EFF Stops Accepting Bitcoin, Regifts All Donations 391
Gendou writes "The EFF issued a statement that it will no longer accept Bitcoin donations, has not used any of the donations, and will transfer all past donations to The Bitcoin Faucet. See also additional and forum threads."
No surprises here (Score:3)
Re:No surprises here (Score:5, Insightful)
The news here is that they were foolish enough to accept them in the first place. I had no idea that their judgment was that bad.
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Just because implementation sucked does not mean idea sucked too.
Re:No surprises here (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the implementation was pretty sound. Nobody has cracked the Bitcoin blockchain transfer protocol. Some websites dealing with the stuff got hacked, but that happens all the time. It's the idea that sucked. Satoshi got the crypto right but fucked up the human element, economics.
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Agreed.
Limited supply, deflation, absurdly huge difference in 'mining' speeds between first adopters and the comparatively early adopters on the thing now, various other weirdnesses... these all counted against it.
As a P2P crypto currency system it's pretty cool. It just had a few things wrong.
Oh, and the morans on the bitcoin forum. Dear god is that place 'live with 'em.
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Why is it foolish?
It's just another way to get money. If the cost/hassle isn't worth what it brings in then obviously you get rid of it.
Are charities that accept bottles that they can return for the deposit, or aluminum cans then can be paid for handing over to a recycling center or clothes they can then sell to others foolish as well?
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Those are accepted for a value that is relatively fixed, or at least doesn't fluctuate all that much. The value of Bitcoins can and do fluctuate a great deal. It's sort of like the difference between a donation of IBM stock and a donation of a random penny stock.
I don't think they were foolish to accept Bitcoins. Even selling them at a low rate gets them more money than they had before the donation (presuming that it covers costs). But setting a preference for something of more stable value is also with
Re:No surprises here (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think they were foolish to accept Bitcoins. Even selling them at a low rate gets them more money than they had before the donation (presuming that it covers costs). But setting a preference for something of more stable value is also within their rights.
It seems their concerns were legal: "While EFF is often the defender of people ensnared in legal issues arising from new technologies, we try very hard to keep EFF from becoming the actual subject of those fights or issues. Since there is no caselaw on this topic, and the legal implications are still very unclear, we worry that our acceptance of Bitcoins may move us into the possible subject role."
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The IRS cares.
The EFF functions as a 501c3 in the US, meaning Americans can deduct their donations to the EFF on their federal tax return.
By accepting BTC, entirely aside from its own actions and legal status, the EFF inadvertently provided a loophole by which you could launder a potentially "rogue" currency into US dollars at 35% of its exchange value, via the US government itself.
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Yes, if the EFF accepts aluminum can donations, that would be foolish as well.
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Sounds great, can I buy that TV from you? I have 1200 cans in my pocket....
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Cans can....pun?... have value because they are not money. They are something to be directly used. A Block of aluminum cannot be directly used. It must first be machined, which is a service.
Money is a way to exchange "work effort". The more money you have, the more someone is willing to work for it. As long as others are willing to work for the money, it has value. If someone finds a way to "print off" more of that money, the current money gets devalued and people are less and less likely to do the same amo
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Aluminum cans have other uses besides exchange for money.
Aluminum cans can be used as tools for cutting, scooping, of course holding things and many other things I don't have on the top of my head.
Monopoly money and Pokeman cards can be used to play the games they came from, so they have value on their own.
Bitcoin has absolutely no use other than as a fiat currency.
The fact that they took bitcoins in the first place puts serious doubts into my mind about the understanding of technology at the EFF. Typical
Re:No surprises here (Score:5, Insightful)
Bitcoin has absolutely no use other than as a fiat currency.
Bitcoins are not a fiat currency. A fiat currency, as should be obvious from its name, has its value set by fiat (decree). No one is decreeing that bitcoins have value, any more than anyone decrees that monopoly money has value. It's fashionable for libertarians to use the word 'fiat' to mean 'worthless', but the two words are not interchangeable.
