Bitcoin Forum

How come communist country like China massivelly jumped in on the bitcoin wagon already and modern and democratic country like US is still (mostly) taking their sweet time?
Where is Wall Street, where are the big money? Right now China is driving the price up for second time and we see little to no action from US capitals.
Kinda can't figure it out?

Chinese people are obsessed with riches. Because the male in a family must provide for all expenses.

and western people are not?

Strict financial regulation and fear of lawsuit are probably slowing down Bitcoin entrepreneurship in western world. This is particularly true for the US.

The US is not a democracy. Never was.

Because BTC is not able to be printed or inflate.

So why arent more people jumping onboard?

This.  Regulation slows down adoption - e.g. the BTC ETF (from the Winklevoss twins) will be lucky to be approved by the regulators by the end of 2014, and they hope 2015.  So the US just reduces freedom and reduces opportunity, and the ETF is just one example.

Maybe the arrests which have happened in the US have scared people there.
Haven't heard of any in China yet. Correct me if i am wrong though.

Because those who run the country money system (Fed and banks) need inflation to profit from their slaves citizens.

Is it either because many of you are too naive, or too stupid to understand the nature of Bitcoin. It's an anonymous virtual currency that's quite impractical and instable. As shown just this month with Mt.Gox, it's price jumped what, 30% in one day? I love how many of you are so against regulation, but without regulation is when there's a real problem. Illegal drug trafficking sites such as Silk Road made millions off people buying drugs through Bitcoin. There needs/will be regulation of a cryptocurrency in the future. The reason why the feds haven't bothered to regulate Bitcoin much in the USA, or completely ban it in other countries is because of it's price fluctuations, high transaction times, and high energy output to mine, which they know that after a while people will Move on to another more effiencet, more practical for daily use cryptocurrency . They know that in the future, a new cryptocurrency without all the flaws of Bitcoin will emerge, and WILL become mainstream which Bitcoin hasn't, still 5 years after it's release and never will become. Once that happens you can expect regulation no matter how "anonymous" you think it is.

Just giving you all naive suckers a heads up.

Pce.

The only reason the Wall Street is not in this yet is because (just a fictional scenario here) the U.S. is in development of their own cryptocurrency.

Just saying here......

Wouldn't that make sense?

EDIT: Let's not forget that nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is ;)

I think the Chinese are currently in an opportunistic mindset whereas many Americans are content with the current establishment. The Chinese have been working for wages that are considered unacceptable by even "poor" Americans for quite some time now.  Many Americans tend to stick to established financial guidance from reputable investors such as Warren Buffet who are stating that bitcoins are not real currency. Just my guess.

You don't know any of us, and there is no evidence you understand anything about bitcoin. The flaws you describe have always been a part of bitcoin. This is what a free market looks like and I Would not be interested in BTC if it were otherwise. Did you think free markets were nice? They are not, they are brutal and fluctuate wildly. The NYSE was like this also in the 1800's.
Regulation only created a profoundly unfair market. Your 401K isn't worth toilet paper yet you may well think that you are going to retire on it. Talk about a sucker, a 401K is a scheme where you put up all the money, take all the risk, and get 30% of the profit.
Call us all the names you want, consider us stupid fools; I don't care. The proof you are wrong can be found in our vaults full of gold, deeds, index funds, and bitcoin wallets.   

So you're saying that instability and anonymity are the main flaws of btc, am I right? The former is due to the narrow liquidity intrinsic to any new-born market, the latter is simply false. Bitcoin is not anonymous.

it is a small market for them, they won't jump in any soon

Clarified tax structure, a bit of friendliness from established banks, regulated and dependable exchange on home soil = Wall Street en masse.

Because in order for Wall street to get in they must own all of the warlords that controls the market.  Since there are no warlords in the bitcoin economy they won't get in.  Too much of a risk.  

There is no risk in the stock market to Wall Street because if the market dips they win, the market goes up they still win.  

If 1 coin is about 5k-10k $$ maybe, but not before. Just not profitable enough.

This

I doubt wall street will ever get involved because wall street has enough money to just turn around, create a bitcoin version where they are the early adopters, and push it on the masses.

There is zero interest in them making us stupidly rich, when they could do it themselves and for themselves.

