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Showing 6 of 6 results by Ippolit
Thanks but these sites link up buyers and sellers. What I mean is a trusted shop where you could buy and sell bitcoin for cash face to face
None exist yet. What does exist though, although I'm pretty sure unfortunately not yet in the UK, is BitInstant, which allows you to buy bitcoins by depositing cash at pretty much any bank, Walmart or 7/11.
Since the emergence of Bitcoin, several alternative cryptocurrencies have appearted, although afaik none have them come even close to bitcoin in terms of popularity, trading volume and money involved.
Question: why? Is there something wrong with Bitcoin? What advantages do the alternatives offer? What does Bitcoin lack what the others don't?
It's my impression that these alternatives were only introduced by people who would like to be early adopters themselves, hoping to see their stack of virtual coins (which are cheap or free to obtain in the early stages) booming just like BTC. Or am I mistaken?
Question: why? Is there something wrong with Bitcoin? What advantages do the alternatives offer? What does Bitcoin lack what the others don't?
It's my impression that these alternatives were only introduced by people who would like to be early adopters themselves, hoping to see their stack of virtual coins (which are cheap or free to obtain in the early stages) booming just like BTC. Or am I mistaken?
Solidcoin is just a profit-driven scam IMO.
Litecoin is interesting because its mining mechanism is designed to be CPU-friendly, so you have less of an advantage from mining it with specialized hardware.
Devcoin has a mechanism which pays 10% of mining profits to developers - an interesting experiment at what's basically a voluntary, decentralized taxation mechanism.
Namecoin is actually really useful (or would be if anyone actually used it) - it's a decentralized DNS system (DNS systems map IP addresses like 173.194.73.105 to human-readable URLs like google.com)
So they do have some redeeming value.
Re: Can bitcoin become the currency of the people and replace money.
IMO only revolution or total banks crash could force average "normal" people to commonly use bitcoin. Without that it will be interesting thing for some geeks and blackmarketers.
Bitcoin ~= Linux imo. In all the visible markets it'll just be its own dedicated group of hippies - even in a revolution normal people will just stockpile gold, guns and food first - but slowly and quietly it will take over more professional markets like international money transfer and financial applications one by one, and in 15 years' time we'll all be using Bitcoin without even realizing it.
I really don't like the idea of setting it up as one organization overseeing everyone. We don't need that kind of centralization IMO.
What about promoting an Intrade-like site to bet on defaults? You could have bets like "each share pays 10 BTC if MtGox defaults within the next 30 days" with a floating price, where people can either buy the shares, to insure themselves, or short them, if they think the price is above what the risk of default merits and think they can expect to earn a profit.
I think it could work for sites where account holder can expect to earn a profit, like GLBSE and Bitcoinica.
What about promoting an Intrade-like site to bet on defaults? You could have bets like "each share pays 10 BTC if MtGox defaults within the next 30 days" with a floating price, where people can either buy the shares, to insure themselves, or short them, if they think the price is above what the risk of default merits and think they can expect to earn a profit.
I think it could work for sites where account holder can expect to earn a profit, like GLBSE and Bitcoinica.
Closest I can think of to what you need is this:
http://www.google.com/trends/?q=bitcoin
Although it's really not representative IMO since you can't see the recent growth in volume of just about every Bitcoin business anywhere on there.
http://www.google.com/trends/?q=bitcoin
Although it's really not representative IMO since you can't see the recent growth in volume of just about every Bitcoin business anywhere on there.