Bitcoins

who took all the monopoly money!

http://www.screwthestatusquo.com/storage/post-images/letters/monopoly%20guy.gif?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1273091093189
Come to think of it, he kind of looks a lot like the 1u1z5ec guy

I always try to steal money when I play monopoly - wait until people look away then grab some 500$ s

I did that with my little brother all the time when I was a kid

but I would do it like one bill at a time

so he wouldn't notice until some point where I had 75% of the bank

cheating is more fun when it comes to board games

I loved stealing Monopoly money.

do you love bitcoins?

Sadly, no.

Is there a single reason why this thing is a good idea?

I think what needs to happen is for bitcoins to be backed by gold

how about gold being backed by bitcoins?

Chocolate gold coins?

we're back baby!

https://mtgox.com/trade/buy

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9555513.stm

bitcoinplus now blocked by our firewall!

A couple months ago I wanted to sell flash drives filled with a "starter purse" of 35 "bitcoinz" (note the z!) on eBay. Bundle it with some phony .PDF about starting your exciting journey into the world of crypto currency!

there was a website giving away free bitcoisn for a while to get the "movement" going

LOL at bitcoin-themed episode of The Good Wife

What if there was some kind of Bitcoin/Minecraft crossover (Minecoin? Bitcraft?)

http://i.imgur.com/8xgFw.jpg

bitcoin just bit yoru ass yo! while you was havin strawberry

http://www.examiner.com/article/hackers-claim-possession-of-romney-tax-returns-threaten-release-on-sept-28

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/10/analysis_of_how.html

In addition, we isolated all the large transactions in the system, and discovered that almost all of them are closely related to a single large transaction that took place in November 2010, even though the associated users apparently tried to hide this fact with many strange looking long chains and fork-merge structures in the transaction graph.

awesome

cant pull the wool over thiese bitches

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8096/8372512244_9e314b0605_z.jpg

http://qz.com/61893/this-is-how-we-mint-money-now-software-upgrade-glitch-causes-bitcoin-flash-crash/

http://www.kurzweilai.net/bitcoin-hits-1-billion

http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_8qRwhHaLc7b5Sp7

Austan Goolsbee Chicago Strongly Agree 10 Hahahaha. ROTFL.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/seven-men-charged-in-liberty-reserve-global-money-laundering-operation/2013/05/28/0999536c-c7ce-11e2-8da7-d274bc611a47_story.html

http://gawker.com/feds-seize-assets-of-worlds-largest-bitcoin-exchange-506790294

I'll bet that even possessing the Bitcoin software will be "probable cause" from here on out.

http://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/H0-6OpjswRj1Ke3U.jpg

Bitcoin offers privacy -- as long as you don't cash out or spend it

On the surface, Bitcoin seems to be a great way to hide cash. Actually, it's a terrible way to launder money.

That's the conclusion of a new academic study that analyzed Bitcoin's blockchain, or the public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. The ledger shows how bitcoins move from one person to another, represented by 34-character alphanumeric addresses.

It's a sea of numbers without names. But researchers from the University of California at San Diego and George Mason University found it is a lot harder to convert bitcoins to cash -- or spend the bitcoins with a service -- and stay anonymous due to the ledger.

Most bitcoin users interact with a service to buy or sell the virtual currency. These days, most of those services want to know exactly who they're dealing with, especially as regulators around the world take an increasing interest in bitcoin.

Using special algorithms, the researchers were able to associate large numbers of seemingly anonymous bitcoins addresses with certain major services such as exchanges and payment processors, said Sarah Meiklejohn, a doctoral candidate in computer science at UC San Diego, who assisted in the research.

By analyzing those transactions, they found it is possible to somewhat deanonymize bitcoin users, opening up avenues through which investigators could reveal the people behind them.

For example, they linked more than 500,000 Bitcoin addresses with Mt. Gox, a popular exchange in Japan where users buy and sell bitcoins. Mt. Gox requires identification from its users, often including a scan of their passport. It wouldn't make sense for a hacker to cash out a large number of bitcoins there.

"We haven't uncovered the identity of the thief, but we've paved the way for law enforcement or an agency with subpoena power to do exactly that," Meiklejohn said.

Woah, Silk Road supposedly busted: http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/2/4794780/fbi-seizes-underground-drug-market-silk-road-owner-indicted-in-new

(this seemed about the best place I could find to post this... do we have a general cybercrimey type thread?)

rip

http://nation.time.com/2013/10/02/alleged-silk-road-proprietor-ross-william-ulbricht-arrested-3-6m-in-bitcoin-seized/#ixzz2gaCv1yiE

According to the filing, Ulbricht is being charged on four counts: narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy. The criminal complaint also alleges that in March 2013, Ulbricht engaged in a “murder-for-hire” scheme where he enlisted one Silk Road user to murder another Silk Road user who was threatening to release the identities of all of the website’s users.

p21 and onwards of the complaint is pretty nuts re this: http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf

(re murder that is)

Silk Road did $1.2 billion worth of business between February of 2011 and July of 2013 ... Silk Road had 957,079 registered users who did 1.2 million transactions between February of 2011 and July of 2013

so the average transaction was $1000? huh. i suppose the high price of assassinations will put the average up a bit.

Fucking lol

xp i think the calculations thrown off because they're valuing it by what a bitcoin is worth today, rather than what it was worth at the time of the transaction

RIP

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/11/27/bitcoin-1000-cryptocurrency/3768821/

Man searches landfill site for hard drive with £4m-worth of bitcoins

I just found out that a college friend who I consider brilliant and who did very well in silicon valley has jumped aboard the bitcoin train. He's convinced it will be "huge" and "disrupt banking." I remain skeptical, but it at least prompted me to think about bitcoin more than I have in months.

http://www.businessinsider.com/someone-holding-bitcoin-sign-on-college-gameday-receives-over-22-bitcoins-2013-12

new thing is Litecoins

That dude with the sign on Game Day story is crazy. Wonder if I could go back in time and hold up a sign with a Pay Pal address.