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Really? What about Eldred v. Ashcroft?
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Re:No surprises here (Score:4, Insightful)
Foolish to accept them? They might not be worth much of anything but if someone offers you a bitcoin what exactly is the harm in accepting it? I suppose the EFF might have taken bitcoin from a few people who might otherwise have given dollars, but in the grand scheme of things I doubt they lost out on much if anything.
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It might be stolen property.
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What's interesting with Bitcoin is that all coins are essentially "marked," you can trace the posession of a sum through all of the endpoints it passes through, and if someone alleges that they had BTCs stolen from them, they can tell you what endpoint they went to, the transaction is in the public tree, and software that would recognize funds that came from that endpoint (or any subsequent endpoints) is possible, without having to invent any exotic new technology.
If someone is defrauded, it should be possi
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That doesn't make any sense. Why is it bad judgment to accept Bitcoin? Those that gave Bitcoin did so probably because they weren't going to donate cash in dollars or another currency, ergo they haven't lost anything.
So they got something for free. And decided not to cash it in so lost nothing. Big deal. If they don't want free money then that is their prerogative.
Phillip.
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Care to expand that? It isn't intuitively obvious to me why accepting a no-strings gift would automatically be foolish. No, I don't accept "free" offers from spammers or telemarketers, but that's because of the strings, not necessarily the nature of the gift.
Sure, the gift might be worthless, but I wouldn't think it would be likely to have a large negative value.
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Sure, the gift might be worthless, but I wouldn't think it would be likely to have a large negative value.
I think the EFF would be properly hesitant to accept donations in "Liberty Dollars" [wikipedia.org] or counterfeit US cash.
I suspect that Bitcoin is close to the former in legal status, and some commentators have implied the latter (probably in borderline slander, but whatever). Statute law on alternate currencies seems inconsistent, but the authorities have been energetic applying what law is available to any exchan
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Then add in the fact that there are already money laundering and dope dealing going on with i
You mean exactly like with the real, traditional, cold hard cash?
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You do realize it doesn't work that way, right? You can't just go "give me my dollars for bitcoin" and you instantly get it. There have to be enough requests on whatever exchange you like and depending on how much you trade you risk causing a price swing which ends up netting you less money in return.
Re:No surprises here (Score:5, Insightful)
Less money than what? Than nothing? Than no money you have with your assets frozen as bitcoin? Would they get less for selling it than by giving it to "the tap"?
Say, EFF tomorrow receives a donation of one trillion Mozambique dollars. Should they exchange it to USD as soon as possible or worry that selling them all now may earn them less money?
If EFF sets the policy: "sell ASAP at current price" then there is no worry. They are not a currency trade company, they are a charity. They can freely treat Bitcoin as "donation of other goods" and it's their duty to keep the assets in a safe form, not to speculate and wait for best offer for unsafe/volatile goods.
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The worry is that bitcoin may not be legal at all. Would you as the head of a charity want to take that risk?
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The problem is that they could be left open to future legal claims from the people they sold these worthless magic numbers to; and to all sorts of criminal charges.
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Yeah, nothing is lost at all - unless you count the potential thousands or millions of dollars in billable time, court fees, and judgements which you could end up having to pay because you accepted a currency which violated numerous laws in ways which have not been
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If you RTFA, you'll see that this has been a move they've thought through carefully and had been planning for awhile. It has nothing to do with recent events. Their biggest concern is that bitcoin is a legal grey area that might possibly make them the subject of the sort of legal action they try to defend others against.
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Hm, following news of high volatility, major security problems, and the fact that one compromised account panicked an entire exchange, can anyone claim they are surprised by this?
We have to read about something besides house fires, car crashes and political scandals, how else are we to know it's news?
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Copper, Nickel, etc. are no more real. Some have an actual use value, yes, but that is not what they are being traded for, and it varies greatly depending on location and time. If everyone decided that gold was no longer cool, that would be the end of the gold standard too.
