However it should be noted that most of the entries "XXX now accepts bitcoin" actually mean "XXX now accepts dollars even from bitcoin adopters who decided to sell some of their bitcoin".

For people who do not own bitcoin yet, going that route would mean downloading software, learning to use it, buying bitcoin with credit card or bank transfer, then sending the bitcoin to the store.  In all, probably more expensive than paying with credit card directly, and a lot more cumbersome.

Bitpay has an entry-level plan, limited to 100$/month, that delivers dollars to the merchant, has zero cost for him, and charges a small fee from the customer.  Thus it is easy to convince a store to "accept bitcoin". With such a plan, one could also get them to accept Dogecoin, Linden Dollars, Zimbabwean dollars...

So those "XXX now accepts bitcoin" events are not likely to increase adoption.  They are likely to promote movement of coins from hoards to the market, thus helping to depress the price.

It is amazing how little hard data exists on the bitcoin economy.  Companies like Bitpay and exchanges are privately funded so they do not have to publish real trade data.  The blockchain statistics do not mean anything; since address creation and transactions are free, most of the volume is clearly "fake" (transfers between addresses belonging to the same owner).  Almost all the trade at the exchanges is speculative, not people buying bitcoin to use in e-commerce; and we do not even know how much gets deposited and withdrawn each day.  We do not know how many bitcoins are owned by the Chinese, how much is used in gambling, how much the large miners get for their bitcoin...

Thank you, but I lived in the US 13 years starting with Reagan's election.  I have seen it happen in real time. And I have seen that here in Brazil too, before and after that. It was deregulation, not government intervention, that created the monster banks and all economic crises since then. 

If there was such a thing, how many lives would it have?

Trade associations hate the idea of "free market".  They are created and financed by the existing suppliers, and threfore defend their interests -- which include keeping competition away and the customers captive.  When they set quality standards, it is only for the purpose of labeling competitor products as unacceptable and hence prohibiting them.

The concept of copyright, for example, was invented by printers' guilds in various European countries, between 1620 and 1720, to ensure that the market of each book was the monopoly of a single printer -- using the police to crush attempts by other printers, domestic or foreign, to enter that market.

Laissez Faire capitalism, which in the US was brought in by back starting with Reagan, first allowed banks and corporations to grow and merge without limits.  (Once upon a time, there was a US government that ordered the breakup of AT&T because it was too big.  Would you believe that?)   Huge companies meant cartels which meant fat profits which meant fat bribes and campaign contributions which meant laws favoring the richest, such as the end of the progressive income tax and all sorts of tax breaks, loopholes and tax heavens.  Laissez-faire capitalism (or extreme deregulation) then allowed banks and financial corporations to invent all sorts of virtual assets built on top of each other, take risks that were once unthinkable, engage in undetected massive fraud, cede control to foreign corporations, etc..  When the house of cards finally collapsed, they already had enough power over the government to force it bail them out with taxpayers money.  That is where laissez-faire capitalism inevitably leads to.

More like "let them do (as they please)", i.e. without regulations.

That is not free market, it is "laissez faire capitalism", "wild west market", whatever.  The name "free market" has been taken long ago to mean what I wrote.

Laissez faire capitalism is what gave use the banks too big to fail, tax exemptions for the rich, the 1%-99% society, and so on.

Sigh... Just because it would be nice if something happened, it does not mean that it WILL happen.

Just because bitcoin promises to give you something, it does not mean that it WILL deliver it.

And "free market" is not unregulated market, black market, market of illegal goods, tax-evading market.  A free market is merely one where new suppliers can enter when the price is high enough for them to make a fair profit, and where customers can freely choose their supppliers (and symmetrically.)  A free market is a good thing, because it results in a fair price, a little above cost -- just enough  to make that market as profitable as any other fair market.

Thus, a free market does not require anonymity or secrecy; on the contrary, it presumes that consumers and suppliers have sufficient information about  products and prices, about supply and demand, and about each other -- including the reliability of suppliers and the credit rating of customers.  A market where most transactions are private, at undisclosed prices, is not really free, because suppliers can exploit the ignorance of customers (or vice versa) to limit their free choice and thus deviate from fair price.

And regulation does not make a market less free, as long as it is fair to all suppliers and customers -- in particular, if it does not favor established suppliers over potential new ones.

Is anyone from blockchain.info monitoring this thread anymore?

(And the link "About Us"/"Contact Us"/"Blockchain Blog" on their site seems catatonic.)

Some gambling site, but that does not matter any more, does it?

Hm, "free market"  does not mean "unregulated market".  A free market is one without significant obstacles  to the entry of new suppliers, where suppliers can freely offer varieties of their products and fix their prices, and where consumers can freely choose among the available suppliers.

Regulations that protect customers are no problem, as long as they apply equally to all suppliers and do not effectively prevent the entry of new suppliers.  It is still OK if the regulations prevent the entry of certain suppliers, e.g. for being too small, foreign, unqualified, whatever  The important point is that if the price of the product were to rise much above its cost, or the quality were not not as good as it could be, other entrepreneurs would promptly enter the market and offer the product at lower price and/or better quality.  As long as this "liquidity of suppliers" exists, the market is free, and will eventually reach a "fair price" -- one that provides to each supplier about the same net revenue that he would get if he switched to some other activity.

