Bitcoin Forum

No TA

With Silk Road down Bitcoin now has now no practical use. Buying stuff over Bitpay has no practical advantage over other methods and it's volume is negligible if you exclude ASIC sales.
Bitcoin is now 99% concerned with itself, that is either mining or investing, any sensible individual gonna look for a exit in the following months. Then you true believers will be finally on your own.
It's now a pure financial bubble.

Have fun!

You still have some stock from "the Road", ha?

Nah I'm here for the comedy.

Damn! Why doesn't the market just do what I think it should do. What a deeply irrational market!

[ElectricMucus, all the time, on every topic]

But, yeah, I also expect we'll go down. Just not as much as you seem to think.

I don't expect the market to be rational, I'm just pointing out what would happen if it is.

Might have guessed you'd come out with something like this Mucus.  You say bitcoins have no practical use! Thats like saying cash has no practical use.

You have no TA, I'm not surprised.

Time will tell whos right

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=306221.msg3291312#msg3291312

Ok here's your precious TA
I don't really trade on that method though, just so it's consistent with common practices here.

https://i.imgur.com/ngllnaQ.png (http://imgur.com/ngllnaQ)

A rational person doesn't need TA to know that we are clearly in a bear market since the 5th September.
It's a funny one, with limited seller pressure, due to the relative scarcity of the coins and also a bullish mood.
So some of you may have trouble recognizing the EW patterns, but they are there.
The gist of the issue raised by EM is what will happen after the 5th sub-wave of capitulation?
Will the price be in the 80$  - 90$ range and a new bubble period will form, or will the bubble
deflate completely and the price will reach 50s, maybe even 40s? IMO it depends on how many
of the 'missing' coins will reappear in the market during capitulation, with the intention of cashing out.
But cashing out of Gox is still a problem AFAIK, so as long as Fort Gox 'works' this way, the complete
deflation scenario seems unlikely to me. During capitulation the price should drop by about 50$,
IMO only if if drops a lot more, then EM's scenario could be close to the truth.

There is resistance at the level you describe, but very little chance we'll go below $100 any time soon. I predict we'll break up through that resistance around end of November time, until then yes price will meander sideways, maybe looking slightly bearish at times.

what no, bitcoin is obviously a raging bull and a break out is imminent.

Are you serious when stating 'a break out is imminent'?
IMO a significant drop can start in 1 - 2 days, to end the first sub-wave of wave B.

180 by friday. infinity by the 17th  :D

Never used SR. But I use bitcoin all the time for other things. I could care less about SR and their closing has no effect on my spending habits. If bitcoin were dependent on the decisions of crackheads then it would already be gone.

OK. Quoted for future reference.

IMO by the 17th we could be in the 135$ - 140$ range, but that's not even close to infinity.  ;)

+1

Cant say I've ever found a use for bitcoin aside from buying illegal substances...

Which is why I just like to trade it.

lol, what a noob.

Remittances and internet industries that have a high rate of credit card fraud are two use cases where Bitcoin is hard to beat.

Your experiences aren't representative for everybody involved in bitcoin,
You are a minority and I said bitcoin is to remain for the true believers.

Silk Road is dead but Bitcoin is alive. Police fights criminals but not the currency. I think all this buzz about Silk Road is good for Bitcoin's publicity and de-centralization. It really doesn't depend on any single business or institution. And if you really want to buy drugs, you can always find ways to do it. I am quite sure new darknet marketplaces will emerge. You can talk about bullish or bearish trends, but every single bitcoiner is a long-term bull. You can earn something on short-time bearish trends too, but it is complicated and risky. To my mind it doesn't worth it.

I may be in the minority on a lot of issues, but the fact that prices remain basically unchanged by this leads me to believe that SR was a minor player. Don't get me wrong, I think most drugs should be legalized. But bitcoin now has a large and complex ecosystem. Any one use is trivial compared to the myriad things bitcoin is good for.

I wonder if you have seen your signature lately?  :P

LOL!

Yeah I put it there.

No Bitcoin isn't a large ecosystem it just consumes the power of a small country.
The remaining activity can be put into two categories:

1.) ASIC sales, which are a zero sum game and do not contribute anything to economic activity and are just a lottery ticket for yet to be released Bitcoins, it's speculating either way.
2.) Enthusiasts consuming in Bitcoin and thats a small minority in comparison to ASIC sales. They pay a premium for that to other enthusiasts, but other people are just not into that.

A third category doesn't really exist, gimmicks like humble bundle or wordpress for Bitcoin don't really generate any volume. (Check their published statistics)
Paying with Bitcoins in some German hipster bar is laughable, I think I don't get any arguments there.
Silkroad was the 3rd category until now...

