Bitcoin Forum

Not good!

A whole month of not having new lows was enjoyable.

Indeed. I was hoping we're gona be at 5 like years.

It's goin back up... good thing, I was just about to liquidate my long position at bitcoinica

woop... spoke too soon

I wish I could get more money into Mt. Gox faster! We're looking at a prime buying opportunity.
By all means, please keep panic selling.

Word

+1

The sell price at bitcoinica AND the gox price DID dip below S0352's projected bottom of 4.18 ... to 4.16 for a minute or so...

... I have a bit of cash left at bitcoinica, should I go short?  is a drop to 3.50 really feasible?

I would expect 3.7. For now.

Nah, I think we're done with this month's drop.   4.2 is the new 5 for the coming month.  Look for confirmation on deepbit though -- if total hash rate remains around 4.5 terahash (currently 4.3) over the weekend we'll be stable after a small, short term rally to around $4.4.  If hash power does a swandive then we'll finally get our capitulation.  At which point $3.5 will seem quite optimistic.

The guy pulled his bidwall of 13000 bitoincs out at the 4.00 mark and looks to have set it at the 3.2. He is giving into a total collapse.

It's just a matter of days.

I bought some just incase this is the new low...but, I don't think we've hit the bottom yet.   :-\

The lowest low will be lower lol

Waiting on confirms on coins coming from btce (a bonus bitcoin a day from mining tenebrix! yay!) so I can send them to mtgox in support of this "rally."  In hindsight I should have just sold on btce.

Because of the recent "Lost" wallets from http://bitcoin7.com. I would not be surprised to see an estimated 15 to 20k BTC to hit the market. And push this down trend further towards 3.5.

They had like 8,000! This is panic selling coming from the big guys!

With how shallow the ask side is, shouldn't the price be going up?

Do I hear a 4.01?

Haven't you learned the ask/bid volumes on mtgox are less real than porn star boobs?  They may be pretty, but I wouldn't base any lifechanging decisions on them.

What is real is the cost to run this network ($1000/hour) and bulls failing to deposit enough money to keep the pyramid from wobbling.

Not if the "Big Boys" are in collusion and have set a buy price around 3.5

Just saying.

3.99? Anyone?

No, I don't base anything solely on Gox charts! But, I thought it would be a round about idea of what's really going on there!

All these panic sellers should have their man cards revoked, get kicked in the nuts, and be IP banned from ALL exchanges!

Dot ask how I came up with this:

http://bit.ly/qKCavv

It's the finaaal countdooown...

We got to get that price into the $3.00 range to set a new psycological level. Sell guys, someone out there sell to drive the price into the $3's, and show that bitcoins should be cheap for everyone to own and afford.

So true. I would like anyone in the world have the chance to buy 1 bitcoin. It would be great.

It remains at above $4 but looks to be quite bearish, anymore hacking or unpleasant news will see it dive even more.

It's just waiting for th to catch up.

What happens if I would sell 1500?

Perhaps you mean .001 bitcoins, because there aren't 7,000,000,000 BTC in the world.

You would probably be :) and less worried about the obvious decline we are going into this weekend.

Yup, glad to see my strategy of selling on Tuesday mornings and/or Sunday nights is still sound.  Weekend effect in full swing.

Not buying until I see a massive hash rate drop on deepbit to confirm capitulation.  80% of the bitcoin community still being bullish is too rich for my blood.

And we are below $4.

Let me be the first to admit I was wrong about 4.2.  Clearly the OP is better at this than I am.

Did you drop your 1500 about 3 mins ago?

Just 1000

Not bad guess someone beet you to that 1500 drop :) I seen it tic by.

I did see an 1000 order... Anyway: $3.86

I want $2.9! then stop.

Just remember that Bitcoin becomes far more acceptable by retailers at about $2 each since there is a potential for further gains in exchanges of maybe a few %.

I would like to see it maintain a 2-3 range.

And along with that we would be motivated as miners to streamline our operation with other options rather then just GPU's

The wall at 3.2 is gone.  If we smash the wall at 3.6 there's NOTHING until the twos.

Hell with this. Bitcoin won't die. SELL SELL and bring down that wall!

Where are the arbitrage bots? There's a huge spread between Mt. Gox and Tradehill right now, which is exploitable. Maybe the 'bots ran out of cash buying on Mt. Gox and can't get money out of Tradehill fast enough. (That's a big problem with arbitrage between Bitcoin markets; getting cash out of the exchanges quickly and reliably is like pulling teeth.)

The price is actually going up right now. I don't think we are going to see lower prices today. We already had the "usual" 20% decrease. I could be wrong, though.

Got nothing left.  Sold on Tuesday and again at 4.2 from my tenebrix winnings.  I'm completely out until I mine another coin some time later today or early tomorrow.

