Or by that point we'll have a situation where organizations will be saying "Hey, use PeepCoin because we have a whole day's worth of Bitcoin production (1800 BTC) backing it's value among a bunch of other usability bells and whistles."

Maybe that is effectively what you are saying, but in that scenario I would see Bitcoin values mostly just continue to rise until the demand for crypto-currencies was saturated.  The main Bitcoin transactions would be relatively large transfers swapping backing value between competing crypto-currencies.

This is a big incentive for me, though I still don't recommend BTC for most people since I don't consider it safe and solid yet.

A big difference between USD and almost everything else (BTC, PMs, etc) is that the former comes in automatically and bi-monthly.  No other forms of wealth do in my case.  So it makes a lot of sense that I would be actively looking for places to dump USD while holding on to other assets just to keep things in some form of balance.

I want explicit and official state sponsorship from a non-aligned nation of size, and one which would be exceedingly cumbersome to cut economic ties with at a state level.  e.g., Russia, China, Venezuela.

The key element of my statement was 'all'.  I thought about trying to elaborate on that but decided not to.

The reason that this is key is that if a handful of 'rouge' institutions decided not to play ball, it would be enough to keep the exchanges happily chugging along (with some requisite adjustments to their pricing models) and thus allow the Bitcoin show to continue in much the same form as it does now.

Not only that, but the (current) $30-40m would suddenly become a significant factor for said 'rouge' institutions and thus a much more incentive to continue on.  That is why I don't see it absent state level legislative actions (state=nation.)  Half-hearted legislative attempts would be worse than nothing as they would create an engine for evolution of 'rouge' organisations, many of the operating in other states.  My bet is that this is part of the reason we in the Bitcoin community have been blessed with apparent ambivalence after Schummer spent a few minutes thinking about things (or more likely, some of his minders whacked him with a clue stick.)

It's hard for me to believe that all financial institutions would abandon service of Bitcoin related enterprises absent some legislative action (whereupon I have no doubt that they would do so in a heartbeat.)  It's a really interesting question in my mind about what would happen with the value of BTC in that scenario.  I could see it going several different ways.  Among them:

If demand is there it could get fairly pent up and explosive.  After all, banks (mostly) don't want anything to do with drugs which has contributed to them absurdly valuable.  Even though drugs are a physical commodity and thus cumbersome to supply, they are still plenty available and the demand ensures a thriving market.

On the other hand, I sense that a good bit of the demand is by day-trader types who have no real interest in holding BTC and see no value in doing so other than to flip them.  That demand would evaporate without convenient exchanges which could depress the value of BTC considerable.

The bitcointalk speculation forum is hardly my first choice for locating 'insightful' commentary on the Internet.  That's part of it's charm for me I guess.

I've had beefs with Tradehill not living up to their published timings.  OTOH, they have vastly exceed them at other times.  (Unfortunately for me, this was more common on incoming wires two quarters ago when I was trying, unsuccessfully, to catch the falling knife.)


So one can either have trouble getting USD into the exchange, or getting USD out of the exchange.  Nice to have choices I suppose.  Unfortunately both eventualities can be costly.

I was interested to see this Tradehill communique on MaxKeiser.com in my morning scans.  Posted by Max.  I know that these guys are interested in Bitcoin, but so far their coverage has been fairly mute.  I suspect that (like myself), they are hesitant to encourage people toward Bitcoin until it is more stable...insofar as a newbie is unlikely to lose a great deal of money by screwing with it that is.

Someone in the comments section of the maxkeiser blog mentioned that CITI has a habit of shuffling incoming money through multiple accounts.  I've been aggravated that my early wires were tradeble within hours, but for the last four months or so, it's been days from the time WF wires money to CITI to when Tradehill claims to 'see' the money in their account (according to their support.)  I did not know who to blame, exactly, so I neglected to blame anyone.  I still don't know who to blame but if the poster on the maxkeiser blog is right, it's looking a lot like CITI is the guilty party.