Consider how NSA has problem with Tor, I think a new SR will spring up.

796 exchange is bringing something new, speculating on gold futures where the difference is 'bitcoin-settled', daily volume is about 5000 BTC so far.

Close to half of BTC / fiat trade is in CNY, and I highly doubt the Chinese were SR users.  The 'speculative' demand will keep BTC prices up.

so is the Chinese bitcoin "economy" purely speculation? is there anything going on besides mining and exchange?

Not that I am aware of.

Bitcoinstore pays its Chinese suppliers in btc.

the zero-sum mining game will probably keep going until at least the next halving, if not longer.  The allure (or belief) of making lots of money by running a bunch of computers is hard to resist.

What a load of shite. All the SR buyers and sellers have migrated to BMR and SMP. It's business as usual for them.

Yup, Silkroad is like the Hydra of Lerna. One down, two new pop up. Government is going to lose this.

The hydra gets it at the end. Don't you think the FBI will utilize the data they got from the SR sever to go after the merchants there?

Yeah Silk Road required an ID scan and recent utility bill from all merchants before they could start vending  :D

What data exactly do you are think they recovered?  Nicknames, product lists, public keys and and country seems like about it.

it is not the end, it is the beginning  8)

Was pgp mandatory? If not there are at least some postal codes and consumer addresses.

If it took the feds so long to get DPR, then how long will it take getting hundreds (maybe thousands, I don't know) drug merchants?
This may have an impact 6 - 12 months from now, by then the BTC market would have moved on, while other drug markets replaced SR.
I am more interested to know when will the feds sell the confiscated coins, that could have an impact on the market.

PS. I forgot that this is the bearish scenario thread, so I have to post a bearish image. Enjoy, if you can understand where we are.  ;D

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?width=940&m=mtgoxUSD&SubmitButton=Draw&r=150&i=6-hour&c=1&s=2013-06-01&e=2013-10-12&Prev=&Next=&t=S&b=B&a1=&m1=10&a2=&m2=25&x=0&i1=&i2=MACD&i3=MFI&i4=StochRSI&v=1&cv=0&ps=0&l=0&p=0&

I'm more concerned with the 600k coins they haven't have control over (yet). Considering DPR will likely live the rest of his life behind bars, that's a ticket to make pretty damn sure their value never reaches anything significant.

I have no idea, but if they can handle TOR they can handle pgp, and it would be fucking dumb to not use it.

However, if they do recover addresses of recepients, you can bet your ass they will be added to some surveillance lists.  This will help with investigations in the long run if they can get a large enough sample of TOR drug pirchasers to watch.  However, it will be used for to profiling, which always carries the risk of creating prejudice.

If he has his money stored in brain wallets he can do a lot with that while behind bars.  Unless, of course they catch on and put him in solitary confinement.

I'm sure merchants used TOR too, so no DATA about them. (maybe few bitcoin addresses)

Odalv, yes
notme explained quite well what I am thinking.


The FBI claims they have his encrypted wallet...

Not possible to buy any coin when price crashed since I could not transfer the fund into exchanges enough quick, now it all went back without slightest sign of retracement :-\

If those 600k coins were safe, then people will know that even FBI can not confiscate bitcoin, lots of money seeking for secure storage will rush into bitcoin later

The single most important usage of bitcoin is store of value, it is super easy to transfer over internet, could not be confiscated and has limited supply, there is no other store of value can compete

you think online marketplaces for drugs are gone?

Black Market Reloaded http://5onwnspjvuk7cwvk.onion

Sheep Marketplace http://sheep5u64fi457aw.onion

Deepbay http://deepbay4xr3sw2va.onion

all the vendors are moving over and verifying themselves via PGP signatures.  BMR and SMP have grown significantly already.

Silk Road 2.0 https://github.com/goshakkk/silk-road-2.0-concept
- http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1nxgnq/silk_road_20_a_concept_of_distributed_anonymous/

MasterCoin could be extended into a fully decentralized silk road http://www.reddit.com/r/mastercoin/comments/1nqcq3/mastercoin_could_be_extended_into_a_fully/

Silk Road was the Napster.  We're just getting started bro...

damn i thought it would take months

i had no idea this was the case

this 600 k btc stuff is nonsense. take any companies turnover for two years, shut down the company and expect the entire funds still sitting somewhere... never !
sr had expenses. especially when you are underground things are expensive. and the value of btc during this time was averaging single digits. on top of it dpr might have spent/squandered/donated/lost a lot of it.

maybe 100 k btc, but that is still very high.