I am doing arbitrage and yes, I ran out of money on MtGox ;) Bitcoin arbitrage works like this: during 1/2 weeks there are nearly 0 opportunities a day. Then in one day you get like 1000 opportunities. You gotta have a lot of money placed at exchanges in order to catch up with everything that happens in that one day.

Exactly.  My bot ran out of $$ at Gox and bitcoins at TH about an hour into the downswing.

4.20??????????????????????????? WTF?

That's where a 600 coin 'wall' is.  Whomever bought out the thin as air supply between that and the asks didn't have THAT much money after all.

So what's next? further decline? Or he saved bitcoin?

Since the price on TH didn't go below 4.2 I'm re-calling the 4.2 monthly stagnation target.  See you next month for a repeat of the bloodbath.

(barring a huge drop in hash power on deepbit as I said earlier, of course)

No. It has to be either up or down.

I still hold onto the notion that we will see further pressure downward by the end of the weekend.
Factors such as the bitcoin7 fiasco along with spec activity and finaly the normal weekend decline.

However where it should stop is unknown.

I want parity NOW !!! Damn it, this cannot fall fast enough.

Since I posted that a few minutes ago, somebody did trades that brought Mt. Gox and Tradehill back in sync. Mt. Gox now at $4.18, Tradehill at $4.21. No more arbitrage opportunities for now.

I vote for stagnation slightly above $4. But maybe the weekend will bring us surprises...

I don't quite believed in the long term trend - but many did and that line was for sure broken now so I expect further down pressure.

Give it 2 hours. Everybody is excited right now. It will go down again, no need to struggle.

long term trend isn't broken until $2.80 is broken..

He's talking about the S8675309's charting.  That one clearly calls out a short and medium term support above where we're trading now, and it seems like the guy has a bunch of followers.   Disciples that utterly ignored the bearish macd divergence staring them right in the face to treat a not-yet materialized reversal pattern as a sign to buy hard.

Come on 8XX,000 difficulty!

Oh, that guy.

The long term trend since the bubble popped looks like this:
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?width=640&m=mtgoxUSD&k=&r=90&i=&c=1&s=&e=&Prev=&Next=&v=0&cv=0&ps=0&l=0&p=0&t=S&b=&a1=SMA&m1=30&a2=&m2=25&x=0
Bitcoin, last 3 months, with 30 day trailing moving average.

Now that's a trend, not wishful thinking and fantasy line drawing.

I think people have different definitions for timeframes. For me a 3 month period is not a long term period, long term is one year at least. 6 months is something I consider a semi long term period, but 3 months is definitely not long.

This is to clarify that when we talk about long term trends, drawing a line from the peak is absolutely ridiculous. That's more of an extended mid term trend, which is currently bottoming. That's actually what S3052 called in his last analysis (Mid term: DOWN / BOTTOMING). He did miss on the short term though, but the long term and mid term is right on.

And for most of us those are more important than the short term anyway.

look's like the price still down under 5 until next month  :'(

I worry when the real long term trend is broken and that would require a price below $3, which I don't see happening right now. If $4.x was a buying zone before, $3.x is on another level entirely, it's buy like crazy zone. And I do plan on doing just that if I can get money in while the price stays or visits the $3.x area.

We're looking at the price bottoming at $3.x and then stabilization added with a few rallies. Then one of these rallies will break a significant barrier signaling a mid term trend change and then we might have a new rocket launching.

This is the likely scenario for now, the less likely is a doom scenario which breaks the long term trends. I see this as very unlikely because the fundamentals of Bitcoin are simply not weak enough for that.

+1

People said this all the way down. All you need is a little stability in between to get people comfortable with the "stable price". Perception is a bitch, it's not going to happen the way you predict.

Exactly this.  When bitcoin was at $9, $6.58 was buy like crazy zone.  When it was $6, $4.18 was a lucky buy.  Let's see what happens after it lingers at $4.20 for a month before dropping into the $3s around this time next month.

I know I'm not waiting for $6 to dump, anything close to $5 and it's a selling opportunity.

That's exactly how downtrend forms :) Each previous support now becomes resistance

BUY BUY BUY!

So, you stepping up to buy at 4.1 and sell at 4.5 all next month?  You know it's the right thing to do.  These bulls are just begging to be milked.

I sold 45 coins at 4.6 and 5 at 4.1.

Now I have 0.5 in my wallet and I'll cointinue to sell the coins while mining them

The interesting thing for me is, who exactly is doing the mass selling?  Are newly 'mined' bitcoins being dumped?  Are people who bought into the bubble and started catching falling knives in June/July/August cutting their losses?  Or are we seeing early adopters who maybe bought bitcoins at 10c each thinking 'well, if I don't cash in my 10,000 bitcoins now they'll be worth $1 each by the end of the year'?

