I'd be even more of a true believer in Bitcoin than I am if I could amass 25k of them while shirking the responsibility for paying back the $500,000.00 that I ripped off from distressed mortgage holders and stay out of jail in the process.

I might have a shred of respect for Bruce when he voluntarily makes some effort to help those who he ripped off...particularly because it was people who could least afford to be ripped off so it seems.

I have to thank Bruce for opening my eyes to the fact that anyone who is a true believer in Bitcoin has some reason to be.  Seems obvious in retrospect but I did not ponder the concept enough at the outset of my interest in the subject.

$10,000 is ballpark assuming adjustment for inflation.

A better metric for me would be gold, and my ballpark valuation would be 1BTC/ounce-AU (since I consider gold to be undervalued at this time.)

For the record, Tradehill was the only exchange I used except for a bit of dabbling on with bitmarket.eu early on before I did major purchases.

A small fraction of the time Tradehill would take longer on something than their stated timings, but a quick probe always got things finished right away.  More often in my case, things went a lot quicker than stated.

Tradehill persons have always courteous and professional to me and either implemented my suggestions or took the time to tell me why they were a non-workable idea.

I know that there were occasional system problems, but I never happened to have been effected by them.  Lucky timing.

I never tried to withdraw USD so I cannot speak to that aspect of the business.  Sounds like it was at times a nightmare for both the requestor and Tradehill from what I read on this forum.

In sum, I am very sorry to see Tradehill shutter their doors, and will be delighted if there is an opportunity to do business with the team in the future.  Or will be if they do indeed refund the balances in my account at least

Thanks, Tradehill, for serving my needs well during the time that I was interested in acquiring BTC.

Bruce is half right half wrong in my case.

I started using Tradehill in part because Mt. Gox was down with their hack, but also kept using them because the initial Tradehill interview on his show, and follow-up after the Dwolla fiasco was fairly impressive.  As much as anything I just thought that the Bitcoin ecosystem would be better off with more than one exchange (and Tradehill was a great place from a buyer's perspective back in the day.)

One of the reasons I did not ever (yet) use Mt. Gox was that they continued to sponsor Bruce after it became known that he is a convicted scam artist.

Anyway I've got my space in the block-chain and have not bought or sold BTC for many months.  Nor do I have any immediate plans to do either.  We'll see if Tradehill comes up with my funds which I just requested back.  If I were a betting man, I would bet that they do, but time will tell.  Bruce had me pretty well fooled so I have not much confidence in my judge of character these days.

I puttered around with some documentation this weekend.  It is not close to ready for presentation, but has enough material to potentially be of some interest to the handful of people following this thread:

  http://www.bakcoin.org

After the above post, I started a set of documentation which explains my thoughts better.  It probably won't be ready for initial display for a few weeks (and perhaps never.)  If/When it is, I would be utterly delighted to get your and anyone else's feedback, critique, input, etc.

My concerns about Bitcoin scalability is rooted in my study of this document and it's directly linked material:

  https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

For one thing, I consider 'keeping up with Visa' to be potentially a very low bar to set.  Another thing that I have significant concern about is the ideas of 'supernodes' and certain things about the bandwidth provisioning.  Although I do find it technically plausible to arrange supernodes as clusters of processing units with load balancers distributing work, I do *not* believe that I will feel compfortable with the function of my currency system relying on the function of such hardware (and software) in light of the potential for coordinated attack by the state and corporate adversaries.

A crypto-currency solution, or set of solutions which do not anticipate and actively guard against a coordinated attack such as I've eluded to are a much less interesting solution to me than ones which do.  Frankly, I feel that any crypto-currency solution which operate within a free and semi-functional economy are mostly just interesting novelties.  But the world is full of interesting novelties and there are many which are far more interesting than crypto-currencies.  We see much less interest in Bitcoin at this point than I would have expected, and I believe that a fundamental reason is that it is simply not a necessary thing at this point in time.  If and when it is, I want it to have a good potential to live up to it's promise.


