Bitcoin Forum

-------------------------------November 30th 2013 Update---------------------------------
I just posted the final conclusion including a donation of 1,000 Bitcoins worth over $1,000,000 USD at the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orzhba2dV1A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orzhba2dV1A)
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-------------------------------August 4th 2012 Update---------------------------------

I've posted the one year update to my $10,000 Bitcoin bet video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxC0dIBPzZg (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxC0dIBPzZg)
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-------------------------------August 4th 2011 ------------------------------------------
$10,000 Bet that Bitcoins will outperform Gold, Silver by 100X over the next two years

Please spread this far and wide,   It should be good for some positive media attention.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfydIbhduu0 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfydIbhduu0)


Roger Ver
Memorydealers KK
(A Division of MemoryDealers.com, Inc.)
8F Kudan minami green building,
3-7-7 Kudan minami, Chiyoda-ku,
Tokyo, 102-0074, Japan
roger@memorydealers.com

TEL +81-3-6280-8666
FAX +81-3-6280-8665
MOBILE: +81-80-3242-1056
AIM: rogerkver
MSN roger@memorydealers.com
Yahoo rogerkver
Twitter http://twitter.com/MemoryDealers


For all your Memory needs please visit
http://www.memorydealers.com
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----------------------August 10th 2011 Update---------------------


I’m about to place the official bet on www.longbets.com  but I would like some help tightening up my arguments as to why I think
Bitcoins will outperform Gold, Silver, the US Stock Market and the US Dollar by one hundred times over the next two years.

So far I am intending to post my argument as follows:

Bitcoins are the world's first peer to peer, distributed electronic currency.  This means that they can be sent directly from person to person over the internet,  without needing anyone's help or permission.  They are free to send, receive, or to store,  and they can be as public or anonymous as you want them to be.  

With bitcoins,  a person in California can send $20,000 USD worth of value to a person in Russia in a matter of seconds,  for FREE.  

In comparison:
Paypal would cost about $600,  and take a few seconds.
Credit card would cost about $600   and take a few days, to a week, or more.
Bank wire would cost about $40,  and take one or two days.

By all of the traditional payment methods,  any government can block your transaction for any arbitrary reason.  
Because Bitcoins are peer to peer,  no one can block your transaction for any reason, ever.
A recent example of this property of Bitcoin being put to use,  is with the online gambling industry.  
Recently the USA Federal government blocked credit card companies and banks from being allowed to process gambling related transactions.  
Since then,  numerous online gambling sites that use Bitcoins have launched.  
Because Bitcoins are sent over a distributed, peer to peer network,  governments are powerless to stop them.

With traditional government issued currencies,  politicians are always tempted to just print more whenever they have a budget short fall due to the most recent war, bailout, or “stimulus” package.
When governments do this,  all the citizen’s savings lose value in real terms.
With Bitcoins,  governments can never take the value of your money in this way.
Because the software is open source, we know that there will never ever be more than twenty one million Bitcoins. No one will be able to provide themselves with additional bitcoins by decree,  as happens so often with traditional government issued currencies.

Bitcoins are also resistant to government tracking or seizure.  With just a few steps, anyone can store their bitcoins in such a way that governments or other theives are powerless to access them without the correct password.  

Bitcoins may also make paying most taxes voluntary since governments will lose the power to track or control who sends bitcoins to whom.
The IRS, DEA, Customs and Border Patrol, and other agencies will no longer be able to seize peoples money at will.

Bitcoins may also bring an end to war.  Currently governments force all of their citizens to pay for war efforts whether they are in favor of the war or not.
Once Bitcoin use is wide spread,  the people in favor of the wars will no longer be able to force the people against the wars to pay for them.  
If suddently, the half the population who does not support the wars stop paying for them,  it will quickly become much more expensive for the suppoters of war to continue funding it.
I suspect that many people who claim to be in favor of the current wars would change their mind if they had to pay for all of it themselves.

Because Bitcoins are limited to 21,000,000 and they have so many advantages over traditional government issued currencies,  
once even a small percentage of the economy begins using bitcoins,  the price will quickly soar to thousands of dollars per Bitcoin or more.

In short,  I believe bitcoins are the most important technological revolution since the invention of the internet, and because of that, their price will skyrocket in comparison with
Gold, Silver, the US stock market, and US Dollar.


