Looks like my buy order in the low $3.00 is still in from last time.  I guess I'll leave it and see if this time brings better results.

It would be kinda cool to see an animation of the charts through time.  Not cool enough for me to actually do it though   One can sort of obtain the effect by sliding on the forum page.  Sort of like drawing a stick-man on multiple pages of a book...back in the old days when books were common.

Sure.  You pay Bitcoinica to play in the first case and not in the latter.

You're example is a bit silly though.  Normally you would deposit far fewer BTC (of equiv) than you borrow.  Consequently, you get liquidated before the price goes to infinity.

This is what makes a 'short squeeze' such a wonderful and delightful thing to watch.  As the price rises, more and more people buy (albeit not particularly willingly though that does not matter to the market.)  So the process perpetuates itself until it burns out (as people who have some powder dry recognize the situation and capitalize on it.)

Really interesting things can happen when a lot of the shorting was 'naked'.  That is, there was actually no borrowing of the item by the person going short.  In this case a situation can occur where the curves never cross and things cannot 'burn out'.  Then we get a great deal of market instability and loss of confidence.  In markets where naked short selling is possible and tolerated, great efforts are made to avoid such an event and obscure it if it happens.

I think the general principle is that before you get in debt to Bitcoinica, you get liquidated.

Bitcoinica ends up getting screwed only in the event of very high price volatility in which liquidations cannot be done within anticipated ranges, or in the event of coding errors.  My understanding is that Bitcoinica maintains a reserve of their profits to (hopefully) allow for either of these eventualities, and anticipate that many users would walk away from obligations such as you are describing.

Your ADHD supposition makes some sense to me.  And I'm probably in that catagory.  I do tend to take a long-term view of things, however, and to that end my base objective was to have a certain amount of BTC squirelled away and I met that.

I'll be interested to learn more of your efforts as things progress.


This is where I have a big problem.  If/when we reach a situation where it is technically challenging for individuals to run clients, it will mean that the utilization is approaching something other than minor fringe.  I would estimate the number of individuals participating in the transmission of Bitcoin at a vastly lower percentage than 10%.  Worse, they will likely be highly reliant on non-consumer-grade networking services, and possibly processing services as well.  This, to me, is 'centralization' and Bitcoin becomes a very different beast.  I would consider it highly unreliable at that point because 1) it would be becoming a significant threat to other monetary systems due to the high utilization, and 2) it would be prone to attack due to the centralization and reliance on corporate controlled infrastructure.

BTW, I consider it highly likely that the Internet will change fairly radically in terms of the freedoms that most of us currently enjoy.  We are seeing signs of it in the recent SOPA fiasco, and I expect that more competent persons will be driving such things going forward.  A Bitcoin-like solution which would appeal to me would be one which, by careful core design, would degrade rather than be destroyed in the event of a much more restricted global internet.

Most of your hypothesis make a lot of sense to me, and I expect most of them are a factor.  Here's a factor that I suspect.

I think that the concept of Bitcoin generally tends to attract people with either a short attention span, or have borderline manic depressive tendencies depending on how charitable one wishes to be.  That is the case with me I will admit.  Half a year of being interested in something is unusual, and my interest is wearing off.  To some extent that is because I've achieved some of my targets, but I did have tentative plans to do a lot more than I likely ever will (which I suspected after a lifetime of monitoring myself and thus tend to not jump into things which require ongoing effort.)

Another part is that I am losing confidence in the implementation to be frank.  I feel that key features of the solution will need to be sacrificed as it grows in order to satisfy scaling constraints.  If that does not happen, I suspect that that will mean that the demand did not require the growth, and that the Bitcoin solution was an interesting novelty.  Or that a more scalable solution superseded it.

I labor under the assumption that detectors which can do some form of spectroscopy will be able to discriminate high densities of a chosen element rather easily are available, or will be as needed.

LOL

Technically I'm not so sure about that.  Although not pleasant, it should be less uncomfortable than a prostrate exam, and an ounce of gold is pretty valuable these days.  I think a 1-oz bar form factor with rounded edges would be OK.

