Good luck with that. Someone who knows what they are doing have uploaded their encrypted wallet to at least a few cloud services including some offline storages as well (HDDs, CDs, USB sticks etc..).

On the other hand I suppose they could put you under house arrest where you're not allowed to use electronic devices for a certain amount of time, that is to say until they have figured out what you could have potentially done wrong to be under suspicions that would warrant freezing your assets.

Regarding suspicion of terrorism they could potentially whip out anything they want so I don't think any system could protect you from that but I would argue that it's better to trust a decentralization service if you're suspected of terrorism (not guilty) than a central authority such as a regular bank that would be strong armed under "national security".

A less extreme situation that doesn't involve terrorism, perhaps minor suspicision of money laundering or tax evasion it might become a grey area.

But a decentralized service requires availability of the service and availability of sufficient connectivity between you and the service. Take away any single point of failure, like your access line, or enough of the decentralized service to prevent timely validation of transactions, and the service becomes dead to you. Nobody will honor the contents of that encrypted wallet if the system to validate it is not usable.

I'd have thought that they would try to stop access to your online cloud services; relatively easy unless they're based in the third world. Although using a cloud storage service based somewhere like Nigeria would bring about its own set of risks.

Either way, I'd be intrigued to see what they do; did they say what they did to the Silk Road founder, who must have had bitcoins?

Also : Obvious Pyramid Scam is obvious Pyramid Scam.
It's only a valid "currency" as long as people use it. As soon as those heavily invested in it decide to take their stake elsewhere, the whole thing is coming down like WTC2.

I don't know, if you've signed up on them with different aliases and there's no tracks to lead them there I don't think they can do much. Besides, the idea isn't to keep the authorities away from the wallet but to spread it, securely, around the world so you have global access as long as you've a device and internet connection.

I read that the FBI confiscated about 32 million dollars worth of bitcoin. Then there's some rumours that the founder were money laundering in the billion amount so I assume they spread that around in case of capture. Then again blaming bitcoin because of criminal activity is like blaming guns: the inherent reason is inside humans, not outside, at least that's how I see it.

It's not that simple. See this: A ponzi scheme?

As for your other remark how is that any different than any other currency or commodity?

As long as mining is lucrative, banks won't fight against it (smart banks will likely adopt their own bitcoin exchange or "bank") and businesses find it useful (lower fees, faster transactions, global accessibility etc..) it's likely here to stay. I agree though that it's an issue that people only want to get in on it so they can cash out in a few years due to the early overvalue speculation. On the other hand if that keeps interest enough to attract businesses to use it as a payment system it's an acceptable trade off as long as people understand the nature of it.

No, it's a currency. A commodity is a raw material from which direct benefit is derived and has a market that is controlled by demand from secondary markets for these commodities. All commodities are processed into other goods.

Currency is a resource or asset that is used exclusively as a medium of trade and from which no inherent benefit can be derived.

If you're referring to Finland's recent rejection of Bitcoin as a currency, that's based on a legal technicality, namely that while Bitcoin is a currency, it is not recognised as legal tender anywhere in the world and so cannot be traded as currency.

No, it is not a technicality. Having no standing as "legal tender" does not make something not a currency; the concept of "legal tender" has to do with the manner in which debts may be settled or disputed, not recognition as a currency.

Rejection of Bitcoin as a currency can more readily be founded on the observation that it has no backing: there is no institution responsible for maintaining its liquidity or stability, and no institution responsible for assuring the solvency and continuity of market makers in the currency. The arrest of one principal market maker and the systematic embezzlement at another and its ultimate insolvency make it look more like criminals taking advantage of ignorant amateurs.

I hope GOG accepts Bitcoin soon, so that when my MtGox account gets reinstated, I can use it to pre-order those regionally priced games. *fingers crossed*

Are you sure they will? I thought most of it was stolen and the rest leaked out due to mismanagement (whatever that means).

Yeah, doesn't look good anymore. :(

Won't happen. Mt. Gox is, as many have expected, now bankrupt. In the understatement of the year, Mark Karpeles failed to apologize for the loss of 850,000 bitcoins:

"There was some weakness in the system, and the bitcoins have disappeared. I apologize for causing trouble."