Please critique the above.
Let me know what you think I have missed,  points I should remove or add, including grammar and punctuation.
Remember,  what I post on longbets will likely be read by over a million people over the next two years.

Thanks for your help!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please feel free to re-post any of this anywhere you think people would be interested in it.

Please post this in tweetforum.com/bitcoin (http://tweetforum.com/bitcoin) and we will retweet it to all our followers ! Thank you  :) !

Instant Legend  8)

I can't view videos in work. What's all this about?

This is the attitude I wish everyone here would express.

You're a legend. Perhaps I should bet some money too, but considerably a bit lower than 10k to my friends. :)

I am going to start directing all my customers to buy their ram from him. Hope he's dead serious about this. :) Obviously think hes winning the bet...

I am %100 serious,  but remember,  when I win the money will be donated to charity.

I have absolute faith in Bitcoin and the concept behind it but still may be interested in the bet.  I do need you need to be a little more clear.


Please define outperform?  To say that Bitcoin will outperform the stock market (which index), Gold (relative to what), Silver (relative to what) and the US Dollar (relative to what) is very vague.  Also you are measuring the performance of Bitcoin relative to what?  Does Bitcoin have to outperform whichever of the above four performs the best over the next two years?

My opinion is that you are setting yourself up for failure saying that Bitcoin will outperform all of the above by 100x as the USD is inversely correlated to Silver and Gold.

I've bought hardware from Memorydealers a few times.
Nice to see the owner has some major balls & confidence in BTC.

@BTCSports,
Since I think you know a lot more about how betting works than I do,  I would like your input on how to structure the bet.

I am saying that Bitcoin will outperform ALL of them.

How I imagine it would work is if the current (easy math) price of each is:
Bitcoin is $10.
Silver is $50
Gold is $1500
Dow Jones 10,000 points
Nasdaq 2,000 points
USD is $1

in two years if everything doubles (except the USD will still be worth $1USD) to:

Silver is $100
Gold is $300
Dow Jones 20,000 points
Nasdaq 4,000 points

Bitcoins would need to be more than 100x more  ($1,000 a coin)  for me to win the bet.

Please let me know if anything is not clear,  or you think I am missing something.

This is awesome. We need more people like you. All those people who sold off yesterday are morons! Cheap bitcoins for those who are left!  ;D

That seems clear enough with the exception of changing the word "ALL" to "whichever performs the best relative to the USD" and remove the mention of outperforming the USD on your youtube post since as stated $1 will still be $1 in 2 years.

For $10,000 I would be willing to take the other side of this bet while at the same time hoping you win.  The only cavaat is that I am not sure I can agree to the charity aspect of the payout.

Great to see someone putting their money where their mouth is (instead of the usual "BUY BUY BUY" thread).

Can't wait to see the outcome in two years!

If Bitcoin outperforms "ALL" of them, then it will certainly have outperformed whichever "one" that performs best relative to the USD.

I think it might be illegal in one of our jurisdictions if the money is not donated to charity,  and that is one of the rules for www.longbets.org (http://www.longbets.org)
They hold the money in Escrow until the bet is resolved.

What? I understood it to mean that if you *lose* you get to decide which charity the money goes to.
If you win. You can keep the 10K yourself.

Memorydealers is putting the money to charity if they win. You don't have to.

All can be construed as meaning the results of the 4 are cumulative.

I would make the bet if the MyBitcoin victims were the designated charity.

No at longbets the charity has to be pre-selected by each party.  If they win the money goes to that charity.

Ah ok.  Well I'm cool with that.  It just means a smaller pool of people will be interested in the wager.

Im too poor to afford such a bet, but even if I had the spare cash, I would think twice before accepting this bet.
It is likely that this happens, as bitcoins cannot be stopped (although something like Liberty Reserve or uKash can be). Confidence in its usability will take a long time to be built up. It will take a while, and two years might be an appropriate timeframe.

Interesting thread, time will tell if it was a good choice by OP!

lets say i put 20$ in BTC and 10000$ in this bet:

BTC < 1000$ : i win the bet and collect his 10000 -> net win 9980$
BTC > 1000$ i lose the bet and sell my bitcoins -> net win 10000$

so... if it is too good to be true its a scam; or have I made an error in the math here?

although this is a highly unlikely outcome, what if stocks are negative after 2 years and gold and silver are up only 2%, then bitcoin would only have to be up 200%.  So your $20 bitcoin investment is now $60 but you lost a $10,000 bet

What could cause this to take off.

