rockyleal

Impressive. You managed to turn the most positive news for Bitcoin into a post about the "collapse of the Bitcoin economy", through a very flimsily constrcted series of assumptions. There should be like a new version of Godwin's law wherein all positive Bitcoin news will lead to its collapse in three steps.

The report you refer to, about the bot at MtGox, is itself speculative, interpretative, and proves nothing. Just a heads up, before you jump into your radical conclusions:

An Occam's Razor approach to understanding the data, is that the bot was performing legitimate buys for an institutional investor who would have made a deal offline, and directly, with MtGox. There is a perfectly plausible explanation to the bot that is not nefarious. So, please reconsider you "irreparable" decision, since its basis are far form solid.

There are many reasons to believe the rise is 'real', especially that the fundamentals are enormously more solid now than when it crossed $650 now than when it reached that price for the first time (in november).

Fundamentals, you say? I am afraid that there are more serious ways to learn about those than whether the "normals" you interact with are using it or talking about it just now. Your personal perspective might not necessarily provide the whole picture! I recommend you get your data from a site like http://www.bitcoinpulse.com/ check it, please, and tell me if you still stand by your arguments.

Also, 'volatility' is not argument enough to eliminate the reasons why people like to be paid in Bitcoin. I prefer Bitcoins over Dollars without hesitation, and I am very glad I have been paid in Bitcoin in the past. Other people just want to accept any kind of money their customers want to give them, and eliminate the volatility exposure by using Bitpay and the like.

Microsoft. It is a convoluted PR stunt for Xbox.

http://www.tekrevue.com/excavate-atari-landfill/

http://www.vg247.com/2014/04/10/microsoft-invites-you-to-att...

Everyone, including HN, is falling for it.

As I type this reply, the counter says parent comment is 15 minutes old. It is the top comment right now. Why on earth? It is an off-topic comment! Is it because anti-Bitcoin sentiment is popular? Or is it because on HN the top comment must always be negative, even if off-topic, for some weird bias of the community?

Ad Hominem

No I think he means the terrorists that want to kill you because you are free to pay for everything.

I've been paid in btc in several occasions for my work as a writer and researcher.

Pierre Bourdieu called it "cultural capital"

The "Eastern Philosophy" section is a bad joke.

yet

No, it is true. To describe a currency as 'debt-free' means that it is not created through the process of creating new debt. The way modern currencies like the dollar are emitted is through the generation of new debt (government bonds are government debt, and banks create new currency when they 'loan' money). The negative consequences of not paying what you borrow (forclosure, etc.) are ultimately what backs debt-based currencies. Graeber argues (and I agree) that it is therefore the threat of violence from the state what gives value to currency in the modern era.

Bitcoin is fundamentally different because new currency is created through mining. Yes, you could create a secondary market on top of Bitcoin that handles loans, but not new Bitcoins, therefore it is debt- free currency. When Nixon decided to decouple the dollar from gold in the seventies, what he did was effectively to move from a debt-free currency to a debt based currency. The move had huge implications in shaping the world until today, because it meant that the US became free to print dollars endlessly. The external market for dollars was solid because of the world reserve status, enforced through the US military. In this way the US could print away AND keep internal inflation very low in relation to the amount of circulating currency.

Breaking this cycle, which is what feeds the US empire, is why I think Bitcoin will in the end provide a great service to mankind.

The author of the Article summons Graeber in an abysmal way. In 'Debt' Graeber proposes two main ideas, that the State is by no means necessary to have a great economy (he is an anarchist, with small 'a'), and that our current debt-based monetary system is a mess. Bitcoin is debt-free because no one needs to take loans or create bonds since bitcoins are mined. I think Graeber would be (is?) fascinated by them.

One more lesson? It's not spelled "Columbia", that is the name of a city in the US. If you are referring to the South American nation it is "Colombia". With an O.

The price

>There likely are others, but they don't come to mind at the moment.

