From what I understand, Bear Sterns and Lehman were under significant attack in 2008 from naked short selling.  A rule did come down to cease and desist naked short selling for a time during the crisis (which is kind of funny because it never was legal.)

I was not aware of the regular short selling ban in parts of EU.  Dumb/Desperate (imho.)

http://www.youtube.com/user/writerjudd#p/u/18/xUKSU1qahgE

I only hope to get people to see that there are some legitimate advantages which PayPal (and pretty much all mainstream systems) which Bitcoin lacks.  I feel that if people do not appreciate these and take steps to address them, they will be disappointed in their efforts.

PayPal is way high on my shit-list and I was/am planning to dump them, but that is because of the Wikileaks thing.  As a payment platform for _buying_ trinkets, it's fine.  So, again, if that is what people are hoping to use Bitcoin to compete with, beware.


I'm not second-guessing Satoshi (but would not hesitate to if I felt so inclined.)  What I am doing is questioning the various interpretations of his work which I feel are, as often as not, peoples personal projections.


I hope to God that it will...I've got a raft of BTC at this time.  But the last thing I want in a monetary system is 'evolution'.  I want a fixed set of rules which do not change except only under the most extreme of circumstances.  In this case, only when there is a terminal threat to the core of the system.

I feel that a variety of tuned currencies which derive their value from Bitcoin could both do the heavy lifting of supporting entire economic zones (if it every became desirable to do), AND at the same time provide a lot of features that were left out of Bitcoin in the interest of making the system clean, reliable, and simple.  Win/win as far as I am concerned.

Did anyone say that 'investors' or 'manipulators' are 'cheating'?  If they did, I would disagree, and go so far as to say that they (or we) are probably the only reason the system is even where it is today.


I don't want to be to sacrilegious, and I am a huge fan of Bitcoin in it's current original form, but it is simply not a very good internet currency for buying trinkets.  This is largely due to the lack of claw-back protection unless one uses a very cumbersome and expensive escrow or something.

Of course Bitcoin and it's cash-like qualities sounds like the cat's pajamas to the likes of logansyrche (or whatever his name was.)  The guy was so stupid that I don't think he even realized there was anything wrong with taking someone's BTC and giving them nothing in return.  The trouble is that about half the people in the world are of his caliber or below.  Another fair fraction are Libertarians who seem to believe that it is a good and healthy thing to get screwed since that is the way markets develop or something.

Sorry, but as a consumer I'm not about to get screwed and it does not matter if its for $1.00 or $10,000.00.

Bitcoin has a great promise, and I think that there is some possibility that it will be realized, but it's not for exchanging trinkets.  At least not directly.  I sometimes wonder if Satoshi didn't design Bitcoin to be just barely usable enough to keep the network going on the backs of dead-enders who cling to some Utopian vision where they sit on their asses and get people to send them Bitcoin until they cannot produce results (through 'no fault of their own', giving them a legitimate reason default.)

Looks like I've made around 50 purchases on e-bay, and 4 or 5 of them have not gone through because the seller did not have the goods after all.  In at least one case, I had to get PayPal to retrieve my money.  I'll bet that had that not been an option it would get screwed by about 25% of the counterparties.  (Actually, I bet that e-bay would not be able to stay in business.)  I acknowledge that PayPal takes an unpleasant bit out of transactions, but from my perspective as a buyer, it is worth it.

What Bitcoin could do, and if it survives probably will end up doing, would be to provide backing value to currency systems which share it's distributed nature and some of the other niceties, but go farther to address some of the deficiencies that the 'real' Bitcoin has in terms of usability.

You probably don't have much to worry about from 401k folks (like myself) but were I in your situation, I would be significantly concerned about someone with actual money playing around in the market for shits and giggles.  The entire Bitcoin economy is tiny.  Even if you were well protected with stop loss (vs. being crouched over your keyboard) you may still end up wiped out since orders do not get filled at predictable (or desirable) prices in a run.  We've already seen that happen to a small extent in even in our relatively stable and uninteresting little embryonic economy as I recall (from people having bitched about it.)  Then there is also the issue that Bitcoinica and Mt. Gox may not be the best of friends, and Bitcoinica seems to have a relationship only with that particular exchange.

I found various info about using Forex, but on platforms that were orders of magnitude more sophisticated than Bitcoinica.  They would have graphical markers and histories which would make some of the question marks on Bitcoinica's platform fairly clear.


