Whatever happens in the short-term dealing with this mess, I'm happy this phase is concluding. Gox was a holdover from early bitcoin, where clearly incompetent people/operations handled massive amounts of customer funds, and we've been needing to get sharply over that phase for a while now. This does so rather dramatically. I look forward to bitcoin moving into the next phase of adoption driven by far more professional entities.

Failing to announce their insolvency to the world themselves was probably the last straw of their incommensurable incompetence.

Tangible Cryptography has announced the completion of a $600,000 seed round investment funded completely in bitcoin.

The company will use the funds to launch BitSimple, a new bitcoin sales portal that aims to set itself apart from traditional bitcoin exchanges.

this is BITCOINtalk.org, not Dogecointalk. You fuckers are just being rude. I don't go to your house, piss in the flowerpot and shit on your rug. Please do us the same courtesy. You have your own, threads, your own subforum, your own reddit. use them and leave us alone. We don't want you here. You are like juveniles. you missed the early adopter phase and you think it's unfair. tough shit. life ain't fair. It'll be even less fair when your shitcoin tanks but I won't invade your space and gloat about it cuz, you know, I'm better than you. Now do me the favor of fucking off and possibly dying, but that last part is up to you. Thanks.

If Bitcoin is not a currency, how are these different from any other vending machine?

I love how everyone overlooks the fact that Zynga's target audience are people who are barely computer literate. "I turn on my pc/laptop, and NSAbook is my homepage". The first sign of trouble is a major disaster. "I have to update FLASH for my games, how do I do that? OMG!"

And yet, somehow, via magic or telepathy, we expect people to just jump on the Bitcoin train - after probably never having heard of it ever before. Right. I'm skeptical that their mindless clicking drones have the slightest interest in Bitcoin, or the skills to even acquire any.

Bitcoin adoption from the second most well known brand on the internet should generate a bigger price rally, and more secondary reporting of the fact than from just one bitcoin news site.

Sure, Zynga will get some great publicity out of the decision but inquisitive investors may wonder what effect, if any, could Zynga's decision to spend a few programmer hours integrating Bitcoin have on earnings. The ROI may surprise you and have you demanding your other companies jump on the Bitcoin express train.

In 2012, Zynga had $1.2B of gross revenue. We do not know what percentage of revenue will have the Bitcoin payment method as an option so we will just assume all of it. The credit card or PayPal fee for a $5 sale would be about $0.445 or 8.9%. Assuming Zynga has the same payment method breakdown as Reddit then we can expect this effect.

Approximately $30m of annual revenue being processed by credit cards or PayPal would cost about $2.7m. Bitpay will process this amount for a flat fee of $300/month or $3,600 per year which is a cost savings of approximately 99.87%. Not bad for a few hours of a developer who is likely already on salary!

Not really surprising, I mean - they are asking people who are personally vested in Bitcoin if it will do well. I think it will be just fine of course, but I had to comment on the sillyness of this poll. Sure they're going to say higher, hardly anyone ever says "This is the year of the slide back to $100".

Congressman Steve Stockman announces that he is putting forth a bill this January to protect #Bitcoin

  Tokyo, Dec. 20 (Jiji Press)--The Bank of Japan is "very interested" in the online virtual currency Bitcoin, Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said Friday.
   The central bank's Institute of Monetary and Economic Studies is studying it, Kuroda said at a regular news conference.
   "Compared with traditional ways of money transfers and existing electronic money, Bitcoin has both similar and different aspects," Kuroda said.
   Central banks around the world are closely watching Bitcoin, the value of which has been swinging wildly due to speculative trading.
   The BOJ currently has no plans to take action on the situation surrounding Bitcoin, Kuroda said.