We Now Accept Bitcoin for MSB Access
We have just added the option for customers to pay for MSB access with bitcoin. Current members won’t be able to use this option until they come up for renewal at this time.
Bitcoin has come under the exact type of attack I predicted just a week ago, a full on press to demonize that which can’t be criminalized. I have been back and forth on whether to set up bitcoin payments for quite a while. Not because I was opposed to it, but simply because it means more work for us, my member’s software can’t be made to integrate with it. So just like silver we have to do all member entries and account set ups manually.
The reality though is I have come to see the real value in bitcoin over the past few months and understand now why those in power hate it. It isn’t about being anonymous, which always starts a debate anyway by people who are generally only partly informed on all the options. Let me assure you though, paper money or gold and silver are the most anonymous forms of commerce. Anonymity isn’t why those in power really hate bitcoin.
Bitcoin is hated for two major reasons…
1. Bitcoin Has Low Transaction Fees
The transfer fees for doing business with bitcoin are very low and it has the potential in time to take major market share from the financial institutions. This is a multi billion dollar market that is currently under major threat from bitcoin.
Simply put bitcoin threatens the status quo of the monetary elite, why do you think JP Morgan is on board with the smear campaign? Do you really think that they care if money is used to buy drugs? Do you really think no one has ever used a JP Morgan account to buy or sell something illegal before?
2. Bitcoin Can’t be Controlled or Seized
Right now more and more capital controls are being put in place by financial institutions and governments alike, not just in the US but around the world. Many TSP listeners sent me copies of letters from their banks strictly limiting or eliminating their ability to transfer money out of the country. This is but on example of coming capital controls.
In England now customers must show good cause to withdraw money over a certain amount from their own bank accounts. Sounds crazy but it is 100% true you can read about it here. This is all about control folks. The problem for the elite is bitcoin can be held in a huge variety of ways, many of which make it impossible for authorities to control or seize. For instance you can set up a paper wallet, this means your bitcoins are in the block chain somewhere but you don’t have an account to log into, there is nothing to attack.
To access this wallet you need the wallet itself which you can print out. But you could burn that wallet and still access your bitcoins with mnemonic device. While it sure makes sense to record that somewhere in theory you could memorize it, get on a plane, step off anywhere in the world with nothing but the clothes on your back and still have access to your money. You can also send that money to anyone in the world, with no one to prevent you with it.
Some say this makes bitcoin ideal for “criminal use” ignoring that criminals use the banking system and cash payments all the time. Right now they want to equate the fact that some people use bitcoins in criminal activities so that makes bitcoin criminal itself. This is idiocy! Criminals also use cars, dollars, baseball bats, pry bars, checks, credit cards, binoculars, cell phones and shovels, does that make any of them bad or criminal?
Trust me folks the hatred of bitcoin is all about two things.
- Competition with banking transaction fees
- Immunity to capital controls
Watching my prediction from January 27th come true on the very day I made it with the arrest of Bitcoin Exchange CEO Charlie Sherm, has triggered my decision, I am all in! Sherm publicly gave money to Silk Road, as in he announced it, one doesn’t publicly launder money! The charges against Sherm are not that he hid money but that he gave money to a group who would likely do something illegal with it.
They are calling it money laundering, but perhaps someone should explain that term to the prosecutors of the case. The fact is that if what Sherm did broke a law, it would have broken the same law with cash, bank wire or a big fat check. Sherm didn’t try to do this transaction anomalously, he donated money to a business he wanted to support and again did this publicly.
For you investor types, all in doesn’t mean all in that way. I am not at this time advocating converting all your dollars to bitcoins. What I mean is I am from now on accepting bitcoin in any way that I can.
I am going to build some store of wealth in it and hey IRS, yes, I will pay you your taxes on any money I make with it, even though I don’t want to. I am not taking bitcoin to avoid paying “the man” and I am not doing it to be anonymous, I am doing it because it competes with the financial elite banking industry and because it lets me have full control of my money held in bitcoin. Quite simply if the financial elite are going to attack bitcoin, they I will support it!
Bitcoin Payment Options are Now on The MSB Payments Page
I will also soon add an option for people to “tip” in bitcoins on individual episodes of TSP. That will be coming soon!
While I applaud all efforts to make bitcoin a widely accepted currency, I fear that it will be shut down for exactly the reasons you state, and especially because it presents a potential threat to the banks. All the government has to do (at the bank’s behest) is make bitcoin illegal. The government can come up with any number of reasons that bitcoin should be outlawed, which the public will swallow hook, line, and sinker. If bitcoin becomes a real threat to the banks, count on it.