The only standards that are somewhat stable would be food and shelter...
Bitcoin is a better standard, being more easily transferable. It may have problems re. the auto-inflation - or it may be a strength. I don't know, I am not an economi
Re:No surprises here (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is a fun fact.... the same can happen to the Euro and US dollar. All fake currency suffers from this potential.Hell the Federal Reserve is printing money so fast that the US dollar is going to go flat almost as fast...
GO back to coins made of real copper, nickel, silver and gold. suddenly the currency regains it's value and cant be destroyed..... Unless someone perfects alchemy and turns lead into gold or synthesizes gold.
For the naysayers complaining about carrying coins... do you realize how much a 1 troy oz gold coin is worth?
What intrinsic value do precious metals have that makes them so valuable? Many of them can be made into shiny jewelry, which has some value; there's also some value for use in electronics and other products. Apart from that, the only value they have - just like any other piece of property, physical or otherwise - is their desirability to others.
I don't care for shiny jewelry, and I have no intention of manufacturing products that would use precious metals. Therefore, the only value those metals have to me is their scarcity and the fact that others find them useful. How is this different than the paper money I have in my wallet?
I have no problem with your decision that precious metals are a safer currency for you than USDs or Euros. I fail to understand, however, how government-issued money is a "fake currency". My USDs are accepted in trade for all the products and services I desire, meeting the only criterion - ability to be freely traded - necessary to fulfill its role as a "real" currency.
Any form of currency - USD, Bitcoins, precious metals, seashells, etc. - is simply a shortcut to enable trade without the hassles of bartering. I agree that governments aren't always stable, but neither are commodities markets. Perhaps the USD is about to collapse - but the gold bubble could also pop at any minute. If you want to avoid any currency with the possibility of instability, go back to bartering. Alternatively, trade in your preferred currency with the realization that it is not a panacea.
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What intrinsic value do precious metals have that makes them so valuable?
Scarcity and the fact that it's works well for 900,000,000 years... I'm guessing history puts more weight behind it. Plus history also shows how the fake money systems collapse... History is riddled with how Fiat Money systems fail over and over throughout time.
Re:No surprises here (Score:4, Funny)
Funny, I didn't know that dinossaurs traded on gold.
They still take WOW gold though? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:They still take WOW gold though? (Score:4, Informative)
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So far, I've gotten more USD out of Bitcoin than I've put in by about 250%. And I still own a bunch of bitcoins. I will be using them to buy actual physical goods and not USD as much as possible. I think there are enough people like me that the currency will succeed.
It's certainly a heck of a lot more 'real' than WoW gold, which only exists on WoW servers and is completely controlled by the server you're on, which generally means Blizzard.
Currency not accepted is currency no more? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Precisely ... but IMO, at least in concept, a virtual fiat currency like this could work well for items in a virtual "fiat world", no?
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Precisely ... but IMO, at least in concept, a virtual fiat currency like this could work well for items in a virtual "fiat world", no?
Look to EVE online for how it works for them.
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Bitcoins are quite similar to most forms of fiat money.
Except that Bitcoin cannot be used to pay taxes or any government fees or tariffs. Nor can Bitcoin be used to legally settle debts in some places (like the United States). In fact, Bitcoin is about as similar to fiat currency as a Chuck-e-Cheese token would be. Most fiat currencies are designed to defend against deflation, whereas Bitcoin is designed to encourage it. Most fiat currencies are useful for money lending; only a fool would lend or borrow Bitcoin.
Bitcoin was a superficially nice idea, bu
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In fact, Bitcoin is about as similar to fiat currency as a Chuck-e-Cheese token would be.
At least a token lets me play Skee-ball. Are there any skee-ball machines that take bitcoins?
I guess not, since nobody makes Skee-ball machines with continuous, high-speed Internet connections. I'm taking all of my money out of bitcoin and putting it into Chuck E Cheese tokens. (Well, if I had any, which I sure as hell don't.)