1 - people lock down their stuff and security takes priority
2 - more merchants accept them
3 - more people willing to pay in them

what could cause this to crash?

the opposite of above.

Except even if you win the bet you won't collect his 10k since it's going to charity, not your pockets.

you da MAN Roger!!!

i happen to agree and i've staked my money on it!!!!

I think there's a good chance he will win this bet.  Not because the price of bitcoins skyrockets, but because the price of everything else could drop over the next 2 years.  Personally, I don't see silver and the stock market both dropping together over that time period, but it's definitely possible.  I'd say his odds are pretty close to 50/50 on this one...

How precisely has this been specified?

Does this mean that so long as he finds some point within the next 2 years where this holds true - he's won.. or does the bet only look at the performance 'over' the entire 2 year span and so have to be evaluated exactly on the final day 2 years from now?

Can I get a side wager that this bet will be welched on?

Just so everyone knows, he is offering to make the bet using longbets.org (http://longbets.org/).  So far, no one has accepted, and the details have not been completed.

In either case, the money from both parties will go to a charity chosen by the winner, not into anyone's pocket.

If he wins the bet, he gets $20,000.  If he loses, he gets nothing, the $10,000 winnings would go to MemoryDealer's charity, and $10,000 wager would go back in MemoryDealer's pocket.

you my friend have balls.
$1000 a coin is huge expectations!

I don't think that it is logical to assume that the Dow, Nasdaq, Gold or Silver will double in price in the next two years.  

I do think it is almost gauranteed that one of them will be up 10% while another will be down 10%.

If that is a valid assumption Bitcoin will have to increase in value 10x to ~$110 for memorydealer to win his bet.

I would consider buying 100 Bitcoins for $1100 as a hedge and making this bet as pretty much a risk free wager.

All four would go up with heavy inflation though, which is what more and more economists are predicting.  I wouldn't be surprised to see 20-40% inflation over the next 2-3 years.

Nope, neither party can ever get any of their money back.  That is in the agreement on the site.  It is a tax-deductable charitable donation the instant the agreement is completed.  The resolution of the bet only decides which of the two charities it goes to.

This is very interesting.

@Roger

Was it MemoryDealers that commissioned a billboard showing Bitcoin accepted or was that another party? If you, does it happen to be in SJ/SF area? I am heading to SJ/SF today for the weekend and would love to get a look at it. :)

My bad then.

Yes Trent,

This is the same MemoryDealers that did the bitcoin Billboard.
It is on Lawrence Expressway about a half mile south of the 101 freeway.
Google gives the approximate address as:  2399 Lawrence Expressway, Santa Clara, California, United States

Street view still shows the old billboard:  http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=37.363097,-121.99605&spn=0,0.052314&sll=37.363199,-121.99605&sspn=0.045911,0.104628&layer=c&cbll=37.362967,-121.996053&panoid=ix57vPj5FLihP6eI0Nvvhg&cbp=12,341.09,,1,0.31&z=15 (http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=37.363097,-121.99605&spn=0,0.052314&sll=37.363199,-121.99605&sspn=0.045911,0.104628&layer=c&cbll=37.362967,-121.996053&panoid=ix57vPj5FLihP6eI0Nvvhg&cbp=12,341.09,,1,0.31&z=15)

WTF?  A billboard for fiber transceivers at retail?

This is in the heart of Silicon Valley.
You would be surprised how many "walk in"  customers we have.

Found It!

https://i.imgur.com/uhrYT.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/DFy3t.jpg

August 10th was added to the original post.
Please help.

You spend a lot of time talking about governments. But gold already has a lot of the properties that supposedly makes bitcoin great in this respect. Thus you might want to highlight the distinction between bitcoins and gold, e.g. bitcoins can be sent over the internet, and gold can't.

You might want to focus on some technical aspects of bitcoin, like how you avoid the middleman, and this is why transactions are so much cheaper.

You should mention that there can't be charge backs. This is important to small merchants.

You should consider discussing the pseudonymity and privacy features of bitcoin. It may not be as anonymous as cash, but it is vastly more private than credit cards, where many third parties get all your personal info and details of your transactions.

You also might want to explain why all these wonderful features are going to lead to greater adoption of bitcoin (which is necessary for the price to increase 100x).

