Good article that details exactly why the bitcoin is a pyramid scheme

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I would totally have bought some dogecoin if it had been physically printed coin.

Why isn't anyone doing THAT for alternative novelty currency? I mean, c'mon.

[Faust]

I would totally have bought some dogecoin if it had been physically printed coin.

Why isn't anyone doing THAT for alternative novelty currency? I mean, c'mon.

Dogecoin is worse than the bit coin, it's pricehas been deliberately driven down by a pack of clowns on IRC, it's like all the problems of bitcoin with shady activities that will stop it ever being recognised as legitimate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126153

[Junkenstein]

I would totally have bought some dogecoin if it had been physically printed coin.

Why isn't anyone doing THAT for alternative novelty currency? I mean, c'mon.

Like this?
https://www.casascius.com/

Casascius Bitcoins are physical coins you can hold - and each one is worth real digital bitcoins.

However, due to myriad legal issues:

As of Nov 27, 2013, I suspended sales of items that contain digital bitcoins.  Current items for sale do not contain bitcoins.

I wonder, would a physical launch followed by an online/open mining system be open to more or less manipulation?

I suppose the other avenue open at this point would be just crank out a bunch of different ones and run them like HYIP's with a different face.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I would totally have bought some dogecoin if it had been physically printed coin.

Why isn't anyone doing THAT for alternative novelty currency? I mean, c'mon.

Dogecoin is worse than the bit coin, it's pricehas been deliberately driven down by a pack of clowns on IRC, it's like all the problems of bitcoin with shady activities that will stop it ever being recognised as legitimate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126153

Yeah, but at least it's funny.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I would totally have bought some dogecoin if it had been physically printed coin.

Why isn't anyone doing THAT for alternative novelty currency? I mean, c'mon.

Like this?
https://www.casascius.com/

Casascius Bitcoins are physical coins you can hold - and each one is worth real digital bitcoins.

However, due to myriad legal issues:

As of Nov 27, 2013, I suspended sales of items that contain digital bitcoins.  Current items for sale do not contain bitcoins.

I wonder, would a physical launch followed by an online/open mining system be open to more or less manipulation?

I suppose the other avenue open at this point would be just crank out a bunch of different ones and run them like HYIP's with a different face.

No, like a physical alternative currency that's not connected with bitcoin in any way. But is funny. I would buy shit that was funny.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I would totally have bought some dogecoin if it had been physically printed coin.

Why isn't anyone doing THAT for alternative novelty currency? I mean, c'mon.

Like this?
https://www.casascius.com/

Casascius Bitcoins are physical coins you can hold - and each one is worth real digital bitcoins.

However, due to myriad legal issues:

As of Nov 27, 2013, I suspended sales of items that contain digital bitcoins.  Current items for sale do not contain bitcoins.

I wonder, would a physical launch followed by an online/open mining system be open to more or less manipulation?

I suppose the other avenue open at this point would be just crank out a bunch of different ones and run them like HYIP's with a different face.

No, like a physical alternative currency that's not connected with bitcoin in any way. But is funny. I would buy shit that was funny.

Junkenstien is just channeling my coworkers, I think.

JUNK:  "NOVELTY CURRENCY".

[Cain]

Article on Naked Capitalism about how BitCoin is helping to reduce the stigma over e-money and moving towards a cashless society

If you believe the hype, you've been had. As Izabella Kaminska of the Financial Times tells us, you all are really just doing free/underpaid R&D for central banks, since you are debugging and building legitimacy for one of their fond projects, making currencies digital and getting rid of cash altogether.

This is important because, in the current economic climate, the introduction of a cashless society empowers central banks greatly. A cashless society, after all, not only makes things like negative interest rates possible, it transfers absolute control of the money supply to the central bank, mostly by turning it into a universal banker that competes directly with private banks for public deposits. All digital deposits become base money.

Consequently, anyone who believes Bitcoin is a threat to fiat currency misunderstands the economic context. Above all, they fail to understand that had central banks had the means to deploy e-money earlier on, the crisis could have been much more successfully dealt with.

Among the key factors that prevented them from doing so were very probable public hostility to any attempt to ban outright cash, the difficulty of implementing and explaining such a transition to the public, the inability to test-run the system before it was deployed.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

All your base are belong to us!

I feel like some people still haven't read Jennifer Government.

[LMNO]

Great link, Cain!

It does well to see how far the ripples actually go.

[Junkenstein]

I would totally have bought some dogecoin if it had been physically printed coin.

Why isn't anyone doing THAT for alternative novelty currency? I mean, c'mon.

Like this?
https://www.casascius.com/

Casascius Bitcoins are physical coins you can hold - and each one is worth real digital bitcoins.

