Holy crap. That guy Gavin Andresen, I worked with him like 10 years ago at a startup game company when I was in college. I helped him write an article for Gamasutra about what we were working on. Basically we tried to take the open source Quake code and make a 3D environment for blind gamers. It worked, but it never made any money.
He also wrote, or helped write, Roger Wilco.
Small world. He’s a wicked smaaht guy, what the hell is he doing at BitCoin?
Getting in early so he can get out early, most likely.
Putting irreversibility to the test!
Short version: exchange has a coding error that sends a customer 512 bitcoins instead of just 1. Recipient says “hey, thanks for the gift!” and resells them, exchange owner flips out and begs him to return the coins, accuses him of theft, threatens to show up at his door, all to no avail.
Say what you will about The Man, he knows how to get his fiat currency back.
I’m kind of kicking myself for not trying to cash in on this lunacy.
Anyone interested in the bitcoins who isn’t checking the sa.com thread on them is seriously missing out. It’s amazing - also 500 pages long, welp. Scamming, prostitution, sex tourism, criminals on the lam, oh, and ridiculous ideas about alternatives to fiat currency, it goes on and on. Here’s a link: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3413928
Bit delayed, but blimey I thought Roger Wilco, for its time, was a cracking piece of software. we used to use it over 28.8k modems playing Delta Force. Good times.
Unfortunately, it looks like you have to register in order to even browse SA again (ie give them $10)
They lock out unregistered people ever now and again. You’ll be able to browse them again without paying :10bux: in a few days.
What in the hell am I missing that the guy who made the first post needed to be temp banned for it?
Maybe. Its always cut me off after a few pages.
Somedays you don’t get to see anything at all. Other days you can look at 4-5 pages before it stops you.
I gave up even bothering in short order.
This is not a road you want to go down.
The OP probably smelled too much like pro-bitcoin spam to the mods would be my guess.
Someone on the bitcoin forums un-ironically suggested bitcoins might become more stable if they were backed with something tangible in the real world like, say, hmmm, I dunno maybe gold?
This is how dumb these people are.
I linked to an interview with him earlier. He seemed mostly interested in it as a fun tinkering project. It’s been a massive success on that level. It’s not his fault that all of his users have questionable rational faculties.
We hardly need another person telling us the fundamental flaw of the Bitcoins, but here’s Krugman:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/golden-cyberfetters/
So how’s it going? The dollar value of that cybercurrency has fluctuated sharply, but overall it has soared. So buying into Bitcoin has, at least so far, been a good investment.
But does that make the experiment a success? Um, no. What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that’s not at all what is happening in Bitcoin.
[…]
So to the extent that the experiment tells us anything about monetary regimes, it reinforces the case against anything like a new gold standard – because it shows just how vulnerable such a standard would be to money-hoarding, deflation, and depression.
I’m not sure being a lot like gold in the eyes of many people is such a terrible fate. Of course Bitcoins won’t work as currency; that was obvious. But whether the same social forces that granted gold, a relatively useless mineral, its large and stable value through the centuries will do the same thing for this virtual good seems to be an open question.
The whole point of Bitcoins was to be a viable currency alternative/replacement to physical money.
Bitcoins are nothing at all like gold from any standpoint. The whole point of gold is that if the world goes completely to shit you have this physical substance that humans have deemed valuable since the beginning of humans with which to trade. Key word: physical. Mad Max would piss on Bitcoins if that was at all possible.
Of course, Mad Max would use gasoline as a currency… which powers his V8 Interceptor.
Well Krugman made the point that Bitcoins were intended to be a fixed supply commodity…that there would only ever be a max amount of them and that would approximate the sense in which gold can only be mined at a finite rate. (In fact, a better approach at least according to people that think that money should never ever change in value.)
Krugman then went on to point out how incredibly retarded the concept of perfectly fixed currency is. Society should want money to promote economic activity and not rely on it to support some loony-toon ultra conservative worldview about wealth accumulation.
They aren’t even 100% like gold from that standpoint, as mining tech could improve dramatically or an enormous gold deposit could be discovered that would flood the market with the stuff, killing the price (as happened when Spain dumped its booty from the New World into the European markets). Plus, anyone can mine gold – you can’t artificially mete it out the way you can with bitcoins.
And yes, there’s only so much gold on the planet so ultimately the two are the same in that regard, but for the moment they are not.
To be clear, I’m not disagreeing with Krugman. My main point is that nobody on the planet is going to be stupid enough to accept bitcoins in the post-apocalyptic scenario that goldbugs invest for. Fallout 3’s bottle caps would make better currency than bitcoins, because intangibles simply won’t cut it.