Ya, most of my losses were associated with trying to get some positive cash balance in order to avoid a negative one.  After digging around in the historic mail on the site, I did find that this was a common question.  Seems that Bitcoinica can convert BTC to USD in order to zero a balance, but cannot (or will not) go to a positive balance (but will happily pocket a lot of spread if people try.)  Basically it seems that it is not their business model to 'act as an exchange'.  I've no idea if Bitcoinica's behavior in this arena would be obvious by knowing the details of other Forex platforms or not since I've not used any others.

If you end up taking it upon yourself to produce some usable documentation, I'd love to read it out of general interest but as I said, I don't have much need for Bitcoinica at this time.  It seems like a good tool for undercapitalized gamblers however.

But would not very large text and a lot of extra whitespace padding help that?  Inquiring minds want to know?





Seems like doing so could serve an valid goal (in the process if irritating users.)

I wish I had a funny name, but now it would be just sock puppetry I'm afraid.

The last time it happened (at least the off-line and frozen funds part of the equation), it was actually, and surpisingly, quite the snoozer.

I had been planning to try to clean up if/when Mt. Gox cashed out, but have given up on that and come to the conclusion that they are strong and among 'th good guys' which is where they stand in my book at this time.


I had not seen that much from Nagle and certain of the other more vocal 'Bitcoin is finished' crowd.  I figured they finally went ahead and did their buy-ins near the $2.00 range which left just a few of their ilk empty handed and howling for the $1.xx which may never come.

It could be that if you can figure out how to short within 5 minutes, then trading is not for you.  IIRC, Z let slip that pretty much all of the shorts were cleaned out on the 80% rise a month ago.

I would not short unless I spent another 5 minutes figuring out how to put in effective stop loss.  In fact, that was the first thing I did on Bitcoinica. It worked exactly like I thought it should.

I did not accuse Bitcoinica relying on customer ignorance for their profits, and actually do not believe that that is the case.

My point was that although the 'soccer' comments got some people all giggly, they really don't make a lot of sense.

If Bitcoinica's business model is based on their customers not knowing how to use the platform, then yes, it would be absurd and counterproductive to spend effort on training and documentation.

I choose Tradehill in part because they were, I thought, based primarily in Chile and specifically not in the US.  Looking at their info now, I see no sign of Chile so who knows what the status is.  I figured that no matter where they operated they could be forced out of business by the various financial institutions, but in certain regions they may be a little more isolated from political pressure and less likely to cough up whatever personalized information about me might be requested.

One of the reasons that I am not completely panicking about Bitcoin seeming for all intents and purposes to be in it's death rattle is that it is less likely to be attracting the attentions of it's potential competition.  This gives it more time to strengthen and develop the necessary support infrastructure.  I do hope that the time is being used wisely.

@trogdorjw73

I'm struggling to interpreted things as well.  I guess if I'd played around with Forex, the stuff would be obvious.  Even futures would probably help, but I've done neither.  Here are some details/observations which may or may not help shed light on things.

I actually decided that I did not need Bitcoinica since I have both the USD and BTC to fund my own gambling and pocket the spread.  Additionally, operations on the exchanges are much faster, cheaper, and more intuitive.  Futures markets would probably be more useful for real business with a legitimate need to hedge I would think.  But I left a few BTC in in order to piss them away on leverage.

I've found that while the spread numbers are updated continuousness, the rest of the details are not.  And sometimes re-loads are particularly slow.  I think that some of my head-scratching was associated with not waiting long enough for things to update.

I have always been under the impression that one wants to 'buy low and sell high' to end up making money.  This seems to be either wrong on Bitcoinica/Forex, or I am looking at things from the wrong perspective about who, exactly, is buying and who is selling.

Wishing to 'go long', I put in a 'limit sell' for a higher price than market.  I thought that what would happen would be that Bitcoinica would 'buy' my order at current market price, then sell it if/when it reached my target price.  What seemed to happen was basically nothing.  After the market rose to my target price, it was still on the 'order' books.  So I tried to get rid of it.  That seemed to switch it to a 'position', and nothing I could do could get rid of it.  Later, when the price rose some more, I was able to 'liquidate' it.

My various attempts to get rid of the order or liquidate the possition were not successful in doing that, but lost me a fair amount of money (as a percentage of my meager funding) in a hurry while trying.  I guess that was the 'spread' kicking  in.

So, I thought I would try again.  This time I accidentally put in a 'limit buy' for a much higher price.  This was basically an accident to do a 'buy' rather than a 'sell', but in this case the 'order' turned into a 'position' immediately.  The market price has been going higher, and my p/l is green and rising.  Dunno what will happen if/when I hit my target price (North of $3.00) but I'll try to update this post if it does.

Dude!  You don't need to pull stuff out of your ass when it is easy to look up.  Just look at the 'mix' on bitcoinity.org at 30 days.  You'll see the current pattern is, if anything, more predictable than unusual.