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> At least a token lets me play Skee-ball. Are there any skee-ball machines that take bitcoins?
There's probably one somewhere in Silicon Valley, existing mainly for the amusement and satisfaction of a dotcom billionaire, but you can only play it if you have an Android phone with the proper app installed, already spent a week getting funds from your checking account to Dwolla to MtGox to buy the bitcoins, and you're willing to wait 20-40 minutes for the transaction to be published and verified before the
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I have no idea whether Bitcoin will work or not, but you spend more than 5 minutes thinking about it then you see it appears as good as any other currency. You can use Bitcoin to pay taxes or government fees, just the exchange rate is dependent on the intermediary currency your government accepts. I've paid French taxes using British sterling, just the bank exchanged currency behind the scenes. Same with Bitcoin.
The dollar seems more like Chuck-e-Cheese tokens than Bitcoin, as the government or Chuck-e-Chee
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Yes and it's quite interesting to observe that once again human greed provided fuel for a bubble. As the perceived value of bitcoin increased, greed also increased - until a single trigger event, the "theft" of $500,000 worth (I wonder what today's value is) of bitcoin popped the bubble. Of course it's funny to watch the bitcoin "exchanges" today saying they will do things like reverse the transactions leading up to the crash, etc. This changes nothing. Confidence has been destroyed, bitcoin is not a "safe"
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Except it's not backed up by anything, it can literally lose value overnight, good luck finding a sucker to pay for it after that.
You mean, like every other fiat currency? USD? Euro? Etc. Etc.
Re:Currency not accepted is currency no more? (Score:5, Insightful)
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More like faith that the government in question will honour it's obligations at roughly the purchasing parity value of the money and not rapidly deflate their currency (by printing money). Their ability to repay is backed by not just gold but the whole assets of the country (since the government can tax anything theoretically).
Much of its value comes from the fact that you can't 'run out of cash' with fiat money, which was a problem after 1800 when the population wordwide started to explode but gold and si
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Actually, there's nothing stopping people from creating a fractional-reserve banking system based on Bitcoin. Most inflationary pressure is done by using fractional-reserve banking to increase the money supply beyond the actual amount of currency in circulation. Works just as well with Bitcoin.
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If you had read the articles linked, you would have seen that yes, they are slowly releasing them so they aren't flooding the market.
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Please stop posting Bitcoin stories (Score:2, Interesting)
Please stop posting Bitcoin stories. No one cares about Bitcoin. We don't give a rat's ass about Bitcoin. We could not care less about Bitcoin. We have no interest in Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not concern us.
Re:Please stop posting Bitcoin stories (Score:5, Informative)
I care about Bitcoin, I like seeing some news about it. I find it interesting.
Bitcoin ended up as a pyramid scheme (Score:5, Interesting)
The Bitcoin thing has gone off in a different direction than its promoters anticipated. They were thinking "payment system", like gift cards. The idea was that most Bitcoins would be tied up in people's "wallets", and spent slowly. All that static value would anchor the currency.
That's not what happened. Bitcoins turned into a speculative vehicle, with "miners" grinding away solving hashes and generating more Bitcoins, and flaky "exchanges" offering on-line trading. The exchanges are tiny; today's worldwide Bitcoin trading volume is comparable to the sales of one supermarket. The daily volatility is huge, even on days when there isn't a break-in. So no major retailer can accept Bitcoins; they don't know what they will be worth at the end of the day, let alone the end of the month.
In a speculator-dominated system, Bitcoins are a pyramid scheme. The scheme by which it becomes harder over time to generate Bitcoins favored early adopters by a huge margin.
It's already too late to get in. The difficulty level has reached the point where buying and powering the new hardware is not cost-effective. And that was before the price of Bitcoins crashed. (The current price is around $13.)
