too many chinese.  too few bitcoins.  someone is making a lot of money by selling for $350 in china and buying for $330 in europe.

when the chinese buyers decide to take a profit, you had best be headed the same direction, faster.

meanwhile, if the same number of bitcoin are bought in the lit market today as yesterday, then the price will go over 3000 yuan.
since that can't happen, either someone will buy the wall at usd 335 on bitstamp, and send it to btcchina, or else the dam will break tonight.

1.3 billion chinese are telling us that BTC is a buy at $358.28, while 750 million europeans are telling us that BTC is a sell at $334.40.

It can't happen because the arbitrage cost between btcchina and bitstamp can't be that large.  Nothing to do with BTC's fundamental value or technical condition.  Just an arbitrage argument:  Things go on until they can't (completely disregarding "should"). Then they don't.

The honey badger is chewing through 2200 yuan right now.  Another 2000 BTC of flow puts the price at 2500 tonight, absent more supply.

some dipstick is going to be facepalming for dumping 1715 at one go for 335 on bitstamp.
it's a huge gift for bobby lee.

bitstamp has the next wall at 350.  doubt that can get consumed overnight, but i'm usually wrong about that.

Actually, it is still there.  $374 on btcchina, 337.74 on bitstamp.  arbitrageur's wet dream.  I am so mad I have a day job.

taking about 60 BTC off of bitstamp rightnow would unleash a deluge up to 350usd

it's not manipulation if you really want the bitcoin

This is market dynamics in action.  We've been predicting this for how long?  You can't honestly be surprised when it happens.  And this will happen again.  Many times.

Regarding senate hearings and fear of regulatory overreach, I would remind everyone that bitcoin is a honey badger.  Crazy nastyass bitcoin does not care.

A credible assassination market would clean up politics.

wall street journal weekend investor just published, recommending to buy bitcoin as a small speculative position.

Oh so sadly true, and abundantly illustrated in these forums and in the press. 


I will bid my 1BTC to your 0.5BTC that the US dollar ceases to be an international reserve currency before BTC trades with a daily VWAP under 1 dollar (US2013 PP).
I will bid my 0.5BTC to your 1BTC that the US treasury defaults on debt before BTC trades with a daily VWAP under 1 dollar (US2013 PP).


While true in a sense, this is misleading.  Bitcoin has fundamental value as money.  Most punters fail to understand how to value money.  PQ=MV dawg.

I am amazed to still find people posting about currency deriving its value from "faith".  That is a  preposterous  big lie which gains currency only from its constant repetition.  A currency per se derives its value from its use.  Not from faith orconfidence or backing in quatloos or fairy dust.  This is accurately and adequately described by the quantity theory of money:  PQ=MV.   The value thus derived is kept connected to the currency by the faith or confidence that the utility conditions described in this equation will persist over the users discounting horizon.

Bitcoins have uses other than use as currency, i.e. a medium of exchange, and therefore the fundamental value of  bitcoin is greater than the total M might naively imply,  but of course the quantity theory adequately accounts for this in the V factor.

ifi you attempted to value a tech startup based on anything other than its discounted cashflow you'd come up with a rather misleading figure.  discounting accounts for time.  the cash flow rem accounts for growth.  likewise valuing bitcoin without reference to its future velocity and trade use appropriately discounting is a doomed enterprise.  its long term commodity value is zero apart from use and monetary value will equalize with instrumental value lest there be arbitrage.

I guess you can be safely ignored then.  I suspect that I despise the neokeynesian kleptocrats even more than you do, but you had might as well cast stones at the ideal gas law.

All of November was a linear rise, except every weekend it drops.  All of November, institutions are buying bitcoin, and they don't work on weekends.  Coincidence?  I expect shaking trading until Monday morning in London.

BTC is always in a cup w/ handle.  but the cup is permanently missing a left hand side.

Since he wasn't making a prediction, but describing a hypothetical series of events which he regards as paradigmatic of a syndrome, he got everything exactly right, as far as you or I can tell.  After all, the only evidence we have of his intent is our perception of his action.

Months?  Methinks you underestimate the compelling nature of the bitcoin case at present.  No mere price fluctuation will sway the value investor who recognizes an undervalued asset.  The longer it stays low before it rises to its fundamental long-term value, the more I can accumulate.  Crashing bitcoin to dust levels for a year might even allow me to accumulate to my long-term target:  Half of the bitcoin.

Do it right before halloween and I think you have a winner.   PumpCoin and CandyCoin.

Also HallalCoin, BodhiCoin, and KrsnaKoin.

1200 offered on stamp.  dude is begging us to shut up and take his money

bitcoin is the best thing ever to happen to the federal reserve.  they need someplace to burn all the QE.

There are basically just enough bears to keep this price steady, mutatis mutandis.
A thousand coins offered at 900 on stamp is the real reason for the price stagnation.
This is the wall observer thread, after all.  If the wall holds we go down.  If the wall falls we go up.
Question is, what will the wall do, and why?

So buy the wall then.

No one could be that dumb!

And a vast horde of newly minted millionaires would spring like calves first from the stable cavorting in their glee.

There are as many reasons to desire things to be different than they are as there are persons who see things other than they would that they were.  A clever man once said something akin to this:  Everyone may be entitled to their own opinion, but they are not entitled to their own facts.

amusingly, while the price is rising in china, it is falling on stamp

...and china breaks above 4000.

Truly.  It warms my heart to see such blatant price suppression met with a sneer.

btcchina is trending up nicely now

Williams may be a great expert on commodities but he does not understand money in the least.

btcchina keeps pulling the market up and up.  looks like the panic in china is over, sad to say.

but i did see something mildly clever:  put a bid in at 640, then fill the top of the order book with bitcent bids up to 650 to make it look like there's no support in the order book.  let the dumpers dump into your funnel, and if someone wants some liquidity, let them reach for it.

I know that when I buy bitcoin it is to recover some losses.  Like the loss of my virginity in high school.  Still recovering.  Still buying bitcoin.

Well, I don't know about y'all, but I'm full.   If I tried to ingest another 650 coin I'd pop.  Y'all can have the rest while I digest.

Miners always make money.  The reasons are simple.  Any miner who does not hold his coins until they are worth the cost of mining goes bankrupt, and sells his mining gear to a miner who does.  The bankrupt party is not a miner, but an ex-miner.  The remaining miners hold until the coins are worth enough to be profitable.  Consequently, by hoarding all the new coins, the miners drive up the price, since demand cannot meet supply at the older, lower prices.  Since mining is always profitable, it is an attractive investment.  Therefore, more miners come online all the time.  Some few are inept, and go bankrupt.  The survivors make money, and drive up the difficulty, and hoard coins until they are profitable, thus creating an incentive for more miners to come online, driving up the difficulty, which drives up the prices.

In short, because miners are always profitable, difficulty always increases, and bitcoin always goes up.

You may protest:  But bitcoin has gone down!  In fact that is noise.  You must separate the signal from the noise, or you will be deceived by your innate talent for detecting patterns in information.  The signal is:  Bitcoin is going up.

This is known as tacit agreement.  Unless you mean that it is aesthetically displeasing (I disagree) or morally corrupt (perhaps - I have no opinion).

ocean, atmosphere, dysonsphere, space-time...

I see.  There are actual disagreements.  Firstly, a religious one.  Perhaps my language was blasphemous to TANSTAFFL.  I do apologize, as I had no intention of defaming your deity.  Secondly, a semantic one.  You wish for "always" to mean something like "invariably" whereas I use it to mean something like "ever and anon" or at least "anon".  Duly noted.  Moot as regards substance, but noted.

Interesting economic question for speculation:  Will the profits from mining rise faster than the costs of energy?  If so...singularity.  Renormalization can derive a perpetual price of energy in bitcoins.

I too paid an exhorbitant amount of BTC for a 60GH/sec miner.  However, when it was obviously a net loser, even on a USD basis, I immediately flipped it for a profit.  60GH/sec smells like BFL to me, which is of course where we both went wrong:  Taking a flyer on thieves.  But in general, when you are not being conned, mining is profitable.  Even the block erupters are paying for themselves these days, and almost nobody bought those thinking they would ever be profitable.  Why, given the cost of the BTC then and now, in USD terms that 100BTC would be profitable now, would it not?

Ah, manipulation, the moral puzzle.  Personally, I think manipulators should be hunted down and garrotted, perhaps with a columbian necktie.  Why so harsh?  Because they are oppressors of the poor widowed orphans, shivering in the cold, trying to daytrade some bitcoins fair and square to buy their gruel.

I take some responsibility for this tack, with my necktie quip.  Seriously, it's not worth the karma burn.

Not quite.  Let's try for 3.  No serious resistance on stamp until 615 (300), 600 (400)

Hey, it can go to subpennies and still trade on some exchanges.  "Could" is pretty broad.  And markets are reflexive and grossly over-reach the fundamentals every day.
My hat is off to anyone who is simultaneously able to predict an extremum with useful accuracy and retain enough confidence in their judgement to act on it productively.
What is interesting is what will actually happen.  Clever people will buy from less clever people at ever decreasing prices until all the clever people defect from their shared
interest and greedily collect enough to drive up the BBO.  My thinking that given level will hold or not hold is unlikely to affect the point at which defections overwhelm.

we just witnessed the reorganization of the future of mankind.

