The Bitcoin Saga

“Investing in Mt. Gox seemed like a win-win at the time…”

That Ars Technica article had a really nice layman’s breakdown of how alt-currency works, what alt-coins are and how it all comes together.

I also could not stop reading “Arscoin” and hearing “Arsecoin” in my head.

If that wasn’t intentional, I’m very disappointed in them. :)

I love how Bitcoin has basically become “free money for hackers”.

Wasn’t that always what it was?

Haha me too! What a bunch of morons who work with this stuff.

So remember how MtGox said they have no Bitcoins and are bankrupt?

Maybe not so fast…http://www.dailytech.com/Mt+Gox+CEO+Hacked+is+Paying+650750K++a+Year+for+Tokyo+Penthouse/article34476.htm

Hack shows they apparently have 951,000 Bitcoins, worth about 611,000,000 in USD at current exchange rates.

Oops!

I had no idea that Mt Gox stood for Magic The Gathering Online Exchange, and was actually originally a MTG trading card site.

WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU IDIOTS? You gave hundreds of millions of dollars to a guy who ran an online site for Magic the Gathering cards?

I’m pretty sure I just had an aneurysm from learning that.

No, it’s even more amusing than that. He registered the domain to do a trading card site, then lost interest, then repurposed the domain. Because if he can’t even be arsed to implement a trading card website, that doesn’t necessarily imply that you shouldn’t trust him to run a full-on bank.

Hey, to be fair MTG cards can be worth a lot of money. He just decided to trade in bitcoins instead of cards.

At least you can do something with Magic cards if you’re so inclined. You can’t even make a ring out of Bitcoins like say gold or silver.

What we need is a Mox Bitcoin. Cost 0, tap to provide any amount of mana of any color. Opponent may untap Mox Bitcoin to steal all the mana in your mana pool.

Brilliant.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/i-r-s-says-bitcoin-should-be-considered-property-not-currency/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

According to the IRS, Bitcoins now count as property and are subject to capital gains taxes. Apparently a lot of the vocal miners have decided they’d rather go to jail than submit to this, so I’m looking forward to that happening.

Those idiots want legitimacy, and then they get it, then they don’t want it! Tsk, tsk.

Someone should remind them you don’t eff with the IRS. The FBI couldn’t bust Al Capone for years. The IRS did it in a heartbeat.

Idiots.

Also;

The I.R.S. now, however, says that these miners must report the fair market value of the virtual currency as part of their income."

I believe at the time you mined them, too. Keep those records!

“I’m making money outta thin air and Uncle Sam wants to tax it?! NOT ON MY WATCH!”

Though on the plus side, this probably means they can report their mining hardware as business expenses.

The irony here is that in their efforts to make Bitcoin be taken seriously, they’re drawing the very gov’t attention they wanted to avoid by using an “untraceable” currency in the first place. Oops.

To be fair, for the vast majority of its life, bitcoins have been less useful and less valuable as legal tender than MTG cards.

Yeah, I’m sure someone traded a dual land for a pizza back in the early days of Magic, but you don’t have people mythologizing it.

Anarchs don’t operate in reality, and the anarcho-capitalist Libertarians who are Bitcoin’s biggest cheerleaders are no exception.