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[G-Flex]

Why the hell is this in DF General Discussion?

[GoombaGeek]

Why the hell is this in DF General Discussion?

Because bitcoins are awesome and stuff.

[BinaryBeast1010011010]

Because I havent the first clue about the way to move a thread

[misko27]

Because I havent the first clue about the way to move a thread

It's IN the lower left corner.

[BinaryBeast1010011010]

ok, where do you feel I should move it?
 

[misko27]

*cough* General discusion*cough* lower forums*cough*

[Scelly9]

Probably General Discussion.

On another note, I will say that as an anonymous currency, bitcoins are thriving. Every internet black market uses them, it's pretty weird.

[Helgoland]

Reminds me of the post WWI Germany. Motherfucking Hellhole that.

That's what I was thinking of, but I think I've talked enough about the less pleasant parts of Germany's history around here lately

[MetalSlimeHunt]

We already have a fancy electronic currency. It's called EVERY CURRENCY but most often USD, Euros, and Yen.

Bitcoins have no additional benefit besides darknet shadiness. I would prefer not to conduct my electronic transactions with a currency that is most often used by drug dealers, smugglers, hitmen, pedophiles, and whomever else the deep internet caters to.

[Leafsnail]

To sum up, as far as I can tell there are thee uses for Bitcoins.

1. Buying illegal goods or services
2. Converting someone else's electricity/ computer parts into money
3. Performing scams on other members of the Bitcoin community/ losing money to said scams

That's it really.  Almost nowhere accepts Bitcoins and the amount of money you make while mining is tiny compared to the amount of electricity and expensive GPUs it costs to mine (which is why you need someone else to be paying for your electricity/GPUs for you to make any money).

It also fails on numerous other fronts.  I'm gonna avoid touching the "has no actual value" element because that one is fiercely contested, so I'll go with the stuff that's undeniably true.

1. The transactions are irreversible so if someone hacks your wallet you've lost your money forever.
2. The privacy it offers isn't actually that strong because there's a publicly available log of all transactions - you have to really mess around with anonymous names in order to avoid making it obvious what you're doing with your money.  In other words it's easy for a scammer to maintain anonymity, harder for an honest user.
3. Transactions need to be approved by peers so they tend to be extremely slow compared to credit card purchases.
4. In order to use Bitcoin you need to download a huge multi-gigabyte blockchain that wastes space on your computer and slows it down.
5. You can get around some of these problems by using an online bank, but these are "hacked" or stolen from on a ridiculously regular basis.
6. Bitcoins have horrible liquidity issues due to being a deflationary currency.  In practice this barely matters because the above 5 points are enough to sink Bitcoins before this even comes into play, but the fact that the vast majority of Bitcoins sit around doing nothing forever is a huge obstacle to it being a major currency.

So I guess my ultimate rating is "useless except as an aid to crime".

[misko27]

Oh finally, the voices of reason.

[Cthulhu]

Yeah, it's always struck me on a moral level as a means for safer deep web shenanigans, and on an economic level as a way for unscrupulous people to pump&dump, etc. 

[Jimmy]

Until the day I can trade bitcoins for a cheeseburger, I doubt I'll use it.

Really, the only tempting use I can see for myself is as a method of purchasing an anonymous VPN subscription. However I seriously doubt I'd ever need to do this, as right now my country has a pretty good track record for courts upholding the privacy rights of an end user.

[Helgoland]

It also fails on numerous other fronts.

But all that's stuff that Bitcoins fail by design - the idea was to have the electronic equivalent to cash. The lack of anonymity is a problem there, though.
And yes, they're currently quite useless because you can't get most things with them.

[Darvi]

They're currently useless because you cannot do non-shady things with them that regular cash can't.