AMA: Long-time DU lurker and democratic supporter, know everything there is to know about bitcoin

[Rassah]

106. FYI...

I'm not sending PMs to anyone, and don't want people to get excited about bitcoin. It's too new, and I don't want it to grow too fast. It's still not easy to safely store them, especially if you are on a Windows machine and use the same 8 character password for everything.

I also STRONGLY advise against mining, as at this point mining them isn't for "suckers," but for extremely well capitalized professional businesses that know what they are doing. You likely need to dump $50,000+ into mining equipment just to have any chance.

As for the get in early and sell off first system, if one person has bitcoins, and he sells them off, that sale would mean that those bitcoins simply went to another person. The bitcoins don't disappear, they just change owners. So selling them off won't really have any effect on their value.

My only goal is to help people to understand what it is and what it can do. A lot of people seem to have a misconception that it's just a virtual currency that's not controlled, isn't actually worth anything, and can't be used for anything other than paying for drugs or illegal stuff online. In reality, it's a programmable store of value that can be made to store anything, from money, to contracts, to property deeds, and in any way, from single person ownership, to distributed ownership, to even conditional ownership, where it is owned by X until time Y, or until its value grows to Z. You can do things like escrow, or kickstarter fundraising campaigns, right within the bitcoin programmable protocol, meaning if it takes off, it can make a lot of those types of companies obsolete. It's basically TCP/IP for money. And it's controlled by a mathematical algorithm way more strictly than any organization of people. You can bribe people, or hold a gun to their head, but you can't do that with a math function. That's a fact, which people who understand it are dumping millions of dollars into to develop. It's up to whoever knows this whether they want to get excited, or consider it as too risky and avoid it until it becomes as ubiquitous as credit cards.