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-mt-gox-bankruptcy-bitcoins-20140228,0,2153477.story#ixzz2uevZX0F1

While I wouldn't classify bitcoin as a commodity, calling it a currency is also a bit of a stretch, at least with regards to how it currently behaves. A couple of key elements for a currency are being something that is widely accepted for trade, and which also acts as a store of value. While bitcoin is accepted for trade at some places, it's quite a stretch to say that it is widely accepted. Additionally, most of the places that do claim to accept it don't actually do so directly in practice- rather, prices are denominated in some other currency, then an easy mechanism is set up for someone to trade an equivalent amount of bitcoins to an exchange, which then pays the merchant in the currency the prices are denominated in. The merchant never actually accepts any bitcoins.

As for being a store of value, bitcoin utterly fails in this regard, due to the large fluctuations in its price (even on a day to day basis). If I had to classify bitcoin I'd call in a vehicle for speculation (most people holding large amounts of bitcoin don't seem to be doing so as a way to store their wealth, but in the hopes that they can cash them out at a later date for a higher price). With the way bitcoin is structured this kind of speculation actually does look like a pyramid scheme as Lone3wolf mentioned. This is because the value of bitcoin is dependent on the number of people using it (the more people who want to use bitcoins the more they are valued at). New people buying in to the system increases the value of the bitcoins of those who have already bought in, but then if those people already holding a lot of bitcoins decide to cash out the value drops and the new people are left holding the bag. In other words, pretty much your basic pyramid scheme, just on a much larger scale.

I have no idea, why is everyone so hostile towards bitcoin. It is a technology - it can not be "uninvented", and it is not going away any time soon. Bill Gates (Microsoft), Marc Andreessen (Netscape), Eric Schmidth (Google), Richard Branson, have all agreed it is the biggest innovation of the decade.

Here is what really happened (and what did not happen) on Mt.Gox http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/03/01/what-did-not-happen-at-mtgox/

Saying bitcoin is on the verge of collapse, because one exchange got closed, is equal to saying that the internet is on the verge of collapse, because one e-mail company got closed. It just doesn't make any sense, and shows complete ignorance about the subject.

I came here to ask, if I can use a payment method, which is accessible to me, because all others (offered on gog.com) are not accessible to me. Instead, my post got buried under pages of hateful trolling.

When you get several pages of people writing hateful comments and lies, just so gog.com would not accept an ADDITIONAL payment method (which no one would be forced to use), it is clear that something's fishy here. Were they all hired by gog.com competitors? By PayPal? Who knows...

I have explained, that you don't need to accept bitcoin as a currency - you can accept it only as a payment method, but still get US dollars, the exact amount which you would get if the person was paying another way (but with smaller fees, and with no possibility of chargebacks). I have shown you feedback from other companies accepting bitcoin, and showed, that you could raise your sales by a minimum of 10 percent, but you refuse that, and refuse my money? Based on trolling and deceitful comments? Fine, I will go and pirate the games which I wanted to buy from you, because I have no other choice (the only other would be to not play them at all), and then I will contact their creators directly, offering them a donation in bitcoin.

In 2-3 years, you will realize, that you chose the side of trolls and liars, and not of IT pioneers like Bill Gates and others. I hope and wish you to realize this sooner.

You've received very little trolling. There's been some skepticism about how you are only able to use a currency as new as BitCoin, but that's understandable. To many of us your predicament seems backwards, so we will take some explaining. However I've seen very little by way of hate, only people expressing distrust of BitCoin, and skepticism of its future. That's not trolling.

Incidentally, that article (which is quite interesting, thanks for posting it) recommends at the end that DogeCoin looks like a better horse to hitch your wagon to. Perhaps you're backing the wrong currency?

Anyway, sorry you're unable to by games here. There's not much we can do about it, this is a forum, you're not talking direct to GOG. Furthermore it took them ages to include just one additional online wallet, the odds of them being able to make a change to the site to take BitCoin are not only slim, but when those guys change the site everything crumbles around us. I think the technical costs of implementing your desired change would be prohibitive.

Have fun pirating, and feel free to come back when you're able to pay. I'd suggest when you do return, starting off a conversation about religion so that you can set the bar for what a troll post is. Then feel free to join us in a nice debate on something like this, in which unfortunately for you, you're in a minority.

Yeah. That reasoning went out with the Bible.
"This is the Work and Word of my God. It says so right here on the first Page!"

:facepalm:

Independent analysis? None.
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