It does.  It will.

That's a losing proposition.  You are buying BTC high and selling them low.
The opposite direction involves buying BTC with RMB which is challenging right now.
However, you might get a good deal from miners in China.

The only news coming out of China is that BTC crossed over 4000 again

Well, in retrospect moves seem obvious.  Thus you think, I should act on all these obvious moves.  Then you try to act before the move instead of regretting it after, only to discover that the move you thought was obvious was just a bit too subtle for Mr. Market.

It is particularly difficult to avoid this trap when you accurately predict things ahead of time, but fail to act on your prediction because you were skeptical of your ability to predict.  The next time you have burritos before bedtime, you wake up with a wild hare notion that something in particular is going to happen, and you may not feel confident about it, but hey, your last prediction was good, and you didn't feel confident enough to bet on it, and this time you don't feel confident enough to bet on it either, so maybe this is a good prediction too?

You see, they don't want you to know that you know that they don't know that you want them to know that you think that....

Reminds me of a Kinks song:  Paranoia, Brain Destroyer

watching this ping pong match, i'm thinking "food fight!"

there are no good arguments for regulation, merely bad arguments in a good suit.

More coins.

Not possible.  Not enough coins. There is always more fiat.  There are often no more coins.

i disagree about btcchina leading.

for example, from 20:25 to 21:00 there was a ramp up which started on gox, and the volume of btcchina was low, but it followed gox.  stamp followed later with high volume.

The rate reflects volatility.  Notice that the BFX sentiment index is bearish.  I suspect that the weekend dump pattern has played out, and those bets will not pay off much.  The 4000 coin dump earlier didn't seem to harm the price levels much.  Absorbing that much coin so well... draw your own conclusions.  We're still assimilating the resulting vacuum, however.  I'm anticipating basing action consolidating to the 600-620 range, ending in a slow rise to 680-700, but no massive shifts without a polarizing catalyst.  Bobby Lee sorts his issues with the princelings, and we glide up maybe, but no serious choo-choo coming out of China unless those ex-hodlers start to feel some remorse.

Indeed naming a coin for the Doge of Venice, where the European sovereign fixed income market began on the Rialto bridge, is clever, but hardly genius.

lol. i think you just ddos-ed cryptsy.

Springsteen addresses the trend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vO5kEqJdRxA
Bowie pines for Yuan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_8IXx4tsus

Banks in Europe still haven't been recapped after the credit crisis.  Basel III rules will raise their capital requirements.  Spain is a basket case.  Italy is wobbling.  France is showing cracks.  Normality bias causes people to keep calm and carry on, but the rot underlying the Euro system is deep and pervasive and won't be covered up forever.  At least half of the debt in Europe has to be destroyed, in one way or another.  I would be surprised if there were not another sovereign debt and/or Euro currency crisis in the next three years.

victoria's secret bitcoin app http://read.bi/1clQBte

Russia increases bitcoin purchases 7%

Looks like the same pattern as 2011.  2014 should look like 2012 in that case.

Ever since 18 November, the only time that there is above average volume is when it is selling off.  All the buying is being done by stealth, one coin at a time.

oh my goodness. it's dick cheney's ecg on btc-e.  that's not a good omen.

Tease.  C'mon, post it.  At least if it is stupidly obvious, then it will be true.  That's more than can be said of the vast majority of posts, and a big step in the right direction.

What's the alternative?  To model it without data?  To model it with made-up data?  Not to model it at all?  All of these alternatives are inferior.

As I recall that was the justification for invading the sudetenland as well.

RMB volumes are rising.

Fidelity offers BIT.

it seems clear that everyone and her brother are short-term bearish (hence has already sold everything not nailed down) and long-term bullish (hence has nailed everything left down twice, and then bolted it and welded the door shut).  i am finding it increasingly difficult to imagine who, then, is left to sell anything?  the guy loaded bought his doges from?

the phrase 'magic internet money' has a lot of resonance.  for those who do not understand it, the phrase captures the inherent absurdity of placing fiduciary trust in a mysterious incantation promoted by the primary current source of misinformation disinformation chicanery and charlatanry.  for those who do understand it, it captures the awe of a technological masterpiece, the marvel of the untrammeled vistas of future innovation, the absence of counterparty risk,  and the creative power of value added through network effects.

BTC price has tracked difficultly fairly well.  Cointerra hardware will be hitting the streets in January, about 2 peta hash worth in the first drop, another 2 peta hash near the end of the month.  On this basis I expect a 40% appreciation during January.

in case no one has noticed, someone is trying to sell about 8000 ciins.  i see 200 coin offers every $5 from 740 to 850 on bfx, and similar albeit less obvious offers on stamp.

2 hour 144 and 72 bar linear regressions.

Market manipulation is generally understood to mean trading for purposes of effecting a price impact, not otherwise in the interest of the trader.  For example, sham sales, in which the counterparties have pooled resources, or one party takes both roles, so that transactions occur at their preferred prices, can be used to create a trap for speculators, who trade at prices not determined by market forces, but by the collusion of the manipulator(s).  The phrase is meaningful, regardless of your opinion on the moral or legal status of the act.

I think the first meaningful triangle of 2014 is 680-820 on 1 Jan to 775 on 7 Jan (bitstamp). If the price is in that range with the new year, then the direction in which the price exits this region is likely to prevail over the following two to five days, and it may move quickly.

Of course this merely pushes the question back a square:  What is unfair?

*shake*
outlook not so good

Someone (wisely) said:  All human systems will be gamed.

I am not often robbed, but when I am, I prefer for it not to be under color of law.

if you can arrange that, try to arrange it for evening in the u.s. to maximize the number of tarders watching the tape, to shake loose the most panic sells.  the book is thick with deep order ladders, so it wont take long for the slim band linking the blue world exhanges to the red ones to snap, but the selling would be hot for a little while.  it would have more effect albeit slower in onset, if the tape out of china stopped after a rapid 5 pct decline i think, but even then you are only going to get the twitchy over extended types in the absence of news.  positions are hardened about china.  a shock from a new direction would be more likely to create a self-sustaining spreading panic.

i think an e.u. directive requiring registration of bitcoin addresses to a chartered financial institution would really shake things up.  it wouldn't need to be legit, just so long as it was picked up by bloomberg and maybe reuters.  pray god that it doesn't happen now or i will be blamed.

mind you the bitcoin foundation would love it, say it legitimized bitcoin.  i think they have no reason to live if they don't file an anti-trust action against APPL.

I'm sorry, AAPL, but it doesn't matter how good your lawyers are when you have NO CASE. 

The relevant equation for valuation is PQ = MV.  Learn it, love it, live it.  To determine the value of the money supply (the circulating funds, not the total theoretical supply, thank you Gresham) M=PQ/V.  The higher the velocity of money, the lower the value of each monetary unit.  The intuitive explanation is that the more things you can buy with a unit, the less the unit is worth.  Re-using the same unit means that it buys more stuff.  Of course this is only true once money velocity achieves orbit, but after that it is certainly and always true.  It is similar to the ideal gas law in that respect (and in many other respects).

best case sanrio:


worst case sanrio:

Ross Ulbricht is a clever dude, by any rational standard.  I conclude that you are not rational.  Sorry, but Aristotelian logic alone compels me.

Almost no one enjoys getting their bullshit analyzed.

Definitely not.  10 Petahash is a huge security boost for BTC.  It's what Warren Buffett would have called a "moat" if he weren't so darn old.

eventually some child of ameratsu with enough yen to turn the crank on the japanese court system will take a civil action against gox so brutal that all the bitcoin and all the goxbux will not suffice to put mr. karpeles back together again, and y'all will be wishing you had picked another venue.

i prefer e.u. or british common law jurisdictions, so bitstamp in slovenia or bitfinex in hong kong get my highest trust rankings.  i have always used bitfinex.  i do not want a venue which reports on me to the occupation administration of north america.  bitstamp has excellent liquidity, and all of it is available on bfx.

I hope that in the foofurah over Voodah's rash moment the doc's prescription is not lost.  

If the bitcoin foundation can't even manage this critical infrastructure issue effectively - existential threat management - ought there not to be an alternative vehicle for our collective rational self-interest?

We, the speculators should be the most rationally self- interested and hence charitably enabling,  of all the possible interest groups and communities of interest in the cryptoverse.

multipool switch-mines btc and alts selected by return in btc terms.  why not multipool?  sorry for the OT, but in this thread...

I didn't realize that lemniscate was considered a digit.

I'm just assuming here, but I am assuming that order sizes above a certain threshold are approximately exponentially distributed.  We've seen 4k dumped more than once in the past day or two.  I think we're going to see a 50k dump (without doing the math here, which is notionally trivial, but I can't be bothered to do it ATM) certainly within the month, feasibly any day.  

Um, to me stacking orders of 200 every 5USD to a depth of 4k on each of two exchanges qualifies as a dump.  Others may use the word with more rigor, e.g. to mean an atomic market order (OMG the very thought makes me weep for the fool) or at least a near-market limit order.