Then there's the flaky exchange problem. Mt. Gox (formerly Magic, the Gathering Online Exchange) turns out to be two people in Tokyo. Tradehill is some company in Chile. All the other exchanges are too dinky to matter. Not one of them has the organization and resources of a typical small-town bank. Worse, they're not just "exchanges". They're depositary institutions, holding customer balances. Mt. Gox customers are now very aware of this, because they can't get at their money while Mt. Gox is down. Some people are worried over whether the money will be there when Mt. Gox comes back up.
The "exchanges" represent a mis-design of Bitcoin. There should have been a way to do an exchange in a distributed way, without the exchange holding customer assets. The NYSE and NASDAQ don't hold customer balances. Brokers do, but you can have your cash swept from a brokerage into a bank daily, or more often if the numbers get big. The Bitcoin exchanges are slow at delivering money - Mt. Gox has a daily transfer limit, and even when they were up, many users reported delays.
The EFF was right to bail.
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It is completely incorrect to call Bitcoin a "pyramid scheme." Technically, it's a "pump-and-dump." [newstechnica.com]
Re:Bitcoin ended up as a pyramid scheme (Score:5, Insightful)
Haha, good one.
Not pyramid, run on the bank (Score:2)
I am not saying it's good or bad. I am merely pointing out that this is nothing new for any type of currency. Liquidity is always a consideration and every currency; past, present, and future has had to deal with runs on the bank at various times.
The real "tell" will be if Bitcoin survives the run.
Re:Bitcoin ended up as a pyramid scheme (Score:4, Interesting)
The Bitcoin thing has gone off in a different direction than its promoters anticipated. They were thinking "payment system", like gift cards. The idea was that most Bitcoins would be tied up in people's "wallets", and spent slowly. All that static value would anchor the currency.
Citation?
That's not what happened. Bitcoins turned into a speculative vehicle, with "miners" grinding away solving hashes and generating more Bitcoins,
Which in general is good. The more miners there are, the more secure the currency is against double-spending.
The exchanges are tiny; today's worldwide Bitcoin trading volume is comparable to the sales of one supermarket. The daily volatility is huge, even on days when there isn't a break-in. So no major retailer can accept Bitcoins; they don't know what they will be worth at the end of the day, let alone the end of the month.
There's no reason retailers have to wait until the end of the month or even the end of the day before cashing out their bitcoins. A retailer could cash out their bitcoins immediately, or after the first confirmation block. The volatility of Bitcoin is only a problem for speculators.
The difficulty level has reached the point where buying and powering the new hardware is not cost-effective. And that was before the price of Bitcoins crashed. (The current price is around $13.)
No it isn't. An average ATI graphics card will still net you $100 per month profit, even at the current difficulty.
Worse, they're not just "exchanges". They're depositary institutions, holding customer balances. Mt. Gox customers are now very aware of this, because they can't get at their money while Mt. Gox is down. Some people are worried over whether the money will be there when Mt. Gox comes back up.
Why anyone would store money in Mt. Gox and not immediately take it out after a trade is beyond me. Clearly some people do, but that seems like asking for trouble.
The "exchanges" represent a mis-design of Bitcoin. There should have been a way to do an exchange in a distributed way, without the exchange holding customer assets.
It's not a "mis-design". Acting as an exchange is beyond the scope of the Bitcoin protocol. If you want a distributed exchange, that's an entirely separate project.
However, I can't see how a distributed exchange would work, unless it was just some manner of trust network and actually making the trades was up to the individuals. That doesn't seem particularly user-friendly to me, so I suspect that exchanges will have to be centralized websites.
That said, it would be better if (a) people used alternative exchanges more, and (b) the exchange source code was open sourced.
The EFF was right to bail.
The EFF bailed for entirely different reasons. If the future legality of bitcoin is contested, they want to be able to fight without also being the one of the ones being prosecuted.
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How exactly can a transaction system that broadcasts all of your transactions to the network "make the world a little better place".
Because it's not Paypal ;)
Seriously though, I'm not saying that Bitcoin is perfect. That's kind of the point of geek things, we're trying to break some new ground here. But the specific point of broadcast transaction seems quite essential if you want to keep things distributed, so that other peers will verify your transaction.
