Has Bruce Wagner pulled off the biggest financial scam on the bitcoin community?

The LinkSwarm community called this meep on day one, I am proud to say.

Not really. One bitcoin scam does not render the currency worthless anymore than Bernard Madoff heralded the end of the US dollar.

..wait...

heh!

According to http://bitcoinwatch.com/ there has been 256,175.25 Bitcoins sent in the last 24 hours. At the current exchange rate of $8.4391 USD per BTC that would be $2,161,888.55 USD worth of transactions since yesterday.

Since I don't pay for electricity (heh) the coins my rig makes (daily) are all profit. Granted I still need a month to break even for the hardware I bought to build the rig with, but that's assuming the exchange rate does not improve during that period.

I would have thought libertarian nerds like L0ki would be all over BTC.

sry... 'technotarians'.

@meeproach

This is funny.

I've spent 15 minutes looking at what BitCoins are.

I have no meeping clue, but

seems about right.

Without spending more time to figure out whether or how they are connected to value, I'll just presume that they are an elaborately rationalized fiat currency.

And while I admit that I have no problem with fiat currencies competing with each other for legitimacy, I'm still wondering why you'd think I'd be "all over" a particular fiat currency ... like perhaps BitCoins for example ... when I already have so many other (at least as ludicrous) fiat currencies to choose from.

sry....(at least as "luscious")

sry ...

from this source here:

The benefits of a currency like this:

a) Your coins can't be frozen (like a Paypal account can be)

b) Your coins can't be tracked

c) Your coins can't be taxed

d) Transaction costs are extremely low (sorry credit card companies)

You can watch a simple video here: http://jc.is/jlcte0

@LOki

So adorable.

meeproach: The benefits of a currency like this:

a) Your coins can't be frozen (like a Paypal account can be)

Neither can real coins.

meeproach: b) Your coins can't be tracked

Neither can real coins.

meeproach: c) Your coins can't be taxed

Yet.

meeproach: d) Transaction costs are extremely low (sorry credit card companies)

But not cheaper than real cash.

And you forgot;
e) Hashtags represent real value backed up by real assets just like real cash.
To which I reply,

shrug It works for me as a monetary medium. Your mileage may vary.

Ok, so the entire linkswarm community, with the exception of one meeping dork, called this bullmeep on day one.

One of use actually went out and spent real money on real GPU's and such to build a 'mining rig' to produce imaginary meepcoins.

Hey, there's bound to be one in every crowd. ^shrug^

I think yer setting the bar pretty low to be "right". None of you specifically predicted "this" and "this" does not mean anything anyway. You expected BTC to fail 4 months ago, it hasn't, and now 4 months later one weasel defrauds some (foolish) folks out of some coins and you think that vindicates you?

PREDICTION: Eventually you'll read about bitcoin thefts on a daily basis, just as we read about thefts of any currency on a daily basis.

How many meepcoins can you hold in your hand?

I can hold my android phone in my hand and my phone can hold all the bitcoins in the world. A friend came over the other day and we ordered pizza. He paid the delivery guy with his debit card and I shot my friend a bitcoin for my half of the pizza. I filled my belly using bitcoins, works for me.

wait how does scamin your friend out of half a pizza mean that bitcoins work?

You'll have to research that one on yer own, chum(p)s.

> Memo to the Bitcoin guys: you can build a community that has some cool microfabricated steam engines and open source software. But the first time your grandma need a pacemaker, or blood pressure pills and dies, and when your neighbors decide to just use squatholes for meepters and there's a cholera outbreak which leads to your clan leader finding out about that girl you like from the Smith clan, which your clan hates and clan integrity is the only thing protecting you from a cruel world, and the only person who would have spoken up from you was your grandmother, and then the boiler of that micro-fab steam engine you built that didn't need those commie government regulations explodes and kills half your clan members, and that cute girl, and then your clan leaders excommunicate you and put your sorry meep naked out in the street, bleeding, with a latent head trauma that only an MRI could diagnose and only a neurosurgeon in a sterile ER could fix, then you'll miss the common good. Right before you bleed out.