Talking your book is a form of intellectual honesty.  I respect that.  But "could" is emotional FUD land, while facts and logic create "optimisms".
I find it very difficult to make price-bear cases on the basis of facts and logic, easy to make price-bull cases.  I won't detail the reasons which have
been addressed elsewhere as I'm not trying to convince on that point.  But, and here is the point of this post, or will be eventually, if I ever terminate the meta-narrative component, I am deeply puzzled by the volatility-bearish nature of this thread recently.  I remain deeply volatility-bullish.  If I could buy BTC vol, given the sentiments expressed here, I suspect I could get it for CHEAP!

Volume enough for you yet?

the eyes.  that shibe knows i want to drop-kick it's head.
the bottom support line looks like it's one bubble too low.

Well, Risto said that, and everybody mostly found his model to be pretty compelling, me included, since it accounts for so much of the history, but that doesn't make it right forever (such things are always right until they are wrong) -- and it was broad enough to encompass a scenario in which there was no deeper cut than the December low.  Certainly we could be back on the exponential trendline right now, to within the generally lax parameters of the model as described.  I've certainly been surprised by how quickly a model prediction has played out in the past, as regards hyperactive bitcoin.

If you can't commit, then optimize your scenario using a bimodal model.  Make a probability estimate for each case, and estimate centroids, to optimize trading outcome.  I think more than two modes would be excessive:  The indefinite sideways alternative is ludicrous in the bitcoin world, unless your ADHD has reached the terminal phase, in which case event horizon time dilation means we are instantaneously sideways forever and always.

I suspect if you had more than half, everyone else would switch to cowrie shells.

That's an interesting claim. I find it impossible to believe, however: 

Suppose we hit an ATH, then came back down to 50% of it.  Then the next time we went 0.001% past that ATH, in order for the observation to be true, the price would have to hit 50.0005% of that original ATH thereafter.  Clearly we have not seen such a revisitation of that level relative to many previous spike tops.

Nonetheless, your point is taken, with suitable qualifiers and parameter changes, and if that pattern were to persist, trading it would be very lucrative.

800 gone and 200 going on bfx

Yes, that was the correction.  The error was in dropping again.  Now the market is correcting itself.

Bitcoins are naturally scarce.  No human can make math otherwise than it is.  It's as natural as the omega-inconsistency of Peano arithmetic.

1096, then 2981.  My psychological lines are integer powers of e.  The really major ones have triangle and square numbers for exponents.

On week days, There's definitely a drop in volume from about 5 to 11 PM on the U.S. Eastern seaboard, at least on stamp.  Has anyone done a cyclic analysis of the weekend volume patterns?

I wish we'd stop getting rallies driven by huobi.  So dodgy.  The dopamine addicts get fixated on it, and then when China goes all tiddlywumpus, they panic again?  No thanks.  Even so, it would only take 800 coins to push huobi over 5600.  Unfortunately they only publish the top of their book, like btc-e.

Did I sleep through something in the 60s?

wake me up when it recrosses exp(0)=1 t.oz. Au.

Perhaps.  Meanwhile, gox has a double bottom and stamp appears to be experiencing a series of higher lows on the 5 minute chart.   Either a bearish pennant or the start of another overnight run-up.  

Patterns are wonderful things.  You can pick N of them to justify whatever conclusion you wish to make.

Nurikabe just disappeared on stamp.  Where there's one, there are more.

There are about 25,000 coins left on all the exchanges put together.  Just guesstimating -- didn't actually count them.

For about 40 million you could get a corner on bitcoin.

That's about 9 days of mining output.

I'm a U.S. person, residing in the U.S.  I can answer the question on the basis of my personal outlook.  The IRS has rules for barter transactions.  I don't know what they are, and I don't want to know, but I don't want to violate any IRS regulation such that there is a feasible chance for the IRS to win a case against me in a tax court, at least a case significant enough such that they would not prefer to settle it out of court.  (U.S. federal tax court is a kangaroo court set up by the IRS and operating according to IRS rules.)  If I were inclined to activism, I might prefer prison to cooperation.  If I had no dependents I would take higher risks.  But it is what it is.

Prison is not so bad actually.  It's a boogeyman.  Everyone pretends that people who go to prison are highly likely to be anally raped,but it's mostly just a rumor used to instill fear.  (Think about it -- if you had to live close to someone, turn your back on them, for 5-10 years, would you anally rape them?  It would be suicidal.)  If I thought the principle were sufficiently important and the ancillary consequences relatively less significant, I would violate any tax law I considered unjust, and brag about it.  Those conditions have not been met.

Can I avoid prosecution for violating tax laws which, if the violations were exposed, would likely send me to prison?  Almost certainly.  But I think that if I am unwilling to go to prison to punish the state for its unjust abuses, then I have no moral standing to violate the law.  Again this is a risk-preference.  In this case it is moral risk which I am averse to.  And again, were I an independent agent I might take more risk, but taking too much moral risk could affect my relationships in ways which I will not risk.  As so many things in life do, at least for me, ultimately it comes down to sex.


I certainly will not.  I know the tax code well enough to avoid any taxes on BTC gains, in an entirely lawful manner, but maintaining the lawfulness component will prevent me from accessing those gains until I am relatively old.  Meanwhile, I use them for philanthropic purposes (making them tax exempt, although I don't file the required paperwork because I'm pretty sure that's not going to create untenable risks) or for business enterprise expenses internal to my exempt holding structures.  If I wanted to buy a lambo tomorrow, I would probably choose to pay taxes on the gains from selling coins.  But I won't.  I have different priorities.

Not only if you are a US citizen, but if you are a US person, which includes a lot of non-citizens.  But citizens can stop being citizens by renouncing their citizenship at an embassy.  The downside is that you'll almost certainly never get back into the US again, unless you sneak over the border.

Contributing to the liquidity problem, that is.  But I could just as well have said 2,500,000,000,000 satoshis.  It's not like you can't trade satoshis.  The fact that people want them removes them from the exchanges.  But that doesn't make the market somehow defective.  It just means the price is too low.

The instability is due to the price being too low.  That's unsustainable.  When the price is high enough, liquidity will be balanced.

Not since Tian-an-men.

Off-exchange transactions are for the most-part intended to soak up liquidity, and avoid price impact.  Thus, off-exchange transactions are *less* likely to cause prices to go higher, rather than *more* likely.  I don't understand your point.

Such diversity of viewpoints is stimulating.  Mine is different from both of yours':

- Holding means 0% gain in BTC. 
- Selling means converting BTC into fiat, which is suicidal.

The only remaining alternative:

- Buy more

is my choice.

well that makes me wish for a way to buy vol.

If he needed fiat for something I doubt he would get it by such inefficient means.

Sure, I will, after you tell me how you would sell 15 tonnes of gold in this market inside a month without destroying the global market.


Fiat liquidity is not currently a problem.  It's a lack of bitcoins.

Some interesting things about this post.  

Firstly, you seem to be responding to a straw man.  When I see this, I wonder: Why? You may be reacting to a monster of your imagination.  You may be reacting to a monster of the public imagination as you construe it.  

Secondly, why the bitter tone?  Ressentiment much?  Someone tries to give you helpful information, and you attribute all manner of venality to them.  Strange.  But I see this in many people.  When you try to help them to accomplish their goals, they get very irritated with you sometimes.  It can often discourage me from helping them, but I try not to let it get in my way too much.

Thirdly, these mass forces of which you speak only impact the market in as much as they cause fiat and/or bitcoin supplies to increase or decrease in the order book.  Everyone who participates in the market moves it.  The more fiat or coins they move, the more they move the market.  Since the market moves against the interest of the buyer or seller, one seeks to minimize that impact, not compound it.  Yet you seem to think loaded wants to compound his impact.  That must mean that you think he is trying to lose money, or else he is playing the game backwards.  I'd be interested to know how he is playing it backwards, if that is your model.

Personally, I think you have a paranoid view resulting from allowing jealousy of another's wealth to corrupt your ratiocination.  (But I may be reading too much into the negative spaces between your comments.)  If my diagnosis should be correct, the most helpful thing I can suggest is that you meditate upon the concept of natural selection.  Remember that some people in a large population will just be much more successful than you, with overwhelming probability, and there's nothing you can do about that, no matter how good you are, or how long or how hard you try.  It's okay to be number 2.  Actually, it's freaking amazing to be number 2.   You're already way past the mean and into the long tail at the upper end.  Chill.

That would be pretty much the definition of a UFO.

dead cats climb no trees

bitfinex is holding the btc market up now.  the stamp/bfx pair is currently the best vehicle for price stabilization.

I feel I am being offered a last chance to sell my coins at 875.

Price of a unit is irrelevant to use as a money transfer mechanism.  It is premature to use bitcoin without a service provider.  In future bitpay et al will be disintermediated by software, but for now they get to play monkey in the middle,because yes, you are right, I finally admit it, the volatility is too much for direct use as a currency, and is likely to remain that way until the super-exponential growth phase has finished.

I would call it the bitch-slap pattern.

The future of the world is being decided here, today.

bottom appears to be in, in china.  the buying begins

618 has the most votes so far.  Not sure how much wisdom-of-crowds you can derive without a crowd, however.

