Posted on 11/22/2013 8:12:36 AM PST by Errant
Looking for photography services in Australia? Customers willing to pay via bitcoin to Seagull Photography in Waitara, New South Wales, which is just outside of Sydney, can get a bargain.
Anyone in need of a photographer that pays 1 BTC to the studio will receive an AU$400 voucher. Based on the current bitcoin price in Australian dollars, that’s a 50% discount for using bitcoin.
And it is cumbersome Australian banking processes that influenced Seagull’s decision to promote bitcoin, says Mohammad Soltani, who helps his wife Azam Vahabzadeh with the technical side of the photography studio.
“It takes one full business day to receive the payment from another bank which is effectively three calendar days if the payment is done on Friday. As a business we think that this is not acceptable,” Soltani told CoinDesk.
In Australia, people use bank transfers to make payments. And moving money from one bank to another is what causes this delay, Soltani says. “Eighty percent of our customers transferred from a different bank which took a day or more”.
(Excerpt) Read more at coindesk.com ...
God help us.
No .. wait ... God ... come and get us.
Thanks for keeping the bitcoin info going on FR.
A reason to spend those bitcoins instead of hording them?
No problem... :-) There are a number of links for more info on Bitcoins at the link above.
Bitcoin => Fiat Currency Ponzi Scheme bump for later...
I'm not advocating using Bitcoin and I don't have any myself. However, I can see the advantages and I think there will be a lot more e-currency platforms appearing in the near future.
FYI Bitcoin mining rigs are selling for $3 million. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
It is the first digital equivalent to gold- something rare and impossible to cheaply create/fake. As long as the Internet exists and government doesn't persecute exchangers, it will remain valuable.
Just like gold, the price will of course vary in relation to fiats.
It’s the “persecute” part that has me crossing my fingers.
I SAW the Liberty Dollars get taken down. Bitcoin is 1000x more vulnerable, and bull me no sh!t about their ‘encryption’.
I see.
Who decides to create more bitcoins? No one decides to create more gold.
The only possible way to attack bitcoin is to target physical businesses that accept it. It basically amounts to them saying "no you cannot trade goods/services to a person giving you string of numbers because it gives those strings real physical value. Value we cannot trace or tax."
Like gold miners, people generate more bitcoin by investing time and equipment. It cannot be generated by government decree.
In one way it is more stable then gold- the algorithm itself dictates how many bitcoins can exist, period. With gold, we have no idea how much more can be found.
Who wrote the algorithm?
Sorry but algorithms can be manipulated.
Its just another fiat currency.
You can't manipulate such a simple algorithm that is visible by everyone. Computers can theoretically break it by brute force but it would require far more resources than the value of bitcoins “stolen”. The algorithm is self policing and gets more complex as computing power increases to make brute force worthless.
Yeah I think the term is Deus Ex Machina.
Sorry but if it is created by man then it can be manipulated by man. It is not magic and all powerful. Its a process created a human using a computer and as such it can be manipulated by a human using a computer.
And the moment governments feel they are being cheated out of tax revenue that is rightfully theirs, they will have no problem doing just that.
But the value stolen can never exceed the amount of computing power required to do so. I.e. youll burn through $1000 of electricity to steal $500 of coin. Legitimately “mining” coins by doing the process to maintain the system will always yield more value so theft is pointless. Just like labs can theoretically create artificial gold but the cost to do so makes it pointless(for now).
Even if computers somehow become a million times more powerful in one day, legitimate bitcoin mining will still defeat theft. The complexity of the algorithm approaches infinity to mine the final bitcoin. That is the inherent beauty built into the algorithm. Man is clever but the raw mathematics make it a monumental task. Maybe someone will someday think of a solution that makes encryption useless but it is just as likely that someone will think of a cheap way to make gold and make every gold bar worthless. Not too long ago, aluminum was more precious than gold but it was changed with one simple trick.
Of course man will continue to change the value of all things through technology. NOTHING is a completely stable store of value for all time. With atomic 3D printing, a day may come when NO physical object held by man will have any stored value. Encrypted data may someday become the only currency but will eventually be worthless too. Someday the entire concept of currency will be eliminated and it will be a very very different world.
Ahh you still miss the point. Its not some magical construct with built it god-like powers. Its an algorithm. it was created by a man and that very same man can alter it. Its not locked in a super secret bunker somewhere guarded by killer robots and zombie-ninja-squirrels.
What can be created by man can be altered and or destroyed by man. It is a system and as such it is vulnerable to entropy as are all systems. And entropy comes in many forms.
BTW several organizations have already been prosecuted for illegal bitcoin mining meaning as such they created fake bitcoins in the process.
So its already been proved vulnerable.
It is pure simple math that anyone can see. There are no hidden tricks, insiders or complex algorithms. Math is more powerful than any bunker and the fundamental rules of math are beyond what man can alter. There is no need to lock anything because it is OPEN yet fundamentally unbreakable. At the basic level, it is the most simple fundamental math. Trying to mess with the entire bitcoin system is like trying to convince the world 2+2=5
“BTW several organizations have already been prosecuted for illegal bitcoin mining meaning as such they created fake bitcoins in the process.”
Show me. Even if they did break it, there are no laws against that. The ones I've seen were prosecuted for one of the following:
-stealing electricity and/or computing resources to mine “real” coins. Yes, such coins cannot be detected by the system but the theft occurred entirely outside it.
-breaking into individual’s machines and stealing keys. this is a weakness in the user, not the system. just like the weakness of keeping physical gold with poor security.
I'm not saying it is 100% double-plus impossible to do. But it is currently far far easier for criminals to break into the systems of a bank holding “real” money and few do. Those systems are not open for inspection by every computer scientist or monitored by thousands of peers in real time. The digital holdings of banks are FAR MORE vulnerable than bitcoin. Even their physical gold/cash holdings are more vulnerable than bitcoin. Criminals are more likely to rob a vault than try to start a revolution in math/computing. And IMO, a revolutionary discovery is needed to crack such a cryptocurrency.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.