But it'll be too late because you and your fellow traveller community-haters will have destroyed everything that made it possible, including the idea of a common good.

So, rather than continuing to destroy the social fabric of America, I'd prefer that you all get the meep out now. Thanks

I'm sold. Where do I sign up?

meeproach:A friend came over the other day and we ordered pizza. He paid the delivery guy with his debit card and I shot my friend a bitcoin for my half of the pizza. I filled my belly using bitcoins, works for me..

This is funny.

Why didn't you just give the pizza guy BitCoins for your half of the pizza?

Why didn't you give your friend a $5 spot he could deposit into the bank account his debit card draws from?

LOki:And while I admit that I have no problem with fiat currencies competing with each other for legitimacy, I'm still wondering why you'd think I'd be "all over" a particular fiat currency ... like perhaps BitCoins for example ... when I already have so many other (at least as ludicrous) fiat currencies to choose from.

I can think of one reason to NOT choose BitCoins--that being, with the fiat currencies already available to me, I don't have to ever arrange some elaborate exchange rate conversion-to-"legit"-tender scam on any friend with whom I'm breaking bread, ... or on the random pizza delivery guy--he's already got plenty of actual problems involving the questionable legitimacy of actual money; he doesn't need the additional actual problems appurtenant to the questionable validity of virtual money.

I think the trouble here is that you meeproach, like so very many out there, are unable to parse the difference between money and wealth. That by simply printing, stealing, or "mining" money you think you're creating wealth. Your "friend" might have bought your rationalizations, but I haven't--and clearly the pizza guy didn't either.

I ain't in America, sugar.

@sugarslim

I actually hate you more than meeproach right now. Where meeproach has a point (though illegit IMO), what you've got there is just retarded.

L0ki, I think the problem you and others here have with bitcoins is that you think mining is akin to "printing" or "stealing". It's not. BTC mining is providing a genuine validation service to other users of BTC, (for which they invested some amount of other currencies in, in order to acquire those BTC or by purchasing equipment to mine with themselves) and for which I'm paid in BTC to perform.

If you still don't think the essence of BTC is sound, consider the coins themselves as abstract representations or energy. It takes a ridiculous amount of energy to solve the computational problems that produce BTC, more than the coins are worth at today's market value. I just happen to have a landlord who offers electricity inclusive in the price of the steep rent he demands.

Hate the game, not the player.

*OF energy

What I like about the idea of bitcoin is that it seems harder for The State, or any other large powerful entity, to extract my wealth from my currency, and I can still use it non-locally, unlike that fiver. I don't have to be there to hand my tokens over, nor do I need to pay some guy to burn fossil feuls to deliver my tokens. I don't have any bitcoins yet, but I am on the fence about acquiring a few, mostly just to see if I can buy low and sell high on that jaggedy trade chart. It looks like an interesting video game that might possibly even give me some free dollars.

Also:

@meeproach
@MstrLance

meeproach: If you still don't think the essence of BTC is sound, consider the coins themselves as abstract representations of energy.

Like the way gold certificates were "abstract representations" of gold during the gold standard days?

You thought to perhaps trap me here?

Without going into the superiority of gold based currency over fiat currency. (Or even suggesting the claim that we should return to the gold standard.) I will point out the superiority of the gold standard to these "abstract representations of energy."

The gold represented by by gold certificates was not consumed by the issuance of said certificates ... as you seem to suggest that your BitCoins do.

meeproach: It takes a ridiculous amount of energy to solve the computational problems that produce BTC, more than the coins are worth at today's market value.

Aside from "validating" your BitCoins, what value do the solutions to those "computational problems that produce BTC" have?