"I believe bitcoins are the most important technological revolution since the invention of the internet" - word.

Why bitcoins will outperform gold and silver by 100x in two years

Gold is almost the perfect money, except that it is hard to lug it around. Paper money, or currency, was invented to make paying people with gold easier. Eventually, currency evolved into the fiat currency system we have today where the currency is not backed by gold. Because they are abstract, fiat currencies can be sent over the internet. Unfortunately, fiat currencies require trusted third parties to keep track of balances. This has two problems: 1) Requiring a third party slows down transactions and makes them more expensive. 2) The third party may (and in fact they do) betray their trust by inflating the currency and giving the extra currency to themselves, selling private information about the people transacting in the currency, reversing transactions without due process, and many other creative abuses of trust. We need something like gold that does not require a trusted third party and can be sent over the internet. Bitcoin is the first technology to satisfy these requirements. Unlike currencies, bitcoins were not originally designed to merely represent quantities of true money. Rather, like gold, bitcoins are money in themselves. Bitcoin is the gold of the internet.

Because of the enormous economic pressure for bitcoin, they will become extremely popular in the future. Small merchants will love them because they can't get charged back. International merchants will love them because they can be paid instantly and with very small fees. Everyone will love them because they will hold their value. Bankers will hate them because they cannot control them. Productive people everywhere will win. The world economy will be greatly improved.

There will only ever be something slightly less than 21 million bitcoins. But there are billions of people on the planet. Eventually, when bitcoins are widely used, each bitcoin will be extremely valuable. Ordinary transactions will use very small fractions of bitcoins, possibly down to the smallest unit, which is one hundred millionth of a bitcoin. Because bitcoins have the fundamental advantage over gold that they can be sent over the internet, they will become the de facto money of any transaction that is not hand-to-hand (although it may be the de facto money for those transactions as well). In fact the economic pressure bitcoin is so enormous that this is likely to happen soon. Within two years, the growth of bitcoin will radically outperform gold (and silver) by 100x. We are at the dawn of a spectacular change in the world economy.

Great initiative!

I think there are two points that should be clarified with regards to the bet:

• As someone else pointed out elsewhere, what would happen if over the next two years, stocks and precious metals decline in value? How would an "outperformance" of 100x be defined relative to a decline in value?
• What, exactly, does the "two years" time frame mean? Is it: on the date the bet is agreed on, we write down the value of Bitcoins, gold, silver (all in USD) and the stock indices. On the day that lies exactly two years into the future from this date, we look at the same prices and determine whether Bitcoins have outperformed the rest by more than 100x

While I love the billboard, and even the sentiment behind the bet - I think the 100x bet could be slightly damaging.
In my opinion it's likely to scare some investors off and reinforce the impression that there is a lot of snake-oil and hype around anything bitcoin.

That has to be balanced against the publicity gained from such a bold claim. 

I guess that even if Bitcoins were to outperform by 'only' 2X or 3X -  then history will look fairly kindly on Roger even though he was a little overzealous; but if  it's much less, it's going to make the climb even harder from that point onwards.

For now - I guess I guess I peg the whole thing as 50% batshit crazy and 50% visionary ballsiness! 
(maybe that's the impression he was going for anyway :P )

Julz,

Thank you for your concern.  I share some of them myself.

I actually expected it to get more press attention than it did so far.

I also posted a link in the video description to an encrypted file that contains my thoughts on why I offered this bet.
http://www.memorydealers.com/lib/memorydealers/Why-I-Placed-The-Bitcoin-Bet.tc (http://www.memorydealers.com/lib/memorydealers/Why-I-Placed-The-Bitcoin-Bet.tc)

It may make for some interesting reading in the future, if/when I make it public.

I wish I could be this optimistic.  In action, I am hopeful; I'm still gung ho about mining, partially because I've invested about $3000 in my rig, not to mention all the electricity I've spent on mining.

However, I am not quite so optimistic about the real future of the Bitcoin's adoption as a currency for everyday use in all the scenarios where today we use fiat currencies.  The major reason for my doubt is with the infrastructure requirements.  Even now, in what we consider Bitcoin's infancy, joining the P2P network requires the download of a rather long block chain.  And, every client that wants to make transactions has to continue to constantly download all the data about every transaction that occurs.  That may not take much bandwidth today, where most of the transactions are just a few thousand trades per day.  Expand that to a commercial payment system where Billions of people around the world are using Bitcoins to buy everything from a house to a pack of gum at the gas station, and you have a serious bandwidth problem.  When obviously you'll want your smartphone to be holding your everyday wallet, no device short of a multi-terabyte workstation hooked up to an OC-3 will be able to keep up with the bandwidth and burgeoning size of that transaction list.  Even at today's rate, I doubt anyone's smartphone battery could last the day running a Bitcoin client.