Everything that bitcoin is great for, can be copied (has been copied multiple times)

Wall street can spend billions of dollars developing and marketing an alternative which will make them money, and they can integrate it with their own payment processing systems such as visa.

Besides, to the average person on the street bitcoin means anarchy, silkroad, scams and failed exchanges.

first of all the USA is not democratic it is plutocratic which is different.
The average citizen is not allowed to own a Bank, a Casino, or any other juicy business that competes against the big guys the laws do not allow it, if the laws did allow it, it would be different you would see tons of tiny banks, and casinos regulated by market laws, and not politician laws.

As far as Wall street jumping in it will happen, but lets remember the sequence, at this stage Wall street is waiting to see who wins the war if the Central Banks or Bitcoin, once they see that Bitcoin won they will jump in, but each sequence takes about 2 years, so now it is a very good time to buy if you believe Bitcoin will win since when Wall Street jumps in the price will skyrocket.

phases:
1. years 2009,2010 Bitcoin is completely ignored by big media, Banks, and politicians.
2. 2011, 2012 Bitcoin is laugh and made fun of it  at  by the same group of people.
3. 2013,2014 War is declared against Bitcoin, war begins when Bitcoin hits 266 USD.
4. 2015 and up Bitcoin wins, and Wall Street jumps in, actually everyone jumps in, at such stage we will not be talking about Bitcoins anymore by we will we using the term Satoshi.
Most likely this will happen by the end of 2015, my prediction over 20k USD per coin before 2016.

Bitcoin puts the money in the power of the people and it is a very good test for democracy, the least democratic countries will fight it the most, tax it the most, and regulate it the most, the most free countries will allow its free use.

 :) good one

Actually, the US is exactly what a Democracy really is.

+1

I think the situation is a bit different than 5 years ago (even 1-2 years ago). Think only how many ATM’s are in service today and many more will be installed in the next few months - and this is only one example of many changes that are coming. The number and importance of merchants accepting Bitcoin is increasing continuously. We know that will be some gox like setbacks but ultimately those will probably make Bitcoin more stable and strong.

It's possible that some Wall Street people already jumped in but didn't make it official.

Wall Street has its fingers in SecondMarket if I understand correctly.

^ Indeed, very much looking forward to seeing what (and who) Second Market's member exchange brings to the table.

I believe that in communism the financial regulations and risk of lawsuits/jail/murder are quite bigger?

Wow ... who let this spouting, opinionated asshole in?

This place is going to the dogs, fast.

That's exactly why bitcoin is more popular in China. Your bit coins are out of the control of government theft through jail/murder/lawsuits/regulations. As long as you control those private keys, those bitcoins are safe.

Also, who says Wall Street is not on board bitcoins? Winklevosses are working on a bitcoin etf. Once the eft goes live, institutional investors will jump aboard.

Thats backward thinking... it doesn't matter what the value per coin is, because if some whale puts $10M on the market and it goes up 30% - thats still a 30% INCREASE on $10M

infact, those wall street guys probably buy in at every dip and offload at the top again and again

Clearly you don't understand the internet concept of "First to critical mass wins".
Although in theory bitcoin can be copied and improved on, the facts on the ground are that the majority by far of value is in
the bitcoin network and the rapidly expanding retail network accepting bitcoin. Try nipping down to your high street and buy your
aunts birthday present with quarks!!

When is that about to start?

Three words bro.

Friends Reunited.

Myspace.

This. Despite all that talking-point hot air about "deregulation," Wall Street is profoundly regulated. The standard informational bill of fare in the analyst community is 10Ks: documents that listed companies have to provide because the SEC will prosecute if they don't. Or, prosecute if there's a material untruth or omission and the company gets huffy or suspiciously delinquent about cleaning its act up.

As for the regulations that impose registration and knowledge tests on brokers et. al, they are not seen as impediments. They're seen as another notch on the belt, like getting an Ivy-League MBA. Sure, there are angles like setting up a hedge fund, but the hedge-fund 'cowboys' depend upon the accredited-investor-only prohibition against investing in them. That prohibition keeps the hedge fund world pretty much an Ivy Leaguer exclusive club. 

Fact is, what's called 'deregulation' is just loosening at the margins. It's part of a regulatory arms race with regulators on one side and clever securities lawyers on the other. There's a well-established revolving door between the two, which means that there's an underlying sense of collegiality between the two.