Fiat will always pile up on Mt.Gox because you can't withdraw.  The surplus of fiat is no surprise.  What makes Mt. Gox bullish is the lack of coins on offer.  The coins are on stamp, btce, bfx, or in china.

Scammers.

both.

there is a data center which needs to be removed.

when bitcoin depends on winklevoii to survive, then bitcoin is doomed.

A badly run charity which serves ex-military disabled.

We seem to be running out of 800$ coins.

Eventually.

Also coinbase.com and robocoin and lamassu hit stamp with market orders.

They have a fundamental value which is described by PQ=MV.
Destructive demand in this case means savings.  Dividends in this case means deflation.

Savings which are never dishoarded are effectively destroyed.  This manifests as low velocity relative to the total.  In fact, since transactions are much more efficient, the velocity of non-hoarded coins can be expected to become large relative to inflationary currencies.

Since PQ grows as the economy grows, a productive return is realized, which is analogous to a dividend.  Ownership of a non-inflationary currency is very much like owning the total market, and receiving all of its dividends, in that regard.

PQ = MV.

Price of goods and services transacted * quantity of goods and services transacted
=
value of CIRCULATING money supply * velocity of money (number of times each unit turns over on average during the period in question)

PQ is the "bitcoin GDP"
M ~ 15 million for a while
V can be read from the blockchain.

Do the math.

No exchanges use the blockchain for internal transactions.  In common-book interexchange transactions, movements are aggregated as well.

The blockchain is a ledger. Whether dollars are currency or not is irrelevant to GDP.  FRNs are functionally ledger entry tokens.

Last I checked V was 5.98,  which is similar to the historical norm for USD, although USD is currently well below mean, meandering about 4.

My own expectation is that V will remain in the normal zone,  but reserve demand will mean that the circulating fraction is small, and turns over relatively more rapidly.  I know of no better predictor of future velocity in BTC than the present velocity. One or the other or both M, V will increase with increasing PQ.  Given the reserve demand it is hard to understand how V can increase, since an increasing proportion of M has V=0.

Actually, yes, I do.  You sacrifice your future in order to enrich mine.  Thank you, Sir.

An article on the San Fran FRB web persuasively argues on the basis of boomer demographics that the S&P P/E will tend to bottom around 8.4 in 2024.

I personally doubt that sovereign currencies will exist at that time.  They are a very new experiment, only having existed since 1971, and they are built on the delusional notion that exponential growth in the underlying economy will permit exponential growth in debt.  The notion that this can be made stable by open market operations and variations in interest rates is a highly improbable one.  Fiat bears all the marks of a failed social experiment since 2011.  Heck, since 1997.

Market wants the 820 wall gone and is willing to commit suicide in order to destroy it.

Is that a wave of raw sewage?

And (the opposite) hedgers.  Very inefficient hedge, however.

Not quite.  Or if so, then in a rather pleasant manner.


But the majority of miners probably don't do their accounting in BTC.  They probably do it in RMB or USD.  In which case, the picture changes substantially.


Only those who do their accounting in BTC.  The true believers.  And a large proportion of the true believers would mine at a loss, even in fiat accounting, just to support the network and stay involved in the protocol, keep their hand hot, awaiting new opportunities.

But yes, point taken, they will not ROI in BTC, most of them.  Some will.  Certainly mining new alt-coins is very lucrative, with GPUs, at present.


That would be nice, but I wouldn't count on it.  Mining has been this way since early 2013.  No cracks are showing.  The failures we've seen have just meant cheap mining hardware, in bankruptcy sales.  The market for virgin coins is very brisk, and has been as long as I've been involved.  Could change.  No catalyst is evident however.


Transactions quintupled in 2012, tripled again in 2013.  They will more than triple in 2014.  But transaction count doesn't really impact BTC value directly.  It's the volume that impacts value directly.  Price and value not being equal, of course.  A risk-free discounting of a minimum future valuation indicates that value is much higher than price at present.

I do agree that most miners will hoard in order to get break-even or better in fiat terms.   I've been mining a while, and roughly 1/4 of my hardware has been negative in fiat terms at the time of mining but eventually positive with price changes, 1/2 has been positive in fiat at the time but negative in BTC, and 1/4 has been positive in BTC.    Overall, it's fiat positive, roughly BTC neutral.  When you do win, you tend to win big.  But it is a terrible crapshoot, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who can't get a sweet deal on a hot chip at the right time unless, like me, you just want to keep a large exposure surface to the BTC universe, to keep your awareness keen.

It's called a jump-diffusion.  Essentially all exchange-traded investments are modeled pretty well as jump-diffusions.  It is difficult but not impossible to discriminate the signal from the noise at finer scales.  Self-similarity argues that it is also difficult to discriminate the signal from the noise on larger scales; however, comparing BTC since 2011 to a log-normal process over the same number of points would not be remotely confusing.  The jumps have structure, but it is most not endogenous structure, so they are not markovian.

Yup, you're french alright.

Every army needs cannonfodder.

Being French, red tape comes naturally to you, and you may not perceive immediately what a red cape you have waved.

I consider myself rationally goal-directed; I perceive regulation as damage, and route around it.  Damage is unavoidable, but highly undesirable.  If damaged severely enough I will die.  

"partner"?  You've got to be kidding me.  "Suckerpunch" is more like it.  Like I said, every army needs cannonfodder.  The raison d'etre for evangelical american christianity's entanglement with the republican party was unitary:  Deterring abortion.  This was dangled as a carrot by the slug-lords of the mammon party, but what happened when the presidency and both the house and the senate were all in republican control?  Nothing.  They could have passed a law defining the criteria for human life, without the tiniest speedbump of opposition during that 2 years.  They did nothing.   The only real purpose accomplished by the entanglement of christendom with the political "right" in the u.s. during the past 40 years was turning "evangelical" into a term of oppobrium, and forming an association in the public mind between christianity and the aligned forces of murder, rapine, and pillage.

hmm.... not so sure about that.  An edge is an edge.  Combining indicators can turn signal into noise, if not done properly.  
I would rather trade on one signal which had both empirical and theoretical support (strong) than a thousand weak oracles all in perfect agreement.
Well, maybe.  I'd have to do the math.

war is often described as interminable boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror

we've been moving up about USD 0.50 per hour since 21 december, with remarkably little variance.  i'm not sure how that can be construed bearishly.  i admit that i am trying nonetheless.

Nice call on the 907 level, by the way.  I had thought 880 was the pivot, but bitcoin does tend to surprise with the vigor of its moves, and you understood, anticipated that vigor better than I.

presumably any mining sales should be showing up on stamp.  counterarguments?
i see no evidence of such.  i don't think antminers at 3btc break even here.  if so, then barely.
when difficulty spikes up due to cointerra shipping, those boxes will be immediately profitable, which should precipitate some prompt flipping.

tail wagging the dog again, everybody waiting to see if huobi crosses or rebounds 5000

coinbase instant buy limit was lowered from 10 to 1.
seriously stinks.

i do like the newsflow.  wish gocoin would get some PR traction on walmart/amazon support.

as much as i dislike gox, one would do well to buy on stamp and sell on gox right now.  spread is unusually juicy and likely to revert

UK VAT & BTC: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153332.0

This is interesting.  How many government agencies are buying bitcoin?  How much bitcoin?

They are going to need a LOT of it.

Hardly.  He is a hero to every freedom loving person on the planet.  It is certain that his work will go on.  I'm also certain that he would rather die a lion that live as a cur.

it reached the .764 retrace of the rise from 4640 to 5195.

That's what they want you to think. 

Until you need to byu smoehtnig.

Your momma?

Honestly, I tried to resist.

Nor is capitulation necessarily in the cards.  We've seen a variety of these blow-offs in the past, and many lack a meaningful capitulation.

A meaningful capitulation requires that the participating funds should despair.  But despair usually requires a degree of certainty or a wearisome, prolonged level of grinding fear that may be unavailable in this cycle.  After all, the rise was put on with all the punditry railing against the bubble.  The longer we spend at this level, the more absurd the bubble talk becomes.  Speculators on the intraday frames will perhaps feel some despair, but those trading on daily, weekly, monthly scales have little reason to capitulate.  Almost all of them are up 100, 200, 400%, 800%.  Push the price down below 400 and you may see some serious capitulation blowing out.  If that doesn't happen, I don't think there will be a dramatic bottom, just a long slow jam until the on-ramps get all knickered again and we do the gravity slingshot thing to mars.

2-3 months from now the logarithmic baseline will put the bottom of wave C higher than...a really high thing.

Shorts always have to cover eventually, unless it goes to zero, which is obviously impossible.  Moreover, unlike futures markets, shorting BTC by proxy does not increase the BTC float.  The more the Winklefloss gets shorted, the more demand there is for Winklefloss, and the more BTC they buy, removing it from the market.  Only redemptions (if the fund allows them) can free those coins to float on an exchange.

Oh, better far to live and die
Under the brave black flag I fly,
Than play a sanctimonious part,
With a protein head and a protein heart.
Away to the cheating world go you,
Where acids all are well-to-do;
But I’ll be true to the song I sing,
And live and die a Protein King.

For I am a Protein King!
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Protein King!

For I am a Protein King!