Unless some revolutionary changes are made to the entire system, I'm afraid this problem will quickly kill the Bitcoin as a real means of value exchange.

I would love to hear about a solution to this problem because I sincerely want to see the Bitcoin succeed.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#If_every_transaction_is_broadcast_via_the_network.2C_does_Bitcoin_scale.3F

sure, for instant payments clients work well now but not so later.
later you might either need a big machine to accept unconfirmed payments or wait for the next block.

There is also this article on scalability from the wiki:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

Couple of mistakes there.  Twice $1500 is $3000, not $300.
And if everything else gone up 100% and we want to outperform it by 100 times, we'll need to go up 10,000%, which would take the price of BTC from $10 to $1,010, not $1,000.  Going to $1000 from $10 is 'only' 99 times more of a percentage gain than gold made.

I suspect it's the same reason the New York conference didn't get much media attention: Journalists don't want to feel they've been 'used' to pimp someone's investment or simply provide publicity for some interest group.
I'm not sneezing at 10K - but from a marketing perspective it would be cheap if it did get mainstream media attention.


I hope you release the password either way.. even if in the end something you said in there is way off the mark, you don't look the type to get embarrassed too easily ;)

So this appears to be an argument that Bitcoins will make taxation impossible.
Is that right, or do you envisage some system where tax revenue is still extracted but somehow bitcoin gives more of a say in how it is spent?

If it's an argument that the entire taxation system will become unworkable - I'm not clear on how this is really an advantage for bitcoin.
While 'no tax' might play well in some subset of the US - I'm pretty sure most people around the world see it as a necessary evil.

A tax system that is able to be hamstrung in order to stop wars, is also able to be crippled simply through individual greed.

It rather seems that the 'bring an end to war' argument is simply a thinly veiled 'destroy the guvmint' argument and I don't think this is a point in favour for bitcoin mass adoption.

Thank you for the articles on scalability.  I'll take a look.

The real question is if this bet will have an effect on price in the long-term.

Unless something major happens, I fully intend to release my comments in the future.
I also agree that from a marketing perspective $10K is a bargain if it gets any kind of media attention.
So far,  I haven't even had to put up the $10K  since no one has accepted my challenge.

I do think Bitcoins will make some kinds of taxes very difficult to collect,  but others (like property taxes)  will hardly be affected at all.
Governments arguably, occasionally do some nice things,  but they also murdered over 150,000,000 innocent people in the last century alone.
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM)
I wont lose any sleep if somehow Bitcoin were to 'destroy the guvmint'  but I don't see that as a likely scenario.

I'm surprised no one has accepted this bet.
I have bitcoins so if you win I will be a millionaire and can easily pay you your $10k, if I win at least I get $10k (and I'll still have my bitcoins, even though they won't be worth so much)

There are other possibilities, too.  Bitcoin could serve as a master currency that underwrites other currencies issued against it.  For example, you could use Open Transactions to issue a digital currency backed by Bitcoin holdings, which would be publicly-verifiable through inspection of the blockchain.  Any transactions in this new currency wouldn't have to touch the Bitcoin network or blockchain.  The same is true for Ripple--you can establish credit and conduct commerce based on Bitcoins without actually burdening the Bitcoin network for transactions.  As an imperfect analogy, Bitcoin could become to pseudonymous currencies what CHIPS is to the traditional banking system.

I will take the OP on his bet.

Please do!

http://longbets.org/611/ (http://longbets.org/611/)

Challenge submitted.

Your challenge is $9,800 short.

http://longbets.org/611/ (http://longbets.org/611/)

Other than that,  I think it is a well reasoned response. 

This website is a joke, right?

Large Hadron Collider will destroy Earth? http://longbets.org/382/ (http://longbets.org/382/)

That's like saying "I bet one trillion USD that USD will become worthless".

Except that both parties need to pay their trillion up front, and it all goes to charity no matter which party wins the bet.

But then charity will receive trillions of worthless dollars  :D

Oh, nvm then. Didn't know you had to pay up front.

