Bitcoin Forum

EDIT:

BitTalk.TV will interview Zhou Tong this week regarding the now famous Bitcoinica.com.

We’ll probe his mind on the making of bitcoinica, the issues he faced, the success of it, and his future projects.  During the interview, Zhou Tong will be announcing some very important news that you won’t want to miss.

If you have a question you’d like Zhou Tong to answer during our interview, please post it below.

If it makes it on air, we’ll give you a free issue of BitTalk Magazine, the new digital magazine made for bitcoiners, by bitcoiners.

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Everyone at BitTalk.TV would like to introduce themselves here and announce our plans for 2012 (which we are all very thrilled about).

For the sake of consolidation and avoiding spam, we’ll be putting all updates and announcements into this thread and changing the title of it accordingly.


In 2011, I had some fun with a webcam and some stories that I thought someone should talk about. That grew to a whole bunch of people being interested in doing it right and not the shitty way I was doing it alone.

After a pretty handsome donation from some hardcore bitcoiners and my inspiration to do something entertaining, I mostly ad-libbed an entire Christmas Special. It wasn’t meant to be serious, and it was coming right off the heels of a death in the family and our funds coming in late (e.g. we had 2 weeks to buy all the necessary equipment in Korea, plan, write and shoot everything, and none of us had worked together before).

We had some fun with a camera and now we know what not to do (like recording skype calls as AVI at a different framerate than our Premiere projects and to CS5.5 instead of trying to get 2 machines with CS4 and CS3 to work together well.)

After the Christmas Special, people knew that I was actually serious about what I’m doing, and by association what everyone who believes in BitTalk.TV is doing behind the scenes. With that came another handsome donation of proper state of the art rendering hardware.

We’ve come a long way from CosbyCoin webcam announcements and recording everything on my iPhone, but we’re still only getting warmed up. We’ve got a digital magazine planned for release at the end of the month as well.

The idea behind bittalk.tv is a simple one-- provide some actual quality entertainment in combination with some vivid education. Something we want to stay away from is 45 minute self-important interviews, crackhead-like fidgetting, and constantly belittling everyone who comes on our shows.

We truly hope the community supports us for what we do, but the bottom line is, even if they don't, we're doing it anyway because it's fun and we want to.

The day before yesterday when I gave an interview with Charlie Shrem of BitInstant, he told me that bitcoin needs a proper media outlet and that he believes we can be it. I hope nothing I do fucks it up, and that's why I try to get others involved in what I do-- to make sure it has the proper substance in addition to the obvious enthusiasm that comes out my every hole. With time, the things I record will stop looking like they came out of the larger of those holes.

Thanks.

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This thread is live! That means that the topic will change and all future announcements will be posted directly here. Might want to subscribe!

BitTalk.TV will interview Zhou Tong this week regarding the now famous Bitcoinica.com.

We’ll probe his mind on the making of bitcoinica, the issues he faced, the success of it, and his future projects.  During the interview, Zhou Tong will be announcing some very important news that you won’t want to miss.

If you have a question you’d like Zhou Tong to answer during our interview, please post it below.

If it makes it on air, we’ll give you a free issue of BitTalk Magazine, the new digital magazine made for bitcoiners, by bitcoiners.



*This thread is live! That means that the topic will change and all future announcements will be posted directly here. You might want to subscribe!

*Subscribing*

Can't wait to see this episode!

Infamous?

Are you sure the word is correct? (I made this language mistake in an exam before.)

It was more of a joke than anything, but if you think about it-- everyone knows you due to having been zhoutonged!

I'll change it to famous just the same. ^_^

Hello all,

Just wanted to remind you that there is no more than 24 hours remaining before we will no longer be recording questions asked in this thread for Zhou Tong’s interview that will take place on BitTalk.TV (http://bittalk.tv/).

Please, if you have any questions to address to Zhou Tong, post them within the next 24 hours!

Thanks!

Mihai Alisie

I would like Zhou to be asked:  "Do you have any philosophical reasons for being involved with Bitcoins?"

I think infmaous is the perfect word.   Your site is definitely known for being attached to Gox and having crazy numbers right away and of course, the site by the young kid.   The more people that know about things regarding your site but probably don't even understand how it works, infamous is a great word.

The fact that you keep pushing through all these little things and keep focus on your project and making sure it is the best service using the tools that are available, will hopefully make you famous.

You sure?

Definition of infamous : deserving of or causing an evil reputation; shamefully malign; detestable, having an extremely bad reputation.

I am 100% not sure of the text book definition, all I know of is used around me, based on that only.  I can see the actual one having a way more negative connotation.  Even going by that though, I definitely have seen posts that were too keen on Bitcoinica, but I really feel those were the people who put money in that did not read the manual first to see what they were getting into.