I have argued this for several years about bitcoin (yes, several years) and the usual response from the liberty community is that the government can’t shut it down. While it is true that bitcoin encryption [probably] prevents a direct intervention, all the government needs to do is make it illegal. The government could enact a blanket law making all crypto currencies illegal. If crypto currencies are made illegal, they will never become widely accepted in a mainstream sort of way, thus defeating their ultimate raison d’être.
Hello Lisa – I agree that the government could make crypto currencies illegal. They would get large pushback from companies like Apple who has many apps that work with crypto currencies. When you buy “points” or “coins” in a game you are buying crypto currencies. The same goes with many PC and console games these days. This is a 100 billion dollar industry.
I would not be happy if the government outlawed crypto currencies, but the upside is that my BitCoins would go up in value! Same thing goes with alcohol. If for some reason the government outlawed alcohol, all of my current alcohol supplies would be worth a whole lot more.
I agree with Lisa’s concerns, and I feel like they lay out the EXACT reasons for people to adopt bitcoin sooner vs. later. When 0.00001% of the population is using bitcoin it’s pretty easy to enact a ban with minimal resistance. But when that user base scales to 1%? 10%? There is going to be significant flare toward any sort of outright ban.
@Lisa, so we should let fear prevent us from acting?
I personally think that bitcoin has an unbelievable amount of things to overcome and by its nature is only as stable as a completely globalized world and mindset is (I think that’s breaking apart at the seams right now).
But I agree with jack. If it becomes illegal, then what? (Who cares other than you now have illegalized digital objects?) I personally believe the chances of the government illegalizing bitcoin is close to nill. Regulations? Sure.
Pretty cool. It is definitely a good time to take a stand, before the demonization picks up too much steam.
Jack,
I just paid using bitcoin. I think the currency may have dipped between the time I clicked the buy button and the time I submitted my bitcoin because I got an email saying I only sent “49.82” despite choosing $50 via the Coinbase API.
I sent another payment to make up for the difference.
Thanks for doing this, and I’m glad to finally be a member after 4 years of listening.
-Hank
@Hank, thanks will get your MSB set up right away. Don’t sweat pennies man but thanks for the honesty,
Jack
Jack I do not know a lot about bit coin. Really only what I have heard you talk about and a couple of Gary North articles. Can you do a show on bit coin please?
Like “Intro to Bitcoin” where do I get them? How does a rookie “mine” them? Do rookies even mine them?
Thanks brotha.
IMO Mining is not something to get into at this point unless you’re doing it for fun.
If you think of it like the CA gold rush, its moved out of the ‘miner with a mule’ stage in to the ‘mega corporation w/ big money’ stage.
‘Difficulty’ determines how hard it is to mine a coin. If the exchange rate is flat, it is inversely proportional to your earnings.
Here’s the difficulty chart:
http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty
As you can see in the history its getting roughly 30% more difficult EVERY 11 DAYS to mine bitcoins.
So, if you were mining at a rate of 1 BTC a day at the beginning of the month, at the end of the month you’d only be mining at 0.5 BTC a day. At the end of the next month you’d only be mining at 0.17 BTC day.
In other words, your income would be declining 30% every 11 days (income hyper deflation).
And before anyone freaks out about that, this is exactly how the system was designed to function from day one.
For the record, the network is now doing
20.7 Quadrillion calculations per second.
Hey man did you see this nonsense?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfeA94BedQI
The entire thing starts with a complete lie,
“To use bitcoin all users must download the entire block chain”, and from the comments you can see no one there seems to care about facts.”
The presenter is a typical detractor, who sees bitcoins as an investment vs. a currency.
I didn’t see it.. but I’ve kind of totally tuned out the ‘noise’.
Hmm.. 3.5 minutes listening to someones opinion about how I’m ‘doomed’.. or 3.5 minutes watching the latest Geoff Lawton video.. choices choices..
😉
oh. and I forgot to put it with the right show..
But casually throwing in the fact that spiders like to overwinter in Comfrey.. that was awesome. Made me LOL.
Simply trading like effort for any form of like effort that is acceptable to both parties is far superior for a lot of reasons. Kind of like a 1033 tax free exchange with no onlookers? Bitcoin is incredibly volatile, far more than the VIX ! Great idea but far too many complications none of us can resolve. Good luck on it . As always there is a better way.
Now see that is nonsense. If I was worried about stable value, I could easily take bitcoin and have it immediately converted to USD and put in my bank account. I can set it to do 10% in BTC and 90% in Dollars, or 50-50 or 25-75, you name it.
You know if I had taken bitcoin as I was asked to do for the past 5 years, I might be a muli millionaire from it. I am not planning on that happening now but I am not letting fear prevent me from accepting payment in BTC. If I am ever worried about “volatility” I can convert to dollars in about 5 seconds.
