+1 

alrite misery guts, he did say it wasn't directly related... does the world really have to revolve around the keyword of 'bitcoin' for it to be considered relevant, or is it conceivable that there are some things that might actually be related to the topic without needing some journalist to make the connection for you?

this article has an irritating slant... choosing to focus on the most negative aspects of the China announcement and also inexplicably about half of the word count is bringing up greenspans irrelevant bollocks which has nothing to do with the story!

this is a good thing for bitcoin, demonstrating that bitcoin fraud is a serious offence that can be enforced under the law (just as fraud with any other currency would be). Gives more legitimacy to BTC when crooks can no longer thing "it's only magical internet money, the police won't be bothered about it!"

I find it interesting how much activity the brainwallet address generated by "correct horse battery staple" generates!

This is the default brainwallet in place if you go to generate something at brainwallet.org.

https://blockchain.info/address/1JwSSubhmg6iPtRjtyqhUYYH7bZg3Lfy1T

You do see money frequently going in and out of this address, but somebody actually sent a whole 0.8651 BTC (worth more than $800 at the time) to the 'correct horse battery staple' address just two days ago...

Unsurprisingly, it left the account about 10's afterwards...

Sadly, the only sane explanation I can think for this happening...somebody went to generate a brainwallet using this site but accidentally refreshed and used the default 'correct horse battery staple' instead of their own passphrase

This story on reddit about somebody managing to randomly guess a brainwallet with 400btc is also relevant

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ryj9s/help_i_might_have_access_to_your_wallet/

Anyway, I think the point is that given how much effort people will now be putting into trying all the possible brainwallet combo's highlights how this is really quite a foolish way of storing your coins.

If you are trying to think up a brainwallet passphrase with enough entropy...you may aswell just use a properly pure private key and keep it safely offline.

Hi - Perhaps you would have better luck and have less grounds for attack if you take a more long term view and focus your research on the idea of cryptocurrencies in general, as a superior financial technology - rather than bitcoin specifically.

The arguments about it being deflationary are therefore voided as that's specific to bitcoin. You can argue along the lines of "when" bitcoin fails, it will be replaced by something superior that improves upon its problems, as in its current form its kind of a beta version...and subsequent versions will entail further evolution of the technology until we have a system that is ready for mass uptake.

I'm not saying I think bitcoin is doomed to fail...but your tutors obviously do! So for the purposes of your project, if you want a higher mark you won't get anywhere by complaining to your professors that they are simply wrong about bitcoin. It will just annoy them and further cement the view they already have. Instead, you'd need to find arguments that are not direct contradictions of their own opinions, make them think a bit more long term about the technological and economic impact of this type of technology - etc.

The less you mention the word bitcoin, the better. There is definitely a game to be placed in academia.

good luck with your project

I'll wait for it to hit £10,000...

why exchange for dollars at all? afterall, a value of 10K would presumably entail a great deal more of merchant acceptance, etc... than we currently have - you could just buy with bitcoins whatever it was you were planning to spend the dollars on.

and if you did decide to cash out, why on earth would you want to do it all at once like that?! i'd take my time about it, and also hold onto some of them, the price could go up further if it had got that far!

It seems like some people have a bit of an obsession with cashing out at certain price points, overlooking the fact that for it to get to those price points, there must still be good reasons to keep your money IN bitcoin...i.e inflating fiat currencies, it's increased confidence and acceptance as a transferable, secure store of wealth a bit like gold etc...

26

It is a limited promotional offer - however, china telecom is totally massive in china - I'm in China now and there is no brand that even comes close to its prevalence around the place - even in small, countryside towns, their shops and promotion is absolutely everwhere - the move would certainly have needed gov. approval and taking an optimistic view, could represent this huge company testing the waters a little.

I believe his intentions were pure in this case, and he did state the intention was more of a novelty than anything else - actually it was primarily a response to idiots constantly complaining "but I can't hold it in my hand!!". But yeah, does require trust on the behalf of the producer and Mike has built trust and been here from the start. I would be very wary about holding a significant amount of these, other than for collection purposes. I'd also be wary of any new people that come on the block offering various coins/bills etc. At the end of the day, you've trusted a private key to someone by buying one.

Trip to North Korea (young pioneer tours)

pretty good article but a hell of a lot of dumb-ass comments!

AWESOME - not too far off parity with an ounce of gold. That's gonna be a compelling headline!

very interesting and definately related to bitcoin, albeit indirectly. Am in China atm, this particular bloomberg article is blocked by the great firewall of china, just for your info.

what a lovely read!

lol btc going a lot more literally "to the moon" than I could have predicted! awesome news, Branson is pretty legendary

I like that theory!

To say otherwise is a pretty defeatist attitude that goes against historical precedent

I think this should be done at some point, mainly for the reason that for everyday purposes it could get annoying dealing with prices with lots of decimals like 0.00004 etc.

Think Jan 2014 is probs too early though, it will be confusing/suspicious perhaps to these already presumably psychologically 'weak' people!

And yeah another point is, do we really need psychologically 'weak' people, investing in bitcoin when they havn't even researched it enough yet to understand for themselves that bitcoins can be split down to smaller chunks than 1btc!