I don't buy the bitcoin bull excuse that only stolen bitcoins are driving down the market.  The market has been falling since June, so unless we're seeing mass theft every couple of weeks one would think we're fresh out of stolen bitcoins to monetize.

Since every bitcoin transfer can be traced, I wonder if someone has genuine statistics on who (as a early/mid/late adopter group) sold on the way from $20 to $10, and $10 to $5.

Miners may be selling immediately as opposed to holding. Also holders from the June spike deciding to sell late. So does all of Bitcoinica's hedging to balance a strong aggregate short position. Haven't even touched big holders or early adopters.

The balance is between sellers/buyers, of course, but more importantly, sellers who sell to buyers who must buy at any price (merchants or anyone selling goods/services in BTC). This imbalanced demand is where your price drop comes from.

What all of you are stating is the obvious, this is exactly what has happened. We have been on a continuous downtrend for the mid term but as it is with all trends, they change eventually. The key indicator this time is the fact that market behaviour after the 4.18 low has been more bullish than ever since the downtrend began.

This is the reason why I think that it's very likely for the next bottom to be a trendchanging one, because the last one almost was. The support is not going to get any less, in fact the opposite will happen from this point on. As long as the long term trend holds.

As long as the long term trend holds there are many miners and investors that will be less likely to sell at current prices and the $3.x buying zone will be the biggest buying zone since the downtrend started and will most likely be so significant that it'll cause trend changing behaviour.

But we'll see.

Yes, we will.  $5 looked to be pretty darn impenetrable.   

IMO BitMagic is right.  We've had a shift from mine-and-hoard to a mine-and-sell strategy as BTC went lower and lower from a bubble peak.  So the selling pressure on the market increased even though the dollar volume decreased.

That's why we have a month of stagnation followed by a drop.  Miners mine-and-hold hoping for a bounce.  When it doesn't materialize (and in fact they're looking a bear straight in the mug) they dump knowing they'll mine their position back over the coming month.  Possibly even increase it if other miners flee and difficulty drops.

The market may be able to absorb 1000 new bitcoins a day, but it has a hard time with 30,000 at once.  (just a wild guess that somewhere around 15% of mined coins are being sold monthly, up from 10%).  And it's a lucky thing for bitcoin that people who aren't willing to deposit dollars are at least "depositing" the cost of their electric bill.   If the full 7200 coins a day got sold it'd be game over in less than 3 months.

I had a 'mine and sell' mentality from day one.  Who could know what the future value of a bitcoin could be?  I originally sold some at $7.  Was a bit painful watching them go to $15, then $20, and upwards through $25.  To the moon, and beyond, was the general feeling of bitcoin's value on this forum.

I kept mining and selling, progressively through the 20s, high teens, and dumped the rest at $12.  Looks like a pretty damn good decision right now.


By mining and not monetizing their bitcoins, miners took on a considerable amount of risk.  I maintained bitcoins were a high risk, highly speculative investment.  Many disagreed.  I hope not too many people were burned on the way down.

The funny thing is, bitcoin does its 'government free, bank free' currency model just as well whether it's valued at $1 or $100.  Bitcoin hasn't intrinsically changed in nature.  It's still the same libertarian commodity it was in January 2011.  It's just that it's worth a lot less fiat currency units now than it was a few months ago.  If we value bitcoin as a commodity based on its fiat currency value, doesn't that devalue bitcoin as a whole?

While I agree with you and got in roughly during the same time (except I was a roaring bull when the trend was UP, I only started selling once the trend looked to be broken at $24-$20) the bitcoin network is worth more when it's more secure.  Just look at fairbrix -- demonstrably it didn't take too much computing power to pull off a 51% attack and destroy the value of that network.  That currency is just as usable as bitcoin for libertarian purposes, yet has a fiat value of roughly $0 and a corresponding utility value.

Bitcoin needs to have some sort of revenue model to pay for people securing the network.  Right now that revenue model is a pyramid.  In the future we will see.  But you are wrong that the value of the bitcoin network is utterly independent of its value in fiat.  At least today.

I'm pretty sure the actual percentage is _much_ higher - more like 50%-70% I'd say. Of course I don't have any facts to back that up either, but 15% sounds much too low IMHO.

Game over? Depends on your definition of game over, but I can very well imagine a scenario of Bitcoin going back to the ~0.1 USD level, being traded and used only among enthusiasts for some time and then slowly rising again once inflation levels off.

As long as the cryptographic foundations remain sound, I see no reason why it should be game over.

You are right to a degree, but as long as trading for fiat vastly outweighs trading for goods and services, the fiat denomination will be the dominant factor in the valuation of Bitcoin.
Also, the lower the price of Bitcoin, the lower its usefulness for transactions of higher valued things (if you have to pay 10.000 BTC for a pizza, you won't even think of buying a car for Bitcoin).

