That's no different to any other currency. Speculators have free range to do whatever they want on forex trading systems.

And two days later you regretted not hoarding the bitcoin instead.

I don't, the price was good and the amount was tiny. Sure it would have been better today but I needed it yesterday.

That wasn't the point though, the point is yes, you can buy stuff and it's simple. Apart from the hour it takes to confirm the transaction (this is done by the BitCoin network, nothing any user or particular party needs to do) it was much less of a hassle than paying with a credit card... at least if you already have the BitCoins.

Almost nobody is buying anything with bitcoin. At least 99% of the bitcoin price is due to speculation.

Price your goods in USD and do the conversion at payment time.

Didn't think of that idea did you?

But then you're not really charging BTC, you're charging USD but allowing BTC as a payment mechanism of USD.

This is a feature not a bug. Also its much more valuable for the endpoints to be dissimilar payment regimes because financial transfers have obscene fees at this time. You double the currency exchange cost while eliminating all transfer fees. Transfer fees to go from my employers NYC bank checking account to my local credit union checking account are pretty low. On the other hand hopping borders and using multiple payment processors adds up pretty quick and the rates are extremely high for small transactions.

So?

I guess the main difference is that we know exactly how many bitcoins are left to be mined, while we don't really know how much gold is left in the earth's crust.

Well then you'll be happy to hear that Bitcoin does NOT allow one entity to produce money out of nowhere.

Exactly. Bitcoin allows many entities to produce money out of nowhere...though this ethereal production will eventually stop at 21 million, if Bitcoin survives that long.

By the same logic gold miners produce money out of thin air too.

It's nearly equivalent, except the rate of production halves every 2 years.

It isn't out of nowhere, it is relative to the market price of electricity and transistors necessary to do the work to generate transaction hashes. There is a valuation of how much money you spend on hardware and power to run a bitcoiner miner to obtain the new btc entering the system.

Currently bitcoin can be divided down to eight decimal places.

What the fuck

UK banks aren't regulated by the EU, so the banks essentially act as if they were divorced from their counterparts in Cyprus.

The same thing happened to Cyprus banks with branches in Russia.

I'd be more than a bit pissed if I was from Cyprus, though if I was a wealthy Brit or Russian, I'd be very pleased about this...

Thats not entirely true. Laiki UK is a branch, which means it is regulated and supported by Cyprus, while Bank of Cyprus UK is a subsidiary, regulated in the UK. However some sort of deal seems to have been done with Laiki UK.

> such studies are obviously social science, not science.

Hey man, you can believe whatever makes you feel better.

You didn't eat enough fat. If you cut carbs you must increase fat intake because that's the only other source of energy.

Only: fat is quite filling. So it's hard to eat enough calories from fat alone. (At least I found fatty meat quite filling. Gulping down cream or double cream is easier.)