Talk:Bitcoin

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What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is the first digital currency that is completely distributed. The network is made up of users like yourself so no bank or payment processor is required between you and whoever you're trading with. This decentralization is the basis for Bitcoin's security and freedom.

• https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page - wiki
• http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/ - forums

That weusecoins video is a great primer. If you've got questions, peruse the forum.

the Myths article on the wiki [1] is also a great read.

Download the bitcoin client, and when you're ready to support the independent, peer to peer economy, read this wiki [2] to decide what option works best for you.

Thanks for promoting this incredible technology.

P.S. Bitcoin is currently outperforming damn near every other economic investment right now. Check up on http://mtgox.com to see stats and realtime charts from the largest trading site.

An Emerging Free Market Currency

By Joel Bowman

Bitcoin has appreciated at an incredible rate since it “took hold” in the online community, especially over the past few months. One of the first ever transactions using bitcoin, according to the forums, involved a consumer who paid B$10,000 for a pizza online one year ago. Those same bitcoins are today worth about US$140,000. Not a bad tip for the delivery guy. Still, such phenomenal currency appreciation has led many to assert that bitcoins are in a “bubble.” And maybe they are…but not for the simple reason that they have appreciated against other currencies. Value, as Ludwig von Mises described it, is not determined by the nature of objects themselves, but through our interactions with and appreciation for them. “Value is not intrinsic, it is not in things,” he wrote in Human Action. “It is within us; it is the way in which man reacts to the conditions of his environment.” Is Google Inc., to take a real world example, in a bubble because it has more or less quintupled since IPOing in 2004? Or is it fairly priced at US$525 (or one third an ounce of gold…or B$37.5) because buyers and sellers of the stock agree, in this moment, that’s what it is worth?

— An Emerging Free Market Currency

bitcoin implementation sucks

A friend of mine who is an excellent python programmer told me that the efficiency of the code in the standard bitcoin client "sucks" - I believe him, because it take minutes to start up and my p4 crawls until bitcoin finishes initialisation.

is anyone aware of a 'good' reimplementation project?

Improvement proposals

Possible applications for smart property and distributed contracts

• Joint ventures without incorporation and involving the state
• Direct exchange of 'things' for 'things' without an intermediary unit of exchange, i.e. watermelons-per-tomato (nullifying the worthless bitcoin argument)
• Shares of jointly-held assets without interference from the regulatory agencies (who practice insider-trading and contribute to market instability)
• Elimination of lawyers, courts and clerks involvement in business endeavors
• True-cost accounting for true-cost economics (real costs derived as percentage of component resource costs, and their component resources' cost... )

New

• Just got a news item in the email from paxum.com, they now allow account top-up from external credit cards, and tradehill.com allows purchase of BTC from Paxum balance, which means you can now buy BTC online with credit card - they're currently only about USD2/BTC --nad 18:28, 23 November 2011 (PST)

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sudo apt-get install libssl-dev build-essential g++-4.4 libboost-all-dev libsparsehash-dev git-core perl
git clone git://github.com/znort987/blockparser.git
cd blockparser

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