Is there something that can be done to make bitcoin rally again? What should happen?

Maybe more publicity? The early-adopters sell more so the price gets lower and more appealing?

I'm going off of the first MtGox hack having 500k in their trading wallet and 700k during the time of the second suspected hack.  That rate of growth maps roughly to around 10-15% and I'm using that with lots of assumptions as a proxy for # of coins entering circulation.

Of course I don't have any hard numbers, only mtgox and possibly dwolla have those.  I can only guestimate.   But IMO 50-70% is waaaaaaaaay too high of an estimate.


Look at fairbrix.  The fiat value is roughly $0, and so is the hash rate.  It took one guy to pull off a 51% attack.  If the hashing power of bitcoin falls far enough it's only a matter of time till someone does the same thing for "lulz."


More importantly, nobody would ever think of selling a car for Bitcoin.  Their risk of actually cashing out at market value is too huge.

I'm just dying here for parity man !!!

Put in more money.  That simple.  Buy a million dollar's worth a few tens of K at a time every time it dips and you'll paint the chart, drive up the price and get more people interested.  You'd get a multiplier effect magnifying your investment.  Cashing out will work in reverse, but so long as you're the first one out you SHOULD make money (it depends on how hard lemmings follow suit).

Once the price drops low enough you could do this with far less $.   Using Tenebrix as an example -- you can cause a huge rally at will with only a thousand dollars or so worth of BTC.  Last week you could do it with $100.  When BTC is at parity you could probably pull off an impressive rally with $20-30k or less.   At 10c, 5k will be enough.

I can come up with 50,000. Me + 4 friends. What would that do?

It would pay for a truly magical Caribbean holiday for the four of you and your familes. :)

No.  Get 160 more friends.

In all seriousness, with balls that big I'm surprised you guys fit through doorways.  I hope you're billionares.  I'm well off enough having been a $400/hr consultant during the dotcom boom and to this day having a decent two senor techie income family, doing well enough trading and having two profitable businesses -- but I'd never risk more than pocket change on bitcoin.  Hat off to you.

But you would risk in something else? Stocks? Forex?

Oh absolutely.  My "unlimited risk play money" portfolio is about 2 orders of magnitude (almost 3) larger than my bitcoin investment, and it's a prudent tiny portion of my overall net worth -- most of which is exposed to various (yet much lower) risks.

With bitcoin there is ONE exchange.  It's really one guy.  The others are so tiny they might as well be brokers trading out of inventory instead.  With the other markets there are millions of participants.  Here we have a few tens of thousands.  With other markets I have derivatives, with assignment ultimately backed by armed people and jails.  

With bitcoin my potential of losing 100% due to *a single guy* making a mistake or committing fraud is also 100%.  Over and above market risk.

With most other markets not so much.

TL;DR - while bitcoin trading is risky enough the rest of the ecosystem makes the total risk high enough to not be worth current rewards.

Ok, fair enough - the truth is probably somewhere in between :)

Ok, fairbrix has been around for how long again? The thing is, Bitcoin is a whole different beast - there's been quite some money been invested by actual businesses and a lot of individuals, the system has proved itself for quite some time and the mining infrastructure has been perfected. Of course, hashrate will drop with the price, but mounting an actual attack against Bitcoin even if it only had 1/10th its current hashing power will be very difficult.

A while ago I also suggested some kind of insurance against such a scenario and I still think it could work: have some considerable hashing power on guaranteed standby, ready to be brought online in case of an attack within 1-2minutes max. I'm sure many would be willing to rent their mining-gear for such a service at a very low rate (think about it: you get money for your computer just sitting there on standby). That way, nearly the same level of security could be maintained at a much lower cost.

Fairbrix lifespan is irrelevant, it uses equivalent technology to bitcoin.  What is relevant is the hashing power relative to value of destroying the network.  Sure, it's difficult at 1/10th of current hashing power (difficulty of 150k).  How about a difficulty of 15k?

If there is no income to be had from securing the bitcoin network people will flee.  The question is: are there enough believers and people with free power and hardware willing to do this for no compensation relative to those interested in imploding the whole thing for "lulz"?


This sounds like a wonderful idea.  I have 1337 googlehash of computing power that I'm willing to sell lower than anyone else.  No, I don't have photos of the hardware at the moment, my camera is broken.  But I'll get them to you just as soon as you pay me.

Aside from fraud and contract enforcement issues it'd be senseless to do this unless the cost of hardware is marginal compared to the value received.  In other words, if it's more profitable to turn the hardware on than leave it off it'll be turned on.  But if it's NOT on, the odds of receiving enough value to pay for hardware before it becomes obsolete are low.