ElectricMucus, I honestly don't understand why you are in the bitcoin forums, I've never heard you say anything good about bitcoins ever. You act like someone who has a massive short position in bitcoins, is that the case? Where do you trade?

Or are you a paid shill, or simply a troll ?

AFAIK EM is trading on BTC-E, and while he can be rude, IMO he's not a troll. But in the bull section of the forums, he just looks like one.  ;D

good to know and very encouraging

He's just extremely cynical, probably because he lacks any form of ideals and vision himself. He will call this being 'realistic' ofcourse. People often project their hatred towards themselves unto others, because they envy what others have that they do not. Belittling bitcoin enthousiasts as ''true believers'' saying they are a very small insignificant group of people who are just delusional is all part of that projection of self-hatred. ;)

Napster was a new technology, like Bitcoin. As far as the analogy goes Bitcoin is Napster and Silk Road was the top40s.

Just a silly little permabear.

http://i664.photobucket.com/albums/vv10/JimboToronto/sillybear1.jpg (http://s664.photobucket.com/user/JimboToronto/media/sillybear1.jpg.html)

 :) ;) ;D

I realize that it can be slightly annoying to see someone (ElectricMucus) downplaying bitcoin so much, but you know what, it just reassures the community the dedication to the currency itself. Point being, for every 1 troll, you'll see 100+ supporters for bitcoin. What you don't want to see is an entire community agreeing with him.

Just ignore, and keep posting :-)

Bitcoin Scope is a fine site to go to for live news about current bitcoin sentiment. It's pretty entertaining too: http://www.bitcoinscope.com

No: Bitcoin is the Bittorrent where e-Gold or digicash was the Napster of digital currencies.

Going back to SR--an ebay for drugs is a new thing, so it would be analogous to Napster since SR was centralized.  the next gen SR will not be centralized.

i think EM is a troll.

I see it differently. To me it looks like the money regression theorem we have shifted from wheat to metals in Smith's wealth of nations.

XBT is now a socialized p2p distributed store of wealth.  

I hope these new vendors know what they are doing. Their servers must be locked down 100%. Not 99.99%. I'm talking 100%, 24/7/365 days a year.

One little misconfigured setting in hundreds of config files could slip through vital information to be traced. Maybe a stray DNS query or misconfigured port. The list is endless.
Tor is not fool-proof.
And god forbid don't use PHP. That's just asking to be hacked.

Because the stakes are very high indeed. Their life.

Rather them than me.  :D

Bitcoin is the first digital currency per se, e-gold was just a website, it's not even relevant for the debate.

But Bitcoin is something else also, it's a proof of concept, more academic work rather than what it is made out to be now. That alone doesn't have to be a bad thing, but that it wasn't made to handle the requirements very well is. The distributed blockchain for example is prohibitive expensive, it doesn't suit to store every transaction ever made on every node. The list goes on, proof of work consumes too much energy, transaction conformation time is to long to be suited for a POS system, etc...

It's a immature concept in every way, and one way or the other it is going to be replaced by a successor which was made with those things in mind, not just patched.
OK enough digressions.



I don't really think other tor marketplaces will be in place of silkroads former glory. The cat is out of the Bag essentially.
The FEDs have gathered a bulk of information by busting SR which makes it that much easier to go after the merchants there, if they move on to black market reloaded for instance the FEDs would posses postal codes of some of their customers at the very least and can track the shipment back to the origin, building profiles and eventually busting the sellers.

If you don't believe that, let me tell you the process has already started... the sellers will have their hands full to stay ahead of the FEDs for the foreseeable future. Business as usual under these circumstances should be out of the question.
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/10/feds-arrest-alleged-top-silk-road-drug-seller/

It's not coming back guys...

Police Arrest 8 In International Silk Road Busts (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=230442617&ft=1&f=) [npr.org]

drug trade cannot be killed. when they took down pablo escobar (which enterprise dwarfes sr), what had the us and columbian prohibitionists achieved ? columbian drug trade split up into thousands of small scale enterprises. they took out the big guy and ended up with a much harder to control hoard of little guys. more drugs were produced/sold/smuggled then before.

Yeah that is entirely the same thing as sending drugs to the consumer via postal service.

What made Silk Road so useful was not Silk Road in and of itself but the concept of using Bitcoin and Tor to do mail order drug trade. Even though it's likely most of the bigger players on SR will get caught, I'm sure there are already vendors on other tor market sites who never used SR. And more will emerge.

The ecosystem will adapt. There's an immense demand for illegal substances all over the world.

This was happening long before SR and has been ongoing since the bust.

What SR did was put this all out in the open and made tor/bitcoin use compulsory.

