Looks like Mt. Gox is dead...

[xeemzor]

While bitcoin is a failure as a currency, distributed trust is still a very powerful thing. Developers need to stop trying to fit it into places where it doesn't below and focus on new areas.

From the whitepaper here: https://www.ethereum.org/:

Ethereum can be used to codify, decentralize, secure and trade just about anything: voting, domain names, financial exchanges, crowdfunding, company governance, contracts and agreements of most kind, intellectual property, and even smart property thanks to hardware integration.

 

[LegendKiller]

I am getting a kick out of all of the nerdrage over the supposed creator being "doxed". Wow, so a guy who put his name everywhere and seems likely to be the creator gets found.

These are the same people who will "dox" anybody they don't like. If information is free, *ALL* information is free. Deal with it.

 

[WelshBloke]

I think the Bitcoin project/protocol is a very interesting computer science/economics experiment, and a successful one.

The failures have all been related to the conversion of BTC to USD and vice-versa, the 3rd party sites set up to facilitate it, and the speculative investors who trade it like a commodity and use predatory marketing to convince others to to so too. Without those pressures, its value compared to major world currencies would have settled somewhere stable in accordance with its value in facilitating online anonymous transactions in international or unregulated markets.

But the fact that this little cryptography experiment is still going and grown big enough to be a household name is testament to how brilliantly designed it really is.

Soooo....

If nobody trades it and people only use it as a currency to buy... um... how is this going to work again?

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

lol, the whole idea, wow i never saw that coming, lol - end of story

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

mm popcorn and lawn-chair time! :biggrin:

 

[rockyct]

My buddy told me the reason people are gravitating towards Bit Coins is because they are tired of the Fed's manipulation of the dollar. This is the reason why gold and silver are undervalued today. The Bankers know what they are doing.

They saw Bit Coins as a huge threat.

I hope the people being ripped off right now are people as gullible as your buddy. Someone is going to get their money, it may as well involve bitcoins.

 

[cubby1223]

*snip*
This is, we now know, a psychologically normal response for prophetic groups whose central predictions fail to come true. And today, you can see something similar going on with another group of failing zealots. I'm talking about the cult of Bitcoin.

For months now, Bitcoin soothsayers have proclaimed that the virtual currency is going to Change Everything. The mass adoption of Bitcoin, they told us, would utterly transform the way the world stores and exchanges value. Government-backed currency would become obsolete. Farmers in Kenya would use the same Bitcoin-based payment systems as cafés in the Mission. With the future of money in the hands of Satoshi Nakamoto's brilliant protocol, inexact central planning would be replaced by algorithmic decentralization.
*snip*

Of course I agree with the article, but I am also aware that I too enjoy when news articles against Bitcoin present themselves.

I don't know, I think both sides are guilty of seeking personal confirmation.

I still have a closet full of baseball cards that were once just as good as cash But then I grew up! Never believed in bitcoin, never owned a bitcoin, but dang it would have been nice to make some sweet cash along the way. Do I want to see bitcoin fail because I think it's a horribly flawed system designed to primarily make the creators rich off of everyone else, or do I want to see if fail because I was not one who got rich off of it?

 

[KlokWyze]

Such collective fail. Many misunderstanding. No intellectual profit!

 

[iGas]

Autumn Radtke, 28-year-old CEO of virtual currency exchange, found dead in suspected suicide in Singapore

Withdrawal vulnerabilities enabled bitcoin theft from Flexcoin and Poloniex

Is there a way to short bitcoin?

 

[halik]

Autumn Radtke, 28-year-old CEO of virtual currency exchange, found dead in suspected suicide in Singapore

Withdrawal vulnerabilities enabled bitcoin theft from Flexcoin and Poloniex

Is there a way to short bitcoin?

lulz

“We see ‘financial’ organizations related to bitcoin collapsing like a tower of cards,” he said. “Not having any ability to recover (financially) from an online attack is not something we would expect in a mature financial market. I think that what bitcoin users are learning now, the hard way, is that there are some benefits to the existing ‘centralized,’ regulated financial infrastructure (like supervision and insurance for example).”

No shit. As per my last post, it's not as if the US government woke up one day and started up coming up with finical regulations. Literally all the statutes on the books address some issue that has happened in the past; regulation is almost always reactive.

 

[Mandres]

Soooo....

If nobody trades it and people only use it as a currency to buy... um... how is this going to work again?

I imagine it would work well if speculative investors hadn't started driving up the value and flawed/corrupt exchanges hadn't started disappearing with everyone's holdings.

