zazen

Read the rules, jaspmf

It isn't. And it has been posted numerous times before too :) He just posted a track to this one called "Alis Track Thing Remix". Alis Track is 17 on the other SC acct. That seems pretty damning Anyone can post a track called something remix after the fact. Stop posting bollocks in this thread And Read the rules jaspmf

Mods can we get Jaspmf out of this thread

bollocks, and obvious bollocks, mr just-signed-up-to-watmm read the rules

lol, afx is such a troll

Someone needs to rename this thread to holyshitwqtfbbqaphex!!!!1111111111111

brilliant yeah good work. For the lazy: compare 0:10 in the vid to about 0:50 in the 22 pearls soundcloud

I think they're going for a retro vibe, as with the soundtrack. That poster is totally 80s. (Also, very clear references to original star wars posters)

The music and style seem somewhat Tarantino-esque to me, I guess because that same song was used in Reservior Dogs. Like, they're going for a pop, fun, but Tarantino kind of vibe.

ohh! I thinki found it!! Now... how do I go about importing a wallet or whatever? Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk There are different Bitcoin clients and I think they might use different .wallet formats. Or they might be compatible, not really sure. The two main ones are Bitcoin-Qt and MultiBit so try them first. http://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet

https://blockchain.info/address/13BRTUE2e2Krun67K5otWfa8q3Db5jvPex 0.01 BTC was transferred in to the address on that date, but nothing else. Still, thats $10 or so. Gordo: You would not have needed to be online to receive the money to that address - only the sender needs to be online. Its all to do with the public transaction blockchain etc. So if there were problems they must have been at Funktion's end. Or, he was bluffing and never sent it. Someone sent 0.01 in, for sure. In short: with a normal wallet, to work out how much money you've got, you open it up and have a look. with a bitcoin wallet, to work out how much money you've got, you look at the entire history of bitcoin transactions, count the totals coming into and out of your wallet's addresses, subtract one from the other and thats what you've got. Everything is public except the private keys that lets you send from your wallet's addresses. If you still have the private keys to that wallet's addresses (in the .wallet file) then you still control the wallet.

There was a US senate hearing today about virtual currencies, and they generally said positive stuff about it. e.g. see http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-18/u-s-agencies-to-say-bitcoins-offer-legitimate-benefits.html http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304439804579205740125297358 US Govt making positive noises can only fuel the rise. I think it'll break $1000 soon.

$4.6m in todays price

lol

It hit $197 on Mt Gox today. $180 on the more cool-headed bitstamp.net interesting times

That sorta looks cool but I have no idea whats going on once he gets inside the guys mouth. Why does he turn his head? What kills him? How does microscopic ant-man throw the other guy through the window?

wow, yeah. Looks like he's moved to Fargo with his Sister. Thats pretty major http://www.youtube.com/user/ulillillia/videos?view=0

Four posts in a row, I must seem pretty obsessed. Ok to be clear: I think bitcoin is fascinating but it is experimental and potentially unstable. I don't think of it as a scam, but on the other hand I wouldn't advise anyone to put money into it that they can't afford to lose. Its all pretty volatile and the exchanges regularly get DDOSed or go bust.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/12/bitcoin-is-ludicrous-but-it-tells-us-something-important-about-the-nature-of-money/ As to the deflationary thing, thats a bit beyond my grasp of economics. The article claims it caused the great depression, but surely there was more than one cause of that. Ultimately though, Bticoin is open-source so if the community agrees, they could switch to Bitcoin2 or whatever which could be designed to not have a finite limit. I imagine bitcoins original makers built in a limit because they were hedging against Moore's law. As for the faith question: whether to put my faith in a central bank vs a bunch of programmers: I'm a programmer and I've seen the tech/programming community create some literally amazing things over the past decade or so. The fact that Linux exists is incredible. The fact that Wikipedia exists is incredible. Its early days for Bitcoin but I think a currency created with the same open spirit as Linux or Wikipedia is a fascinating idea. I'm not exactly putting much faith in it yet, but compared to the complete bollocks-up of everything that the traditional financial sector has managed over the last few years, I'm interested to see where bitcoin goes.

The energy that goes into mining is problematic, I agree. But a technical detail that people often miss is that the Miners are actually providing the "Transaction Engine" that validates the Bitcoin transactions people are making. That is, the pooled processing power of the miners is also what powers the blockchain and hence the whole peer-to-peer validation system. So the energy the Miners consume should be compared to the the energy that normal banks consume with their own transaction systems (visa, swift, bacs etc).