Some dipshit on these boards was projecting silver in the low $20's.  I resolved to buy some more if that happened, but now it seems unlikely to me.  But I'd be delighted if it did (assuming it was in the physical markets.)

My personal projection based on the periods of weakness over the past decade that I've been paying attention to PMs is that we'll have another quarter or so of consolidation and see-sawing in the current levels, then a pretty strong updraft to do it all again for another cycle.  I see no changes in the fundamentals which have been driving PMs upwards.

In the event of a monetary crisis I could see 2008-ish behavior in PMs, but if there was a strong sense that the crisis was severe enough to spell the end of the road for our current Western monetary systems and a re-boot is likely, I could imagine a mad rush into the PMs (and a lot of hassles with capital controls and related grief.)

BTC is at this point a noticeable, though not huge, percentage of my wealth.  The reasons you mention are big factors in my decisions in these matters.  I have, however, never considered Bitcoin as anything but a very long-shot gamble albeit one with the possibility for a large payout, and that remains my mindset.

Bitcoin is the one possession of mine which I have realistic access to if I alighted in a foreign land with nothing but the shirt on my back.  That was one of the biggest 'selling points' to me since it is by far the most tenable way to achieve this goal.  Buying a condo in Montevideo is much easier fantasized about than done, and Uruguay may or may not be the land which I could find myself.

Funny...back before I took my fill of BTC I used to feel the same way only opposite.  I often made a BTC purchase before going to bed because I didn't want to go to sleep with USD in my pocket.  But for similar reasons insofar as not wanting to wake up with dirt for money.  I probably spend to much time reading zerohedge.com

Now I've got a nice enough pile of BTC in deep deep storage and am past break-even at $6 and am sleeping well.

If BTC continues to rise to the value that I've always felt like it should have on the world stage, I wonder how many would-be early adopters will end up being caught out, or much more out than they could have been.  The only reason I can imagine how badly that would suck is because I got busy with other things when I first took an abortive interest in Bitcoin in late 2010.

The first time I remember Mt. Gox locking users for having 'stolen' coins, it became immediately obvious that they got the coins in question from Tradehill.  I remember watching these coins move around in odd ways on Tradehill, and got some of them myself (or I should say, I bought BTC on dips caused by a large previous owner wanting badly to have cash instead of BTC.)

Whatever method Mt. Gox has for identifying stolen coins needs to be either refined or open-sourced for scrutiny by more competent persons as it is currently sub-standard and if probably only Mt. Gox with their near monopoly could get away with harassing their users on the basis of that quality of analysis.

Beyond that, I would have trouble classifying any BTC losses as 'thefts' on a philosophical basis.  In the case of various services (e.g., MyBitcoin, B7, etc) people willingly gave their BTC to someone who turned out to be not reliable.  In the case of allinvain, keeping that much value in a single wallet.dat on a Windows machine was at best unbelievably negligent, and there is always the possibility that the whole thing was staged.  There is no reason why I as a holder of BTC should be penalized or even inconvenienced by the poor judgement of others.

I'll sell enough at around $120/BTC to pay off my initial outlay.

The remainder would be a nice number (in a Bitcoin-ish way) which I will sit on until I need the capital...likely for decades.  Possibly a suitable investment opportunity for my stash in BTC form will materialize (e.g., lending for shorting operations or backing more user-friendly and politically palatable crypto-currency solutions) in which case I may put my stash to work.

I retain a certain amount of USD at my exchange.  If/when I choose to patronize a merchant using BTC or make donations to an organization accepting them, I'll convert as needed.

Firstly, I'm obviously glad you are still alive (OP).

Seems to me that Bitcoin is attractive to the best and the worst of humanity, but that the latter is particularly well represented.  It makes a lot of sense as to why this would be, and I suspect that that will always be the case.  I would not allow anything I purchased on the street with Bitcoin enter the body of a pet rat, let alone my own, and would be as careful as possible even operations which had been in business for some time and have a good reputation.