I researched the state of mesh network development a few months ago and was horrified to be honest.  To the extent that mesh networks might work at all, I think that anyone who is anticipating a network experience which remotely resembles the Internet that we all know today is in for a fairly big shock.

My best hope is that a handful of people are able to achieve something which harkens back to UUCP if the 'Internet kill switch' is ever flipped.  (In fact, I suspect that it actually would be UUCP initially.)

Having Bitcoin:

 - serve as an exchange currency for 6 billion people buying skittles

 - serve as a reserve currency with as solid a support as gold and it properties or the USD and nearly half of the world's military expenditures

 - operate in a decentralized manner with minimal reliance on corp/gov sponsored/controlled infrastructure

is, in my opinion, a pipe dream.  It may be theoretically possible to achieve 1 and 2, or 2 and 3, but not all three.

Bitcoin would have to do a 180 degree turn to be the kind of reserve currency that I envision, but even then it would be carrying significant baggage and I very much doubt that it would survive the stress very gracefully.  But there is no real reason to try to hammer this square peg into that round hole in my opinion.

Color me unsurprised that Rickards was familiar with Bitcoin.  I'd wager that he understands even the technical details better than a majority of those on this board.

Lamentably, I must agree with Rickards that Bitcoin is not a very suitable reserve currency.  Although I sense that Satoshi might have had some impulse in this direction, the focus on making it a decent exchange currency both initially and more significantly as a goal of it's recent evolution have simply not been in that direction.

I do have hope that Bitcoin will inspire a purpose oriented and successful reserve currency solution and have hope that it will come into fruition prior to Bitcoin's collapse.  A collapse which, although I dearly hope does not occur, I expect will be assisted when the timing is most opportune.

Thanks for the update, BTW.

Ask him why a war with Iran is so important that an otherwise respected analyst would damage his credibility by downplaying the fallout to the possibility of some minor equipment loss on the part of the US.

I believe I know the answer, but it would be interesting to know what comes out of that particular horse's mouth.

Amir Taaki's comment from a year ago was unimpressive to me.  Of course I do not know if that is the Intersango Amir Taaki or not.

Like MF Global?


To the point I alluded to in my smart-ass rhetorical question, another way to skin the cat (or for the cat to be skinned) would be if the 'traditional' markets start to fail.  I don't rule that out, and in fact, I am anticipating it to some degree.  To what degree I do not really know, but if people start to feel like they are being bent over and the regulatory and enforcement agencies are not looking out for them, the mathematical certainties of Bitcoin may start to look attractive in spite of the volatility which it exhibits.

I do believe that the goal of the MF Global take-down was, in part, to establish in case law certain features which were introduced into legislation along with the bankruptcy reforms were put into place circa 2005...just in time for the housing bust funny enough.  As I understand things (derived from reading non-mainstream ravings) part of this legislation involved a shuffling in how creditors line up to take haircuts when financial organizations fail.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=198650

My fundamental analysis from last summer was way off.  I would not have believed it could have gotten down to $2.00 absent a system failure, and not even close.  For this reason, my confidence in my own ability to estimate the lows that can be plumbed remains weak.  So, I'm ready for anything...including that my fundamental analysis could be low on the upside as well.

Fortunatly I always considered Bitcoin to be a long-shot with a high probability of total loss and a outside possibility for enormous gain (years down the road, and not limited to monetary gain) thus any money I put in I considered disposable.  That remains the case, and it was thus not difficult for me to hold everything I have ever had (except for a tiny bit of hour-by-hour exploitation of Tradehill artifacts.)  I also had no inclination to cash out when I could have done so at a profit (which is not the case at this moment.)

Your suggestion is so ubiquitous that I planning to trade a few quarters (real ones) for a couple of ammo cans if we ever get to a situation where I need them.  If we don't...the hopeful scenario...I'll use said quarters for something else and let others burn up their barrels in target practice.  Fondling and firing guns amuses me for all of 5 minutes or so.