Fairbrix does use a different hashing algorithm - everyony having a bunch of workstations at a company/university or a small Botnet at his disposal can mount an attack at this stage, whereas you'll always need specialized hardware (at least modern AMD GPUs) to attack Bitcoin.

Sure, in the end it's the hashing power that counts, but attacking a CPU only blockchain will always be easier and cheaper than attacking a highly matured GPU-mined blockchain.

Ok, then probably somebody who thought about it some more than you should set up such an insurance service ;)
Seriously though: of course you'd have to make sure that people getting paid have the actual hashing power available by randomly asking them to do some work.

I'm not saying that this would pay for somebody building a shiny new standby-mining operation, but all the gamers out there would probably not mind getting some money every month for having their rigs on standby.

The thing is, even if you don't organize this via a formal insurance service, it would probably happen: everybody having a vested interest in Bitcoin might keep some hashing power on standby to prevent an attack - even if the power-cost outweighs the immediate mining reward.

Still no worries.  I could satisfy the random proof of work when requested and use the hardware for mining during the other times.  Net result: no increase in security, slight increase in reward for me.  Higher cost for the policy because anyone providing the "insurance" would need to factor in doing work at random times.


Key words: vested interest.  Most of the population has no vested interest in bitcoin.   75% of the current hashing power could very well have low to no vested interest in the future of bitcoin.  From personal experience any hashing power I have is used to produce bitcoin so long as it is profitable.  And if it is not profitable I'm better off selling the hardware on ebay.

Look at namecoin if you want a guestimate of the ratio of devoted fanatics compared to opportunists.  It's about 1:20 fan to greedy SOB.

How many gamers would commit to their machine not being usable for gaming for a few cents to a few dollars a month?  I'm guessing not enough to make this worthwhile.  I won't even go into the entire technical nightmare of getting standby working across the gamut of hardware and software.  Out of 5 machines I have at home and at the office only one older one (Q9400(IIRC) CPU, P35 chipset, mature Gigabyte BIOS, Ubuntu 10.04, nvidia 8800GT) has flawless standby/resume, the other 4 exhibit various degrees of flakiness.  One MSI socket 1156 board has a 100% failure rate to resume from S3 suspend.

It's only a matter of time until APUs are as prevalent in low cost consumer boxes as CPUs are today.  Sure, they'll have 1/4 to 1/8 the computing power of a GPU, but that's about the same ratio as a crappy Grandma-suitable dual core vs a 6 core Phenom II today.  Specialized hardware is only protection today.

It wouldn't be too hard to detect and discourage such a fraudulent behavior if it was done on a larger scale but I think we already got off-topic far enough. If you'd like to continue a discussion about the technicalities of such a service then I'd be happy to continue in a separate thread. Regardless of the details, my point is that there are quite some ways to mitigate the risk of an attack on Bitcoin in case of emergency - even if the price is very low.

Ok, taking this number you'd still need about 1500 gigahashes to somewhat successfully mount a double-spend attack Bitcoin in a "game over" scenario - not exactly "lulz" in my book. Anyway, all these numbers are far too speculative to be of any practical value IMHO.

Yeah, but that's still quite a few years away - I don't think that ubiquitous APUs are the biggest threat to Bitcoin but we will see.

For sale.

2008 Mitsubishi Lancer SE, Blue, 5spd
91,000 km  (Canadian car, currently in Toronto area)
Power everything, heated seats, aircon.

Hail damage repaired in 2008, approx $12,000
Gravel damage repaired in 2011, approx $5000

Car mechanically great. New tires, new windsheild, dealer maintained.
New tires, new rear brakes. Needs front brakes.

2600 BTC

Are gonna keep the coins or dump them?

Too expensive. Will crash the market at that amount of BTCs !

Not crashing but would impact to some extent.

Yeah probably would get us in the $2 range anyway if I were to immediately try to dump them ;)
I just kind of posted it for a laugh... but I am looking to sell the car so I can buy a truck...
So if anyone WERE to buy the car in bitcoins, I'de probably keep 500 bitcoins and dump the rest.

This reminds me... just a couple of weeks ago somebody allegedly bought a house for 40k btc or something. 

Yeah, not likely. Big problems with mortgage insurance. You need someone to insure the purchase, and I can't see a single insurer ever considering using BTC as a valid transaction. If the seller declared bankruptcy, all of their assets, including real estate sold in the last 3 months is examined. All a buyer needs to do is claim it a "worthless internet currency" and the courts would revert any purchase in a second. That discounts any tax-related avoidance issues with the county clerk of courts (who would refuse the deed where no taxes are paid), and a resulting void purchase.

You couldn't possibly mortgage the property without legitimate insurance, and no insurer in their right mind would insure a BTC purchase like that.