You are!
Hurrah for the Protein King!
King.

And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Protein King.

It is!
Hurrah for the Protein King!
Hurrah for the Protein King!

When I sally forth to seek my prey
I help myself in a royal way.
I sink a few more coins, it’s true,
Than a well-bred monarch ought to do;
But many a king on a first-class throne,
If he wants to call his crown his own,
Must manage somehow to get through
More dirty work than ever I do,

For I am a Protein King!
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Protein King!
For I am a Protein King!

You are!
Hurrah for the Protein King!
King.

And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Protein King.

It is!
Hurrah for the Protein King!

But would that be James Garner or Jennifer Garner?

not a significant number, no.  that is a good thing.

currency is rather different from hard goods.  its value is not derived from stock levels, but from flow.  no flow, no value.  long term holders don't care much about the price, which is a temporary condition resulting from instantaneous supply and demand.  they care more about value, which is a long term attractor of price, and determines the sustainable price levels.

bless you

interesting question.  am i so far ahead of the curve that news which i digested last week is only now showing up in market movement?

seems unlikely.

Or LTC or whatever.  If you did buy DOGE with fiat directly, it would act as a feeder fund, since the sellers would then buy BTC.

It is likely that interactions with alts has substantial short-term impact on bitcoin prices.  indeed, long-term impact.  an inconvenient truth, perhaps.

Everybody wants to rule the world.

The minimum size trades are usually there to probe for dark liquidity.  Folks (bots and punters alike) want to know if there's a hoard they can snatch in order to move their order ticket without market slippage.

It's really nothing to get in a lather about.  Wherever there are hidden orders, there will be probes. 

I do wish the price charts would show liquidity isoquants, though.  Nobody usually cares what the price is at which you can move 0.01 bitcoin.

Now that actually made me crack a grin.  

T minus 24 hours and counting.

can you articulate the peculiarity which you perceive?

In NYC bitcoin was on the front page of the Times last week, front page of the Metro today.

I STILL have not met a single cab driver who knew what bitcoin was.

So growth.  Much runway.  Wow.

I'm trying to understand this.  Off-putting, how?

Okay, where can I buy some DIE?  I know a certain developer/entrepreneur to whom I would like to provide a gift.

It means the price is going up on gox and down on stamp.

New York is not that important.  It's one state in 50.  They can regulate themselves out of the real economy and it won't bother me.  I'd rather enjoy watching them hang themselves.  I spend about half of my time in NYC, and I can tell you it's a fascist nightmare of a place, a vast orgy of vanity envy greed lust gluttony deceit degradation rape robbery and murder.  The only thing that makes it remotely tolerable is the social/intellectual/career opportunities, and a big bubble of money to protect you from the misery all around you.  Float from cloud to cloud, and it won't feel too bad, as you won't have to look at the brutality, the suffering.  But of course you are just denying reality.  Money is an enabler that way.  It helps you live in a world of make-believe.  Wealth is essentially a kind of terminal insanity, in which you become utterly detached from reality, truth, real visceral life.

Makes sense.  XRP *is* fiat; but it's the fiat of a weak hand.

Mostly won't, at least not if they're old.  By that time they believe their own propaganda.  That's the danger of lying all day -- eventually you start to believe it.  Then reality bites.

and one more for the ignorance is bliss column.  bye bye

What is sarcastic about confirmed sources?  He's legit.  Just ask Tony Clifton.

Sorry, but adoption will be at least 4x, and Metcalfe's law says fundamental value is therefore 16x, although curve fitting suggests 23x.  It's always good to SHOTR ahead of these things, as a contrarian play.  Confirmed contrarian sources in Reformed Egyptian acknowledge this.

Welcome to May, 2013.  Spring is lovely and green, and pretty girls wear short skirts.

Definitely time to lever your shorts then.

sequence of higher highs and higher lows today.  this is called an upward trending channel

The same as the sign language for ripple: 
,.!..
\   /

If 90% of BTC are consumed by reserve demand and 50% of the global GDP is denominated in bitcoin, we will see $80mm/btc.

This is a gross under-estimate -- US-centrism is blinkering you.  WU and MoneyGram *alone* do 0.685 tn usd/an in remittances.  Hawala networks, non-US related remittances, Internet-based remittances multiply this by a *large* factor.  There are nations of central Asia in which 60% of the GDP consists of remittances (mostly from Russia and Kazakhstan.)


Definitely not fantastical.  Achievable.  Very *unlikely*, yes.  90% is probably a fair estimate of reserve demand, but 50% domination of all monetary transactions seems unlikely.  However, layered applications may consume much more bitcoin.  I think there is a natural limit when 1 satoshi ~= 1 yen, roughly the smallest unit of useful currency.  Either there is a protocol fork for that, or adjunct chains serve the subpenny traffic, or a fundamental innovation occurs.  Meanwhile, it is a natural resistance point, albiet one very far away and unlikely to be seen in our lifetimes.

dumper on bfx doesn't care what price he gets.

I did, but I like my job.  Also it pays 300k/an, so I can buy more coins.

Someone who wants the coins promptly, and doesn't want to risk not getting filled in time.  Perhaps they are closing on a Moscow flat, or making a ransom payment.

I will happily sell mine on a forward delivery basis.

I heard A-SEX will never ROI, that you need to use V-SEX.

The upward trending channel continues from yesterday, now almost 24 hours old.

You must be using a different "exchange".

It seems proudhon's sources know.  But I think they will not tell you, as you would only be tempted harm yourself by making a long profit.

They may have told MatTheCat, however, since he is immune to such folly, and MatTheCat says 814.

Protip:  Some of the best sources with the most confirmations are in languages outside the Google Translate list.

I am hoping your coins are not on the exchange.  Don't mean to insult your intelligence or anything, just sayin'.

I can count the times on no fingers.

we've come to expect the unexpected.

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that it will become a major currency, a reserve currency.  It has no counterparty risk.  Debt-based money has always and will always fail, either gradually or suddenly.  Only hard money is without counterparty risk.  The technical superiority of BTC to gold is obvious, and you can't overcome that gap without introducing counterparty risk.  USD,EUR,RMB,JPY are all teetering on the brink of the largest synchronized sovereign crisis in the history of the world.  They have sown the wind, and will reap the whirlwind.  It's mathematically inevitable at this point.  We just don't know how long the dead men can keep walking.

Can't recommend it.  They're not as warm to the touch.

Any coins destroyed become part of the reserve demand, reducing M.  Some of the estimates you may be referring to already applied a large reserve demand factor to M.  Some did not.  The former are usually higher than the latter.

Coinbase does ccy xchg via bitstamp.  Bitpay as well.  Probably most layered service providers will be using bitstamp or bitfinex, because they are the only liquid exchanges in jurisdictions with semi-functioning rule of law.

I find it difficult to understand why churn numbers are interesting.  You might discover some correlation to the series, I suppose.  Now if you could separate inflow and outflow, it would become very interesting.  You should talk to the fiatleak guy.

As is becoming usual, BFX is holding the price down.  The linkage between stamp and bfx, once it finally became fluent, has done more to stabilize the price of bitcoin than any whale cabal could ever do.  I think this might be the best example in economic history of how a low-friction swaps market can aid in price discovery.

It would, if you could get it into the chain.  But current software gives zero priority to transactions smaller than a gavin.

242 satoshi, IIRC.

Thanks.  My data was obsolete.  It should really be considered a parameter of the universe physics, not a unit of currency.  Gavin's number, or Gavin's constant.

I don't think you understand colored coins.  They are not part of the fluid money supply.

Ph3ar the power of WHIMSY

I see.  So you're just bullish before crashes, and just bearish before moonshots?

They lynch people in Florida.  I sure hope nobody from Mt.Gox is there.

uptrending channel is now 68 hours old.  at least 4 hours of consolidation before the next choo-choo.

With levers?  You have levered shotrs?

confirmed and agreed, by multiple reliable sources.

bfx ask walls are pretty common these days, and they are real.  bfx is the real reason for the name 'bearstamp'.  levered shorts perhaps?

Having seen about 8,9 or 10 of these walls today, I'm wondering if someone is building up a big short position.
If so, that is exceedingly bullish.

More likely, BFX sells are coins from Gox.   

Mark Karpeles must be getting very rich, selling 800 dollar coins for 1000 dollars.

wall means different things to different people, because we have different histories.  you've been around longer, and back in the day, walls were bigger.
i've hardly ever seen the market direction change as a result of a wall.  far more typically they are eaten or moved or vanish.  and they've been smaller than the walls of your experience, on average.

looks like someone woke up late, just got the shrem news.

ain't no one here but dangerous heretics

stuffing my pockets

oh it will be terrible.  scary man, lawsky.  just the sound of the name.  obviously a lawman, deeply opposed to anarchy.  he has the backing of the state.  guns and aircraft carriers.

scoop em up cheap on stamp, dump them on huobi.  it's a sweet sweet time.

Who needs fiat?  The coins on huobi will be cheap in a couple of hours!

8% arb.  risk free!  i'm scraping myself off the ceiling

c'mon people. dump on huobi now.  that spread needs to come *down*

no no!  you're supposed to wait for the spread to tighten a bit more before you buy on huobi.

batman's head may bless your enterprise

I live in a town of 8 million and I've never yet met a taxi driver who knew what a bitcoin was.  And I always ask.