To me, the only realistic system designs involving Bitcoin are ones which preclude fraud by making it more costly for either party to engage in it than not.  In a lot of instances this introduces the need for a fair amount of engineering and inconvenience which leads me to the conclusion that Bitcoin is most useful as a simple and solid foundation upon which to build more viable end-user solutions for a large percentage of economic transactions.

A well written and informative article.  Thanks!

I have a lot of hope that the EFF intends to defend Bitcoin if/when there is a need, and if that is the case their actions vis-a-vis donations in that medium are very shrewd and make a lot of sense.  So far (and amazingly to me) there really does not have seemed to have been a need to get involved.

If there is one battle which it makes sense for everyone to get their duck in a row for it would be Bitcoin.  I believe it quite possible that we are in the 'calm before the storm' period.  For my part I've taken an active interest in making hay while the sun shines with this technology.  I sense that others have been doing so as well and that there has been a significant 'transfer of wealth' over the last half year which possibly has occurred more by design than by accident.

I'd likely do another $10k-ish assuming similar conditions as the last time (lack of Bitcoin system weaknesses, scary global monetary issues and some disposable (and lose-able) income.)  Actually, I'd probably be buying into such a decline so I would not have the full funds left at the $2 point.

I expect that the only way to get down there again is if some truly massive holders decide to bail in something of a panic for some reason.  Back at the $15 level I thought it could only get into the $5 range if such players cashed out in a big way, and that they probably would do so mainly if they had advanced awareness of a weakness.  I was quite wrong it seems.  This wrong conjecture moderated my purchases, but fortunately (it currently appears) a lot of the moderation was on the way down and I plowed a good bit in in the lower ranges.

Thanks for uploading the pics, and happy holidays!

Not sure if you mean 'now' on earth, or 'now' on this thread.  If the former...

Unix epoch time has been around for about 40 years.  It is simply the number of seconds since midnight January 1st 1970 GMT.

Because it is simple and means the same thing regardless of timezone, daylight savings, etc, etc, it is very popular in computer related engineering.

It is also the case that there is only one way to format an integer which is hugely useful in avoiding problems...and math on integers is also very straightforward.

If this game (or the ones preceding it) specified to use of Unix epoch time and gave a link to a converter, I bet there would be 95% fewer issues.  And if a tag is used as I described, the entire forum thread could be scanned and results published with several seconds of effort.

If I were running a game (and thus, the God of it) I would:

1)  Demand a tagged format such as I used above which would allow me, and probably about half of everyone else, to get a quick list of sorted results without wading through page after page on the forum, and

2) Demand UNIX time be used since it is widely understood, completely unambiguous, and easy for anyone to obtain for whatever timezone they like using something like this:

  http://www.epochconverter.com/

The winner would be chosen as a result of the most simple of arithmetic.  Period.  The chances of a tie (equidistant bets on either side) are so remote that I would happily pay each party in full if it happened.

I usually budget several hours of tearing my hair out whenever I have to do any time related coding.  Unix time makes most things vastly easier.

With some fiddling around, I could extend my hack above to automatically produce a human readable form from the stamp (but then questions arise about whether one is on BSD or Linux or has python installed (and where) and all that jazz...)

But I have no intention of running a game since I find them silly and only quasi-participated in this one as an experiment in various things.

Just FYI, I used the format above so that a quick list might be generated as so (for those on UNIX or MAC or with presumably cygwin on Windows.)

==========

wget --no-check-certificate -qO- "https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55275.0;all" | grep '###guess123###' | sed 's/&nbsp;//g' | sed 's/<br/ /g' | awk -F "###guess123###" '{print $2}' | awk '{print $1" "$2}' | sort -n | uniq

1330224457 tvbcof

==========

It's a bit of a hack and I would clean up the regular expressions and stuff if I was going to use it.