Yeah, that's the main problem. I knew there was a reason nobody has taken this up. It's a no-brainer otherwise.

Get this setup on Intrade, so we can all make side-bets on you and the challenger without forking over $10k.

Thanks. I'd be willing to make an actual $10,000 bet with you, but not one where I lose the money either way.

I would gladly agree to that,  but betting where bettors keep the money winnings is defined as gambling and is illegal throughout the United States. This is one of many stupid laws that I am confident Bitcoin provides a solution to, and one of many reasons why I think Bitcoin will become incredibly popular in the near future.

What if I want to participate but hate charities?  Those starving kids and cancer patients should just bootstrap themselves out of their predicament.

Also, you look and sound like a douche when you talk.

In his defense, a good lot of charities are corporatist shills. In many cases, only a small percentage of the money donated reaches the actual cause. Giving money to a poor charity is equivalent to throwing money away.

I haven't researched the charities involved myself but this might be a probable cause.

Ok, so if you think that bitcoin will outperform - whatever it means - dollar in 2 years for 100 times, so why the hell is this bet in USD instead of BTC?

I doubt somebody who does not agree would accept BTC for the bet ;)

Becasue his bitcoins will be worth 100x more than now - You'd just need $100 worth of bitcoin today to cover the bet as they'd be worth $10k when the time comes.

Hey Rog,

Still happy about this bet?

why wouldn't he be?  pm's have topped out and Bitcoin has or is close to bottoming.  the metrics for this trade have never been more favorable.  anyone taking this bet now would be crazy.

I forgot what his start price was.

Last I heard, no one actually took him up on the bet.

That's what he told me at the conference...  but I don't know what happened since then.

You just need $100 of bitcoins to take the bet - you can only lose $100, or win $10,000

^ If either silver or gold is up no more than, for example, 1% and Bitcoins are up 100% (to ~5.4 BTC/USD), anyone betting against will lose $10,000 and would need to have invested $5,000 in Bitcoins in order to break even.

The bet isn't that Bitcoins will be worth 100x more, it's that they will outperform gold, silver, stocks etc. with a factor 100.

Also, don't forget that the winner only decides to which charity the money of the loser goes - the winner itself doesn't get anything (besides not having to donate $10,000).

It's not 100% its 10,000% (100x)

The bet is not about Bitcoins increasing in value by 10,000%. It's about Bitcoins outperforming gold, silver, stocks by 10,000%.

If X is up 1% and Y is up 100%, Y has outperformed X by 10,000% (because 100% is 100 times more than 1%).

Right of the bat, these points are WRONG.

Until, bitcoin is a currency, this is completely wrong. Since you use fiat currency value, i assume you know bitcoin isnt a currency yet.

Explain to me whats "FREE" here.


Tell my what makes you think goverment CANT intervene your transfer. They can care shitless about your bitcoins transaction. They can shut down your exchange account. Enjoy your "Free" transfer cost now.

Infact, I challenge you RIGHT now, $10k. To transfer 1million USD from China to US using bitcoins.

Stop with all the wet dream.

This is a joke right?  The price now is $2.4.  Somebody sends $20,000 USD worth to somebody else.  That's 8,333.33BTCs.  The recipient wants to cash out immediately to pay for something.  Remember, we're comparing this to services like Paypal, bank wires, etc, where in the end the recipient has cash that they can spend anywhere.  So, the recipient sells their 8,333.33BTCs on MtGox and, uh oh, at the current depth they get $18,800 (not including MtGox fees!).

To get the same result that they would get from PP (i.e. an end result of cash they can spend anywhere) ends up costing at least twice as much!  Isn't it wonderful.

Yeah it doesn't work for large sums, but I just did 100btc worth (from mt.gox $ to Intersango £) - actually I made a bit of a profit as someone had left a sell buy order on and then gone to bed.  Unfortunately I can only move 100bct out of mt.gox each day (which I'm sure cant be good for the bitcoin economy at these prices).

This is why i cant take OP seriously. Either hes extremely dumb or he has his own agenda.

At the time I made the original post,  there was plenty of depth to accommodate  buying or selling $20,000 worth of bitcoins, and hardly move the price at all.  Today that is not the case,  but give it some time.....

I'm not "extremely dumb"  but I do have my own agenda.
It is promoting the free market and the accompanying voluntary society.