DeBeers everywhere.  Blood (diamonds) all over the floor.

I find the image amusing.

We are in the big downslope on the bubble phase chart.  Proof is by apophenia.  Question is what is the baseline.  On a linear baseline we're all doomed and the bears will gnaw our bones.  A linear baseline is utterly irrational, in my opinion.  The admissible choices are (1) logarithmic baseline in exp(5/4),  and (2) logistic baseline (some parameters for which remain unanalyzed).

Now *that* would make a good shirt. "Bitcoin:  The manias we have experienced are higher-order."

As mentioned elsewhere, price stability should occur when the annual block reward reaches fgr(r-1)/(mn).
If you want to fit a logistic to the value of BTC, estimating f and r should suffice.  Everything else is straight from given data.

A separate thread for running commentary would be nice.  I was unable to get a seat at the hearing, and  I can't see this at work.

What it means is what it does, i.e. the meaning it conveys to the reader, and the meaning intended by the utterer.  Technically, I assume it refers to granularity of manic symptoms.  Psychotic breaks tend to occur in a self-similar manner at varying scales.  The broadest scale, the most comprehensive scale, corresponding to the most severe symptoms, is the first-order scale.  More refined scales are higher-order ones.  But the technical meaning is just a token which can be spent on a variety of rides.

Not so much.  He's quite good.  I mean, even people who are deeply averse to trolling begin to appreciate his work after a while.  I always feel a little better after a proudhon troll.  He's making the world a better place, and I wouldn't want him to overwork himself to exhaustion!

Well then, there's at least 100 btc of fractional reserve left on Gox.  188:1, why that should be plenty, as long as no one starts a bank run.

I'd get tired of paying $200 over market for btc pretty quickly.  I imagine whoever was taking the blockchain offramp either finished or got weary of having their pocket picked.

donut got the last two then.

that's racist

I admit that momentum is one factor, can't be ignored, and in extreme cases may be characterized as a rush to the egress, resulting in spikes. Even so, higher trading frequency is beneficial to liquidity, and in most profitable cases will reduce volatility; most higher frequency trades are mean-reversion trades, at least in my paradigm.

Thank you.

Certain characters in history are paradigms of evil.  I would place Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. among them.  Does this make me guilty of evading Godwin's Law?

confirmed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_IQ

The company partners with Huawei, which is owned by the PRC military.

You can't stop the signal, Mal.

As someone who lives (sometimes) and works (mostly) in New York, I can confirm that.

I think 1000 coins counts as a wall these days, doesn't it?

attempting a bear raid.  not working very well just yet.

Your opinion is redundant with your opinion.  I guess that means it's confirmed then.

bear raid gave up for the moment.  looking for a new angle, probably.

The guy I compared to Hitler, yes.
Close enough, yeah.  But try is an illusion.  There is no try.  There is only fail.

+999  hit this hard people.  Never ever let anyone put virtual currency and crypto currency in the same class.  If they try to call it virtual currency, make them beg for mercy.  Sneer and cajole and ridicule.  One thing they cannot survive is mockery, because it subverts the illusion of competence and legitimacy.  Virtual currency is play money.  Cryptographic currency is backed by logic itself, more secure than any army.

By a strange coincidence, 32150 oz of registered gold left the JPM vault in New York this week.  Maybe Mark used it to buy a metric tonne of gold.

A more pertinent question is:  Do you, or even I, who consider myself well informed on PRC internal matters, even have the ability to understand the meaning of "legal" in China, let alone the legal status of BTCChina's current arrangement with Shanghai Pudong.

Not merely International payments.  Card swipe fees are a 3% tax on the GDP.  Financialization has created some small efficiencies at a vast social and economic cost, which can be slowly removed through the deleveraging effects of counterparty-free cryptographic economy.


That observation may be a bit facile.  Liquidity is a huge boon, for example.  Comparing bitcoin to equities is more likely to lead you astray than to guide you to a useful conclusion.



Where do you think the profits of the miners come from?  From buyers of bitcoin.  Speculators are among the major buyers of bitcoin.  Indeed, until very recently, only speculators and drug users were meaningful purchasers.  They paid for the network.

I am sure that you are making an intellectually honest effort to assess the facts and import of Bitcoin technology, but I get the impression that your political preconceptions are undermining those efforts in some ways, to some degree.

Coincidental template journalism.  Bloomberg syndrome.

Banditry under color of law is far worse than quotidian brigandage.  It's a profoundly subversive attack on the very existence of social order.

All of my gold was lost in a boating accident.

No bait intended.  There is no punchline.  Gold lost in a boating accident is beyond seizure.  That's the end of my gold story.  Sadly I have forgotten the name of the lake.

I use a rational standard of well-informed, rather than a ludicrous one, and it doesn't provide me with a ready facility to make that specific prediction with useful confidence.

Having a password pair which decrypts your encrypted private key file unencrypted keys which reference two different wallets would be nice, but seems to require a substantially different wallet address scheme than bitcoin currently uses.

Huobi acted on the news before non-Chinese exchanges.

I think you mean Ross Ulbricht's coins?  Poor password security.

Ulbricht didn't suffer a wrench attack.  I make no claims of immunity to a wrench attack.  I would like a better system for evading wrench attacks.

1000 ask 4850 at btcchina

http://bitcoinity.org/markets/btcchina/CNY

825 coins to go

Precisely.  I'd like an alternate password for my encrypted keys which yields plaintext keys to an alternate wallet.  I need to have wallets which are associable to me.  But I would like to remove the wrench vulnerability on those wallets.

Personally, I can deal with electronic security.  It's the guys with guns and wrenches -- cops, robbers, I can't tell the difference anymore -- that I'm worried about.  It's much more impractical to change one's habits to maintain physical security than to change one's habits to defend  information.  Much more expensive, for one thing.  Much more conspicuous, for another.  Much more time-consuming and physically limiting, to cap it all.

he, and his philosophy of poverty

They named it after the Doge of Venice, since Venice is where the sovereign bond market was born, on the Rialto Bridge.  Your spell checker honors the memory of the office of the Doge.  Language is a product of the past, not the future.

maker-taker pricing is super attractive.  if i weren't addicted to leverage i would hit that.

Fortress  has done ETFs before.  They know who to bribe.  

By this criterion 70% of the volume on the NYSE should be expunged from the record.

"As bitcoiners used to claim" strikes me as unsubstantiated defamation.  "As Rick used to believe" or "as Rick was advised" might be factual.

Anyhow, transactions are anonymous and untraceable if the wallets are anonymous and untraceable, which is certainly achievable.  It's not user-friendly, however.



 

speedybitcoin.co.uk

That's better than coinbase.  It eliminates the send-to-wallet step.

CryptoLocker payouts.

Constantly.  Any change in the available liquidity creates a new market environment for takers, and their rational choices change. 

In an unregulated environment, you will see liquidity taken away from the BBO.

Yes.

It makes perfect sense up to the point where you draw your conclusions.  It's not clear what you mean by them.

+1

When stresses build up and the system has become highly interlinked, with low diversity, and hence rigid, the fracture size distribution is Zipfian.  That's when you start to see frequent 5-6 sigma events, as we have been seeing over the past few years.  Eventually there's a big crack up, and the system reorganizes with loose linkages, high diversity, and is robustly decentralized.

You won't notice the phase changes until it's basically too late if you're just looking at one species.  You have to observe the whole ecosystem, and notice when high p value events start to occur here and there, in diverse places, with increasing frequency.

that wall will go.  it is pulling the price down to 795.

my target low is 618, but i find it harder to believe that with each passing day.

Most miners today bought equipment when everyone was telling them it would never ROI, and they would be better off buying and holding.   I don't think they need to sell bitcoins to cover costs.  They spend fiat to make bitcoins because they despise fiat and like bitcoins.  Spending fiat on power bills is just one more way to burn the fiat.

y'all been warned about gox repeatedly.  y'all saw the signals.  y'all been pointed at the signals over and over again.  very little sympathy will be obtained when you get wiped out.

Isn't the simplest explanation for the new goxprice that mark decided that taxing all the gox customers $200 per coin was just too juicy, and arbed the prices down to the other exhanges?  any overshoot is just a reverse arb opportunity.  think of it as a stupid tax for gox customers.

I do wish "Ignore" applied to quotes as well as original articles.

Presumably Mark is selling all the cheap coins in Bulgaria.

Exchanges are running out of supply again, especially Mt.Gox, if you wish to include it as an exchange.  Bitstamp is trying to eat the iiquidity at 650, but can't seem to find enough coins to do it.  I suspect we will see 720 within 24 hours.

No coins are stupid enough to move to Gox.  I doubt Gox can sell down to 625

Isn't that reward enough?

It can't be used for anything else, except trading, in an effort to compound it.

Ran out of coins.

There are perfectly viable exchanges available on the internet today, equally accessible and usable from any part of the globe.  


The normalcy bias is strong with this one!