We know very well about one side of the collegiality: crony capitalism. But, the other side implies that Wall Streeters think of SEC regulators as a bunch of nice people who help a lot more than they hurt. Add to that the fact that the bulk of SEC prosecutions are small-time scam artists (wrt Wall Street's volume), then add natural human vanity, and you've got a psychological bias towards getting chummy with the SEC.

"Of course we co-operate with the regulators. We're not scummy lowlife penny-stock con men."

In fact, one of my hunches about why Madoff was never found out until he confessed was because the SEC fell into the mindset of "he's too big to be crooked." Too big to be crooked...that proved to be a helluva blind spot.

Brass tacks: if financial services were really - completely - deregulated, the whole industry would be gutted.

If you have nothing nice to say don't say anything at all.

We need to use that thinking more on these forums.

Also, second market starting up an exhange.. HELLO

Wall St. invented pump n' dump.

bull.  SHIT

Your thinking of applications! This is not just application, this is massive global mining infrastructure, retail store Point of Sale systems. Once established, retailers need a real good reason to change to something else, and Bitcoin is achieving that based on cost reduction. What's the winning argument for Bitcoin MK II??

Don't underestimate retail inertia, there is a reason we are still using bits of plastic 60 years after they were invented!

I do not preclude the Litecoins of this world being part of the revolution, but their success will be dependant on their market liquidity, which is crucial for the likes of Bitpay to be able to freely exchange to fiat and thus offer as a parallel option on their POS systems.

These are the early stages for banks getting involved in bitcoin, and the industry as a whole is hesitant in getting involved before regulators weigh in, says Silbert, the Secondmarket founder. “Banks are waiting for clearer guidance at the federal level on how businesses are having interactions with bitcoin and there is still some questions on the state level,”

http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2014/03/07/major-banks-are-looking-at-bitcoin/

This

That's why the community has been so eager to push it for mainstream adoptation.
Those guys have more money and resources than we do, although they haven't start the race they can catch up fairly easily, so we need to get as much advantage with our head start as possible.

Democracy/socialism are very clever smoke screens.

It is still the master/slave system that has always existed. It has only evolved.

It's a republic.

I pledge Allegiance to the flag
of the United States of America
and to the Republic for which it stands,
one nation under God, indivisible,
with Liberty and Justice for all.

Someone not long ago, I think it was BofA, did a valuation on Bitcoin.  I think they came away at something like $1500-$1600.  I'll try and locate the article.

It was BofA, I was a little off on the price but $1300 by a bank is still pretty bullish.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/12/05/bank-of-america-analysts-say-bitcoins-value-is-1300/ (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/12/05/bank-of-america-analysts-say-bitcoins-value-is-1300/)

Wall St. is quietly getting in and will be doing more on this.

We are working on some things and others are as well.

Fear of the unknown. Most people still think Crypto is a gamble.

They could not be more wrong.

haha

so, true.  most idiots (including many in government) don't know it is a constitutional republic

... besides, democracies can end up be mob rule and dangerous to the minority (just look at the arab "spring")

The Chinese population is attracted to bitcoin because they see it as a better alternative to the obvious government control of the official currency.  

The main reason that bitcoin holds value is that long-term speculators see that bitcoin has value as a widely-used currency.   Bitcoin volatility will reduce once its use as a medium of exchange becomes more widespread.  As the volume of transactions is due to people actually buying goods and services with bitcoin rises in comparison to the transactions due to speculation, then Wall Street becomes more interested.

I think bitcoin has sufficient value to not go worthless.  Wall street might fear that the US government might outlaw bitcoin in some way, such as making it illegal to buy bitcoin in its jurisdiction, on par with buying drugs or gambling.  At this point, the only reason to use bitcoin would be to buy drugs or gamble online, but there would still be demand.  Instead of public exchanges that would restrict your participation due to being a US citizen, you would hookup with your local underground bitcoin dealer that exchanges between fiat and bitcoin.  I see the situation being like alcohol prohibition -- eventually public pressure would force an end to the prohibition, since the argument can be made that an uncontrolled underground bitcoin economy would be more harmful to the country than a semi-regulated controlled economy.

Bitcoin is more popular in the US then in China.

