

The bursting of the Bitcoin bubble - arihelgason
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/10/virtual-currencies?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/bl/bitcoin

======
mcantelon
Bitcoin it ahead of its time. Bitcoin is has a lot of potential uses and these
uses haven't gone away because a bubble burst.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Deflationary currency is an oxymoron.

~~~
nandemo
A deflationary currency might be considered undesirable but it is not an
oxymoron any more that "inflationary currency" is.

------
ww520
Just a wild thought. Is there a way to associate an email with a future-
created bitcoin account? The goal is to be able to send bitcoins easily to an
email address even though the recipient has not created a bitcoin account. The
recipient can create an account later on to pick up the bitcoins. This would
make it easier to seed wider usage of bitcoins. That's how Paypal started.

I guess this requires a trusted central third party as an eschew to hold the
fund for the email recipent and for verifying the recipent's account via
email.

~~~
Andys
A paypal-style site can create a new bitcoin account on behalf of the new
user.

Then the payer can transfer funds to it, using a transaction that requires
signing with keys that only the payer knows and can pass to the payee
directly. Bitcoin transactions can also have timeouts and have the inputs
locked while the outputs are still floating.

<https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts>

------
Tichy
I was about to sell my remaining bitcoins this morning when I realized: wait a
minute, I don't even know how long the Euro will continue to exist (living in
Euro country). As much as it pains me, because probably the price will fall
even further, I'll keep some BTC around just in case...

On the other hand I suppose the existence of Silk Road is not sufficient to
drive prices up, because most vendors will just convert their BTC to dollars
again immediately.

~~~
katovatzschyn
>As much as it pains me, because probably the price will fall even further,
I'll keep some BTC around just in case...

Swiss Francs, CAD, and even USD are much safer if stability is your concern.
If the Euro indeed collapses as you seem to fear, you may even find yourself
making gains.

~~~
hugh3
Or the classic hedge currency: canned food and ammo.

(Maybe not the ammo, in Europe. Get a bat.)

~~~
cpeterso
Plus alcohol and heroin for barter.

~~~
ericd
I doubt you're going to want to barter with people that desire heroin...
Everclear is a good one, though.

------
Lexarius
I did a little mining while it was profitable, but running the air
conditioning to keep the GPUs from melting cannibalized most of it during the
summer. I'll have to check back once things cool down a bit more - perhaps a
drop in difficulty could make "free" heating for my apartment viable again.
Not holding my breath, though.

~~~
hippich
Do not expect it to happen soon tho. Before $30+ price difficulty was
_doubling_ every two weeks. Today with 90+% price cut difficulty drops 10-15 %
every two weeks...

Now, if you really wants to make it right - buy water blocks for your cards,
route water pipes outside your building and mine :) AC will thank you :)

------
hippich
Overall, reading comments on the economist site I now understand how public
perception of bitcoin technology is wrong.

~~~
QuestionWriter
Do share more. I thought many of the comments were surprisingly clued-in.

~~~
hippich
Well... First of all - bitcoin is not "digital coins" or "digital gold", but
p2p distributed ledger in first place.

Once you truly get it, most comments become irrelevant.

