To Wikipedia folks if you are reading this:

I use Wikipedia a lot and would/could/should donate, but I've had a couple of beefs over the years.  These are mostly associated with your editors sometimes being caught displaying personal motives which conflict with the free flow of balanced information.  The situation of Israel, and with naked short selling come to mind.

All the same, I use the service enough to support it (in spite of the laughable pathetic look on the Jimmy's face which graces each page.)  I don't give two shits about tax right-offs and I want to foster the use of Bitcoin.  The BS about Bitcoin taking to much effort is just that.  So, if you accept Bitcoin, I'll pony up some charitable giving on your behalf.

It seems pretty clear to me that Tradehill has the technical side down well enough.  I concluded that prior to and early in my deciding to be a customer.

I have nothing much against most of the rules that I am aware of at this time.  And, as a customer of Tradehill, I am happy that you do follow them even when it inconveniences me.  My goals are better served by your doing so.

My main concern is what happens if the rules become "Don't do anything which has anything to do with Bitcoin.  Period."  I would consider this to be not a reasonable set of rules and would hope that they would be worked around.  It's a big world and I have every expectation that the service could be transformed and remain serviceable if there were both a will, and some forethought put into how it could be achieved.

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Your team's various appearances on Bruce's show went a long way toward my choosing Tradehill, and it is exactly the 'face to a name' principle that made it so for me.  I happen to be in the South Bay very often these days.  It would be cool to catch up with you sometime.

Bruce Wagner claims to have, and with a camera.  He never released the footage though as far as I can tell.

I was kind of looking forward to seeing if I recognized any parts of Shibuya.  I enjoyed my visit there in the mid 00's but doubt that I'll make it back in person due the the radioactive death shroud building up in Northern Japan.


Good luck to you.  Let us know how it goes.

I've always had to balance the wire transfer fees I paid with the amount of USD that I will trust my exchange with and it's always a tough call.

I theorized that there is an outside chance that BTC could be worth quite a bit to someone who needs them, and probably would be under certain plausible macro-economic scenarios.

One strategy is to double down on every price drop.  Then if there is a re-bound it need not be as high in order to at least break even.  I sort of fell into this strategy/trap.  Even though I started buying rather aggressively at $16.00, I only need about $4.00 to be back even.  And if by some miracle the Bitcoin price gets a to a certain point which is not terribly out of range of it's previous bubble high, I'm looking at going for a six-figure win.  Such a strategy takes some combination of alloy steel testicles and a decent disposable income.

Seems that the three little bears (Naggle, EdwardNN, and Proudhon) might be finding more bee stingers than honey in the valley of the Bitcoin market depth.

Another way to look at it is that as long as the network does not crack, Bitcoin is to useful as a currency for at least certain corner case uses.  Ergo, as awareness and utilization of it for such roles increase, so to will it's valuation against other currencies.

And this is not even considering the possibility for other currencies to undergo some sort of a crisis.  Or another round of bubble mania especially if the new users feel some pressure to get in.  An increasing price or threats of legislation could produce such motivation.

I doubt that that would be true.  In a crisis such as this, I suggest that people will be buying damn near anything just to unload their EURO's.  Additionally, there would almost certainly be capital controls and Bitcoin is probably second to none (litterally) in working around that sort of issue.

I personally expect that were the EURO to fail, the USD would be not far behind (though it could go through some very interesting and rapid-cycle gyrations.)  Since the whole thing seems like a distinct possibility to me, I have already taken steps to diversify and I choose BTC as a percentage of this diversification strategy and in part because I could imagine having control of some of them providing a certain amount of utility in a crisis situation.

Both are welcome 'thinks' to me.

What I would be looking for in a Bitcoin exchange (who had some of my money and some of my BTC) would be one who's org structure is such that pressure applied to certain of it's principals is unlikely to be effective at damaging the functionality of it's operations.  At least for an extended period of time.  This in addition to the more obvious and typical hopes that the principals have good integrity and all that.

No response is expected particularly.  I'm just sayin.