They are certainly no more evil than Mt Gox themselves...  that is the textbook definition btw.

I think a good question and point of topic for the show would be:

How can we trust him to not trade against the positions of the members on site?

I have noticed every time they have run out of reserves of either USD or BTC that the market tends to move significantly in the opposite direction shortly after. Being able to know such a large number of orders that can't be seen on MTGox and no one else is privy to is bound to be tempting to exploit for profit. I am also sure that he has a large number of bitcoins and dollars from commissions. He has all the means at his disposal to perform such an act and it would be almost impossible to trace.

We will no longer be receiving questions for the Zhou Tong interview. Thank you for your participation!

We'll announce the interview in this thread and on BitTalk.TV.

With the big drop we just had I think my question is more relevant than ever.

Changing my opinion on Zhou after watching this manipulation...

I will not be using bitcoinica, and I have lost NO money, but I can see how this is hurting us..

I think more people will have questions right now :)

I have one myself which I'll try to squeeze in:

I respect the business Zhou is running and I think he is doing this in a good way, however: it is important for Bitcoinica that Bitcoin has a positive future. As Bitcoinica is taking more and more of the market, leveraged trading happens in higher frequencies and offering 10:1 margin trading will obviously have a positive short-term expected value for him, but I think the market is not ready for 10:1 trading yet and it could have huge negative impacts on the Bitcoin economy as today is an example. What is his view on this?

+1  It's too early for the market.  Or at least get rid of the high leverage options.

Sounds right to me :)

-1

All that happened was a few uberbulls got taught a lesson, and a few shorters got fucked as well on the rebound spike up.  Saw the upspike coming when the * popped up on the sell side down at 5.2.

We now have a higher portion of traders who are capable of not overleveraging themselves.  This is good for bitcoin.

+0   I understand the point and I think it is good that people have the option to use Bitcoinica (after all, it's a free market right?).  I also think people should be able to use drugs if they wish, but that doesn't mean that people using drugs is good for society.  It's good to have the choice, but not necessarily good to exercise that choice to commit to action.

While I don't consider myself a pessimistic person (I actually am one of the greatest optimists you can find), I do not trust the Bitcoin community in general to be careful with a Pandora's Box like Bitcoinica.  By careful, I mean responsible -- I don't trust that the majority of people are aware of the potential impact that their individual actions can have on the entire market. 

My main problem is that it aids in pure speculation.  Bitcoin is treated by most as a gambling opportunity first and an evolved social development second.  But, Bitcoin's intended purpose was to be an evolved social development first and a gambling opportunity, well, never (at least it isn't implied in the white paper).

Basically, I'm just saying that the motivation that drives many users into Bitcoin is antithetical to the intended purpose of Bitcoin.  Of course, one could argue this by saying that it's in alignment with Bitcoin's intended purpose simply because Bitcoin is used.  I think at a certain level this is true, but at a systemic level it is not.  All systems require balance to achieve homeostasis, but Bitcoinica really fucks with the balance of systemic input and output.  It's a threat to destabilization.

are you the same "the joint" who was whining about "old engineers" betting scheme and pumping up "phantomcircuits" mistake?

are you kidding me?  well said Man.

Thanks?  :)

Excessive volatility does cause destabilization, but the level of volatility is stabilized because those that cause it lose.  Once they've lost enough money that they learn to not overleverage, they can join the rest of us in sanityland.  In the mean time, people who understand this (including outsider observers looking for an easy way to profit off this market) will make lots of money adding stability.  The more money there is to be made, the more we will attract the investors necessary to grow this thing to a scale where it could actually be used by a medium sized business like thinkgeek or newegg.  Yes, this involves chewing up newbie speculators, but I can say from experience they won't learn not to gamble like that until they take real losses.  Either that, or they take enough of a hit that they walk away and fail to capitalize on their experience.  That's the saddest part, but we won't build a new economy without being willing to take some risks.  So let those that can handle managing risk manage risk.  Perhaps a community effort to warn new users Bitcoinica is not a toy is warranted, but such effort can't really be undertaken without dragging out all the trolls who like to scream OMG! Bitcoinica is the spawn of Satan!

Any updates? I'm very curious to what Zhou has got to say.

I read it again and again but I don't understand it:

How is Bitcoinica a tool that gives a monetary incentive to add stability? Or did I get you wrong?

Also I often read the hope that once we have much more trade volume over at Gox, the price will fluctuate less. Forex trades T$/d. We are at 100k$/d. Even G$/d would be peanuts for big forex traders. They would still play the market.