

Speed Bumps on the Road to Virtual Cash - blatherard
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/business/media/04link.html

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vessenes
If you're interested in Bitcoin, the absolute best thing you can do right now
is provide viable, interesting, valuable economic exchange to the system.

Work for Bitcoin, offer to pay for work in bitcoin, sell your farmshare for
bitcoin, etc. Bootstrapping an economy is hard, but can be rewarding as the
article mentions.

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axiom
The thing that will keep bitcoin alive is black market transactions. As long
as there is a single officially supported currency that can be traded into
bitcoin there will be a huge market for it.

I don't see every nation in the world banning bitcoins so that pretty much
means it's guaranteed to remain viable (and more likely grow.)

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wmf
But can black-market transactions support the current $100M market cap? The
world black market is probably tens of billions of dollars, but what fraction
will adopt Bitcoin?

~~~
axiom
Check this site out: <http://bitcoinwatch.com/>

The velocity of bitcoin is 730k/24h or $11M/24h, which is pretty insanely high
and suggests that if anything the current value of bitcoin is low (due to
perceived risk.)

Lest you think this is all trading volume, the total trading volume on all
exchanges for the last 24h is under 20k bitcoin. So that remaining 710k in
transactions is coming from somewhere, and I'd bet good money that it's not
ISPs or any of the other merchants listed who accept bitcoin. If I had to
venture a guess I'd say drugs and money laundering.

Think about it, this is a money launderer's dream come true. A completely
untraceable currency with 0 fees. You can pump in a few million in USD, trade
it into bitcoin, pull it out of some random exchange, and dump it in any
random part of the world you feel like. Then hide it in some Swiss bank
account. There's not a thing that anyone can do to trace it.

