Bitcoin Forum

After learning about bitcoin last year, my first thought was that if it did gain enough traction a government would find some way of making it illegal or crashing it.

I see that bitcoins hit dollar parity and then receded even as the USDX has lost strength.

I also see that according to mtgox.com the market depth is very shallow.  This market is ripe for manipulation and "chart painting".

Assuming enough bitcoin users are familiar with technical patterns, using only 50k to 100k I could paint a head and shoulders pattern on the chart and then gap it down one day and watch the crash.  Then pick it up at the bottom and paint a bottom.

How can we prevent this?  There is no good arb right now because it is risky doing an arb trade when I'm trading a fiat currency (FRNs)  against one that cannot really be used to buy anything of real value. Aka real money.

Sure I can buy some goods and services with my bitcoins (if I had some) but not real money to arb trade manipulation.

That is why I believe we need a precious metals to bitcoin market.


There are lots of problems I can think of already like ensuring delivery of metals, etc. but I know they can be solved by the intelligent minds on this forum.

Please lets create a metals pool and gold / silver / bitcoin market.

Secondly a futures market between bitcoins and bullion and even USD would be very desirable.

That way I could sell a bitcoin contract 12 months out at 3 USD per bitcoin and go and invest in hardware to mine it immediately knowing my profits are locked in.

Why would someone by the contract instead of the hardware?  Maybe because their time is valuable and they know they can convert those bitcoins into real money aka precious metals, anytime they want.



If you think my ideas have merit, or you hate them and would like to purchase an argument, please donate to my tip jar:

13PNeVP5hNbmXVccfeC73BENtKdht2aEVe

Even 1 btcent would be much appreciated as I am a bitcoin n00b.
Thank you! :)

I'm not much for economics, at all, but please correct me if I'm wrong... I believe through Liberty Reserve and (geez now I can't remember and its late) some other place you can indeed work exchanges for gold and silver. Bitcoin after all is a currency like anything else, so as long as it has a value, then there's got to be a trading market for it for anything else that has value. The sky is pretty much the limit. My opinion is that as the market undergoes the usual fluctuations, while the hash strength of the network increases (thereby increasing difficulty, heh we'll see  this summer when A/C bills get high), that the bitcoin may gain some serious financial clout (inflation?) in the money market. This is speculation on my part, but the general consensus supports my opinion. As I said I am not much for economics, and I'm sure more savvy people than I am may have a better answer for you. If I wasn't hard up for extra cash, personally, I'd hang onto every BTC I get and just see what happens 6-8 months from now. Parity with the dollar severely piqued my interest for something so trivial (for some) to acquire. As I've been reading and researching, only the tip of the iceberg of the potential of the bitcoin economy has been fully realized. I'll leave it to more savvy men than I am to figure out where that is going, but once again I say, the sky is the limit.

Welcome to the botnet :)

There is a bitcoin to numismatics exchange here:
http://www.chariottrading.com/bitcoin.html

There has been a bit of an informal market on the forums as well:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3409.0
https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=712.0

But it would be good if some sort of formal service were started up, you're right about that.

Also, always check out biddingpond, for I often sell gold coins there.

I'll sell an other one soon.