For instance, the gold--redeemable with a gold certificate--is valuable itself. More-so than the value of the certificates representing it. "Mining" ...ahem... your BitCoins appear to burn "more [energy] than the coins are worth at today's market value.

It appears that to avoid loss of wealth, one must acquire BitCoins outside the "validation" process you've described. Which seems to be a little bit like stealing. Agree?

meeproach: I just happen to have a landlord who offers electricity inclusive in the price of the steep rent he demands.

Interesting.

Rather than parse a handful of different notions of theft, fraud, what-have-you, I'll just ask, "Does your landlord accept BitCoins for your rent, or do you have to engage a currency exchange first?

MstrLance: What I like about the idea of bitcoin is that it seems harder for The State, or any other large powerful entity, to extract my wealth from my currency, and I can still use it non-locally, unlike that fiver.

I agree with this for now. But I suspect that this will not remain so true.

My guess is that while the descriptive distinction the BitCoin community claims their currency enjoys over fiat currency will temporarily favor the effect you like, the functional congruencies that BitCoins have with fiat currency will likely make BitCoins valuable only to those who manage to buy durable goods before everyone notices that the Emperor is naked.

MstrLance: I don't have to be there to hand my tokens over, nor do I need to pay some guy to burn fossil feuls to deliver my tokens.

Well, debit cards and electronic methods of transferring funds is the answer to your spatial critique, and you are absolutely wrong about burning fossil fuels. Electrons are fungible.

MstrLance: I don't have any bitcoins yet, but I am on the fence about acquiring a few, mostly just to see if I can buy low and sell high on that jaggedy trade chart. It looks like an interesting video game that might possibly even give me some free dollars.

Well, we seem to agree upon where their value lies, and how to game a fiat money system to obtain real goods and services without providing real goods and services in return.

I just don't have time (or inclination) to play that game.

Does Amazon take meepcoins?

My point is, your meepcoins are worthless to me because I'm not buying into the fantasy that your meepcoins have any value at all in the real world.

But hey, if you can find some schlub to buy you lunch and pay him with nothing for your half, more power to you.

Also,

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1387443018364156733

I had never heard of bitcoins until the last time there was a bitcoin story on LinkSwarm. I Googled bitcoin, and read several websites that tried to explain the concept, and possibly due to my drug addled brain, I really couldn't understand exactly what the meep a bitcoin was.

From what I gathered, people set up computers to run a program to "mine" these bitcoins, by running a complex algorithm. After an undetermined amount of time running this algorithm, there is an extremely small chance that the program will uncover a specific number, and when this happens, a bitcoin is produced and placed into the person's "wallet". It apparently takes a lot of computing power and a lot of luck for someone to actually mine a bitcoin.

This made absolutely no sense to me, and after reading several websites about bitcoins, it made even less sense. Can someone point me to a site that explains this in a way I will understand the concept, kind of a "Bitcoin for Dummies"? Or maybe someone who uses them could explain it to me. What is a bitcoin, where does a person get a bitcoin, and who sets the value of bitcoins?

^ Starts to sound like a power-company setup to sell more electricity.

new favorite gif

@hoyaguru

You actually understand them perfectly well.

Congratulations.

Now you have to figure out how they're not just some bullmeep that some digital snake-oil salesman is trying to sell for valid fiat money.

If you manage this, then you lose.

Looks to me like an elaborate hoax to sell meep tons of PC components to people that don't need them so that they can use them to burn electricity while calculating nothing in a very complex manner.

Just Google it, duh.

basically, this

Does Amazon take meepcoins?

My point is, your meepcoins are worthless to me because I'm not buying into the fantasy that your meepcoins have any value at all in the real world.

Man, I wish nocle was still alive.

He was eaten by a vegetarian shark while doing pilates on a surfboard next to a Kerr jar full of spinach juice. meep I miss that meepgot.

Do you see what happens Larry? Do you see what happens when you meep a stranger in the meep?