Bullshiet, whatever your agenda is, its for your own benefits.

Saying no goverment intervention is also stupid. But i'm sure you know that.

Wow.

You sound kind of stupid, plastic.elastic, but I'm sure you know that.

Kudos to you MemoryDealers.  I don't think bitcoin is going to outperform gold and silver by 100x, but I think this will give it some good publicity and will benefit a charity either way, so that's great.

I've posted the one year update to my $10,000 Bitcoin bet video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxC0dIBPzZg (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxC0dIBPzZg)

Great update. You are not the only one hoping that you win this bet  ;D

Even if you lose and Bitcoin only goes up to 1x gold, we all still win.

So no one took this bet, right? I do not see it on the site.

No one took the bet,  but it is still listed on the site:
http://longbets.org/611/ (http://longbets.org/611/)

Earlier today I asked Peter Schiff if he would be interested in the opposing side of the bet via his facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/PeterSchiff?filter=2 (http://www.facebook.com/PeterSchiff?filter=2)

One of the first books I read out of high school was one written by his dad, Irwin Schiff. To this day, the IRS has not gotten their fair share out of my ass due to his writings. The first time I ever lived in Las Vegas, I went out of my way to drive by one of his old offices (building). It was my way of paying homage to Mecca.

~Bruno~

I also read some of his dad's book around the time I graduated high school. 
It is shameful the way the USA government has treated him.
He is surely a political prisoner

By performance i dont think he meant the price.

But i can see definitely btc will out perform gold. Just not sure if 4 months is enough time.

Rogers is one of the person i would love to be on TV instead of those so-called financial experts.

I just took this bet!  Waiting to see if it's accepted.

I don't see any challengers on http://longbets.org/611/ (http://longbets.org/611/)  and I think it is a bit disingenuous to wait until the term of the bet is about 85% over before deciding to accept.

Why? There is a good chance you are going to win.

Your math is correct and boils down to leveraging the assets he's betting against. I'm surprised no one is being careful of what you are saying. This is probably the best/safest free money ever.

From my inbox:


Did you not get an email or anything?

Bitcoin has doubled 4 times times since the prediction, if it does it again in the next four months I lose the bet. Yes the period is 80% over, but bitcoin is 80% of the way there. If I wanted to screw Roger, I could have taken the bet when bitcoin was $2 and the odds were really in my favour. At the very least it's going to get interesting. Signing up I felt like I was taking the Kamikaze side of the bet given the trajectory of bitcoin in the last month.

Long bets is pretty adamant about being a platform for debate rather than gambling; and there's the rub.  I totally understand if Roger wants to decline the challenge as I (a holder of BTC) am not in fundamental disagreement with the premise. I am not going to put a long screed next to Roger's saying bitcoin is worthless and will go to zero. I am hedged, but Roger is not. Your call Roger, I'm easy either way.

[For the posters above, the money goes to charity either way, not to us.]

How can you be hedged against bitcoin not rising more than 100x the DOW (which is what will determine it)?

I submitted a challenge in September 2011. Obviously, it wasn't accepted. Roger is just marketing -- though I commend him for a job well done.

This is a nice thing, wish you good luck!

I think as a very long-term outcome, this could be possible.  However, I think many generations of people will only trust fiat currency for the rest of their lifetimes, and that's the only thing that will be propping up fiat currencies versus bitcoin and hard assets.  When it comes to things like communication, those set in their ways will eventually change them out of necessity, but money is a much harder battle to fight.  You probably don't lose sleep at night over whether your emails are safe, but if you have $100,000 in bitcoin, it might be a little harder to.

Very long term? Bitcoin has, currently, out-performed the S&P 500 by a factor of 72.

From this (http://bitcoinmagazine.com/trace-mayer-on-fox-business-why-bitcoin-is-just-getting-started/) article:


Bitcoin is, as of this writing, trading at $202 per bitcoin. The S&P 500 is at 1,563.07. That means bitcoin has had a 2,170% return until now. Compared to the S&P 500 return of 30%. So bitcoin has gained 71.7x more than the S&P 500.

If bitcoin goes to $282 and the S&P 500 stays the same, bitcoin will have out-performed the S&P 500 by 100x.

I think Roger will make it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1bykin/why_bitcoin_is_still_ridiculously_cheap_logic/
This guy says the truth.
Definitely bitcoin is more worth than PayPal.
Even if we do not consider the investiture value of bitcoin just the buying and money transfer value it is more worth.

