Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
What did some people like about using Bitcoin as opposed to other payment methods - say, in an American restaurant? Why would you use it if you also had a debit card or currency?
03-06-2014, 10:19 PM
Guest
n/a posts
transferring money is fee-less.
inflation is controlled.
I've yet to meet any drug dealer who takes checks and credit cards.
Our fiat is used, and stolen, to fund wars, political and government corruption.
I think most everyone who mocks or rags on bitcoin doesn't actually understand what it is, or is genuinely too locked in to the nanny state they're terrified of freedom and prefer the cold comfort of living on their knees.
Bitcoin - as a currency - is still very, very young but the infrastructure is being developed and put into place - many start ups will succeed and others will fail, but once it's easy for the average citizen to purchase bitcoin without having to know all the technical ins and outs and storing it, then it'll catch on more mainstream. Right now, it's not quite there. It is absolutely the internet of the 90s, or probably as of now, it's more like the internet of 2000, 2001 - we're passed the aol goober stage and now into "everybody's getting online" stage but not yet at the "everyone's owned by the internet and if we can't get online we have a meltdown" stage as we are now.
We are "everybody's getting a website" bitcoin, with a large number of people who don't know what a website is and swear they'll never need one, nor will they ever do real business online. That's a better assessment I think of where we are with bitcoin as a currency (blogging website!!) and a technology (internet).
The reason you'd use it would be *free*...including tax free in many cases. Its store of value is more secure than the value of fiat any day.
Eventually some start up will issue the first ever bitcoin card and that'll be when you see massive upsurge in utility, value and price. I think Circle could pull it off. They already make it mindlessly simple to purchase bitcoin, so once they're internationally set, if they produce a bitcard, it'll change the world.
Presumably the biggest advantage is that no one can "print" more of it on a whim, as is commonly done with currencies which are controlled by a central government (i.e. the US dollar).
Presumably the biggest advantage is that no one can "print" more of it on a whim, as is commonly done with currencies which are controlled by a central government (i.e. the US dollar).
Of course there are many that consider that inability to create, a disadvantage.
Like when a nation is trying to lift itself out of a depression.
I heard it can be traceable. Look at how they caught silk road. It was thru bitcoin.
Nah, that wasn't how they brought down Silk Road. The FBI took it down by identifying and exploiting a series of foolish security errors made by the owner of the site (Ross Ulbricht, the "Dread Pirate Roberts"), but tracing bitcoins had nothing to do with it.
Under the username "altoid", Ulbricht posted a thinly-veiled spam message for Silk Road on a public message board a week or two after it went online. A few months later, using that same alias, he advertised for a particular kind of IT expert on another public message board. This time, he asked respondents to reply to his personal e-mail - rossulbricht@gmail.com. In addition, he used an account registered in his own name to ask for coding help on a programming website, and federal agents recognized the code as being almost identical to that used by Silk Road. This wasn't enough to convict him, obviously, but it did make him a person of interest.
By this time, they knew who he was, and by subpoenaing records from Google, it didn't take them long to figure out where he was. They found that he was using his laptop to log into Silk Road from public wifi hotspots near his home in San Francisco, at a nearby coffeeshop and the neighborhood library. Around this time, they also identified the physical locations of the Silk Road servers, although we don't know yet exactly how they did that. At any rate, they asked for (and received) assistance from the police in those countries, who accessed the servers and imaged the entire contents of their hard drives. The same week, they intercepted a package of 9 fake IDs addressed to him, each with his photograph, all of them purchased on Silk Road by none other than the Dread Pirate Roberts.
The rest was like something out of a Jason Bourne movie. Over a dozen agents stealthily stalked him to the library one afternoon, and quietly found inconspicuous seats near the table where he sat down. Another agent was monitoring the Silk Road site itself, and when his user profile showed that he was now online, gave a signal to the agents in the library. One of them, an attractive young woman, suddenly lunged toward him, screaming "I'm so sick of your ****!" He jumped back, startled, and she grabbed his laptop to prevent him from slamming it shut and turning it off. Two other agents rushed him from either side and tackled him, pinning his arms to prevent him from getting at the laptop.
And that was it - the end of the road for Silk Road. They had his computer, with all the encrypted files already open, and all the data intact. The bitcoins they seized were a result of this operation, not the cause of it. In fact, his bitcoin security seems to be one of the relatively few things he did get right, but then again that's probably only because even a trained chimpanzee can move bitcoins around without being traced. Run 'em through a good tumbler service 2 or 3 times, and there isn't a forensic analyst in the world who can tell where they came from.
Nobody cares about bitcoin anymore. The fad is fading. He's hoping he can bump the price up because he sank a bunch of his money into it when it was $700+.
Bitcoin, like any other currency, is tradable therefore volatile. It can be manipulated. There is no accountability, hence no recourse.
Although the following chart is needlessly complex and does not provide clear historical graphs, people should be able get an idea of the price fluctuations.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
