Topic: 2014 is going to be a GOOD year for bitcoin they said... - page 2. (Read 3396 times)

They said that about 2013 as well.
In January it was at around $40 and by December it had reached $1100.
Be patient. Good things come to those who wait.

There is a positive event in the works: Jimmy Wales may be buying BTC now, getting in position to have Wikipedia accept bitcoin donations. Via testing the waters, he personally garnered $12K+ of BTC, of which he said will be donated to Wikipedia after being converted back to fiat.

In fact, it's not a stretch to envision a myriad of millionaires buying bitcoins now to easily earn at least a million dollars profit this year, some of which probably not paying taxes on their windfall due to creative accounting practices, read omission.

B doesn't apply to BTC, it applies to every currency.
C no. If you leave it laying around just about anywhere, there is no point in making them.
E no.

This. If you got GOX'd, it's your own fault for not paying attention. The red flags were visible since summer 2013.

1. Usually you don't hear about $500 million nationally or around the world.  Usually it takes a lot more.  Madoff took $18-65 Billion.  Banks take billions in bailouts.

2. You lost confidence?  In what, your ability to protect your coins with a non-exchange wallet?  Losing confidence in bitcoin is like saying you lost confidence in the Euro because the convenience store was robbed.

No one likes the fact that Mt Gox was either incompetent or criminal, but with the Euro/Dollar/Yen/Yuan, you KNOW that every year someone is going to be stealing money from you via inflation, bail-outs, and bail-ins.  At least with bitcoin, you have the ability to protect yourself - provided you don't use an exchange as a bank.

Remember: if you don't have the private keys, you don't own bitcoin, you have an IOU from someone else.

:-)

Sorry you got gox'd

Remember how 2013 seemed total crap in April?

How about "Thanks to bitcoin and no thanks to Newsweek, Dorian Nakamoto is now a millionaire" 

I'd say 2014 is starting out pretty great:

The market price is about the poorest indicator of Bitcoin's health. Yes it took a dive, but mostly because of Mt.Gox, again. Now they are finally dead and we can all move on, it's only a matter of time before bullish sentiment returns to pre-Goxxing levels. Distributed exchanges will debut this year to displace the private exchange issue once and for all, circumventing FinCEN and other financial regulators with it.

These are all tests of Bitcoin's resilience, and it keeps coming back stronger than it was before as the holes are exposed and plugged.

Overall though, we are seeing 1000's of new businesses entering the fray from small to large, tons of development work on the protocol itself and surrounding technologies. Mining itself is a multi-million dollar industry in of itself now.

Beyond Bitcoin, we're seeing 100s of new currencies coming out of varying merit, and a lot of dev work there too. This is all bigger than just Bitcoin, this is the emergent birth of an entirely new kind of economy.

We're at "Internet in 1990" stage with all of this, just give it some time to mature, and watch the entire world change around it into something much better.

Don't forget the more bitcoin survives the tougher it looks and/or is.

I have a few friends who heard about bitcoin a few years ago come to me recently and say wtf that bitcoin stuffs still around? Wait didn't gox kill it all ? Didn't it like crash already?

I just say yea it crashed a few times since you last looked hey take a look at the numbers for your self.

They mostly then say wtf its worth that much now ?  Fuuuuu I could have got in when it was £2... but I don't get it after all this bad stuff has happened why is it not close to zero if its all over.


I do agree tho some cat getting urgent heart surgery funded by bitcoins or other news might be nice once in a while.

for E, just cold storage, changing OS is not a smart move.
If enough people uses Linux thinking it is safe from virus attacks, hackers will move the focus to develop Linux virus instead.
Remember the only reason windows has more virus is that there are more users. period.

Are we to judge bitcoin based on its price at the exchange or how often it is used to pay for services and goods?

Seems to me a lot of us, myself included, judge it based on price and that may be why we become negative in our way of thinking. Perhaps it is time to start using our bitcoins instead of hoarding them. Even if that means selling for fiat and doing something with the money if you cannot find something to buy directly with bitcoins...

good point, i'm sure btc will be more famous and in value in future cuz it's just great thing.

We need more charitable stories.  Like the Dogecoin bobsled story.

More stories like this:

"Learn how Bitcoin donations helped one lucky family fulfill their dying teenage daughter's last wish!"
"Thanks to Bitcoin, a local mom and pop store were able to stop Walmart from taking away their business an closing their doors"
"Thanks to crowd-funded Bitcoin donations, a former meth addict was able to fix his teeth, and is starting his first day at his new job"

Bitcoin is amazing...but it has a public perception problem.  The Bitcoin foundation should hire a PR firm to right the ship.

Lolz not after sympathy was my own fault for trusting anyone but myself and yes I traded my way up from £1000 to 73 goxcoins because I wanted to have some money and ( yea it paid for me to live too) call that greed sure I suppose it was. That was my job and I can tell you its kinda hard work day trading if your a noob with no trading experience like me.
Only thing i ever sent to gox was 2 years ago I was not one of those wiring in money looking for more cheep gox coins.  I already had more gox coins than I wanted. So kindly fuck right off I'm moving on and trying to get back into bitcoin.

hope BTC price stable and increase (slowly)
wow i just know any virus steal from multibit
try googling it
thanks

I'm not sure this is all such bad news. I think amounts like this mentioned in the media gets some financial heads turning and can lend some credibility to the seriousness of bitcoin. With that much money moving around, it no longer looks like a geeky hobby or some libertarian dream world. Good news or bad, bitcoin is slowly becoming a household word.

It seems to me that people tend to forget that it's not 100% one way or another.

All funds in an exchange - stupid, clearly.

All funds in personal cold storage - an ideal system for the purist, up to a point. It has security risks in the physical world.

But there are more sophisticated approaches that can be combined. Use of multisig, in particular, helps. It means, for example, you can create convenient online wallets where (a) the website has no ability to spend and (b) you can still recover from losing a particular private key.

Then there's Neo/Bee's approach, using 2 of 3 from customer, bank and a third party.

As well as a number of different multisig approaches, you can use two modes of cold storage for safety - one paper, one brainwallet. There's secret sharing schemes to split private keys.

For now, I think it's clear that a simple cold storage approach for the majority of funds is right for most people. It's equally clear that exchanges as currently implemented are not safe at all and one should never entrust meaningful funds with them except for the brief time you use them (doesn't help daytraders, but sorry - daytraders are taking huge gambles anyway).

In the future multisig and some other technologies will give you a broader set of choices if you happen to have a lot of money.

If you want to focus on price then the best thing for Bitcoin is for the price to be stable. Assuming price matters (and assuming a very broad definition of "price"). Bitcoin functions just fine at any price.

2014 started off Bad for Bitcoin, hopefully the price is going to rise and people get over the Mt.Gox scandal.

Don't keep all the copies of your keys in your house. Keep them offline. Make backups and encrypt them. There are ways of planning for all the issues you've raised. As for the ransom bit, I would suggest not letting on to people that you have a lot of bitcoin - that's the beauty of it, you could have 1000 20BTC accounts and no one in the world knows.