Bitcoin outperformed all my "maths". Just three months ago I was willing to make a bet that the total value of all BTC would get to $1 billion USD in 18 months. I was wrong - It  happened in 2. Seems like op's claim might also be possible. Time will tell.

I never doubted that Roger was right, I just didn't think other people would figure it out this quickly.

Good job to those who did. It looks like his timeframe wasn't too aggressive after all!

But for Roger to win Bitcoin also needs to outperform the US dollar by 100x.

Since the US dollar is always worth 1 US dollar, that means Bitcoin needs to go to 100 times its price at the start of the bet.  That was $9.26, so for Roger to win BTC needs to go to $926.

That's wrong. USD's performance measure against itself is 0% gain. 100 times 0% is still 0%. So as long as bitcoin price goes up, it outperforms USD by greater than 100x.

Roger said that Bitcoin would outperform the US dollar by a factor of at least 100.  I think that has to mean that (value of dollar / value of bitcoin) must increase by at least 100.  Your definition doesn't make much sense, since it's always either zero or infinite (positive or negative).

I guess it doesn't matter that the terms are fuzzy since it appears Roger hasn't accepted any of the offers to bet against him anyway.

Exactly two years ago, on August 4, 2011, Roger Ver promised to pay $10000 to anyone who would challenge his predictions: that bitcoins will outperform gold, silver by 100X over the next two years .

On August 04, 2011 the price of gold was $1,664.25, silver $41.62 and bitcoin $9.26.

He himself said, that bitcoin should have reached $1000 a coin for him to win the bet. Others explained, that If either silver or gold is up no more than, for example, 1 % and Bitcoins are up 100 % (to ~5.4 BTC/USD), anyone betting against Roger Ver will lose $10,000.

One has to admit that stipulations for the bet were unclear. So long as Roger Ver would find some point within the 2 year span where his predictions hold true - he would have won. Or should the bet's outcome be evaluated exactly on the final day, i.e today?

Let's see the results.

Gold hit an all-time high in September 2011 when it touched $1,921 per troy ounce.
In late April 2011, silver reached an all-time high of $49.76/ozt.
On 10 April, the bitcoin exchange rate reached maximum $266.

Gold's maximum gain during 2 year span was 1921/1664.25=1.154;
silver gained 49.76/41.62=1.196;
bitcoin gained 266/9.26=28.73.

So, bitcoin outperformed gold by factor 28.73/1.154=24.9 and bitcoin outperformed silver by factor 28.73/1.196=24.0. Not by factor 100, as Roger Ver had predicted.

Bitcoin did not reach $1000 as Roger had envisaged himself.

On the other hand ... if we look at today's prices, then we see that prices of gold and silver have decreased compared to prices two years ago. Bitcoin instead has increased in price more than tenfold. In this respect Roger Ver would have won the bet.

Unfortunately nobody challenged him.

Thanx for the summary. I can remember that I was bullish like he was back then and found it quite likely the $1000 would come anywhere in these two years. Clearly anybody who would have taken the bet would have made clear what would trigger a win/loss with extreme caution.

Bump for the conclusion.
The largest charitable Bitcoin donation ever.
1,000 BTC worth over $1,000,000 USD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orzhba2dV1A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orzhba2dV1A)

You are great Roger. Did everything right, again. Thank you.

Mandatory good guy Roger Ver meme:
http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/1rsndl/good_guy_roger_ver/

Remind me to kick your Kung Fu ass, for this derails my goal of being the first person instrumental in accomplishing the largest charitable Bitcoin donation ever with the exact same amount via Typhoon Haiyan Relief Fund. But, never fear, for I'll still be able to accomplish said task by not only exceeding a $1M USD lump sum donation transfer via BitPay, it'll be the first Bitcoin only charitable crowdfunding effort to date.

No way am I taking time off from my RL venture--procuring and selling barn wood--to travel to Las Vegas to accomplish the task during the Inside Bitcoins (West) conference in vain after I finish up here at Thanksgiving at Satoshi Forest. I'll just need a proverbial ace up my sleeve, then act fast and furious (hint).

Too bad you didn't use Bets of Bitcoin, then there could've been a chance you wouldn't have had to honor your bet.  ;D

This post was penned as a reply to Bitcoin Jesus from TMIBTCITW.