Let's take our money back!

Bitcoin may be the most important the most important technological innovation of our era.

Many people fail to realize that money is one of mankind's greatest inventions. By enabling barter across time and space, it makes advanced civilization possible. The biggest problem with money is that governments create, control, manipulate, abuse, and destroy it.

Bitcoin solves that. Once governments no longer control the money supply, they will be forced to be fiscally responsible. Printing their way out of a crisis will no longer be an option. Inflation becomes an ugly footnote in the history books.

The biggest losers are the banks. No more debt-based currency and fractional reserve banking to make the bankers rich. No more credit card fees sucking the economy dry. You can expect the banks to tell every lie and pull every dirty trick to fight Bitcoin!

The big winners are the ordinary people, the ones who own and use the currency. They benefit from having a stable currency, fast and inexpensive transfers and payments, and no inflation to eat away their savings.

~ John Cunningham ~

Bitcoins are not a fiat currency and have been described as digital gold. They are a scarce virtual commodity whose supply will never exceed 21 million coins. Their rate of release into the marketplace is predetermined with all of the bitcoins being "mined" by the year 2140. The miners are rewarded bitcoins by working on a complex puzzle which is essentially a giant ledger of all bitcoin transactions to ensure that no coins are double spent. Miners randomly receive bitcoins proportional to the amount of computing power they devote to the network. No matter how many people mine the rate of bitcoin creation remains predetermined as the difficulty of finding bitcoins adjusts to the total network computing power.

Like gold, bitcoins are scarce, divisible, fungible, portable, and durable. They have all of the characteristics of money and may very well be the most important invention since the internet. In a world where a group of people can devalue a currency at the rate of $85,000 million a month I welcome the arrival of Bitcoin. I suspect many others will follow and believe they are worth the risk of owning.

~ J Hughes ~

Liberal Governmental Logic at its worst.

If it moves regulate it, if it keeps moving tax it, and if it stops moving subsidize it.

~ Patrick Sigafoos ~

The banks can't stand not being able to control the issue of money. And the government can't stand not being able to tax it.

You're really sounding like a statist flack. This isn't the real reason. This is only the given reason, which for megalomaniac governments is never the real reason.

The real reason has nothing to do with criminals and terrorists. It is 100% about control. Bitcoin and other alternative currencies point to the failure of the fiat monetary system that we are currently suffering under.

The Fed hates competition, and will destroy it.

~ Steven Hoskins ~

The acceptance at major retailers seems to be limited at this time. However, there is bitcoinstore.com which has a lot of electronic/tech items. Also, there is a bitmit.net, an auction site similar to eBay. There's a directory of bitcoin merchants at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade. I've also seen Amazon.com gift cards sold at a discount on the bitcointalk.org forum.

The bitcoin price has been bid up considerably in the last week, so I'd caution anyone who is thinking about buying it for speculative purposes at this point. It's certainly an interesting development to keep an eye on though.

There is no reason Amazon or any other company couldn't start doing business with bitcoins today.

Currently there are companies (Bitpay) that act as intermediaries sitting between the customer and sellers who wish to receive local currencies. The intermediary will accept bitcoins from the customer and immediately convert them into the seller's currency of choice thereby eliminating exchange rate risks. (The exchange rate is quite volatile given the relative infancy of Bitcoin).

Bitcoins are like cash and therefore businesses are not subject to credit card fraud and chargebacks. Consumers benefit as the fees are lower than those of credit cards and Paypal. The fees are extremely small with bitcoin only transactions where intermediaries are not needed.

No one has any idea who the people are that hold the bitcoins, that is pretty much the point. of course the government is going to try to whip up a frenzy saying its some dangerous black market where only criminals meet to exchange ill-gotten gains, it makes it easier to frantically try to pass laws to get it back under their thumb. The entire project was thought up by computer programmers not drug dealers.

~ Robert Holeman ~

It may take a few years but I think the US government will lose this one. I think the private currencies discussed by Hayek or the Vienna economists will end up winning. It seems to me that all governments would have to conspire/cooperate to control the currencies. But as long as there is an impetus for countries to compete, I would expect them to use regulatory arbitrage to get business. All money is now electronic and is simply a promise to pay. Paper money is an anachronism. Electronic exchange can't be controlled so easily. I haven't seen any real evidence but I suspect that element of currency control is the impetus behind SOPA. If the US decides their money can’t be used for drugs, gambling, Canadian pharmaceuticals, DVDs coded to region 2 instead or region 1, purchase of sugar because it makes you fat....Ultimately no one will respect the currency just like fewer people now respect our legal framework because it has been gamed so badly.

~ DAROLD STAGNER