I agree that the price would rise if it were possible for the government to assert sufficient control over Bitcoin to destroy all forms of human freedom, and therefore was pleased to approve of it.   That will not, however, happen, nor is it necessary in order for Bitcoin to rise in value.  
The fiat system is going to collapse very, very soon.  It is mathematically inevitable that debt-based monetary systems will explode.  It does not require any particular economic theory or political ideology to recognize this, merely mathematical literacy.  The only question is when, and the conditions are ripe even now.  Central banks globally conducting coordinated devaluation is a last-ditch, hail-mary attempt to stave off the inevitable.  Their toolkit is empty.

Privacy, freedom, and human dignity will be restored, and the role of the nation-state in world history will diminish.  The nation-state is a product of industrialized warfare.  But just as the rust-belt industries decayed and receded in importance due to changes in the technological, material machinery of society, so too will the nature of warfare change, and the nation-states decline.  The state monopoly on violence is ending.  In a very short time, it will be possible for any intelligent, literate person with an Internet connection to create a controlled nuclear fusion criticality using cheap and common materials.  Today, only a small number of persons are aware of this technology, but within a few years it will be readily available.  When this happens, mass enslavement will no longer be feasible.  The political economy will transform.  

Whether it is desirable or undesirable is certainly a topic of debate, but regardless of your view, it would be wise to be prepared for inevitabilities.  The prospects of being caught on the wrong side of history are quite dismal.

You see the future as doom and gloom.  I see it as a glimmer of hope.  The tide is turning.


Watching your life fall apart for failure to prepare for the inevitable will not cause me to feel any pity.  I only hope you have no children.


We need to route around the corruption, brutality, and totalitarian dominance assumed by traitors, the enemies of humanity.

That is a major component.  In and of itself, it would not make collapse inevitable, but it forms the foundation upon which collapse is built.
The system was designed to rent-seek in the margin, draining the energy made available by economic growth, on an exponential growth model.
The system can no longer work as designed, because the exponential growth assumption has reached end-of-life.  The energy available is declining.
It could in hypothetical principle be adapted, modified, to conform to the new material conditions; however, other factors make that impossible,
in particular the fragility of low-diversity tightly coupled systems:

It is useful to characterize ecological systems by their path through a three-dimensional phase-space, the axes of which are energy requirements, interconnectedness, and diversity.   Ecological systems, incorporating predator-prey dynamics, are attracted to a lemniscate path through this phase space.  When energy requirements approach the limits of available energy, interconnectedness is high, and diversity is low, the system is reaching a catastrophic portion of the trajectory, and a very rapid motion to a loosely-coupled, low-energy, high-diversity region ensues.  

The predators are about to become carrion, upon which a new diversity will feed.

breaking the hash is not adeuate.  any responsible party who could unlock coins would report this privately so that the prrotocol could change crypto.

also not adequate.  and probably suicidal.


now you are raving.  there is something seriously wrong with your mind.


none of theseare adequate.   they all have simple fixes and an  army of motivated technicians to resolve them.

this is simply incorrect. anyone who believed so was too ignorant to count.

That would be evil,  they are more likely to support btc in wallet.

And that will be bitcoin.  

Why fear?  Clearly it is not ready for mass adoption yet.  Write some code.  Build a business.  Lots of opportunity remains!

CryptoGirl82  predicted a drop to 100 before BTC-E painted 102.

February 11th spike top coming, as previously predicted by PoolMinor.

This is getting creepy.

Not only thus, but thanks to Mark, all the capitulation overhang has been wrung out of the market.  We can invest without fear now, thanks to Mark.  Mortgage your spouses and call the loan shark!

That's what it always looks like when the market goes up fast, organically.  Waves undermining a cliff, with slowly rising tide.  It doesn't get serious until 720.

There are cheap coins on offer.  How is that not good news for speculators and investors alike?

Brutal totalitarian regimes hate our freedom.


Apple hates our freedom.


Gox keeps good company.

Currencies have always become widely used spontaneously and through a grassroots campaign.  Fiat currency as we know it today has only existed since 1971.  It is an experiment, and it appears to be failing.  Every government issued currency has inevitably failed, with the exception of those currently in use.

Anyone who would believe JPMorgan's comments on currency deserves what they get.  I pity their children, however.

Caution with customer funds during an ongoing DDOS attack is warranted.  Better to let the facts emerge, and be reasoned upon, before risking anyone's bitcoin.  

It is interesting to consider what measures could remove the ability to conduct a systematic attack on the value of bitcoin.  The elimination of centralized exchanges seems the most obvious.  That, however, will take time.

Another would be to identify the persons who conducted the DDOS, and who coordinated the attack on the exchanges.  If an exchange operator were interested in preserving the value of bitcoin, they would open their records to public inspection.  Transparency is, after all, part of the essence of bitcoin.  This would make it possible to identify the actors.

A defector who considers the purposes of bitcoin and the hope it offers mankind to be more important than personal greed might disclose the communication channels used to coordinate operations.

Reliance on BFX suggests that the dumping is levered, and very vulnerable to a squeeze.

Consider the probability that he is part of the DDOS and dump operation.  Some forensics are in order.

Getting the transaction records and network logs from bitfinex would probably suffice to identify the conspirators.  Thorough examination of the data available on the malleability attack would be good.

Identifying these people would solve the problem.  They are cowards, of course, with no principles but greed.

Attempting to squeeze them prematurely will be futile, and merely funnel funds into their hands, unless you can marshall enough btc to surely squeeze all other players.

This is warfare for the future of mankind, I should point out.  A community that will not defend itself will inevitably be destroyed.

No, they are doing this to gain more BTC.  They will control the future.  Your children will be their slaves. 

People who want to take your coins, if you are foolish enough to give them up.

And who controls that stepping stone will control which way the path turns.  There is little inevitability in history.

The real attack is not the DDOS, which is easily survivable.  The real attack is the offer on the exchanges.

The U.S. overnight is likely to be very volatile.

The coins have not been recovered from Karpeles.  Some regard him as a thief for this reason.  Others consider him a hero for making them whole after Mt.Gox was hacked.  The recent behaviour of Mt.Gox definitely puts it firmly on the side of evil, from my POV.

After the acts of war conducted today, it doesn't need a foundation, it needs a team of assassins with swabs of ricin and silenced 5.7s.

You've obviously never driven a Tesla.  Power and Luxury.  Definitely the best car ever made.  I don't care about the tech.  It could run on clubbing baby seals for all I care.

And they burn and explode at a much lower rate than do internal combustion cars.

About 200 miles.  You can swap the battery in about 2 minutes.


That's a very different use case.


Perhaps.  I don't care about status.  I don't care about CO2.  I care about power, safety, comfort.  For me, the Model S is simply the best car ever made.  The attention to detail is amazing.  Silent, smooth, and the safest car you can buy.

Exporter of crude oil.  Importer of refined petroleum products.

Crude and juvenile.  Noisy as frack.  No room inside.

More lies.

Too noisy for me.

I will happily accept your RMB.

Two reasons come to mind:  They want to invest in the technology, or they want to hedge against a change in government.  Governments often change.  Fiat currencies, historically, have always failed.  Just as they cannot use gold in commerce, so too they cannot use bitcoin in commerce.  Just as they buy gold as a store of value, so too they buy bitcoin as a store of value.  Both are free of counterparty risk, unlike fiat currencies.  The Chinese national appetite for gold proves that they understand this well, and act upon it, en masse, practically.

500 coins on offer on stamp at 651 just got pulled.  Thus, a short-squeeze, should one be impending, may begin soon.

True, but that's not what "zero-sum" means.

The Chinese government is incredibly conservative in outlook.  Any potential for transformative change is threatening.  They are institutionally very ill-equipped to deal with technical innovation with the potential to change relative power structures, and they are deeply, deeply antipathetic to such innovation.  The inner circles of the CCP form a network of extremely wealthy families, which have co-opted the interests of their society in a superlative fashion.  Defectors from their ranks will be required in order for bitcoin to get any sort of sanction.  Historical materialism may motivate defections.  It's ideology is pervasive in the CCP, and it forms a potent argument for the inevitability of socioeconomic transformation driven by technological change.  I find it difficult to assess the importance of this motivation.  Certainly it will only affect a very small minority of the power players, but if it affected a critical few, it would become an important factor in events.

technically, this is the most extremely oversold condition in the history of bitcoin.  i am starting to doubt my 618 target, since it is very questionable that such an oversold condition can persist long enough to achieve 618 organically.  the outcome distribution is increasingly bimodal.

I'm looking at the daily chart, 3 period RSI.

I believe the GBL operators received a cure for their illness, in the form of a small lead pill, in Daxing stadium quite recently.

I won't be happy until the deltas are anticorrelated.

If Gox wasn't buying btc on bitstamp when they could be sold for 200 above in-house, and isn't buying btc on gox today, while they can be bought 200 under in-house, then the management requires psychiatric help.  They should be incredibly wealthy at this point.  They have perfect inside information on these market-moving events, after all.

In kana, there is an "n" glyph and a "sa" glyph, but no "s" glyph

To get even with the NSA for taking their budget.

I cannot imagine what is dishonest about insider trading.