Might as well leave your money at Mt. Gox.  Looks to me like Tradehill may well overshoot, so you may get a chance to abritrage the other way.  The month long ask wall overhang at Tradehill has been chewed off big time lately and is just about gone, and I will bet that a lot of people have money in the pipeline on it's way to Tradehill.

http://bitcoinity.org/markets?currency=USD&exchange=tradehill

Thanks for the correction.  I could make some excuse like I was talking about the cross-over audiance, but won't (since it is not really true.)


LOL (really!)  Saying that Fox Biz is 'good like CNBC' has got to be a joke, right?

I noticed that awsome advertising and thought it interesting.  I wondered immediately if perhaps Napolitano or some of his minions were not an angel investor with Tradehill

If I had to be associated with Bruce Wagner or Faux News, I guess I would choose Faux.  Even though Faux News is more repulsive even than Bruce, it's simply better advertising.

I have very little hope that almost any of the poor mouth-breathers who watch Fox News will have what it takes to protect themselves amongst the jackels in our little community.  I just hope they do go to Tradehill/bitcoin.com and that Kenna and company do live up to my hopes of being solid individuals who will take an interest in doing some amount of education.

I'm a fairly happy customer of Tradehill and have done almost all of my Bitcoin related business with them, but I feel that it is a total shit-head move for them not to put a clear link to 'bitcoin.org' on their home page (unless they were asked not to for some reason.)  This even when the do actually have some service there, but especially now when the do not.

Final note since the last remnants of this act are evaporating before my eyes.

There was one interesting observation in that the entire wall (the remaining 6k or so of it anyway) moved to market and was purchased in one gulp.  Then it seemed to be distributed linearly across the a 50cent current ask-wall range.

In the last week, it seemed that something (possibly some of these funds) would sneak out of the trading range and catch whatever had accumulated in a broad trough between buying and asking.  This created price 'drop outs' which were ridiculously easy to capitalize on, and the breadth of the trough made it worthwhile to do so.

Just now, it seems like the last of this steep ask-wall is going really really fast.  Possibly the Euro conference, Keiser, and Fox News stuff is creating incentive for people with money at Tradehill to buy in.  I would expect Tradehill prices will rebound to Mt. Gox levels and possibly overshoot and be generally much more flexible for a while.

Well I'll be go'ed tah hell!!!

Early on in my analysis of Bitcoin, I wondered if it might be possible that some of the higher powered players (rich people, intel agencies, etc) would see in Bitcoin some of the potentials that I did.  I basically decided recently that they were not else they would have been actually propping up the system to keep it above where it has gone lately.  That would include such things as running highly interesting puff-pieces in the mainstream media and that sort of thing.  But now this!  So...maybe I'll re-open that hypothesis.

Another hypothesis I toyed with was whether it would be possible to take down BTC values so aggressively that a lot of the large 'early adopter' types and thieves would throw in the towel and cough up their stash.  I decided that that hypothesis is not believable either mostly because although I'm not well versed in market manipulation, it seems unlikely that it could be done so effectively.  I'm still seeking an explanation for my vastly wrong estimate about how low demand could get, but am more inclined to write off this mis-estimate to my own clouded analytical abilities than to an effective public perception campaign which I see little evidence of.

I'll step up to the plate and count myself among these.


Agreed.  I disagree with you politically on many fronts, evoorhees, and with a certain amount of your analysis (though I do agree strongly with other of your analysis and certain Libertarian philosophies.)  I always felt that you are genuine, earnest, thoughtful, and your stuff is worth reading for those reasons among others.  (e.g., the great news in the OP.  I've been paying attention to Keiser since the karmabanqueradio days and he and Stacy have had a big influence on my outlook...and investment decisions...)

A happy accident of fate...if one has 90% marketshare that is...

More seriously, there really are some legitimate reasons for Mt. Gox to take actions which may irritate you but which have nothing to do with potential insolvency (or theft.)  Some of them might be 'just business' directed toward their competition, and some of them could be related to presure from Mt Gox's own more mainstream competition.  There there is always the old adage about 'not ascribing to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.'

But who knows what the truth is (or truths are).  I guess we'll find out in the end.

Looks like I got out at 2.36 (almost ) last night.  But I got in again at $2.19 as I slept.  So I've got a block of coin to either play for another sell or sit on if we continue the rise.  And I'm going to be interested to see how much interest Keiser's new work pulls in (which means waiting until people figure out Bitcoin and fund some accounts.)

Currently the prices on Tradehill are much lower then on Mt. Gox.  This likely creates a lot of interest for people who would like to be buyers on Tradehill.  (Looks like I got another 100 BTC for $2.19 as I slept.)

I would suggest that it makes some business sense for Mt. Gox to avoid paying out in Paxum (which is shared between TH and GOX) until this differential is resolved.  When it is, there will no longer be the motive force for people to wish to cash out on Mt. Gox.  Most importantly, these people will not have gotten the 'in the habit' of using a competing platform.

Some users might get pissed of an leave, and some might decide to set up alternate accounts and get them primed in case this happens again (which seems to be almost a weekly occurrence to some extent), but for the most part people will forget all about things and go on with business as usual.  And 'business as usual' is a good thing for someone who has 90% marketshare.

I personally don't think there is much to worry about here.  There have been a lot of these 'forks'.  Most of them are obvious scams to make the early adopters rich.

I looked at Litecoin a few days ago.  It seems (to me) to be on the up-n-up and an honest attempt to solve some of the deficiencies of Bitcoin, but it also seemed to me as though it suffered even more severely from the scaling things that bothers me about Bitcoin.

My dream is that a lot of 'forks' (which I don't consider 'forks' in the strictest sense of the word) pop up and derive their strength from being backed by reserves from Bitcoin (aka what I would term the 'satoshi block-chain'.)  These could have additions like the potential for claw-back (if the recipient screwed you), a built in ratings system, etc, etc.  There are an endless number of interesting things one could do.

The point would be to both provide better alternatives for different kinds of end-use AND to strengthen Bitcoin by reducing the load and creating demand and the potential to deploy BTC in ways which are agreeable to the holder.  That is, by backing a currency which has goals that one believes in.

To me, the most compelling aspect of Bitcoin is the miracle that it is within fairly easy grasp of most people to run the full block-chain.  When that is no longer the case, I really have some concerns about the system.  I would hope that if it could serve primarily as a 'reserve currency', the life span of it's serviceability on normal hardware and networks could be significantly extended.
 

See the bottom of those dips?  Lots of those were me

It's been like taking candy from a baby to buy at the bottom of the wide trough and sell at the top.  But I seem to be running into competition of late, and the commissions take a bite, so it's hardly worth the time.  At least doing it manually.  I started writing a bot to do it when it was going on months ago, but got interested in other things and could not believe that the opportunity would pop up again.

I hope that it's long life pans out, of course, and the fact that it has held up as well as it has is promising, but I'm certainly not betting the house on things.

I have significant concern that if/when Bitcoin is forced to make the shift to 'super nodes' or whatever due to the load of maintaining accurate records for something as complex as an entire economy (vertically), it will fail for either technical or organizational reasons.

If the developers decide to insert various bells and whistles to overcome legitimate shortcomings in the system when it is employed for all potential uses, I can only see this aggravating whatever potential problems are already on the horizon.


I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'sovereign currencies pegged to Bitcoin.'

I see Bitcoin's only hope is for it to be both truly global, and completely divorced from any governmental sponsorship.  Global because otherwise national attacks will probably be successful (if they are are ratcheted up until they succeed.)  Divorced from governmental sponsorship because that will eventually corrupt anything as important as a monetary system (imho.)

I hope that Bitcoin remains completely and actively disassociated from any interaction or any involvement with any bodies of state (or corp/gov.)  Failing to do so will be a waste of time, or worse, I believe.  I hope that the community considers Bitcoin to be happy to be left alone, but willing to be a belligerent in asymmetrical warfare if that situation is foisted upon it.