mf - story #5884

bitcoin
posted by dsk on June 17th, 2011 at 2:48PM

"Any anarchist cyberscheme like bitcoin will rapidly attract the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: Mafia, drug dealers, terrorists, and child pornography"

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posted by dennisn on June 17th, 2011 at 3:04PM

Yep. (Did you hear that from agoristradio.com?) I think one of the Horsemen already arrived -- thugs in the US are saying people shouldn't be allowed to use it 'cuz it is used to buy drugs, like I mentioned in http://dennisn.mooo.com/m...ory.php?sid=5834 . (Not unlike cash.)

It's a wonderful project. I'm wondering whether I should buy them now. Mtgox.com is currently trading them for $13ish/BTC.

What do you think about it's future? Will it bring down Statism? (There's no way to stop it.) I was just thinking, the other day, what's to stop me from starting my own parallel network/currency and calling it DCoins -- if Bitcoins become too expensive, why not just start a new batch? (This would kindof double the "money supply".) But, I guess these are issues that the free choice of currency inevitably raise.

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posted by dsk on June 27th, 2011 at 12:26AM

>What do you think about it's future?

It'll be around for a long time. There was a plethora of articles about it, so quite a bunch of people jumped on the bandwagon. There will be people trying to game the market and I think bitcoins already went through a major crash to an extent that mainstream journalism pointed at it and said "See!! You need a central bank and regulation". The beauty is that even if the bitcoin market crashes 1000 times, as long as you have 2 nodes, it'll stay alive. You can't kill it because there's no head to cut off.

>I was just thinking, the other day, what's to stop me from starting my own parallel network/currency and calling it DCoins

Nothing. Just like there is nothing stopping you from issuing monopoly money as currency. If you get people trusting and using your DCoins fork, all the power to you.

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posted by dennisn on June 28th, 2011 at 12:14PM

Actually, there was no crash -- all that happened was one account got hacked, and the hacker voluntarily sold those stolen bitcoins at near-zero prices. But the USD-value of the coins hasn't really changed much, excluding that event -- which lasted for less than an hour, I think.

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