Tobias Gogolin wrote: > There is nothing illegal about owning or trading BitCoin, but I suppose > there will be 'authorities' that will at some point talk up a storm again= st > them! > If you read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin or the Inventors own > whitepaper, you will see that Bitcoin Mining is intended to be a gainful > work requiring Radeon 5850 Graphics Cards either harvesting the initial > programmed growth or later the transfer fees! > So the Electronic Engineering Tag is deserved for this thread! > I am still curious if there are more interesting observation or opinions! > =20 The thing with bitcoin is that it was clearly designed by someone who was highly anti-inflation. The combination of that and the growth of the userbase leads to heavy deflation. That in turn leads to hoarding of bitcoins which can leave a situation where a small number of early adoptors control enough bitcoins to crash the exchange market between bitcoins and governemnt money. This happened recently when someones MT Gox (one of the major exchanges between bitcoins and USD) account got hacked. MT Gox decided to roll back those trades but sooner or later I suspect a similar situation will happen with a legitimate sell-off. It's certainly interesting to watch but I certainly wouldn't put any money into it that you can't afford to lose. It's interesting technically as well. The blockchain system is an engenious soloution to the problem of preventing double spending (which is a key issue for any "cryptocurrency" system) without the need for a central authority. > > On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 5:26 PM, Tobias Gogolin wrot= e: > > =20 >> Now here is something to get yer' heads smoking! >> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin >> >> Anybody got me a source of one of these? >> >> =20 > > > > =20 --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .