###guess123###  1330224457  tvbcof

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'offshoregenius77' hitting zhoutong pretty hard (or trying to) in the first seconds of round #1.  Who's little sock puppet are you OSG77?  Sounds like a fun topic for a poll.

To the limited extent that I understand things, I'm all for (or at least, not against) high frequency trading, but front-running is an entirely different matter.

One of the things I would be looking for in an exchange is that they allow orders to match before printing them to tape.  I sense that exchanges are sensitive about the time it takes for orders to be withdrawn and their book engines are optimized for this, but (IMHO) it would be at least negligent to provide actionable information on in-the-money buys in time for sells to be retracted (or vice versa).

Sent 21 BTC and kept a token amount of cash and BTC in the account.  I sent it straight from Bitcoinica.  It would be cool to see the pics.


I guess I am a little surprised to  hear that Bitcoinica is being used for something besides straight-up gambling, but probably should not be.  Seems off hand like you would have to keep a huge amount on reserve if you are leveraged 7:1, and in that case another part of the equation that becomes a factor is Bitcoinica's solvency or more generally it's ability to operate.  But I am not an expert.

Heh.  I tried to max out my leverage at about 2.2, but it was only about 2.3 when I got something to stick, and I didn't get that close to my max (set at 5:1) I don't think.  At around 3.2 I liquidated,  then put it back in using the maximum non-greyed button which was new.  Still not sure what the leverage was.  So I pulled a mini-Goat I guess, and made out reasonably well.

I was just trying to lose my last 8 BTC (having removed most after deciding to not mess around with Bitcoinica) and now I've got a margin balance of around $100.  I was planning to try one more time to lose it but I'm pretty sure that the third time will be a charm.  I'd rather see it go to something like, say, and orphanage then to a more shrewed trader on Bitcoinica than I.  You still hooked up to broker such a thing?  Got an addy?

Oh ya, I'm guessing that the fee for going BTC<->USD would be associated with the spread.  I've lost various money trying to go from BTC -> USD (unsuccessfully) when I thought that it was a desirable thing to do, but I did not try very hard to understand exactly where the money went quantitatively.  Qualitatively I assume it went into Zhou Tong's pocket.

'fair' or not, in my mind...

'the_joint' used to be the guy who had some rather interesting comments on some DEA guy in some classroom.

'the_joint' is now the guy who got all whiny, in public no less, about something trivial and silly and which he was mainly wrong about in part because he has an East Coast centric view of planet Earth (or simply neglects to visualize such a construct as a planet Earth.)

I've spent a fair amount of time as a broke-ass student and I an quite confident that it would never have occurred to me to do anything but chuckle about a loss such as this one were I in the_joint's situation so I have very little sympathy.  Sorry.

I am hopeful about this as well since I will tank up again if it happens.

I have significant funds which did not get employed because we never got to sub-$2.00 levels.  The recent mini-rally here and continued lack of system defects adds to the confidence I have in the base value of the system so I would likely do another relatively large buy-in in the mid $2.00 range.

Unlike a lot of more clever traders, I have never liquidated any of my holdings and have no plan of doing so.  I've got the cojones to double-down on a decline, but not to unload.  I guess that is because I am bullish, or at least very hopeful, about the long term potential of the system.

I suppose another factor is that I would have to trust an exchange with more money than I wish to in order to be a big-time trader even if I did have confidence that I could accurately time the cycles.  And yet another factor is that I have chronic paranoia that the exchanges will be shut down and it will become much more cumbersome, dangerous, and protracted to buy in in a modest way.

By 'pledge' I mean simply leaving a certain BTC value associated with a certain key-pair (for instance.)  As long as that remains the case, the value is 'pledged'.

A key element of my vision here would be that BTC backers would not wish to destroy the alternate (break their pledge) because they are receiving some benefit and/or it is cumbersome or costly to do.  Nor would the backers want it to be destroyed so the alternate would be designed such that users would elect to use it over other alternatives.  This provides an engine driving evolution toward currency solutions which work best for everyone.

Now there are a lot of questions in the design of an alternate chain not the least of them being how and if to arrange convertibility to BTC, and there are a range of possibilities here.  Again, though, I envision them having no impact on Bitcoin itself.

== Site Reads ==
Bitcoinity.org

Current version is crappy.

I don't want you to associate bitcoinity with crappy (too late?)

Coming back soon with updates.
=============

Until the last few days when the numbers became largely wrong, your 'crappy' version was still much more useful to me than anything else out there.  The amount of data you managed to squeeze onto the thing especially with multiple trading houses overlaid, and the performance and usability was really impressive to me.

I sense that to some extent you were doing continuous tracking computations.  While this could lead to compounding errors when the feeds are spotty, it also, I sense, lends itself to more useful and powerful results and performance.  If this is what you are doing, I might suggest a series of otherwise identical sub-sites with the data re-based at different times and frequencies.

I, for one, will be looking forward to anything else you might come up with going forward.

Your suggestion scales best.  Needed because I've now zhoudrupled my money.

I'll re-iterate that a monkey could do OK on Bitcoinica if they guess right.  I'll take a breather to see if things retract a bit, then try yet again to loose it all.

I see exactly what you describe.

I blame myself because I have not yet contributed to the beer fund as I promised.

Actually, I have seen such artifacts previously in the many hours I've spent staring at comboy's charts over the last half a year, but never to the extent that they appear currently.  The seem to correspond to periods of high volatility, and seemed to be limited to MtGox.  I thought maybe Gox had a fucked up NTP setup or something earlier, but I'm leaning more toward a bug in comboy's code these days and it showing up on the Gox charts mainly because MtGox tends to have higher volatility.

My conception is completely independant chains.  Informally (from the standpoint of Bitcoin) BTC value would be pledged to an alternate chain.  The alternate chain could verify the pledge in order to valitate it's own value, but Bitcoin proper would not know or care about it at all.

What I would hope would happen would be that a holder of Bitcoin would volentarily support alternate chains of their choice (plegde and not retract BTC), and probably in part because they wish to utilize value on one alternate chain or another.  A very big part of why such a scheme appeals to me is that it might allow Bitcoin to scale to support economies which are at best cumbersome to support with Bitcoin proper.  And, as I say, provide a better solution for a given marketplace.

The nicety of merged mining to me (and in my understanding of the term) would be that one need not choose between supporting Bitcoin or some other chain.  The overhead of supporting many would not be cost linear.

As I recall, he or someone at Tradehill had mentioned it as a possibility a long time ago, but also that they were some distance away from it and that it would require careful studies by proficient actuaries.  It's probably on that intro thread of there's (but I'm to lazy to look.)

From my perspective, I would shy away from an exchange who also did leveraged futures-type operations, and vice-versa.  I see more bad reasons than good ones to double-duty these two functions, and as a customer who had choices, I would almost certainly do these two types of trading with different houses.

---

On a different tangent, Joel, do you remember the guy who mentioned that 'merged mining' could be an alternative to extensions (and further script complexity and what-not) in the basic Bitcoin solution?  Or is that individual reading this note?

Unfortunately the discussion on this was brief, but it sounded to me like he was considering entirely independent block chains (possibly) backed by BTC.  Such a solution has great appeal to me since it seems to me that it would both strengthen and simplify Bitcoin proper while providing enhancements which could be of significant value.  (Another of these I though of, in addition to a 'decaying claw-back potential', was a built-in voting system where holders of the currency could vote on monetary policy with the results being tamper-proof.)

I would doubt it and cannot visualize it ('all' being a very broad term.)

I could see Bitcoin being mainly a way of transferring value across international borders in a relatively reliable and autonomous manner.  That is a sharp tool to have, but the major problem remains of how to get control of BTC in the first place.  First movers (into almost anything but assets under national control) will have a big advantage.  Then Bitcoin could provide a mechanism which is helpful in allowing the value of these things to migrate across borders.

Not answering your question, but...

'capital controls' are, I suspect, something which is going to do two things for Bitcoin:

 1) attract a significant interest from people who have some money.

 2) 'legitimize' Bitcoin's reputation.

I'll expand on #2 since I think it may be quite important.  As long as Bitcoin can be painted as being used by gamblers, druggies, scamers, etc, it is relatively easy manipulate public opinion about it (the the extent that it is even known of.)  Most 'normal' people will quite rationally consider Bitcoin to be a dark thing, and at least tacitly support any efforts that the authorities my take against the system.

OTOH, almost everyone is going to be able to relate to a countries citizens trying to protect their own savings against the backdrop of draconian capital control measures and wealth appropriation.  If Bitcoin is used for this purpose, and if such use of Bitcoin becomes more well known, it has the potential to be a very significant and positive 'PR' ramifications for the system.

I have to say that I am delighted to find that you can be wrong given your unbelievable series of high precision wins and prediction for a long term decline.  I hope that you are simply very good at short term market prediction and suck at secular market calls.  But, as always, I remain prepared for any eventuality...emotionally and monetarily at least.

Of course he 'said' that.  It means nothing.

I personally am a greedy SOB who wants as many BTC as I can get for as cheap as I can get them.  If I were 1) not troubled by being dishonest, and 2) vain enough to think I could make a difference, I would have been sowing FUD at double speed...prior to when I bought in of course.

I have some dim recollection of him saying something like he did his buy-in at around $2.20.

I could be totally wrong, or thinking of a different person.  Whoever it was (if anyone) appears at present to have 'done good.'  I cannot say that I did since I had been grabbing at the falling knife for half a year now.  But the money I was putting in down in that range went farther, so break-even is coming into focus lately in spite of my relatively poor trading performance and strategy.

Really?  It seems just the opposite to me.  BTC are completely fungible.  The insurer would simply needs to buy them in...or mine them.  It would only be impossible to insure, say, 22x10^6 BTC.

It might be quite expensive to insure high quantities since the actuaries would need to consider the cost of buying them in.  I, for instance, can be shaken from my position by an offer which in excess of 'parity'.  'parity' to me is roughly 1kg of gold per BTC which makes the math easier