes..."

Sounds interesting right? Another site said the income was about $15 an hour (- electricity, $ transfer tax, machine usage, ect.) just for having you computer on. I am however still confused at how this new currency is just that, a currency. And how does mining it come up with money from nowhere?
 
Use a pool.
If you discover a bitcoin block it means getting 50 coins at once. With a pool you get less, but constant BTCs.

..and 15$/hour seems far off. I'm generating maybe 50-80 cents per 24h.
 
Back
Top Bottom