However, due to myriad legal issues:

As of Nov 27, 2013, I suspended sales of items that contain digital bitcoins.  Current items for sale do not contain bitcoins.

I wonder, would a physical launch followed by an online/open mining system be open to more or less manipulation?

I suppose the other avenue open at this point would be just crank out a bunch of different ones and run them like HYIP's with a different face.

No, like a physical alternative currency that's not connected with bitcoin in any way. But is funny. I would buy shit that was funny.

Junkenstien is just channeling my coworkers, I think.

JUNK:  "NOVELTY CURRENCY".

To be honest, I'm seeing a situation where eventually there's hundreds of these things kicking around all their sole purpose is to wash money. I mentioned HYIPS specifically, for anyone who's not had the chance to laugh at these yet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-yield_investment_program

A high-yield investment program (HYIP) is a type of Ponzi scheme, an investment scam that promises unsustainably high return on investment by paying previous investors with the money invested by new investors. Most of these scams work from anonymous offshore bases which make them hard to track down.

With this in mind, and with how iffy the setup is anyway, I can see a business model in 5 years along the following lines:

Days before launch - Hype with a side of bullshit
Day 0 - Launch, pump price as hard and fast as possible
Day 5- Exit, walk away with profit, let currency/coin collapse or continue, it won't last a month anyway now you've crashed the price
Day 6 - While the above was happening, you've been hyping currency #2 and can move back to day 0 shortly.

Rinse, repeat and wait for regulation to catch up with you. If this isn't already happening to some extent I'd be quite surprised. Faust's earlier links seem to indicate that something exactly like this is happening now.

Somewhat unrelated, I can't see a time in the near future where society is totally cashless. Some goods and services will never take credit or debit cards and cash is the only realistic and sensible payment option.

[Junkenstein]

While thinking about HYIPS, I recalled this little gem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studiotraffic

Forums[edit]

It is significant that the program had a forum at all. Many other programs online would not do it, as a lot of them were organized scams which would run off after a certain period of time. John Horan posted regularly on Studiotraffic's forums, often every day.[2]
To date, out of the tens of thousands of forum posts, there seem to be little if none at all posts by people not being paid, and hundreds of posts by people who have been paid. The cause of this is strict moderation and anti-negativity rules in the forum - any complaints about a lack of payment were deleted as "account issues", and general negative comments resulted in banning. Adding links or sharing messages sent by admin to a user could also result in banning or instant thread deletion. Since there were a large number of moderators this usually took only moments. In this way, the forums did not present a balanced discussion of Studiotraffic and it would have been inadvisable to judge the site based on them. But on the other hand there were other forums where anyone could openly discuss Studiotraffic and it was in one of those a crusade to stop Studiotraffic started.

I'd bet actual currency that a lot of e-currency forums use this as their blueprint.

I'd also bet that this type of thing will make a comeback in the near future. There's a bullshit pitch about netfix and advertisers just waiting to take cash from people.

[Junkenstein]

Mentioned in another thread, worth adding here.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26352442

The head of troubled Bitcoin exchange MtGox has made his first statement since the service went offline.

Mark Karpeles said he was "working very hard with the support of different parties" to address issues with the service, which went offline on Tuesday.

An estimated 744,000 bitcoins - about $350m (£210m) - are believed to have been stolen thanks to a loophole in Tokyo-based MtGox's security.

Japanese authorities are investigating the company.

"I understand that ministries and agencies concerned - financial services, police and the finance ministry - are looking into the matter to learn the full scope of the issue," said Yoshihide Suga, Japan's chief cabinet secretary.

"Once we have full knowledge of what happened, we will take action if necessary."

A leaked report - which Mr Karpeles has confirmed is authentic - said the huge theft had made MtGox insolvent.

Supporters of Bitcoin as an alternative currency have said they are working together to "re-establish" trust among users and were "committed to the future of Bitcoin".

The fact that some believe that this could end well just shows you just how powerful blind optimism can be. When I was in sales I used to call people like this "True believers" as they had bought into the pitch hook, line, sinker and copy of angling times. Any evidence you presented them that this wasn't all rosy in the garden was dismissed as unimportant, irrelevant or lies.

[Faust]

I'm still seeing comments like that. "How dare people use this as an example of why bitcoin wont work" or "people are always focusing on the negative"

[The Johnny]

You have to admit it had an extremely good run, im surprised it took so long.

[Faust]

You have to admit it had an extremely good run, im surprised it took so long.

It's not gone yet, It will probably stick around in some form, though I'm not sure what will happen now that one guy is holding 6% of the currency.