Sorry to burst your libertairan bubble land, folks. Property (and likely cars), are not a gentlemen's agreement.

You know what's funniest about this? Those laws protect buyers from ridiculous scam artists that have been operating for decades in USD. The kind that are fleecing BTC users on a weekly basis. Free market, indeed.

Having just purchased a house, I can second this.  Under local law, the lands title office requires a strict procedure for the exchange of cheques (written in dollars, not bitcoins) and signatures.  Banks are instantly going to say a firm "no" if they find someone is trying to pay using bitcoins.  Convert the bitcoins to dollars and then use them perhaps?  Then what's the point in using bitcoins?  Less security than going through official channels, more hassle and more paperwork.

I highly doubt anyone has done a bitcoin based property deal that can actually be proven to exist.

I also can't imagine someone doing a serious deal in a commodity that's so unstable in value.  That 40k in bitcoins has fallen by two thirds in value in three months.  Better cash out real quick after the deal is done....  In my house purchase agreement, signing over the title of the land and actually paying for it occurred 6 weeks after I agreed to buy it for X dollars.  Imagine agreeing to 40k bitcoins then and seeing your property sell for half price 6 weeks later...

HAW! Hilarious that those silly old people, who are paying their mortgage with social security so they have a roof in the first place, must be getting shirked by the government! HAW!

I am tearing my hair out at the sheer idiocy of your post.

1) You buy a house, you insure the transaction. Cash, card, loan from a bank, a signed Mario Lopez self portrait; it doesn't matter how you pay.

2) You insure/use a bank for a mortgage, you pay fees. You pay even more fees to buy 40k BTC (close to $12,000, not including inflation/deflation losses).

3) Good luck trying to deposit $500,000 in cash to your local bank without the Feds taking an interest.

I've got a nice link for you retarded US libertarian fools in the general area of tax evasion. I hope you all get arrested trying some of these.

Frivolous tax arguments debunked by the IRS (http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/friv_tax.pdf).

Oh, it looks like the pointless inflammatory BitMagic has graced us with his presence again, and he still doesn't know what he's talking about.

Case in point: "You pay even more fees to buy 40k BTC (close to $12,000, not including inflation/deflation losses)." What sort of an idiot would use an exchange where they pay 7.5% ($12k/$160k at $4/btc) to exchange bitcoins?  And even if he meant 0.75%, he's still way off: Mt. Gox drops the percentage to 0.2% at those volumes, so the fee would actually be $320.  Also, there's #bitcoin_otc, where trades of arbitrary size can be done without any exchange fee whatsoever - obviously he's a n00b that doesn't know that exchanges are relatively new to bitcoin. Of course, the web of trust might not be extended to someone with his complete lack of social skills - I certainly wouldn't trade with anyone that acted like him.

I just wanted to get some clarification.  We're all always going to try to push the bitcoin price lower by always selling our bitcoins at any price no matter what.  Right?

Not necessarily, but for now that seems to be the pattern.

ok you guys are right, the bitcoin world doesn't play nice with traditional, PAPER based title tracking systems.
Time to make them obsolete: launch a new blockchain to track title deeds.

HHOS.

God, this was all so obvious. All new folks here, I see. The old ones must have bailed.

Incorrect.   If it was new folks (providing fresh money) as is needed to grow the pyramid we wouldn't be trading at $4.

I was referring to the names I see on this board. You are right, no significant new money has been infused into Bitcoin to offset the flood of mined coins being cashed out constantly. But lets be honest, everyone here knows that Bitcoin as a speculative tool was doomed. The only folks I imagine left here are those who fueled by some ideological imperative (Evorhees, for example) and those who just want to see the final Chapter in the drama, before Bitcoin returns to the obscure crypto-geek toy it was back in May.

Welcome back, old_engineer! I know you just love it when I have something to say that makes you look stupid. Indeed, I dropped a decimal (40k BTC * $5 = $200,000 * 0.6% = $1,200). Fortunately for me, your omissions make me look even better. Fuck fees, obviously. You wouldn't have anything to say about the truth of the matter, because you'd rather poke at arithmetic mistakes than face the reality: insurance.

I certainly do know that exchanges are relatively new to bitcoin, but don't expect anybody but an idiot to be holding 40k coins after the last 3 months, nor idiotic enough to buy a piece of property with it in the first place. Lol, insert early adopters / the manipulator / globalist conspiracy here.

I promise you, old_engineer, I wouldn't accept your bitcoins even as a tip; because I know better than to own a failing commodity. 


Riiiiiiiight, we were arguing that if you didn't use bitcoins, it would be possible to buy a house with bitcoins.  ::) Don't play dumb, you know what we were discussing: a property sale in bitcoins, and why it could never happen. Also we were arguing about you saying that the existence of taxes deny private ownership, which you ignored for good reason. It's lolbertarian garbage along the lines of constitutionalist arguments I have lovingly debunked.