My calculus is that in a gun fight one has about a 50% chance of needing further ammo after the event, and probably much less if you go up against a gunship.  Thus, owning a basement full of the stuff is overkill unless you plan to enter the market as seller...where you will have much company and almost certainly on the wrong side of whatever laws might exist.

All that said I am totally in favor of as many private individuals as possible stocking up to the gills while it is relatively easy to do.  In a truly unpleasant scenario an ammo cache could very well provide value which survives it's original owner.  So please carry on!

+1

Very close to my situation and philosophy.  I've (hopefully) got some money at my exchange which was earmarked for some more buying in the sub-$2.00 range, but that did not happen last time.  It looks like such a PITA to pull out that I've written it off as well as what I've already put into BTC.  I'll happily deploy it if we take another deep dive though.

I am 'pessimistic' that we'll get another dive which would bring the price down to where I want to see it.  This, in part, because the point when the production rate gets cut in half is starting to become visible on the horizon.

I'm totally bullshitting of course...well, almost totally...I might sneak a peek if she heads off to the bathroom afterwards   I just thought that trying to explain such a thing as 'multitasking' to a female painted an amusing situation (and any donations should go to goat for the orphanage he deals with.)  Thankfully I have little difficulty staying focused on the important things at appropriate times, and am not that into Bitcoin.

I did switch my focus back to Bitcoin and stayed up most of the night when the amazing collapse down into the $3 range first happend, but that was some time ago and both my interest has waned and we've had plenty of similar events since then.

My girlfriend does not seem to appreciate it when we are in-the-act and I keep glancing over that the Bitcoinchart and Kitco charts.  All of my 'multi-tasking' arguments, however logical, seem to fall on deaf ears.

OT - sorry.

Is the @spot a special with BTC (cuz' the website seems to state normal spreads and I would be suspicious if it did not)?  If so, is it considered temporary?

You seem to be generating happy customers (though I always allow for the possibility of fraud.)  Although it is cheap, easy, and safe for me to utilize a local dealer, I have more USD with my Bitcoin exchange than I normally like in order to capitalize on a Bitcoin crash if it happens.  A desirable and cheap way for me to get these funds back would be to buy BTC, then buy silver from you.

I'm fully aware of these arguments and don't doubt them.  I'm also totally delighted by the situation.  Usually the physical price and (artificially depressed) paper prices are close.  As a physical buyer, this translates into more ounces in my hand.  What's not to love!

I feel the same way about any downward manipulation which may be occurring in the Bitcoin markets.  And if manipulators manage to shake BTC out of the week hands, I'm happy to grab a few as they fall through the air.


I'm not sure why PM manipulation or BTC manipulation would have much effect.  If both markets are driven primarily by various speculators, which I sense is the case, than shifts in the mindsets of those speculators who have some overlap in both markets might be expressed. And expressed as an independent phenomenon to the various market manipulation schemes which may or may not be in play.

This is exactly why I feel, and continue to feel, that Bitcoin is suitable only for a minority of people.  Even individuals in the core development team warn that Bitcoin is a new and risky thing which people should not put much money into.

Not only is Bitcoin itself risky, but the transfer of USD (or equiv) into and out of the Bitcoin economy is both theorized and observed to be highly problematic.

While I am glad that you seem to have gotten your money out, and I hope that you patch up your family matters, I do find it reprehensible that you would have chosen to risk so much.  I hope that others will learn from your story.

The timing of this dip in BTC and a pretty healthy uptick in PM's is interesting.  I wonder if people who dabble in multiple speculative adventures made some sort of a shift.  (I personally had gotten some more silver last week in spite of what I considered higher prices than I had hoped, and have been avoiding buying BTC for a while now.)

I've never really noticed much of a correlation between PM's and BTC prior to this, but I also had not looked real hard.