..., yet the Chinese move 70% of the market. And it is "limited"! imagine a bitcoin w/o limitations in China... oh boy, we can just dream of that...

Yes bitcoin is not popular in most of the countries, even people who are working full time work in internet are not known about bitcoin

Not only that, most of those online workers still don't "buy" the concept, even having a "techie" profile. Bitcoin clearly needs a killer app that abstracts its use enough to make it mainstream, like Android has done with the Linux Kernel, I mean just 0,1% of Android users know they're running a Linux flavour in their pocket... People (mainstream people, not us) don't want to know about private keys, blockchain and shite. We just need to give them an idiot-proof app/system that gives them the benefit of lower fees, fast transactions, deflationary prices, etc...

And we all know that an app like that will come, but we still don't know from where it will pop-up... It'll be like this FlappyBird game thing: it will catch us off-guard, it'll spread like fire over gunpowder, like a black swan... and then bitcoin will explode. Rest assured...  ;D

Only after that, WallStreet will jump in, but it'll be prob "too late"..

Bitcoin's killer app is simply taking Paypal's and VISA/Mastercard's business by being cheaper and more reliable.

Lol.

More reliable? Nothing can be further from the truth.
Cheaper? Not with the fluctuations of the value of bitcoin.

Very interesting view, any ideas about this app? :)

They know about it..! most of them they surely do but i guess they are little afraid of jumping into it..!

most people are so ignorant, that even when opportunity slaps them in the face multiple times they still think it's a pigeon shitting on them or something

Gee whiz, a scheme where the people at the top bring in lower-tier investors with big promises of wealth, only to pocket all the real money and run off at some point, leaving the lower level investors with nothing. Huh, where have I heard of such a scheme before?

I'm what most of you would consider a wall street person: I'm a high frequency trader, have been for the past decade, and make my income solely from trading.

I own ~4 bitcoins that I mined myself a couple years back just because I thought/think the bitcoin project is cool.

I'd like to buy many, many more bitcoins (to buy and hold, not to HFT). Putting a few hundred thousand dollars into an investment like bitcoin would be something I'd be happy to do - the risk adjusted returns are within my risk profile. I haven't. The reason is I don't trust any of the exchanges. Even the 'reputable' ones are still small/unproven startups. Coming from the wall street world, there's a lot to be said for the security that larger battle-tested financial institutions offer. When you're talking about putting hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars at risk, counterparty risk is a very real concern. At this point in time, no exchange has given me enough faith to trust them with my money, even if it was only for a single hour where I wired it to them and then bought the BTC and transferred the BTC out immediately. While I never would have used gox, just as an example: What if the company happens to blow up in that hour, and I never get my BTC and my USD are stuck in some sketchy small company that is in a foreign bankruptcy proceeding for the next three years?

Wall street types are happy to accept financial risk, but aren't very fond of counterparty risk, especially if we can't hedge it off onto someone else. At the moment that's not particularly possible. If you got even a single reputable financial institution (bank, equity/commodity exchange, something of that nature) to operate a BTC exchange, we'd come flocking.

All of the "fear of the unknown" type comments aren't particularly accurate about why wall street isn't investing bigtime in BTC yet. Wall Street will invest in pretty much any asset as long as the asset provides appropriate levels of risk adjusted returns -- certain assets are clearly far more risky, however, if the returns are sufficient for that level of risk, and that type of investor is able to stomach that risk, they'll happily invest. Imho, BTC has a track record long enough at this point with returns high enough to make it an interesting risky investment for many many institutional investors -- aka, the returns aren't the problem. For example, ask anyone who trades long-dated far-out-of-the-money options how they feel about risky investments. In my opinion, the reliable, safe infrastructure simply isn't there yet to get institutional investors to feel comfortable trading BTC -- it's too much the wild west, with small fly-by-night companies (gox, btc-e, etc) having large market share in the exchange markets.

Just my $0.02.

Why does Wall Street have to want to jump in? Its like USPS to jump in to electronic mailing back in late 80ies and then extinct since no one is gonna use snail mail for everyday communication?