As a relatively new follower of the BTC fiasco (jumped in June, but kept my life plan out of it), I can say without a doubt that it has been plagued from the start by ideologues like you and old_engineer, pumping your fists screaming up uP UP, while nodding sagely at all the anti-speculation chatter, and patting each other the back for a job well done as your investments and libertarian dreams circle the drain. I love a good experiment, even a failing one, which is why I'm really here. I guess I just underestimated the degree to which you would deny obvious criticisms on nothing but faith and banal pedestals.


Here you are, ladies and gentlemen. One more voice of reason for the doomed hopeful.

People here do stuff on more than faith and banal pedestals.  I have personally witnessed some very sparkly pedestals.

This is probably the best quote I've seen on the forums.

Show your appreciation by donating.  :-D

Well said. This pretty much sums up the ideologues here. Armchair revolutionaries calling for death of imvestment banks, and day-trading while doing so.

Don't judge, mang.  My chair has no arms.  IT ISN'T EVEN REALLY A CHAIR!

I would, if I owned any BTC! :D

Now would be an excellent time to buy in.

I'm glad to see you don't disappoint, PIBM.  My point is that if a $12k exchange fee on a $200k purchase passed your smell test, instead of calling it a "downpayment", you obviously have no experience in these matters, and no one should heed your advice.


Aaaand it looks like insurance isn't your specialty, either. Mortgage insurance, and all the formalities around MI, are only required in the US if you pay less than 20% of the principle as a down payment.  And of course, a mortgage is only required if you can't buy a house free-and-clear, and require a bank to own the property for you. The OP said nothing about getting a mortgage, just that 40k btc was paid for a house.

Perhaps Bitcoin denominated mortgages and mortgage insurance could happen in the future, but that's far-off speculation, and bitcoin prices would have to be more stable than the local fiat currency.  I don't think this would ever happen in the US in your lifetime, but some fiat currencies have experienced 100%+ monthly (not yearly) inflation - see Argentina in the 90s - and if bitcoin prices are relatively stable 10 years from now, bitcoin could be a more reliable store of value than the local fiat currency, and there's no reason why an entrepreneur couldn't start providing bitcoin-denominated mortgages in that country.


No, there is nothing that prevents someone from paying for property right now in the US with any combination of USD, bitcoins, or goats.  Once two parties agree on the payment method and sign the sales agreement, the only paperwork filed with the state is the title change, which is filed at the recorder's office.  Taxes are calculated as a percentage of the sale price, which would be done as USD equivalent, same as if you sell your house for a herd of goats and two oxen.  Being impossible to forge, the Bitcoin blockchain could provide proof of payment that would hold up in a court of law.

And for the record, I'm not a libertarian, I own no bitcoins, and I used to be be young and ignorant once, but I didn't pretend that I knew it all.

Whelp, you caught me in another typo, which you might have been able to fully realize had you known anything about house-buying in the first place. I was actually talking about title insurance. You know, that insurance you purchase no matter how you pay for your house? Yeah, the same insurance that prevents bankruptcy trustees (the seller, perhaps?) from seeking a court order to void the sale because it was paid in "worthless internet scam dollars."

No title insurer would ever insure a house paid in BTC right now.

I apologize for the confusion. Now stop being a contrarian and accept that you're an idiot. BTC, now, is not going anywhere close to that level of transaction. It won't be here in 10 years, and you are a libertarian.

Wanna bet?  On both or either?  Has to be in BTC though.

I can only respond to what you type.  I bought my first house decades ago.  You know not of what you speak.


And you're wrong about title insurance, too.  It is only required by mortgage lenders, and not required for a cash purchase.
From http://www.insurance.wa.gov/consumers/home/title_insurance.shtml (http://www.insurance.wa.gov/consumers/home/title_insurance.shtml) :
"If you are buying real estate in Washington state and using a commercial lender to finance the purchase, the lender will require you to buy title insurance equal to the amount of the loan. [...] If you pay cash for a property, you are not required to buy title insurance."

Have any more face-saving clarification attempts?

Apology accepted, PIBM, but there is no way to rule out that a $40k btc property transaction has occurred.  Unlikely, perhaps, but like a normal distribution, the chance of a very large transactions is non-zero.  Bitcoins can be fun, and people can be purposefully illogical on the bleeding edge to make a point or just claim they were first.  If I were an early adopter with 50k bitcoins sitting around, and a friend of mine wanted to buy bitcoins and also had an investment property he/she wanted to sell, I could see a bitcoin-denominating transaction happening.  Probable?  No.  Possible?  Yes. Stranger things have happened.  A cash transaction can be completed in less than a day, minimizing exchange rate fluctuations.