In fact, strict regulation is essential to ensure that markets remain free.  In an unregulated market, the suppliers that first dominate the market will inevitably try to use their positions to keep competition away, by any means they can.  These include dumping to force smaller competitiors into bankruptcy, bribing the government to issue exclusive operating licenses, prohibiting retailers to offer products of their competitors, and many dirtier tricks.  The market will then become a monopoly, or an oligopoly run by a cartel -- and prices will be set so as to maximize the suppliers'  revenue, rather than at a fair value. 

Regulations that protect customers also increase consumer confidence, and therefore are benefical for all suppliers in the long run.   (We can see that in bitcoinland: people are being driven away from bitcoin by the fear of losing money in ventures and exchanges that they cannot trust.)

For this reason, many countries have things like anti-monopoly laws, anti-dumping laws, and consumer protection agencies that try to limit the market share of individual suppliers in order to keep the market free (although they rarely succeed in that goal), prevent scams, and impose quality standards.   Honest suppliers may grumble at such regulations, but know that they are good for them too.  Deregulation is mostly the demand of the myopic, opportunistic, or fraudulent supplier, who aims to make quick money in the short term, even at the cost of damaging the market in the long term.

The distinction between anonymous and pseudonymous, for this purpose, escapes me.  Either way, one goal of the technology was to allow a secure payment without the parties having to reveal their identities to anyone, not even to each other, at any time. 

That goal implies that governments will not being able to "see" the payments.  Sure, they can tell that someone paid 23.12 BTC to someone else, perhaps to him/herself; but that information is useless if they cannot tell who the parites are -- not even their nationalities or locations.

Without the anonymity goal, the other technical goals that cyptocoins are suppsoed to achieve would be rather pointless or meaningless.  If the Funnycoin protocol required each party in a transaction to reveal and prove his flesh-and-bone identity, how could people do that without having to trust centralized intermediaries, such as passport-issuing offices? (Perhaps there is a way, but I am not aware of any proposal for such a crypto.) If the government and everybody else can see exactly how much XFC you earn and where you spend it -- what would be the advantage of using FunnyCoin, instead of banks?

Did anyone see the spam, now deleted, that prompted my question?

I doubt that any detectives are devoting significant time to the case... The only formal complaints I have heard of were by those two people who gave euros to Danny and did not get their coins, and the total  amount was onlt 35'000 euros -- a small scam even by Cyprus's standars, I would think.

He also owed 1 month of salary to his employees, and is said to have left a million dollars in debts for advertising, offices, furniture
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2603742/British-boss-Bitcoin-virtual-currency-firm-wanted-Cyprus-suspicion-fraud.html
I woud expect these creditors  to file for bankruptcy, a civil process but which maybe would produce further charges (of criminal mismanagement, embezzling, whatever) in due time.

Another group of victims are his investors, who are said to have given him about 10'000 BTC by September 2013, which would be worth ~4.5 million euros today.  There has been no accounting of whether and how those coins were spent.  However, since the investments were made in bitcoins through unregulated exchanges, and were not real equity but "limited-time dividend-only shares", the investors probably will not be able to press charges on any jurisdiction.

How are we supposed to handle spam in this thread?

is that so? I think that the Interpol a site where it posts some of the outstanding international warrants.

Pity that runaway scammers don't have a tracker like UPS. 

Just to pick a nit, something is "just a technology" while it remains confined to papers and lab demos.  Once it is deployed and used by thousands of people and moves millions of dollars, it becomes an "industry" or a "service"; and the question of what it could be used for is overshadowed by  what it is actually being used for.  Bitcoin was "just a technology" right after "Satoshi" posted their paper, but is not anymore.

But even pure technologies have their goals. When it was proposed, the goal of the internet was just to move information efficiently between computers.  While some people may have dreamed of many things fo it,  the many specific  goals that are now assigned to "the" internet -- like universal access,  freedom of information, anonymity, privacy, etc. --  were not goals of the technology.  In fact, until the 1990s, "the"  internet was a completely different thing than what it is now - politically, socially, economically.  

On the other hand, the goal of bitcoin as a technology was to be a global currency allowing p2p payments between anonymous arbitrary parties without a trusted intermediary and without a central  controlling authority.  Take away any of those goals, and the solution described by "Satoshi" does not make any technical sense. But I don't see how it possible to achieve those goals, without also
And that seems to be the conclusion of most bitcoin supporters, too.

EDIT: bolding

But the bitcoin distribution is not much better, is it? By Risto's estimates, 50% of the bitcoins that exist now are owned by a few thousand people -- isn't that so? 

Future mining may reduce that to 25%.  Or may not, depending on the relationship between  miners and hoarders.  Either way, it is a significant concentration of the future world's money supply in a few hands.

Cryptocurrencies are meant to allow payments that governments (and banks, which can be conflated with them)  cannot see, block, divert, or undo.

That is not explicit in Satoshi's paper, but seems to have been a basic assumption by most of the crypto fans, especially the most ardent ones. (Reducing credit card fees is not something that would get people that excited about, is it?).

Most cryptocoins seem to be designed and supported with that goal in mind.  Some bitcoiners are even adopting other coins because they do not see bitcoin as sufficiently robust in that regard.  Few coins, if any (Ripple perhaps? I don't  know about it)  are designed to allow the same level of control that governments now have on bank transfers.

My cape is in the clothesline at the moment but, generally, yes.