> > Just listened to an NPR discussion of bitcoin. Fascinating! Good for > bad-guys, and good-guys. > See Comment two paragraphs below.
> The Silk Road market where you can buy all sorts of illegal things. > And some legal things. What amuses me about the Silk Road is the nicknames of the once and present kings (so to speak) of the site, the Dread Pirates Robert, being of course a reference to the Princess Bride and anticipating the capture of one and rise of the other in the tradition of the first, if that sentence is parsable.. > BC is illusive. Like another "bit", bit torrent, it's so distributed and > p2p that its hard to get your brain around it. > An undercorrected mistake: Illusive = an illusion. Elusive = it eludes one. But I agree, and the inherent complexity of the underlying cryptography makes it hard to talk about in sound-bite format - just in recent coverage, I have heard so many misconceptions about the computer science and politics involved with Bitcoin. Hopefully the cryptographers should be out in force with their diagrams. The best *introduction* to Bitcoin is a New Yorker article from a couple years ago, let me find it. [ HERE <http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_davis>] Doubtless not without imprecisions itself, but not so fearmongering. > Even the Fed Reserve admires it and is interested in its future. > Still wondering what is going to happen to the millions of bitcoin seized from the first Silk Road. Dump it on the market all at once to drive the price down? Withhold it forever? > And in terms of legality, it an offense to steal it and a guy is being > tried for a ponzi scheme involving BC. > I have heard some of those that tend towards suspicion claim that Bitcoin *is* a Ponzi scheme. Their theory relies on Satoshi Nakamura owning a lot of Bitcoins currently. Which brings up the interesting question if we could guess which interactions are his based on inference. > And its trading very high against the dollar. Has anyone gotten involved? > Got a bitcoin? > A friend gave me about 3μB⃦ if I remember correctly. I got tired of keeping the needy blockchain on my computer, so I sent most of those microcoins to an address with Electrum <http://electrum.org>. And on the New Mexico GNU/Linux User Group mailing list today (anyone else subscribed?) someone posted about their project https://bitcoinpaperwallet.com/. -Arlo
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