Thanks for your input. But I don't think I understand your position. If you would be happy to buy and hodl (as per your statement), rather than HFT, why wold you not: transfer whatever amount you are comfortable to an exchange (e.g. $5000?); buy XBT with the USD; withdraw the XBT to your personal wallet on your computer; rinse and repeat until you've exchanged your hundreds of thousands?  You exposure to counterparty risk can be limited to whatever figure you keep on the exchange at any one time.

Alternately, if you really want to take a position of hundreds of thousands, I would imagine you might be interesting to someone like BitPay, whose biz model requires a regular source of $ for which they would provide XBT. You might contact them directly and ask.

It's spelled "R e p u b l i c"

You could always buy from SecondMarket... Check them out.

wall street you say?  they will eat btc, chew it up and spit it out. rinse and repeat until they get the bitcoin community's money all in their pocket leaving btc at 1 usd per btc.

^ all that while they're laughing about it.

Is China really trending higher again, our media is still saying they "restricted BTC" and Russia banned it.
Are the China exchanges doing good again?....sorry I don't know.

Don't understand your point? If you want buy and hold you don't must leave your coins/money at any untrustful exchange. Buy few coins and send the coins to you wallet and keep the coins safe. Or buy at local Bitcoin seller, or buy in many steps small amounts at any exchanger (even to avoid to affect the price with your hundreds or millions of $$  ::))...or or or... Many many possible and safe ways to do...Easy as that...

If you are that big stockmarket trader as you say (doubts are allowed) you might be able to handle risk of small amounts. You gonna lose same or more at stock market trades everyday.

That's total bullshit, counterparty risk is the only reason you won't get into btc lol.

Find some miners who will sell you blocks, go on localbitcoins, there are people offering up to $100,000 trades actually located on Wall street.

You're basically just shilling for secondmarket, or you'll announce soon that wannabe investors no longer need worry about counterparty risk because.....some company you're involved with has sorted out this issue you have created.

Sooner or later they will jump in ;)

Wall Street?

Ye gods, I hope never. They don't deserve the wealth.

They will, sooner or later. When they see with how  less money you can manipulate the market in XX% they will smell the blood. ;)

Thanks for the feedback on my post guys. As a few people responded to it, I'll try to address all follow-up comments in this post:


This definitely would make me feel comfortable with the amount of risk, but it's a lot of work, even for someone like me who I'd only consider a small investor in comparison to general Wall Street types you guys are after. For example, a typical position size in any particular given stock for me on any given day may be ~mid six-figures. To acquire that $ amount of bitcoins by the method you mentioned, I'd have to "rinse and repeat" 100+ times. If each time even took only a single day, that's still 3+ months to enter a position. And that's for someone like me who is pretty small potatoes in the Wall Street world. Let alone the fact that Wall Street people tend to make a decent amount of money, so dealing with that every day has a high real-dollar opportunity cost in terms of their time. And that's just for a small/mid-sized investor like myself. Large funds are the type you'd really want, and they'd come in and pick up 10, 20, 30 million dollars of BTC at a time. That'd never work for them. You need a way that an investor can come safely and buy up BTC all in one go.



SecondMarket is actually probably a good option - I wasn't aware of them being an option at all in fact, didn't know their exchange had launched yet. They're a known quantity nowadays in the private-company-shares market, as many large institutional investors have conducted business with them for the past couple of years in trading private shares. They have a track record of not just running away with your money, and also of not getting hacked (thus far, heh). Their involvement in BTC will be very positive for the bitcoin community, imho.



Same as above, that's just not realistic for the type of investment you guys want to get from Wall Street -- you want to make it easy for people to acquire large quantities of bitcoins all at once (millions of dollars). Local isn't a realistic option for both that reason, and hassle, and probably legal reasons. As far as not "leaving the BTC on the exchange" -- I agree with you 100% there, and never was advocating leaving any assets at the exchange for an extended period of time at all. But even a couple hours of having Mt Gox have any large quantity of my money for instance would be too much and deter me from trading it.