No-one really knows how its going to turn out yet. Its a new thing. People try to compare it to Gold or Tulips or Ponzi schemes but because of the open-source and because of the internet angle it feels fundamentally different to me. ... e.g. Compare with the Euro: invented by economists, politicians and bankers in the mid-1990s. They just decided how it was going to work. ...Hackernews: I am very intrigued by Bitcoin. It has all the signs. Paradigm shift, hackers love it, yet it's derided as a toy. Just like microcomputers. I admire your optimism, but I really don't see a paradigm shift here. Imo, it's just another form of currency and simply adds another example to a large amount of other examples. And the comparison to the euro is a bad comparison, imo. The euro was about joining various nations within a new "nation", the eu. The new coin was but an instrument against the context of creating a union. It was not some new invention of how economies should work. It was about taking from how economies tend to work, and using that to help creating an eu. I know the euro is completely different, I was just comparing how politicians and nation states design things to how computer programmers design things. And, fyi, the countries that used the euro remained separate nations. You don't agree that a completely decentralised currency that uses peer-to-peer validation is a paradigm shift? Well, ok then. I'm not that optimistic - Bitcoin is an experiment and it could go wrong. main problem at the moment is that for it to be useful, its value needs to be fairly steady against other currencies. But because of the press and newness, its attracting a lot of speculation. Here's a good blog post about how Bitcoin could be useful in the Developing world. http://blog.nyaruka.com/bitcoins-bottom-billion-why-the-developing-world-may-be-bitcoins-biggest-customers e.g. imagine you're in Rwanda and you run a tech startup (which is that blogger does, incidentally). Trying to get validated with a merchant visa account is an absolute bureaucratic nightmare. Whereas setting up to receive bitcoin payments requires no rubber stamp from any corporation or government. Similarly, if you're in China, government control of currency exchange is a big problem. http://qz.com/74137/six-reasons-why-chinese-people-will-drive-the-next-bull-market-in-bitcoin/ Disclosure: I have 6.2 bitcoins, just for fun. I'm interested in the tech and economic ideas around it.

No-one really knows how its going to turn out yet. Its a new thing. People try to compare it to Gold or Tulips or Ponzi schemes but because of the open-source and because of the internet angle it feels fundamentally different to me. Its being built with an open-source hacker/engineer mentality. e.g. Compare with the Euro: invented by economists, politicians and bankers in the mid-1990s. They just decided how it was going to work. Not many people ever understood the finer details of how it was supposed to work once you had countries sharing a currency but not a central bank. The economists and politicians assured everyone it was fine. Confidence held for a bit (see my previous post about confidence). Now its all falling to pieces. Now look at Bitcoin: Created on the basis of a published paper, code written open-source, collaboration by different people. Decentralised, see what works mentality. Different clients and exchanges all plugged into the same system. Public debates about features and future directions. When there's a crisis (a hack, or 0.7/0.8 blockchain split) some people panic, some people get together and work out a fix. A good example: MtGox site has been unresponsive/up/down for maintenance for the last few days. Everyones angry. Do they put out a press release? No, they do an AMA on Reddit. This is completely unlike anything we've seen before - a currency backed by hobbyists and hackers rather than a Government. That means its shaky - confidence wanes, exchange rates yoyo, exchanges come and go bust again, web sites buckle under the pressure. But thats an engineering approach - try different things, see what works. Main problem at the moment is that for Bitcoin to be useful the exchange value needs to be less volatile. But because its new and interesting and has been getting a lot of press, we're getting spikes and bubbles. But perhaps the community will figure out a fix. A word of warning though: Along with the DIY hacker mentality, is the opportunity for scammers and thieves, so be careful. In summary: This is a new thing, it looks somewhat like old things that didn't work. But really, no-one knows. its all about confidence in the end. Here's a good quote from Paul Graham, veteran technologist at head honcho at Hackernews: I am very intrigued by Bitcoin. It has all the signs. Paradigm shift, hackers love it, yet it's derided as a toy. Just like microcomputers.

OK, let me explain it: Money is just confidence in a collaborative illusion. USDs are backed by the government etc and so on, but in the end, the value of a USD is just based on the idea that people are confident in it. Granted, the US Government is a pretty powerful entity. On the other hand they're in a lot of debt and so on. Its confidence judegments about that based on other countries that makes the USD go up and down against other currencies. And those other currencies are also based on confidence about their respective countries/governments. And thats it. The USD represents nothing else than that. Its not backed by gold stacked away somewhere. Its just based on confidence that the USD will continue to be the USD. Currencies need a community. For the USD that community is obviously people of the USA and also most of the rest of the world who are happy to deal with USD. If you're talking Uruguayan Peso then thats a smaller community, but still, lots of people all over the world are willing to exchange your Uruguayan Pesos for things. Zimbabwean Dollars - not so good. In theory the people of Zimbabwe form the community for that currency, but in practice they barely believe in it. Not a very big community for Zimbabwean Dollars. Gold - has some intrinsic value due to its use in jewelry (its a nice bendy pretty metal) and also electronics. But its trading value as a commodity is based on confidence - confidence that people will continue to use it as an exchangable thing and will continue to view it as valuable. Bitcoin, then, is designed to be distributed. The problem of keeping track of who has which bitcoins in their wallet is solved by a distributed system. The blockchain. I won't go into detail, but its designed so that as long as the Bitcoin community have more processing power combined than the 'bad guys' combined (whoever they may be) then the system will continue to work. Note that this has never been done before on this scale. Every other currency must be tracked by centralised regulated entities like banks. Bitcoins are tracked by the 'cloud' as it were. Bitcoin has also been designed so that people can generate new bitcoins by mining. Its designed to get harder over time and then stop completely by the year 2140. This serves to entice people into the bitcoin community and also helps make sure the bitcoin community has more combined processing power than the 'bad guys'. Bitcoin is new and very innovative, so although it has a community and that community has confidence in it, that confidence wavers a lot and so the price of bitcoins will remain volatile for many years to come. But i think it has a future. Bitcoins don't exist, but then neither do USDs in any strict sense. Whats important is that there is a system to track who has what and that there is a community and that they have confidence in the illusion.

It hit $250 per bc today The whole thing is very interesting, especially because there's no consensus on whether its the future of money or a huge folly. I'm betting on the software engineers over the economists. Compare y2K to 2008.

Fantastic. Uli's getting older too.