Chavez

Good point, its the West indeed.

A better use of the word 'instead' would be, for example, something like this:

Instead of fixing torture and global surveillance, US building laws to help it become legal.

That is not true, however. While you can't withdraw dollars from Mt Gox, all other currencies work just fine.

Disclaimer: Colombian here

It makes no sense to use quotation marks around the term American Imperialism, as if it wasn't real. That the US is an empire is beyond question, and Snowden has shown that it has turned the internet into an unprecedented tool for global control.

No statesman in their right mind would allow a foreign power to freely operate such a tool undisturbed in their territory/population. Internet sovereignty should be a priority of any government interested in preserving at least some degree of national autonomy, and indeed neglecting to so after what has been made public would be either a sign of great weakness or of being a US-puppet government... or both. The later is the case of my government. The countries that have complained louder are indeed the countries with some degree of power.

Speaking of the Chinese, I think that Snowden has only proved that there is actually a lot to learn from them. They have been the smartest ones since the begining, when early on they realised the nature of Google, Facebook and the like, and refused to let their population become addicted to giving all their information for US corporations to mine, store, analyze, profit, and provide intelligence to the US government.

Of course the above doesn't mean that the Internet should become surveilled by all local governments. The point is that the changes that should be made are toward a globally decentralised web should also not lead to locally operated surveillance, but the first does not imply the second. Surveillance is a political decision.

Chinese Internet is both more autonomous and more controlled. The first attribute is desireable while the second is not. I think it is key to keep in mind the distinction between those two things to make the best out of what is coming next.

Just for the record, what OP is doing is illegal. His main goal while in Thailand is work. By working while on a tourist visa he is breaking Thai law.

On the other hand: from $0 to $140 in 2 years? Oh god yes!

Hacker News's hipsterism, consisting in necessarily the top comment being about how everything about the link is bullshit, is really getting old.

In this case, it is just ridiculous. The speech is serious and articulate, it touches a lot of important points, and defines a set of actions going forward.

And, it makes me want to do business with brazilian-based companies, once the announced more autonomous technologies are put in place. The internet needs to be decentralised again, and this is exactly the kind of step that can lead there. If the technological alternative offered in brazilian soil holds, I would definitively move all of my cloud footprint there.

It is presented as a "distributed network" but it is highly centralised, and therefore (as has been shown) controlled by one player, and yet when someone (Brazil in this case) moves to making it more distributed a it should be, it is painted as "controversial".

yep thats what i meant. i'm sorry he/she got so upset whith my analogy somehow. sheesh!

I think there is a lot of sensationalism in the way this issue has been aproached. To inject data into the blockchain in this way is comparable (although not identical) to writing the same 'evil urls' in a dollar bill with a pen, and then passing it around.

It is a problem that exists in a different layer than the currency, even if it is to some degree 'passed on' through the currency. Likewise, the solution (imho) lies in a different layer: detect a cp link in the blockchain? Great, take down the link, problem solved.

Just as it is not the fault of TCP/IP, or its 'downfall', that it is able to transmit 'evil data', it is not Bitcoin's fault what vandals sometimes write on it.

Rome wasn't built in a day

I you had written "an accountable manufacturer (or at least a sympathetic community of other buyers) rather than a random producer", you would have avoided one of the forms of racism that is socially acceptable to Western people at this time.

Hey PG, I'm Nicolas Mendoza author of the article. Any comments? Anything you specially liked about it?

I clicked, and I see a long list of papers. Which one is the relevant one to this topic? I'd like to read them all, but can't afford that much time right now...

Well, then you can read the actual serious intellectuals and researchers like Chomsky, for example. Read "Manufacturing Consent", no ufo stuff there just the real deal. There is extensive literature and documentation of what is really going on, but its not going to be part of the narrative, you have to look for it. Assange's new book is another example. There are tons of authors, just follow the thread. Note: HN, any other reading material you would recommend to me or to stfu?