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Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a Facebook account, so I can't sign up. I think this is probably true of a lot of Bitcoin users--for a lot of Bitcoin users, Bitcoin is a way to stay off the grid, and being on Facebook would defeat the purpose.

My suggestion is to provide a way to sign up without Facebook.

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Bitcoin... a monetary system that requires internet connectivity and CPU usage... in which every transaction is recorded forever and the database is replicated by all participants... is "off the grid"?

It's the closest you can get to off the grid.

Nope. Zerocoin is.

(Disclaimer : I'm a fervent Bitcoin supporter, I like its pseudonymous property and discard any anonymat claims. I've never used zerocoin because I don't have any use for it.)

zerocoin is only a proposal at this time.

You've never used ZeroCoin because an implementation of it doesn't exist yet...

But libzerocoin is coming tomorrow: https://mobile.twitter.com/ZerocoinProject/status/3521365613...

Cash? Gold? Cocaine? The way the actual "off-the-grid" economy works?

While its true for a lot of Bitcoin users, one of our goals was to make bitcoin more accessible to the public and the average person who is interested in bitcoin but doesn't quite know how to get started.

We are using Facebook as a trust network.

Agreed that being on Facebook takes away anonymity, which is one of Bitcoin's benefits. There are also many great non-anonymous uses for Bitcoin- "free PayPal", for example. That's the angle we're taking in this app.

Conversely, this could be a way to bring bitcoin to the attention of people who aren't already in on it.

I think they're using FB as a trust proxy..

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