And since you asked, my politics are nuanced and do not fall into simple categories.  I'm active in electoral politics, yet have never given money to a libertarian candidate, so though I do have libertarian leanings, I'm most certainly not a libertarian.  Also: NO U! :)

Yep! It has never been a requirement, only a very intelligent thing to do to prevent scams. Just sayin'. If you were an early adopter with 50k bitcoins sitting around, and a friend of yours wanted to buy bitcoins and also had an investment property he/she wanted to sell, I could see you transacting stupidly with bitcoin, with no insurance. Probable? I would have said no until now.

The point, lest you've missed it this entire time, is it's stupid. So stupid that it's a pointless argument. Just...stupid. Feel free to tell me why it's not, though.



I was talking about how stupid it would be to buy a house with bitcoins. You told me how you could do it with dollars. Then I called you stupid. I mean, it's pretty damn stupid. You know, like, not intelligent to suggest using dollars, and ignore how unreasonable such a transaction would be.

Seriously, quit trying to save face when someone comes along to tell you exactly why your idiotic idealism doesn't hold up to reality. I trust you're not stupid people, just obsessed with unrealistic possibility. Like I said before, I'm taken aback at how upsetting it is to hear people constantly look for that one little, highly improbable reason to keep beating this dead horse. You sound like cultists.

Who's sucker enough actually be holding bitcoins at the moment?  Correction isn't over. 

Wanna bet?  On both or either.  Bet has to be in BTC though.

I make market related bets on bitcoinica, not against random internet forum users.  Maximizing my profits, can't stand to have bitcoins sitting around doing nothing  ;) 

Good for you!

Right on.  The future of btc will hold good things, but for the moment I'm short btc.  I don't think we are quite through the denial phase/panic selling stage.  All it takes is a few people cashing out for the holidays/black friday/whatever. 

A few days ago when the prices were fluctuating wildly and dropping, I took a short position at bitcoinica at a base price of 3.91.  I have yet to profitably eliminate that position.  IF ONLY PRICES WOULD DROP FURTHER

OH and yes it will be interesting to see how the holidays factor into BTC prices -- i've been thinking about that a lot, and I think it could affect price moving it up or down.

I've been saying that we're not out of the denial phase myself.

At this point I'm seeing capitulation at $1.25.  It will be confirmed by a crash in deepbit hash rates.   A 20% reduction in hash rates from the peak is not capitulation, that's just a few bulls turning bear early.  If we keep slowly leaking hash rates and price instead I'll adjust my capitulation target accordingly.   If we somehow lose 80% of the hash rate at $3 instead I'll adjust my bottom call upward.

We shouldn't see capitulation until the long thanksgiving weekend and/or christmas and/or new years.  Longs have been severely punished during long holiday weekends in the past and if that repeats during end of year holiday season we may finally be done with the bubble deflating phase.

So far my calling the previous $4.20 support a new resistance (and by extension this month's stagnation target) level has been more or less correct.  The big question is: how low will it drop next month?  Even with a 10% difficulty drop we're still pretty close to power cost for most miners, a $1 drop could result in losing massive hashing power for months while difficulty adjusts.

This is pretty much exactly what I see happening short term.  With the market going the way it is, I just don't see a reversal happening, we are barely holding to 4 as it is, just like with 5. 

Aand deepbit's down.  So much for my market intelligence.  Should have been monitoring multiple pools I guess...

Happened to see a house for sale in Salt Lake City for bitcoins:
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/573699

Poking around, saw two more properties for sale, in the past year: one in Brazil, the other in Buenos Aires:
https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=1617.25%3bwap2

The Salt Lake place looks like owner financing, so you'd only have to put up about 1000 bitcoins to buy the place. The "unrealistic" and "highly improbable" is now looking more like "quite likely" over the next few years.  I really don't see how you could be any more wrong, repeating over and over that it's not possible, even as your objections have been shot down one by one by one, yet you still cling to your belief.  Do you ever change your mind based on evidence?

Yes, nice work old_engineer, you've dug up the same listings I've seen. Property for sale, not sold. Still having trouble reading, yeah? This time it's a grammar problem. Check this out (http://www.eduplace.com/kids/hme/k_5/quizzes/).

I've been looking for something to keep me busy since I automated my mining rig.  Thanks for the link BitMagic -- this will quell my simple mind all the way to bedtime!

Well, to be fair, you haven't shown me anything to believe you need the help like old_engineer. But, you know, if you need something (http://tinyurl.com/3mwjcvx)... Seriously, shut up, Crypt_Current, unless you have a legitimate gripe about title insurance and property sold for BTC.

All I'm sayin is that prohibition never helped anyone, except those with the force