





Bitcoins on the rise





Source: BitCoin Magazine

Comments     Threshold


RE: Not for me
By danielravennest on 2/28/2013 5:37:42 PM , Rating: 2
Bitcoins are like any commodity you can trade. The price is determined by supply and demand. What backs gold? Nothing, just the demand people have for it, and the scarcity.

The second part of your comment is incorrect. The software adjusts the difficulty of solving a block of transactions to maintain a near-constant generation rate.

What bitcoins actually are is a data entry in a history of transactions, associating a balance with an account number. They are just like checking account balances. How much is in the account now is just the sum of previous deposits and withdrawls.

New coins are created as a reward for solving a difficult cryptographic problem based on a set of new transactions (a block). Once solved, it is easy to check the solution is correct. The difficulty makes it hard to fake transactions, because if you change any part of a block, even by one bit, the resulting hash will be different. So it is a security measure to ensure the history of transactions has not been messed with.

There will never be more than 21 million bitcoins, no matter how fast future computers get, or how many people try to generate them.

RE: Not for me
By NellyFromMA on 3/1/2013 3:33:39 PM , Rating: 2
This is a bubble just waiting to burst. A worse ponzi scheme than even debt based currency.

Its a currency promoted as a commodity valued in debt based REAL currency.

Thanks, but I'll pass on that. I actually don't need to obfuscate debt-laden currency even further.

