The Republican and Democrat parties are both private corporations. What does that make you, voting for either one?

Think how much of this money would have gone to any candidate with the slightest shred of dignity and spine to stand up for their constituents.

>The "generally accepted" part is key here - it's far from "generally accepted" anywhere outside of a few illegal marketplaces. That could certainly change though.

While it is certainly not "generally accepted," Coinbase and BitPay offer bitcoin payment solutions for tens of thousands of merchants already. BitPay's merchant adoption curve is still exponential: a few weeks ago they reported surpassing 40,000 merchants.

Then of course there is Toshiba, which turned on bitcoin support for their POS terminals (Toshiba bought IBM's POS systems a few years ago).

And let's not forget Gyft, through which I buy groceries from Whole Foods, hardware from Home Depot, and lots of random crap from Amazon, all using bitcoin. Furthermore, thanks to the volatility, I save upwards of 15 percent on a regular basis (buy when it drops, buy groceries when it rises).

..burning up in the upper atmosphere, like ours will someday on far-off planets, long after we are gone.

...the Next Great Web Language ends up being PERL? Yes, please.

It has a lot going for it, especially if a project like this makes it as approachable as PHP for web application development.

Serious question, though: other than it being old, are there any problems that keep it from being viable as a modern web application platform?

...or some other cryptocurrency. As these low-cost screens come on in the developing world, those users will want access to the modern, internationally-capable fee-free (very nearly) monetary system represented by cryptocurrencies. This may make 1st-world debate about the good or evil of bitcoin (and its ilk) largely irrelevant.

> There will be a real bitconomy the day that real people can meaningfully run their real lives living on bitcoin. As in, can a McDonald's worker ask to be paid in bitcoin, and spend bitcoin directly on everything they need to live, from rent to transportation to food to clothing?

I already buy food and clothing with bitcoin. Rent and transportation aren't happening yet for me personally, but you can buy cars and gasoline with bitcoin in some areas and there are various landlords (and whole LOT of hotels) that you can pay with bitcoin.

Not bad for an upstart nerd-currency barely 5 years old with no political backing whatsoever.

> Your bubble is going to burst soon.

This bubble's crash is double the last bubble's peak, and people such as yourself were saying the exact same thing on the last bubble. And the one before that. Of course maybe *this* one will be its death knell....right? Or maybe you'll be weeping to your grandchildren some day about how you could have bought bitcoin when it was under $500... hmm, sure you want to risk it? Don't you want to have just a *little*, just in case it really does take off?

You think you are playing it safe by staying out. At what point do you realize that buying in has become the safe thing to do? $1,000 per? $10,000 per? When you can spend it for rent/transportation/food/clothing? Or when the grocer down the street puts up a sign, "Bitcoin Accepted Here"?

Careful now, Toshiba bought their POS systems from IBM a while back. And now they accept bitcoin. A real POS system used by real, brick-and-mortar stores, accepts bitcoin. This isn't nerd currency any more, this is becoming real.

Sure you want to miss out?

True, although I don't think many non-nerds come to Slashdot, especially with the decline in viewership.

BitPay protects its merchants from double spend risk. Problem solved. All you wait for is for the tx to appear on the network, which often takes less time than a CC auth.

Bitcoin is faster, safer, and more elegant than credit cards. Once you use bitcoin a few times to pay for real-world things, credit cards start to seem distinctly archaic.

BitPay protects its merchants against double spends.

As for credit card chargeback fraud, all it takes is a phone call.

BitPay protects merchants against double spends.

To clarify, it doesn't cost a lot of money to attempt a double-spend. Got confused with 51-percent attack (perhaps plausible with a big enough botnet?). Regardless, BitPay offers protection against double-spending to all of their merchants, so the point is moot in the case of this article.

Have you ever tried to actually accomplish a double spend? It is not as easy as you might think.

Furthermore, BitPay protects merchants from double-spend risk. Even if you are successful, the merchant is not necessarily defrauded.

Contrast this with any form of fiat exchange -- credit card, check, cashiers' check, or cash -- where the merchant assumes all such risk.

Yes. But a merchant can choose zero confirmations. So for example, I recently renewed some domains at register4less with bitcoin. They displayed QR code and I took a picture of it with my phone's bitcoin app. Confirm the amount, and about 5 seconds later the QR code went away and the purchase was done. No name, no billing address, no entering long number strings, just take a picture and confirm. It was simpler and faster than a CC, and there was absolutely no way for someone to intercept or steal the payment parameters and take more money from me.

Once you do this a few times, credit cards start to feel very archaic.

Now of course I could have attempted to defraud r4l, but the infrastructure required is not even remotely worthwhile for this scale of purchase. For those purchases where that infrastructure is worthwhile (thousands of dollars) then it seems appropriate to wait ten minutes. Notably, merchants in this range -- such as car dealers -- often have access to all kinds of identifying information which can be used to track you down in the event that the payment fails or is revoked. Nevertheless, they still occasionally fall victim to counterfeit cashier's checks and the like. With bitcoin, once those confirmations start layering up, there is no possibility of revokation or counterfeiting.

$600 is not grocery money.