Just curious whether any ladies have thought about accepting bitcoin for payment. It beats cash but can easily be converted into cash, is anonymous (or can be anyway). and would really give LE (and the IRS for that matter) a huge headache (no proof of payment). I can't believe no one has discussed before, but my search turned up zilch.
Untraceable $$ doesn't lend to honorable folks. You are behind sir, bitcoin shut down... Nice idea but hard to keep people honest with untraceable funds..
-- Modified on 3/5/2014 12:44:59 AM
Ugh so much I have to address from that.
First, why would untraceable payments be a problem? Seems like a good thing. What you should be worried about is reversibility and for that Bitcoin is better than cash (or any other existing payment method). Bitcoin payments are completely irreversible so they are safer for the provider versus cash. If someone hands you $500 cash, they can take it right back too if they overpower you. It has happened. Once a Bitcoin payment goes through and is confirmed (about 15 minutes), it cannot ever be reversed. Anonymous does not mean it lacks protection. Silk Road operated for years out in the open selling illegal drugs and mercenary type weaponry including tanks! - it took the CIA, NSA and various international spy agencies literally years to shut it down because the Bitcoin payment system is virtually untraceable (they eventually shut it down by tracing IP addresses and monitoring specific computers they knew were being used by offenders). Hundreds of millions of dollars was traded on silk road over the years. There is a good reason for that.
Bitcoin dead? Hardly. The news media doesn't get it yet either so I understand. I keep over $50K U.S. in BTC for a rainy day, and I haven't pulled any of that out despite the recent attacks (which I expect will continue.. and probably get worse once governments like China start to try to take Bitcoin down because they will eventually realize it poses a threat to their authority). Bitcoin prices have been very stable on most major exchanges (look at Coinbase, btc-e, bitstamp). I can buy and sell Bitcoin all day long on the exchanges (or even better, to locals via a meeting at Starbucks). I did over $2,000 today alone, selling above $690 per BTC. And I can still buy just about anything I want using Bitcoin on Overstock, TigerDirect, and eGifter (among several hundred other smaller vendors).
Bitcoin is hardly "shutdown" - despite the attacks in recent weeks, the price of a Bitcoin is still about $690 close to where it was before Mt Gox shut its doors (but down from the $1,000 high it hit last year). Mt Gox failed after being attacked by hackers, but Mt Gox was no more than a trading platform and a relatively small one by the time it died. I have never even heard of Flexcoin but it sounds like a very small bitcoin bank that got hacked and failed. How many U.S. banks have failed? Does that mean the dollar is dead (of course not, yet)? These failures have had almost zero effect on the other exchanges like Coinbase, Btc-e, and bitstamp. The BTC price went down for a few days after the Mt Gox news mostly because people didn't know if Mt Gox was alone (it was). Then it went right back up.
Accepting Bitcoin doesn't mean you have to take any risk though, unless you choose to do so. Using coinbase (for example; there are others) you can accept BTC and convert to cash immediately, so there is no risk of the BTC disappearing (of course, the same can't be said for the U.S. dollar, which could very easily devalue once inflation starts in which it must). In that respect it is a little like Paypal. Of course, like Paypal, Coinbase will create a record of your deposits (so you need to report to IRS) **but** no record of who sent the $$ or why.
Could someone break into Coinbase and steal coins? I suppose, but their security is as good as a real bank. It is pretty unlikely. They were immune to the attacks that hurt Mt Gox.
But, if you can get comfortable with BTC price stability (or actually, with the fact that BTC is likely to rise rather than fall over time), the best solution is to keep your own wallet, and encrypt it (or even better, print out your wallet keys and store them in a safe). This is virtually unbreakable security if you encrypt.
If you get comfortable with the "risk" of BTC itself (e.g., you realize that BTC hasn't failed yet, has been incredibly stable or increasing in price over the past few years, and its not going to go away anytime in the near future) then you can be completely anonymous and 100% immune from any theft by keeping BTC in your own encrypted wallet, offline and out of reach of anyone. Then, you can spend BTC just like dollars except anonymously at Overstock.com, TigerDirect.com, eGifter.com (which lets you buy egift cards at hundreds of retail stores like Home Depot, Lowes, Sports Authority, etc.). You can easily live off of BTC. You can sell BTC to others at a decent markup. You can hold BTC as it increases in value. You can transfer it to Coinbase (or your preferred trading site) and sett for dollars (or Euros, or whatever).
Bitcoin was made (literally) for businesses that need to fly under the radar of LE. I just don't get the fact that it hasn't been embraced by this particular community yet.
I'm with you 95% of the way but a few points. BTC is somewhat anonymous but not forever. The basis of it is a very public ledger. With the failure of Mt Gox, I suspect that some very powerful forensic accounting tools will be built. People do want to know where over $400m went after all. A lot of people suspect it was not really a hack but a quiet government forfeiture action. Governments do have a lot to protect with the fiat currencies.
I do agree that it's a great new currency and invest myself.
It is possible to achieve the other 5% of total and permanent anonymity by following some simple rules...
You need only to do a few things to make sure your potentially interesting (to LE) transactions are anonymous: (1) keep your own wallet on your laptop (not smartphone) for sending and receiving coins to providers (or for other "interesting" reasons), (2) when engaging in transactions for interesting services or goods, access the internet through TOR, (3a) for the coin recipient/provider, always generate a new address to receive BTC for each transaction (very important), and as a corollary (3b) never put a client in the address book or otherwise associate (through repeated transactions or otherwise) a client with any BTC address, (3c) same rule, never send a BTC address to a person in e-mail, type it out or use the bar code generated automatically by your wallet software, (4) when spending coins to "cash out" (to coinbase for example), first send the coins to a second wallet (in windows, you can create a new user account and the wallet software will act as a new wallet for the new user; or run on a different computer or smartphone, but NOT an online wallet), creating a new receive address each time, then spend from that second wallet, (5) encrypt your wallets (both) and back them up to separate flash drives (offline storage not connected to any network), saving the backups in a secure but seperate locations like a safe just as you would cash, and (6) make sure you have a good firewall and antivirus software that is up to date.. If you are holding coins for a while (not cashing out quickly), and you are really paranoid, there are two more steps: (7) export the coins in your wallets regularly to a paper wallet, which you keep hidden but close enough to reach in a minute or less, and keep a lighter or cross cut shredder near the paper ready to burn your cash (and records of it) irretrievably, in an instant (or a less paranoid solution is to hide it really well - its a sheet of paper, so shouldn't be impossible to hide well), and (8) use a dedicated laptop that does nothing other than run the bitcoin wallets (to prevent exposing yourself through malware you might download while browsing the internet, or downloaded fake software like the Fake Java malware), and only connect to the internet to conduct a transaction.
Note that steps (7) and (8) are ONLY needed IF you are extremely paranoid and IF you are keeping a stash of coins.
Following these steps the likelihood of anyone being able to trace your transactions is about the same as being struck by a meteor in the head (maybe even less likely than that).
Of course that doesn't prevent good old fashioned LE work (stings) from finding you, and once they have your laptop from discovering that every friday and saturday night you received 2-3 transfers of $500 each; but that is all they will have to go on.
-- Modified on 3/5/2014 12:06:09 PM
Or something like it.
I mined bitcoins several years ago when you could still do it profitably at home. I still do as part of a mining pool but the solutions and power consumption are making it less profitable.
But it's totally the future. Second Market is going to launch an exchange soon along with a couple of other serious players with legitimacy and experience.
Edit: BTW, I'm talking about overall, not that it's the "future" for providers as that is something else.
-- Modified on 3/5/2014 7:50:06 PM