Very well said ;)


I wasn't even aware the SecondMarket exchange had launched, and I have no companies involved in BTC at all atm, nor do I plan on launching any at the moment, so no worries there hah. I have no agenda here, I've never even conducted a single trade on any exchange with bitcoin. Just trying to give some insight into how people who work in my world think about things like this, thats all. Localbitcoins is an absurd option to me for a wall street type trade.

tl;dr: You want to make it as safe and easy as possible for large institutional investors to come and buy bitcoins. Not $5k at a time, not $50k at a time, not even $100k at a time. You want the guy who runs a $2 billion dollar fund and wants to allocate $20 million of it to bitcoin to come in and be able to deposit $20 mil at the exchange and run a TWAP buy algorithm over the following few days and get his whole position in one swoop from one exchange. That's how you get real wall street money involved, and that real wall street money would probably crank the BTC price wayyyy up.

Some things to keep in mind if, in fact, groups of large investors attempt this.

• The required investment would push prices sky high, making existing holders extraordinary wealthy. There are only ~12 million bitcoins in existence, and most of them are not for sale.
• Bitcoin traders are resistant to wild price swings, are thick-skinned against fraud and can spot market manipulation. Blockchain analysis and the open source nature of the community would help to hold any naughty whales accountable.
• Bitcoiners are generally highly intelligent and understand how the underlying protocol works. Wall Street and their friends in the media do not.
• Crypto traders already program highly sophisticated trading bots (see cryptotrader.org) that rival or will simply copy what Wall Street brings in. If Wall Street money is imminent, traders will be ready to profit.
• There is no regulated financial industry surrounding cryptocurrencies. There are no laws that will protect them or favor them.

I say bring it on. Let's see what these traders can do on a level playing field without a central bank and their buddies in Congress to bail them out.

My hero. :D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f_HsjpSVaI

Bring it!

let's see what ya got wall st.... men or mice :)

I think they are afraid of real free markets after having their own little corrupt racket for decades, coddling them, making them fat, dim-witted and slow.

Somewhere after midnight
In my wildest fantasies
Somewhere just beyond my reach
There's someone reaching back for me
Racing on the thunder and rising with the heat
Isn't there a superman to sweep me off my feet?

 8)


No heroes left on Wall Street, that's for sure.

They are doing better than they did after those recent events.

The best investors on Wall Street will continue going long on U.S. businesses and likely won't buy bitcoin.  A 3x leveraged NASDAQ ETF is less risky than bitcoin.

go to bitcoin.de.

It's backed by a bank that is a daughter to a very big german bank. BTC supply there isn't endless but you could take your time to buy up coins...

yes they have an english version.

Is there any online broker for futures/stocks who accepts Bitcoin? I noticed that TorBroker is still alive, but I'm thinking about something more transparent.

I'm pretty sure that the ones who want in are gradually building their positions as we speak, while the price is nice and low. No need to drive it up just yet, just keep loading up until the opportune moment. Then see how the market responds to the shortage of available coins now that loads of them are tied up in cold storage waiting for $10,000+

http://www.coindesk.com/new-york-accepting-applications-digital-currency-exchanges/

This was my opinion until I started posting here regularly

I noticed people want their cake and eat it too, although we're preaching to the choir at the moment.

You want wall street money to pour in. But you don't want regulations or oversight. You hate 'DA MAN', but like cunts run crying and bitching to your lawyer/cop/judge/whoever'syourmother or anyone with enough free time to listen when you get fucked over by exact same things you preach.

Regulations and greater 'official' investment, or low-balled and relatively slower growth. Your choice.

Cryptocurrency has a place in this world. The cryptojesus wannabes will be left in the dust bin of history as a good example of joke-of-a-wannbe-spoiled-revolutionaries produced by this generation. Or 'accidentally' get involved in money laundering and drug business, winding up under criminal investigation.

Why do you hate life so much?

Maybe because they are totally into gambling. Any casino in proximity to chinese population is always full.

HoneyPot has a hard time discerning between bringing thieves and fraudsters to justice, as opposed to restrictions before the fact that merely trod upon the liberty to act in an unfettered manner, tempered only by the equal rights of others.

I think the average age of people posting here has dropped drastically in the past few months. Bitcoin is booming and lots of newcomers. I mean many forum members even bought the Dorian Nakamoto story, believing a mainstream journalist. They have also changed the rules so that new members can post immediately in the main sections of the forum. I think this is a bad idea.

And in order to connect to the subject; a "boring" forum that doesn't let newbies post gave Bitcoin a better image. I think Bitcoin is going through a year when much of the unprofessionalism will be weeded out from the Bitcoin community. But it will look ugly until we're done with this process.