What seems dishonest to me is to hide from the market your knowledge, by declining to trade on it.

not a very clever thought, at that.  it would be very expensive to sell bitcoins at half off the market price.  instead, they would be buying coins, not too quickly, but continuously, at these levels, and selling them on other exchanges.  this would have the effect of pushing down the prices on other exchanges.  or if they were really clever, they'd just be buying them cheaply on gox, and freezing them until summer.

It is that.  Dollars on gox are definitely worth more than dollars anywhere else right now.  It's vastly more efficient to just deposit USD at gox, but that takes too long.  Monday's news will change the pricing picture.

On the assumption that gox withdrawals resume shortly (say 2 days), if 1 bitcoin costs 330 usd on gox and 660 usd on stamp, then (ignoring RFR discounting for the trivial period, slippages, fees &c), 330 usd on gox is worth exactly as much as 660 usd on stamp.  I.e  1 usd on gox is worth 2 usd on stamp.

The market on the other hand, as demonstrated at bitcoinbuilder.com, is discounting very differently, factoring in risk assessments which reduce the value of a bitcoin on gox vs. a bitcoin "in hand".  I.e. the market assigns a less than unity probability to the assumption above.

They should be feeling roughly 15% richer now.  They can flip them for 85% of face value at bitcoinbuilder.com.

where do you think Mark is dumping his cheap coins?

3.5k & 17k.

better to be lucky than smart

Once BTC withdrawals are enabled, the price of BTC on Mt.Gox will skyrocket.  Why would you dump on stamp at 700 when you can dump on gox at 900?

If I wanted fiat I could take GBP, EUR, or JPY.

That's pretty much the exponential trend line, doubling every 100 days

Yeah, right after the crash to 250.

Are you in the northern hemisphere or the southern hemisphere?

I stopped shorting when the ddos and malleation flood hit.
call me old fashioned but I refuse to help criminals steal coins, no matter how stupid their victims -- and even more certainly, not when it is harmful to bitcoin.

I will, however, profit by buying the dips, which I deem helpful to bitcoin, so long as price is below fundamental value.

It is an almost perfect characterization of the manic fud peddling behaviours associated with the ddos and malleability attacks:
Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic.

I find it disturbing to think that criminals with these characteristics are becoming wealthy and powerful through bitcoin.  It makes me worried about the future of human life.

another comfort is that these personality types are generally prone to impulse and unlikely to retain their wealth and power for long. however the occasional exception can be a particularly egregious case.

I just did a little math on the blockchain, and came up with a rough January BTC velocity of 4 (compare USD 1.5, a historic low), and an implied fundamental value qua currency of USD 640.  I find it intriguing that the current stamp price is actually below the fundamental value, and I consider this an indicator of sentiment, i.e. I interpret this as indicating unusually negative sentiment.

do you think the fate of gox bears strongly on the long-term value of btc?  if so, why?

I lost some money hopping on Carboceramics too late in the game.  (They make sand, for fracking.)  I found the whole rock-sand trade to be too much risk for me.  Now I hold bitcoin instead.

A "speculator" exercising a reversion strategy will tend to dampen price swings.  A *speculator* exercising a momentum strategy will tend to force price swings.

Now this analysis I can deal with.  In fact, you've described the reason why I have some fiat in reserve.  There is a substantial likelihood of an impending final capitulation.

How about Vessenes?  I mean, has there ever been so much fail at the same table?

I contribute by evangelism, by ownership, by mining, by speculation, by philanthropy, by attempting to be a responsible member of the community.  I may one day contribute code, or participate in an infrastructure business, but for now I am too busy with my day job and other hobbies.

Or, he thinks long-term.


Definitely not true.  Bitcoin adds a great deal of economic value.


"Rare-earth" is a bit of a misnomer.  They aren't actually all that rare.  And the supply-demand equation fluctuates a great deal.  I would definitely consider bitcoin to be a much safer investment than rare-earth commodities, which are not so easy to physically hold, by the way. There may be some rare-earth supply-chain enterprises which are fairly safe investments, but they are unlikely to qualify as stores of value, or to provide such speculative upside as bitcoin.


A very large group of mostly known people whose interests are fairly predictably aligned with my own.

for such a nice person you sure make a terrible president of turkey.

Just the tip? Promise?

Perhaps.  At least it certainly makes you jaded.  I am very disappointed with the lackadaisical attitude towards criminal attacks on bitcoin which I see manifested in long-term traders and holders alike.  Apathy is never healthy or empowering to a constituency, and it is precisely crap like that which gives governments the excuse they want to infringe upon, and potentially eviscerate, the freedom to transact.

The owners are not relevant in determining the supply.  Only the miners are relevant.  The principal mining decision makers are readily identifiable, if you take the trouble.  I have not, nor am I likely to, take the trouble.  Their interests are fairly predictably aligned with my own.

I might mention here that your manners and language are not characteristic of an educated mind, nor even of a marginally socialized modest intelligence.


And where will you find better stability?  "Stablecoin"?  

Bitcoin will be stable when it stops growing so rapidly and has more inertia (market cap, if you must) relative to the fiat cross-flow.

Not all investors are so pusillanimous as to find the necessary growth phase daunting.  Without growth, no network can become non-trivially homeostatic.

Bitcoin is fast, but not so fast that a valid c&h can form intraday.  The structural/mechanical models that create the predictive power of a c&h pattern simply can't be present on that time scale.  Not without unphysical volumes, at least.

In capitulation, heading to despair. All of which will become just another part of the next take-off phase.

The first great use-case for bitcoin, which will drive value for the next couple of years, is international remittances.
The mass of adopters for remittances consists of immigrants.  I am in New York City about half of the time, and always
ask every taxi driver if they have ever heard of bitcoin.  These people are from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ghana, Senegal, etc.
Never, not once, has a taxi driver known what a bitcoin was, or even how to spell it with confidence.  (Although,
I suspect a few of them may one day send their children to Harvard with bitcoin bought since I met them.)

We are way, way short of take-off.  We are in stealth mode.

gaijin otaku
sips candy frappucino
bitcoinica paid

To quote Michael Faraday:  Of what use is a newborn baby?

"Pre-mined" is a term of art signifying that coins were generated before the general public could participate.  Pre-mining is generally regarded as a scam, and pre-mined coins as scam coins.  To use that word with regard to Saint Nakamoto is gross sacrelege.  Rather say "previously mined" or better yet "mined by early adopters" (because being an early adopter implies that any privileges were merited by your foresight, or because you were one of the Chosen).

The likelihood is that private keys of that vintage are no longer extant.  Most of those coins have never been touched.  They are still in their original reward.

Choo (up) choo (down).  I'm starting to feel rather masticated.

Maclairy was probably reacting to some hypothetical interpretation of my tone causing one of his guard hairs to twitch.

wonderful polysemy there.  by mob tactics do you mean to refer to la cosa nostra, or to market forces?

i'm finding it difficult to extract any argument against a certification program from your text, although one seems intended.  perhaps you could clarify.

I will be disappointed if there are no fireworks for Dominion Day, Independence Day, or Bastille Day.

why?  the money supply in btc is stable. 

Your posting was not a contribution to the discussion.  It was an effort to thwart meaningful discussion.
As such it is not appreciated.

A rather clever tit, however.  A piker at econ, but his treatise on probability was a masterwork at the time.

What he said, I endorse.

You should realize that the same can be said of fiat.  Unlike fiat, bitcoin is not designed to rob you.  It is designed to preserve and protect your savings.  When you start to expend a proportionately larger effort in denouncing the ponzi scheme which is fiat, then I will no longer consider you a delusional hypocrite.

You want to protect your countrymen from exploitation?  Convince them to stop using fiat.  But no, instead you are cutting off their only practical avenue of escape from slavery.  That is a despicable treason.

yet in fractional reserve banking fiat is created in this way.  bitcoin does not allow that.

That's a misleading use of ad hominem in my view, contrary to ordinary language use.  I intended to be vigorous.  I think it is delusional to consider the virtual nature of bitcoin to damn it and to propagandize to that effect, and hypocritical to do so while winking in complicity with a systematic method of robbing and enslaving every orphan and widow by means of debt money.  If the reality is a harsh one, I hope I can portray it accurately.

That said, I too appreciate Jorge's contribution to the form and consider him a man of wealth and taste.  That makes his ideas all the more perniciously misleading.

Up, until Gox withdrawals restart, then down while the market cap equalizes, until Gox coins go to a premium, then back up.

Aye, and p2pool should be promulgated, and legacy pools deprecated.

Mark was going to put a floor under it at 150, to be nice, but then his CFO said "tut tut, we can get those coins for cheaper than that!"

That's not what "market maker" means, usually, BTW.  Just sayin'.

I think you're right, after reading his FAQ.  I do not understand Gox (never having used it) so it is not surprising that I do not understand how he can hold the goxcoin.  Do they have a c2c xfer system?

Truly.  That's why you want to wait until after the turn, rather than trying to guess before the turn.  You still get whipsawed, but not *quite* as much, and that can make all the difference.

The new Gox digs are quite high-end.  Definitely an upgrade.

Jockeying to go down in history as the last person to sell 10,000 bitcoin for a pizza.

I now own all the goxcoins I can possibly stand.  It can go up now.

The confirmation suffices to fulfill the role of a source.  You're new at this?  The more confirmations, the more confirmed it is.