Ryda, you are *obviously well versed in this BitCoin thing but… it still makes NO sense. This usage of, and apparently widely used and accepted, “mining” analogy is quite misleading. It still sounds every bit as much as though someone is going somwhere to play a game, solve a puzzle and then gets rewarded with imaginary money.

“A computer or mining equipment is set to take a bunch of 1’s and 0’s and put them in the correct order. Through the process you gain nominal amounts of coinage. BTC is at like .00000000001 per hour now.”

To me, it sounds like you log onto World of Warcraft, mine gold, then sell it IRL for actual money. Blizzard owns the game so they own how much “gold” is found (and also don’t allow gold mining for that reason). And considering BitCoin started as a Magic the Gathering exchange currency, such an analogy might be better warranted. 

You say “take a bunch of 1’s and 0’s and put them in the correct order”, as determined by who? Again, the “mining” analogy is misleading as it makes it sound as though the “nominal amounts of coinage” are an thing that anyone can just stumble upon while surfing the net. “Oh! I just found a penny!” If it isn’t a game for your computer to play by itself, is this a kind of hacking? Is it some kind of “demon/wargame dialer” that just clicks along until a “vault” is found…?

See, I understood BitCoin when it was attached to the Silk Road as a way to bypass currency exchanges for international exchanges. I never actually *used the Road but I did stare at it (I’m not into research chemicals and don’t even trust buying DVDs from overseas via Ebay). People put real money IN (like PayPal) and then it becomes a digital currency that could be used across all forums to purchase *whatever in any country it was being offered. Money goes in, money gets transfered, money comes out. THAT I get. But now there’s this “mining” shit.

So the real questions that needs to be answered better are WHAT IS THE GENERATING SOURCE? Where do these “gold mines” come from? How are they accessed (and using ubiquitous terms like “computers or mining equipment” does nothing to elaborate)? What determines this supposed level of difficulty (again with the game/puzzle analogy) of “solving” or “finding” the “correct” sequence of 1’s and 0’s. How does the speculative nature of any given person’s ability to “find/solve” these equations(?) determine a value? Such as when tulips were used as a currency until everyone just started growing their own, why can’t people just “make” their own BitCoins? Which just leads back to the first question as to the GENERATING SOURCE.

We all play plenty of online games that have their own currency that others have found a way to generate real world money from but in those cases the value is based on time saved or avoided in having to play or find said currencies in the game in order to get magic +whatever armor or the fastest mount or fancy gear. “Ain’t nobody got time for that”, so I’m gonna pay YOU for the time it took you to find the gold so that I can buy that crap faster. Within that framing, WHAT IS BITCOIN?

Also, BitCoin HAS been stolen and lost and stock piled. Some guy lost millions of real world dollars because he threw away the hard drive they were on. In fact, just a few weeks ago they “miracalously found” a few million missing coins in an outdated purse somewhere. I have NO idea what the hell that means. How was it “found”? Again, is it a kind of hacking? If the markets you speak of *require that all BitCoins continue to exist then why didn’t the whole system just shut down?

I. Don’t. Get. It.

To my eyes, BitCoins continued existence is only because it still maintains its original function as a backroom money hustle, only now its gone white collar and rich people have found it as a means to hide their money away from taxation and an easy way to launder massive funds across continents especially now that the Fed is catching up to off-shore banking practices.

Like I said, you seem to have your shit together on this topic so yer gonna need to be the voice on this for those that are fully capable of understanding when explained in terms everyone KNOWS and not the ubiquitous vernacular that seems to keep being used with crappy analogies using the words, “it’s like”… (not that they’re yours, but that’s what everyone’s using). Because the more they get used, the more people’s inheriant bullshit meters go off and signal for the SCAM.

@entrappedmind 

heh, I can’t recall when I started using the asterix but I think it was from way back when on Myspace trying to avoid using characters that the site kept thinking was HTML and screwing with the spacing of sentences. Not to mention, I dislike using caps all the time cuz it kinda devalues using it when you *really (‘er, REALLY) mean it ;}

Oh and “the cloud” is another thing I haven’t wrapped my head around either yet. Not because I don’t get that it’s an external storage source but how everybody (companies mostly) all act like we’re just supposed to be totally cool with uploading all our most important shit and not expect some kinda hackery to go on. Oh sure! Here’s all my family’s most precious pictures and documents and I’ll just totally trust leaving it on some intangible server/service with equally intangible protection and not expect anything to happen to it or find the pictures of my neices being repurposed in some Korean yogurt commercial! Now I can delete them all with confidence everywhere else! Pfft!… Fuck the cloud!