Quote from: Jalum on October 31, 2011, 06:38:45 PM

I know no one wants to admit it now, but some of you have spent tens of thousands of dollars on hardware to "mine" bitcoins. There are people who bought into the idea of bitcoins @ $28 each, then bought more at every step downward. Those people are victims who were led astray by this community.

Quote from: Jalum on October 31, 2011, 07:10:38 PM

Very very few people here care about it's viability as a currency: they just want to get rich quick.

These are the exact same people.

Quote from: Jalum on October 31, 2011, 07:56:34 PM

Considering BTC is priced in fiat money and fiat money begins and ends every BTC transaction, I don't really understand how it's an alternative.

I think you're being a little hyperbolic when you say every BTC transaction. I too suspect that it's mostly currency speculation right now, but we can never tell for sure what it's all being used for.

Quote from: Jalum on October 31, 2011, 07:56:34 PM

And by control you mean trusting a mysterious third party who developed this whole thing, then trusting money changers to convert your fiat money into some kind of electronic form, then trusting the exchanges to not just disappear with your money or bitcoins, then trusting that the difficulty never gets so low that a real blockchain attack could through the whole thing into disrepair, then finally trust that a vendor who accepts your bitcoins won't just vanish with them because you cannot prove that your bitcoins went to someone else (yay anonymity).

Mysterious development: You don't need to trust Satoshi, you can check the code and compile it yourself. Or if you lack those skills, you can find a trusted party to do it for you.
You can exchange with anyone. If for some reason you trust me, I will sell you Bitcoins.
Bitcoins are not anonymous. If you're worried a vendor will deny payment, get them to sign their receiving address so you can post a block explorer link proving you paid.