Mining with GPU's has a very limited lifespan as well now.. ASIC's are here, and taking over, and GPU's can't compete with them even a little.. Right now there may be a window because ASIC supply is limited, but not for long.j In a short time, it won't be worth the electricity. No matter what the price is, it will balance out that way, because ASIC is simply the most efficient way to do it (by far).

I got pizza delivered to the house the other night. It cost me 0.82 bitcoins. Pizza Hut got it there in about 35 minutes.

Of course, Pizza Hut doesn't support using bitcoins directly, but there is a proxy to make it happen... pizzaforcoins.com

Incidentally, the first well documented purchase of anything real using bitcoins was also purchasing pizza (years ago).. The purchaser spent 10,000 BTC to have 2 pizzas delivered. Later after the price of Bitcoin had shot way up, a journalist asked him if he regretted that.. He said something like "no way.. it was *REALLY* good pizza" (that he spent the then equivalent of $300,000 on).

Of course posting the answers to your questions in /. isn't much better than putting them in facebook.. One could argue that it's a bit worse given the audience.

Bitcoin's version of confirmation means that the transaction is set in stone. It's virtually impossible to conceive of a way that the transaction could ever be undone under any circumstances.

When you use your debit card at the store, this is not what you're doing or getting.

If you just want to know that someone had funds available, and has sent them to you, then you will find that out in a couple of seconds.. It's still theoretically possible (but pretty darn difficult) they they could also spend those funds elsewhere, and then you don't know if you're really going to get paid in the end or not. Not the kind of effort someone is going to go through to steal a coffee.

If you've purchased/sold a house, or maybe a car, then you probably want to hang out for a couple of confirmations.. I'd still say though that after two confirmations (somewhere from 10-20 minutes usually) you're probably pretty safe, even if you transferred a couple of million dollars.

Zero value for criminal prosecution.. The loss of family photos would end up in civil court I believe, and could possibly bring in millions depending on "harm" determined there..

Family photos that were stolen in a criminal case would probably have the same value any other random photo's fair market value (not much).

...but the money *is* data.. USD or BTC.. the money is just data.

Many people own USD and praise it's merits.. Not really insider trading. I'm not privy to Google announcing bitcoin support for google wallet or anything.

Also, I'm not trying to tell anyone to go invest in bitcoins. I actually don't think that people investing in it is in my long term interest. People using it is. I also think people using it is in their long term best interest as well if the project succeeds. I'm not a big fan of today's banking industry, and stories about LIBOR manipulation where no one goes to jail really aren't helping.

I was originally just trying to say that the jackasses that call anyone and anything relating to bitcoin fools and scam artists are well..jackasses.

It's true I have more incentive now, but I always thought it was a good idea otherwise I'd never have wasted nearly $20 on someone's pipe dream.

You're certainly correct though, if you're looking for an unbiased opinion, I'm certainly not a good choice.

You can buy drugs relatively safely on the internet. It's a pretty popular use.

It's true it's a zero sum game. The same goes for currencies died of an inflationary spiral. A zero sum game is actually what money is for. Making sure you're on the winners side is nice if you're going to play with money. So far it's working for me.

I was certainly lucky, but you explain to me why my luck is going to change? Your premiss only works if one day everyone dumps them all. I'll certainly keep an eye on it, but tell me why everyone's going to dump them tomorrow, or some other day, when the system has anywhere from 1/10th to 1/1000th the wasted money of our current system? You're not a fool for paying an extra 2-3% for everything? In total, the losers don't necessarily end up being people holding bitcoins. As they become more accepted, the losers may end up being all the other people holding other currencies. I assume that means you. The bitcoin adopters will lose if bitcoin stops gaining in popularity, and does an about face and starts decreasing in popularity (the speculator roller coaster also matters, but is a short term thing). Right now, that doesn't seem to be happening (trust me, I watch). There is a strong motivation for merchants to use them. There are no charge backs, no fraud, no PII to get your ass kicked by California with, and almost no fees (none if you don't mind things being very slow). Bitpay noted that in their first 10,000 transactions online, they didn't have a single case of fraud. The norm for Mastercard and Visa is 1 in every 160 transactions.