'Worldwide fascism' vis-a-vis the control of information is precisely what I would want if I were in a corp/gov leadership role and wished to remain so.  I think it would be silly to ignore the possibility that such a thing might be quite attractive to a large segment of our leaderships.

Doubt it.

SOPA/PIPA were pretty lame anyway.  Most likely the powers that be realized that, and also realized that much more is needed to really 'solve the problem'.  If SOPA is dropped for good, I suspect it will be because a real solution will be in the works.  That would likely involve a pretty massive infrastructure overhaul and only 'authorized' protocols being allowed.  I'd be very surprised if Bitcoin were one of these

I think that it is fair to equate religious extremism to general backwardness and retardation in other areas.  Also to assume that if a relatively high percentage of the population places a high importance in religion, there is a good chance that extremism is alive an well (and again, correlated with general backwardness.)

I took Genjix's map, and a lot of other evidence I'm aware of, to be indicative of the fact that Iran is not a backward helpless basket-case who cannot defend themselves.  This is the 'party line' from the mainstream media and is designed to make Western populations comfortable attacking them.  I am betting that it will be a great folly and that many Joe Sixpacks will be shocked at what the event ends up producing.  One of the few good things that might come out of it is that the populations may start trusting the mainstream media so much.

At least one person once used Bitcoinica to guarantee a future business obligation in the face of Bitcoin's notorious volatility  That's good enough for me to classify the service as legitimate and valuable.

That is a perfectly accurate way to describe Bitcoinica, and I would be surprised if Zhou Tong himself did not think so or even say so.  Big deal.  Lots of things are in that category, and Bitcoinica has more of value to add than many of them.

Did my last buying down in the low $2's.  The rally has given me enough confidence to buy again in the high $3's or perhaps low $4's most likely, but not currently higher than that.

I thought my break-even was somewhere in the $4's until I collected up all my wire transfer notes and realized how much I had sunk into this damn thing.  It's actually closer to $6 so I'm just going to sit on my hands for some time and see how things play out.  Considering I started buying in at around $16, I'm happy enough that I am where I am.

If Zhou wants to set up an exchange I'd welcome it, but

 - solve some of the most pressing issues of the existing exchanges which I see as being at the mercies of Western financial interests.

 - operate it completely independently of Bitcoinica, and as an competitor to both the other exchanges and to the Forex platform (Bitcoinica) itself.  In this way things would probably be significantly simplified and also made more robust against various types of system failures and legal attacks.

Big-picture overview of forex-style trading and how a platform (such as Bitcoinica) fits in with an 'exchange'.  A graphic would be nice.  Contrast with futures markets would probably provide extra insight.

It never was clear to me the concept of 'order' -> 'execution' -> 'position' -> 'liquidation'.  For instance, who is ordering what from whom exactly, and how does it differ under the various types of orders.

Glad to see Bitcoinica taking an interest in this aspect of the business.

How many of you are buying the story that the full body scanners popping up like mushrooms are dedicated to looking for 'terrorists'?

  http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/03/02/docs-reveal-tsa-plan-to-body-scan-pedestrians-train-passengers/

I actually do buy that story though with the caveat that conspiring to employ unauthorized forms of value transmission will be considered a form of domestic terrorism.  I suspect that the 'good' people be using their government issued cash-card or some such and nothing else.  As I watch the evolution of our society here in the US, I suspect that people will probably welcome such a solution in part because with some engineering it could represent their best hope for survival.

I was mildly suspicious of BTCinch for some reason(s) that I cannot recall.  It is nice to see that my suspicions appear to have been misplaced.

How?  The only way you suggested is that the buyer extorts the seller into cutting the price.  But then it is in the hands of the seller to pay the extortion money out of the goodness of his heart.  That might happen for penny-ante little shit where the value of a positive rating is a noticable fraction of things, but for big ticket items it seems pretty unlikely.