If the value had stabilized at some point relative to BTC's ability to enable online anonymous commerce then there would be no need to convert the coins to dollars, and no need for the insecure exchanges to facilitate that conversion to exist.

The BTC program/protocol/algorithm itself is more advanced and more secure than any other currency humans use today. It's also immune to capricious increases and decreases in supply (which may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you feel about the role and effectiveness of the FED and the World Bank in easing the business cycle).

I understand all the spite and "LOL BITCOIN!" responses. That's a normal reaction from people who were pitched this idea as an investment scheme. It's a terrible investment, and always has been. But it's a very interesting idea for a new form of money, with a lot of real advantages.

I think its biggest weakness is that its open source, and therefore easily reproducible. Each new XYZCoin that comes onto the scene reduces the credibility of the original and hinders universal adoption.

 

[dr150]

Autumn Radtke, 28-year-old CEO of virtual currency exchange, found dead in suspected suicide in Singapore

Withdrawal vulnerabilities enabled bitcoin theft from Flexcoin and Poloniex

Is there a way to short bitcoin?

This would be the safest short of all time, even 401k money.

 

[Juncar]

I don't think Bitcoin will ever work in a real economy because of the fixed currency supply. Deflation never works well for many reasons. Also, I do not think fractional reserve banking works for Bitcoin because there is no central body to back it up.

 

[darkewaffle]

http://teamcoco.com/video/bitcoin-explaination

The little 'informational video' was pretty funny to me.

 

[dud]

I stumbled across this article while surfing. Yes, it is from CNN Money but it has a few good points at to why Bitcoin is "doomed":


http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/11/bitcoin-taxes/?source=cnn_bin


"One of the main appeals for bitcoin is the fact that it was designed so that there can only be a finite number of bitcoins created. This, of course, will help those who keep their wealth in bitcoin avoid the hidden tax of inflation. The United States has an explicit policy goal of devaluing its currency at a steady 2% per year, and that adds up to quite a bit over time.

But here's the rub: The IRS will value the gains you make on bitcoin vis-a-vis the dollar. The more inflation in the dollar, the higher your tax bill will be if you keep your wealth invested in bitcoin and transact often using it. There's also the issue of the high cost of record-keeping and reporting to the IRS an individual or company's frequent bitcoin transactions.

So, if you're interested in bitcoin as a currency for its ability to maintain value, you're also going to have to plan on paying a high price to the feds for the pleasure of using it.

The great contradiction inherent in bitcoin is that so much of its appeal comes from its supposed independence from the government, but it's increasingly clear that for the currency to be widespread enough for it to be a stable store of value, it will have to have to receive the blessings of governments across the world. And those governments are unlikely to cede their control over the monetary system anytime soon."

 

[momeNt]

Why are people conflating an exchange failing with the underlying commodity failing?

This is one of the benefits of gold though or central currency for that matter. If a gold bank burns down, the gold is still there, or if a ship carrying gold sinks, it's still at the bottom of the ocean. If a hard drive containing a bitcoin is destroyed, it's unrecoverable. There are some ways of physically destroying gold, but likely would never happen. It would be an incredibly dumb thing to do to vaporize gold or use fusion or fission to change it. Not to mention a huge waste of resources and money.

Loss like that is most likely an instance of bad deflation. For the record, not all deflation is bad, but no need to go down that road right now.

 

[Imp]

Some guy already threw out something like 5,000 bitcoins. That's one shit happening instance within the first few years of conception... This finite supply will really start dwindling over time, especially with how serious regular people (including me) take backing things up.

 

[norseamd]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...xs-us-assets-lets-class-action-suit-continue/

hackers released file dumps that apparantly confirm that mt. gox is lying. now a judge has made frozen mt. gox assets and ordered expediated discovery

This post through #446 merged from another thread.
admin allisolm

 

[iamwiz82]

I, for one, am shocked.

 

[gorcorps]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2370734

 

[norseamd]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2370734

that was about them supposadly losing the coins.

now more info has shown that possibly they did it and a judge has now made rulings against mt. gox and allowed the lawsuits to continue.

 

[TwiceOver]

Wonder if my son will ever sue me for hiding the monopoly money...

 

[ImpulsE69]

I think the government should give the supporters of bitcoin their wish and just stay out of it. While I like to keep government out of as much as possible, common sense of human nature explains everything wrong with the entire concept.

 

[highland145]

Wonder if my son will ever sue me for hiding the monopoly money...

As long as the stripper accepted, who cares.

 

[OverVolt]

You see, you know how to *take* the money, you just don't know how to *hold* the money. And that's really the most important part, the holding. Anybody can just take money.