On the Ponzi issue.. Yes, there are similarities. Same goes for penny stocks and to a lesser extent normal stocks, any forex, and really, *ANYTHING* you could invest in. I don't advise people to invest in them. I tell people that they're neat, and a better form of money, but still very volatile. I also tell them that if they do try to use them as a get rich quick scheme, they're likely going to lose all their money when the volatility spooks them and they make a bad trade. If they're going to do anything like investing, they should get a small amount that they'll never miss, and forget about them for years (it's the forget about them part people have trouble with). What's better though, is to get a few, and use them just to learn what it's about.. Go over to bitmit and see how cool it is to buy things online without handing out your life's history.

OK, do you even listen to yourself? "those BTC that people have will be effectively worthless as there's no upside to buying them, assuming you even can buy them." If you can't buy them, then they're the price hasn't dropped all that much after all. There are lots of the things.. You'll always be able to find someone to sell you 0.00000001 BTC... especially if you're right. For a deflationary spiral to work, the price has to CRASH because nobody wants them, because you can't do anything with them because everyone wants them too much to part with them. Unsurprisingly there aren't many great historical examples. Eventually, people have necessities that they'll need to acquire, and they'll even part with things that might be worth more later.

There are a number organizations that have been very careful to ensure that they're compliant with the KYC requirements, and registered for official approval from FINCEN.. The US government hasn't officially stated anything one way or the other, but having FINCEN involved and participating is a (weak) endorsement of sorts. Under current laws, it's most likely legal, but tomorrows laws may take aim specifically at Bitcoin and similar things. It's still pretty unlikely that they'd be able to do anything about it, but that sure might hurt adoption (in the US anyway), and thus the price.

Some governments have clearly stated that Bitcoin is perfectly legal, although they don't formally recognize it as a currency, more like a commodity.

If you bothered to read up at all, and I mean at all, you'd know all this already.

I guess. He made a few buck along the way didn't he?

I spent my $19.50 after I saw an article on /. about bitcoin. I remember thinking, wow, that's an insane (but good) idea. I was fully expecting that it would get hacked the next week and disappear. It never even crossed my mind that it would survive to become anything substantial. More than a year later when I realized I had a substantial sum of the things, it took me about a week of double-taking and reading to realize that they were really for real, and that they were really very similar to any other currency, except that they're more secure and better managed than any other example that I could find).

As it turns out Satoshi had created a very well designed system that has yet to be hacked in any substantial way. Having looked over the design a few times, I really doubt that it ever will be.

Of course, sites related to bitcoin have been hacked, but that has nothing to do with Satoshi's design. They were designed to work like cash, and they do.. Including the part where someone can just steal them if you let them. One time, a long time ago there was a bug in the Satoshi client that accidentally created some extra coins (and the other Satoshi clients didn't reject them) so temporarily there were more coins that the protocol should have allowed, but the bug was quickly fixed, and the clients retroactively recognized the invalid transaction and removed it, so ultimately it was a failure as a security bug (it should be noted that noone tried to hack extra coins though, it was the product of an accident if I recall).

It's funny all the people calling anyone getting into Bitcoin suckers. It'd be fun to see if one of them would dare to mark the price of Bitcoin for each time they've made a comment link that. I'm one of those "Bitcoin suckers".... At this point, I've got about 30 grand to show for my original $19.50 investment.. Boy, you've really made me feel like a sucker now haven't you. There was a one month period (shorter actually) where you could have bought them and held them until now and lost some USD on them if you were to sell today.. It's looking more and more like soon, that won't even be true.. It will soon become impossible to have lost money on them. Fools! Fools! You're all fools!!! Oh, uh.. Why didn't I do that? What amazes me is how long it's going to take some of you to realize you were the fools, despite the indisputable math, and the fact that no one made anyone any promises you'll still be yelling 'Ponzi Scheme' for years to come. Good for you. More power to ya.

Of course, buy them, and trade them, and you can easily lose money, but that's just because you're not as smart as the other bitcoin traders.. You could do that trading gummy bears as well...

This one would be on you.. You control the security of the key that the money is sent to. Now if they don't send you the money, there's an issue you'll need to work out with them, but your risk is limited to: from the time you put the money in the machine, to the time you receive it.. Depending on how sure you want to be, that's anywhere from about 10 seconds to an hour.

Bitcoin is still relatively unstable, but it's a lot more stable than it used to be.. Time and growth will make it more stable. Of course time and recession would make it less stable but at this point, it seems pretty unlikely that it'll go that way. So far, overall, Bitcoin has seen a lot of growth (exponential growth actually.. look at a graph using a log scale.)