Jack if you were ever worried about volatility, I sure hope you would not convert them to USD. Unless you were planning complete liquidation of them. Otherwise, I think you might have meant to convert them to gold or silver, something a bit less volatile. Just my 2 cents. Thanks.
No absolutely not, right now US Dollars are far more stable than gold and silver. My PM recommendation has been and still is 5-10% of wealth, no more, no less.
Despite its problems right now this very moment the US Dollar is the most stable form or currency we have, specially in the short term 2 weeks to say 5 years.
How would I go about buying bitcoin?
Hi horatio,
The easiest and most reliable way is to set up an account at Coinbase.com (only if you’re American). They’ll require your banking info and it’ll take a week or so to verify your account, but are probably the most secure of all online bitcoin wallets.
The fastest and most anonymous way to buy bitcoin is via localbitcoins.com, where you can purchase in-person and pay with cash. It’s easiest if you live near a large urban area, and you’ll pay a premium, but localbitcoins.com is the absolute fastest way to buy bitcoin if that’s your concern.
Take care,
Hank
Great news Jack! Welcome to bitcoin. I have been taking bitcoin for soil cube tools for a couple of years and it really helps when taking orders from outside of the country… I have done transactions from France, Japan, Israel, and a few to South America. The real benefit I find is the VERY low transaction fee… It makes doing small international transactions possible! Additionally, it is cool to use a “currency” that is increasing in value as opposed to losing value on a daily basis due to inflation. The volatility on a daily basis is simply the result of an ACTUAL free market. The price of bitcoin is set by the daily (at that time) demand, like when you attend a live auction. People tend to be uncomfortable with this because they have been lulled to sleep by being immersed their whole life in controlled markets!!
Oh and Horatio,
here:
http://www.coindesk.com/
https://localbitcoins.com/
https://multibit.org/
https://bitcoinarmory.com/
Here’s a decent overview of bitcoin (keep in mind this is 9 months old and 1BTC now equals ~$800): http://vimeo.com/63502573
A more in-depth overview here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP9-lAYngi4
Meant that reply for horatio!
Electrum is my favorite wallet: https://electrum.org/
Jack,
It would be great if you could do a segment on your show on how you got set up to start doing this, i.e. what steps you needed to take. I’d like to offer this on my website, but some help getting started would be helpful. Thanks!
Glad to know you finally saw the light, Jack! BTC is awesome for a lot of reasons.
I’ve started taking your advice about starting a small business and I sell silver bullion for Bitcoin and/or Litecoin. I sell on Coingig.com and CryptoThrift.com
I like it because the payments are almost instant and they’re irreversible. (there’s escrow service for disputes…)
Anyway, I’ll pay my next MSB in BTC!
Love your show & I’ve been there since the end of TSP’s first month.
Modern Survival asked: @Lisa, so we should let fear prevent us from acting?
Did I imply that in my post? I don’t think so.
Yep that is what I got out of it.
Excellent choice Jack, very consistent with your philosophy.
Glad to see you doing this, Jack! Even if it drops significantly in value, you’ll have done a world of good – just by this act alone I’m betting thousands will become more educated about alternate currencies.
I really hate paypal, and sending silver in the mail always made me feel weird (not that it stopped me). This is a billion times better!
For those with lots of questions about bitcoin, stop by the forum – we’ll be glad to help!
I remember when my friends gave me a hard time for doing simple SEO projects for 50 bitcoins instead of taking cash. It took about 30 hours of total work.
I heard it all. It’s a scam. It’s fake. etc.
Later I dumped 20 of them for $2500 and still have the other 30 worth over $24,000.
It is by far the best pay of my life.
A few things, like bitcoins, increase in value 90 fold over a short amount of time. Tulips did once, and yes I know bitcoins can’t self propagate, but still.
All it takes is significant rumbling from the government about regulating them to get large institutional investors to dump bitcoins. Once that starts to happen, value will plummet quick. They don’t have to outlaw them, they just have to start talking about it in a serious way. Big companies will have to take bitcoins and then immediately convert them to dollars, which will cause a lot of volatility as well.
But the very fact that they can threaten the government, the fed, and the large financial institutions dooms them in the long run. Would they become more valuable if illegal? Probably. Will you risk getting added to the terrorist watch list to trade them and likely have your existing bank accounts and or property seized because you are ‘suspected’ of funding terrorism? Probably not.
Again, this thinking all stems from the thought of “investing in bitcoins” and ya bitcoins compared to tulips, is just a total non starter. There will only ever be 20 million bitcoins that is a hard ceiling.
First gas stations in the world started taking bitcoin this week.
In Greeley CO, you can now buy gas for your vehicles with crypto currency.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1wv4sw/paid_for_a_tank_of_gas_with_bitcoin/
Gas station’s Facebook page, mentioning acceptance of bitcoin:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Cosmic-Market/361536063958766