What are your thoughts on BitCoin?

Okay, that link you gave:
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/google-searches-for-pressure-cooker-and-backpacks-lead-to-fbi-visit/

It links to the following for the article:
https://medium.com/something-like-falling/2e7d13e54724

Unfortunately, THAT link actually gets you this:
BDpoMEK.jpg


And what is medium.com anyway?
Medium is a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends. It’s designed for little stories that make your day better and manifestos that change the world. It’s used by everyone from professional journalists to amateur cooks. It’s simple, beautiful, collaborative, and it helps you find the right audience for whatever you have to say.
Click to expand...

So you basically linked to a fiction posting site to claim something about backpacks, pressure cookers, and prism?
 
To be true, the story is based on a woman's testimony via her blog.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat...er-helped-prompt-visit-feds-article-1.1415101

It was a tongue-in-cheek post, anyway. Do you take PRISM seriously? I do for its intended use as a tool to protect us. I don't as something that threatens me.

No one really knocked on my door at that time in the morning. Authorities would be here for more than an internet search after that.

edit: The story isn't satirical, as for example The Onion, though, if that's what you're inferring.
 
I'm not an American and my justice system, among other things, actually functions.
 
One more article for the Dunning-Krugerrands:

Ever since Paul Krugman started weighing in on Bitcoin recently, people have been using his notorious 1998 Internet prediction to mock him:
By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.

Krugman was dead wrong, but rather than mocking a man who now says he does not “claim any special expertise in technology,” I think we are better served by fleshing out the extremely apt Internet:communication::Bitcoin:finance analogy his critics raise. If we can see why Krugman might have thought that the Internet would not be significant, we might come to understand why many smart people think Bitcoin isn’t compelling and be able to explain why they’re wrong.

The Internet is a telecommunication system, but it was not our first telecommunication system. Telegraphs and telephones have been around for over a century. Like these older systems, the Internet allows us to communicate, but it differs in some important ways. Perhaps the biggest difference in the Internet model is the abstraction of a separate “application layer.”
Click to expand...
http://theumlaut.com/2014/01/08/bitcoin-internet-of-money/
 
In 1998, he really ought to have seen the potential impact the internet could make... In 1990 you can get away with that sort of thing, but by 1998, the internet was already very well developed. The only real difference between 1998 and 2005 was Google.
 
Well, you should never take predictions at face value. They are primarily intended to be fun. Everyone who uses very strongly worded predictions as a serious policy recommendation are dangerous madmen who ought to lose their jobs.
 
Algeroth said:
One more article for the Dunning-Krugerrands:


http://theumlaut.com/2014/01/08/bitcoin-internet-of-money/
Click to expand...

I think that is a really interesting article, that I would encourage others to read. I get from that that you can do a lot of things with the "SCRIPT" language in bitcoin, for example gambling. You could build a bet into a bitcoin transaction and do away with bookies.

[EDIT] After reading the comments, the gambling would (currently?) only work with miners.
 
@Samson: I read the article, but I don't have a handle on the Script language he's talking about, and how it relates to Bitcoin. I can't tell how realistic those applications are. However, the points made nearer the start of the article were on the mark. The internet was not merely another communications device; the thing that made the internet so great was that the infrastructure was divorced from the application. Whereas with traditional utilities, the pipes can only carry one thing, and, if you want another thing to go through the pipes, you need the say-so of the people who own the pipes, the internet was free from such encumbrance. If you wanted to run a Counterstrike server, you could run it on the same set of pipes as a web server, or a VOIP server, or any other server. If you wanted to serve up different applications in a webpage, you could do so without having to ask the owners of the pipes first. Divorcing the infrastructure from the application allowed the applications to flourish unencumbered by how long- or short-sighted the owners of the infrastructure might have been.

I don't know whether this translates to Bitcoin, but it's a sound enough analysis for me to take the author seriously. I was hoping he'd say that Bitcoin divorced the application (exchange) from the infrastructure (fiat currency), and thus opened the door to many new applications that otherwise would not have existed. However, he went into a thing about Script which I didn't understand. I don't know how realistic those applications are.
 
Mise said:
In 1998, he really ought to have seen the potential impact the internet could make... In 1990 you can get away with that sort of thing, but by 1998, the internet was already very well developed. The only real difference between 1998 and 2005 was Google.
Click to expand...

They pay Krugman the big bucks because he misses obvious marks, yes.
 
So the US seized some BitCoin. Is the control war on now?
 
At least BitCoin is free of government control.
 
A “massive and concerted attack” has been launched by a bot system on numerous bitcoin exchanges, Andreas Antonopoulos has revealed.

This has lead to popular exchange Bitstamp putting a temporary halt on all bitcoin withdrawals.
Click to expand...

http://www.coindesk.com/massive-concerted-attack-launched-bitcoin-exchanges/
MtGox’s press release and the responses from Bitcoin Core developers does not shed a very good light on MtGox’s response to the problem. Right now, to the outside viewer it’s a sort of blame-game going around but as, Maxwell has noted, the flaw and solutions to it have been known for some time.

By proceeding with a bitcoin withdrawal freeze (with little explanation) and then the weekend outage of the exchange (followed by a day with little acknowledgement to the public) MtGox is producing the perfect storm of public relations uproar. Now that the company has finally come forward with the reasons for the bitcoin withdrawal freeze the blame falls flat.
Click to expand...
And people behind MtGox are clueless hacks that don't understands the protocol:
http://siliconangle.com/blog/2014/0...tcoin-protocol-core-developers-beg-to-differ/
 
You don't get this problem with paper money and cheques.
 
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