Endorsing bitcoin (Score:3)
When accepting bitcoin, EFF gave credibility to this money and as any fiat money credibility is what it needs. Now EFF doesn't accept anymore, they take back this credibility.
I think in both case, this was on purpose by EFF. They did the first move because they though bitcoin was an interesting experiment. They do the second move because bitcoin is now an ugly mess.
Some Actual Text From The Announcement (Score:3, Interesting)
1. We don't fully understand the complex legal issues involved with creating a new currency system.
2.We don't want to mislead our donors. When people make a donation to a nonprofit like EFF, they expect us to use their donation to support our work. Because the legal territory around exchanging Bitcoins into cash is still uncertain, we are not comfortable spending the many Bitcoins we have accumulated.
3. People were misconstruing our acceptance of Bitcoins as an endorsement of Bitcoin. We were concerned that some people may have participated in the Bitcoin project specifically because EFF accepted Bitcoins, and perhaps they therefore believed the investment in Bitcoins was secure and risk-free. While we’ve been following the Bitcoin movement with a great degree of interest, EFF has never endorsed Bitcoin. In fact, we generally don’t endorse any type of product or service – and Bitcoin is no exception.
Oh! It's just a Soap Opera... (Score:3)
I just figured this out: spoiler alert.
This whole BitCoin thing is fiction. An over-zealous Slashdot editor got the idea to produce original episodic content for the site, and signed up some hardware vendors and electric utilities to sponsor it. BitCoin doesn't actually exist, and anyone who claims it does is obviously part of the production team. Or one of the sponsors.
Now I can sit back and enjoy the daily BitCoin story, secure in the knowledge that it is all just entertainment, and not actually a Glenn Beck-style ploy to involve gullible Slashdot readers in an elaborate Ponzi scheme. I was starting to get worried about unnecessary power consumption and the misapplication of scientific computing clusters, but it's all just CGI, isn't it? Bravo!
Anyway, good luck guys, it's been a great series so far. Hope you win that Emmy!
bitcoin just gettting more popular (Score:5, Funny)
Homeless. Hungry. 11 kids to feed. Please help. 1BYjEs25Eo2Bz7MS4wnN81EkEjD5S2KXPV
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The same way 'capitalism' is -- the freedom to bilk people out of their money if they're willing/uninformed enough to participate.
To the strict free market folks, that's a transaction which is just part of the system, and is 'self correcting'. That's why regulation is considered bad.
And, sadly, I'm only being partly sarcastic.
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More likely your right to promote your "money" as an alternative currency and encourage adoption by merchants and consumers, thus validating your "money".
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Except you have no such right at least not in the US. Such is clearly stated in the constitution as being a power of the government.
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http://www.berkshares.org/ [berkshares.org]
Now, Bitcoin is different, in that there is no guarantee of being
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You are confused. Defending a currency is not the same as forcing somebody to accept it. Your grocer is not obliged to accept the notes printed by the government, as they are not obliged to accept Bitcoin.
Phillip.
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Your grocer is not obliged to accept the notes printed by the government
This is false in many countries. Learn about legal tender [wikipedia.org] laws. Not all countries have them, but many (most?) do.
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Actually, I believe they are.
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There are several alternative currencies currently being used in the US. Look it up - google is your friend.
There's no problem printing money. The problem is getting people to see enough value in the money that you printed to accept it as a medium of exchange for goods and services. Now if you lie to people or somehow trick them into thinking that it has value (like saying, for example, that Collateralized Debt Obligations are "AAA" grade, cash equivalent investments when in fact you don't even have the s
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The problem is getting people to see enough value in the money that you printed to accept it as a medium of exchange for goods and services
That is a problem that is easily solved: give people a fixed exchange rate, and back your private currency with the government's currency. Over time, people will accept the private currency, perhaps out of regional pride, or perhaps because it has some useful property (e.g. maybe you put more private-currency dispensing ATMs in the region than there are other ATMs, or you give merchants some special incentive, etc.).