The pot-smoking public now know about this and will just be moving to existing sites or waiting for another to pop up.

sure

I think there aren't.

well ya... someone even listed some the dark urls yesterday.

so what?

exactly!

The sellers there gonna get busted eventually if they did business on SR recently. Then, who do you think gonna buy there now, under these conditions?

well?

What is more interesting is no drug busts scheduled for machinegun carrying killers or drug pushers at schools.
just the high profile, non violent elusive soft targets.

ElectricMucus

have you ever bought any drugs?

everyone knows gandhi was a terrorist. so was martin luther king jr.

EVERYONE KNOWS.

come on man, get with the program.

The untold story is:
You can't push drugs if you are on tor.
You don't use violence to compete for market access.
Your success is dependent on honest and reputable behaviour.
Civilians are safer for it.

what i was trying to get across was that it will not get stopped by police action. in less than a year there will be more sophisticated ways to buy/sell drugs online. to use hillary´s words: "there is just too much money in it"
technology will serve.

This idea is not digression in the long term bear scenario, just a digressions short term.
But honestly you don't need Bitcoin to be a POS system to be successful, it would be better used as a means of settlement much like gold was in the early 1900's and the excessive energy usage really just results in waste heat, and in any efficient system waste provides food for another part of the system, so it isn't waste but an available resource.  

So while I agree it is a proof of concept I don't share your pessimism.  

there are illegal coffeshops where I live.

The optimists also advertise Bitcoin as a tool which supposedly has those characteristics, and while it hasn't much of the speculation is based on these misinformed decisions. 

Do they sell illegal coffee, or is coffeeshop a euphemism for something else?  

A website going down was one thing but if the MERCHANTS keep getting busted left and right, then the network of trust will be broken and fear will take over,. Some business may continue but the average joe will drop out, decreasing volume/demand. Get your fiat ready.

I assumed everybody is familiar with the term, they aren't actually called that way, but you can also drink coffee there. In fact you have to...

but the number of merchants isn´t limited to those who will experience heat from sr bust. there will be new ways, new trust. online drug trade will not come to an historic halt because of this. give it some time.

Yes that is how the theory goes.

Hindsight is 20 20, and I have made a lot of mistakes, investing in Bitcoin was a risk I understood, and it solved problems I understood. Although it could possibly be 95% speculation I still remain skeptically optimistic. The Bitcoin experiment looks to be more future proof than the reality I live in now, so albeit problematic I'll keep running with it until I know better.  

I forget where i was going with this....
In any case, 3d printers will soon be able to print drugs!
So its all a moo point

 :D

Dwolla stops support for virtual currencies (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=309022.msg3308536)

And another failed Bitcoin business association bites the dust.

hmmm. i dont really foresee any effect on the market (unfortunately for those of us who want to buy cheaper coins). unfortunate for US people, anyway.

Seems like the only exchange to be affected is CAMPBX.
They will need to reevaluate their business model, and either begin accepting ACH or shut down.

Does anyone know any other exchanges that use Dwolla?

CAMPBX was the only one i knew of. gox obviously dropped em quite a while ago. btc-e never did, bitstamp never did (I think). neither do now, anyway.

If by dropped em you mean the DHS SEIZED their account, yes.
It seems dwolla isn't into this kind of clusterfuck.

Don't forget: most of these asics are manufactured in China, and the Chinese have a track record of making cost-friendlier clones.
Except in this case they don't even need to clone and just use the "faulty" production chips to produce a high performing mining rigs very cheap not anywhere near what anyone else would pay for a rig. How many chips they have pumped out so far is anyone's guess.
No hippster bar or local store accepts coins in china, only internet sales. They only mine because they know they can sell Bitcoins for good money, all else is speculation not a true believe in Bitcoin.

ElectricMucus, are you possibly hoping that BTC doesn't go on it's next major rally before you are able to buy in?

(Much like I am...)   ;D

an old school bitcoiner let greed swindled him out of some bitcoin

how sad.

 :P

Nah I'm just disillusioned about the whole thing. Pirateat40 was sort of the tipping point for me.

Oh and what rally?

To answer your question, I don't really care about if there is a rally or not, I buy and sell regardless, but just when I am fairly certain I can exit at any point. I don't give a shit about buying too high or selling too low as long as there is something in for me.
Because one thing I am certain of: Bitcoin will remain ultra volitale as long it'll last. I stay in Dollars most of the time and haven't had a single bad trade since I adopted this strategy.

you hate the cow you milk ?

It feels more like taking candy from a spoiled brat.

taking candy is one thing. just get out of auto-complain modus from time to time... :-*

"Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful" by Warran Buffet

Hows the bearish scenario working out ??

 ;D  ;D  ;D

Bears are eating away at LTC :(