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The "scam" is in how the proponents of Bitcoin constantly try to promote artificial scarcity with a resource that, by definition, is infinite in size.
There are an infinite number of mathematical codes that could be arbitrarily called "money". They might not be called "bitcoins", but they will be completely equivalent to bitcoins in value. So what is so special about BTC, beyond the hype that its speculators keep promoting for their own
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Not related, just an excuse to post trollish comments on how social darwinism is freedom and everything else is nazi-communislam.
Is it me, or is that what 98% of the Neo-Neo-Libertarians advocate now, Social Darwinism... which is closer to Nazism (in ideology) than anything else I know.
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What does this have anything to do with being a "defender of freedom"? Why does the EFF have to support BitCoin?
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Its not absurd at all, they don't have to support someones pet project...
Bitcoin has nothing at all to do with internet freedom - it is you that is trying to somehow link the two.
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I see what you did there.
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The EQUIPMENT that the "internet" resides on is not, the internet. "The internet" is like "speech" or "Writing" it's an intangible medium for relating information and it's owned by humanity as a whole.
Speech is made by a speaker. Writing is made by a writer. The fact that it is a concept does not mean it is not property. Property itself is an abstract concept. Investigate the source of that concept, and you will understand why intellectual property is property, and why "owned by humanity" is incoherent.
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Do you know how you increase knowledge? By sharing it. Culture? Same way. Common bonds? By sharing events.
Notice the sharing? You might want to investigate this entire concept of "humanity" a bit further.
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Do you know how you increase knowledge? By sharing it.
I increase my knowledge by learning. I don't believe I have ever increased my knowledge by regurgitating what I already know.
The fact that more people could learn certain information if it was provided for free doesn't justify the theft of that information. Do you think creators will continue to create if they know their products will simply be stolen and "shared"? By wanting the unearned, you undermine the whole system.
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Except majority of that "property" that is being spoken of here (the cables, pipes, etc.) was paid for by the government subsidizing the ISPs in order to promote the building of infrastructure. Instead of continuing to build the infrastructure that they were given money for, they kept it. Instead of increasing capacity by building infrastructure they are overselling and shaping.
Let's give it by a different example, look at phone lines. Net neutrality is analogous to the common carrier law in respect to tele
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As for net neutrality, the current environment is toxic to any and all competition, so free market argu
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For those who won't realize before clicking the link the story is to an objectivist periodical that was co-founded by Ayn Rand. Take that as you will.
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Attempting to band-aid one regulation with another does not lead to freedom.
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Yes and those monopolies were granted completely out of the blue without any lobbying on the part of the telecoms and cable companies. No, they clearly made huge public outcries against these monopoly grants that the local municipalities forced upon them. Are you fucking kidding us? Seriously, these telecoms and cable companies bought the people who are granting them those monopolies and are clearly colluding with each other so they don't have to actually compete. Hence why you never really see Time War
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So the world of "bioshick" wont become real?
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Well... actually, it's anybody's guess what it's worth right now, or what they'll be worth 24 hours after MtGox is back online. My guess is that they'll end up somewhere around $5-10. The only reason the price dropped to 1c was because someone basically stole a half-million bitcoins and dumped them all simultaneously on a market that normally would only have enough buyers (at its recent trading prices) to buy a tiny fraction of that amount.
If you showed up at a flea market (far from the nearest ATM), set up
Re: (Score:2)
What started out as a $20 coin is (as I understand) now worth about $0.03 US dollars.
It's exactly the other way around. Before Bitcoin hit major news websites like this one, the value was relatively stable at a very low value. Ever since the word is out that money can be made by trading BTC, the value went up to over $30 per Bitcoin, but also became increasingly instable as more speculators entered the market. This all came to an abrupt end when Mt. Gox (by far the largest Bitcoin exchange) was hacked and stopped all activity. The exchange rate for Bitcoin has since then been relatively sta