No problem that I'm aware of (except that they did not process my wire deposit request on schedule again.)  I've been trading all day with not problems.

The answer is rather obvious.  It 'problem' comes and goes and has been doing so for weeks (if not months) which anyone paying attention would know.  There is simply not enough people with funds in Tradehill who are willing to buy at the prices that people are on Mt. Gox.  There has been a much higher supply on Tradehill for at least a few weeks (possibly the haul from a theft) and it takes a lot of interest to dig through it.  The handful of people doing arbitrage burnt out and need time to replenish their funds.  You don't have to make this a harder problem than it is.

Happy to do it ElectricM.

I just got done drawing down my saving account by about half of what it had been.  Again.  Mostly to non-Bitcoin things, but another fraction of that will be to Bitcoin and would be on it's way already if Tradehill would live up to their documented timings (they've failed me again.)

For those who might be interested (possibly pre-maturely and possibly not...):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass-Steagal

http://problembanklist.com/bank-of-america-derivatives-timebomb-shows-system-is-corrupt-to-the-core-0426/

and of course the recent MF Global fiasco.  Now some may argue that the (non-)segregated customer commodities accounts are different than FDIC accounts, but not very long ago it could have been argued that the CME member institution accounts also were bullet-proof safe on the strength of the CME's statements.

http://www.bi-me.com/main.php?id=55360&t=1&c=35&cg=4&mset=1011

In any event, it seems to me that BofA would not be taking their actions to co-mingle their derivatives with FDIC accounts unless they were planning a cash-out.  And I expect that if BofA accounts require FDIC service, there is almost certain to be a bank holiday to sort out the mess (or I should say, divy up the losses by appropriating the savings of almost everyone and/or inflating things away to the necessary degree.)

I hope these things don't come to pass, but they seem possibly enough to me to wish to limit my exposure and diversify into assets which are less juicy targets than numbers of the books of financial institutions.

I'm surprised that there are not more people like me and therefor that Bitcoin and other things are not in higher demand because of it.  Oh well.
A studied this photography closely when I was a kid (it's a bank run in Shanghai) and it probably is responsible for my being a paranoid financial wacko now in my later years.  Someone said once that history may not always repeat, but it very often rhymes.

Looks like Bitcoinity has adapted to the new Mt. Gox API and the price lines are back.  Thanks for that Comboy!

The depth charts are still highly messed up for Mt. Gox.  I'm surmising that they need to be 're-based' or something.

I do find the data for Tradehill to be seemingly, and surprisingly, quite accurate (and very helpful in deciding various trading actions.)

I think that that is true, Netrin, (your openness in posting) and in fact is a big factor in my continuing to hold hope for another dip.  In spite of being pretty dubious about Elliot wave stuff I've been holding funds earmarked for the $1.xx possibility.  About 1/3 of them was what I dumped this morning before heading out for Thanksgiving dinner.

I had had a buy in for 15 or 20 cents below market to catch another dip, but they had not happened for a long time.  Just minutes after I pulled it and made a purchase at market, there's another dip.  Oh well.  It's not like it's a great deal of money or anything...just the principle I guess.

One problem is that purchasing BTC is a little bit addictive to me.

The other problem is that I have USD coming in bi-weekly, and simply want to be as low on any form of paper as possible at this time (and that certainly includes USD.)

I don't want to hold any more rental property than I have because I am of the belief that people who sit around collecting other people's rent checks will be loathed and mistaken for the 1% (often rightly so.)  Even if such people avoid being strung up old school like, I am betting that various extra taxes and fees will eventually be imposed.  And in fact I would like to see such a thing happen and believe that it is fair and the right thing for having a more fair society...but I don't hold that belief strongly enough to volunteer

Another option is PM's, but since that has been the only idea I've had for almost a decade now, I'm already heavier than I want to be here.

So, inevitably, every month or so acquiring 'just one more batch' of Bitcoin suddenly makes enough sense to me that I wander down to the bank and fill out the wire paperwork again.  In spite of being very deeply in the red on it at this time.  I actually really do feel a bit like a junkie every time I head down to the bank to do another wire.

You're a bigger man then most then and win/lose/draw, you have some respect from me for it.  If you are not planning to pop up with a yarn about how you were also cleverly hedged and made a bundle should some other scenario transpire that is.

In kind, I'll admit to having just made another relatively small purchase at market (on Tradehill.)  This mainly because I am shooting for another round number for deep storage, and I'll be gone most of the day.  The ask-face is huge there, and I should be able to pick up coins for this price for some time, but I fear that a large percentage of the asks are controlled by one person who may move things.  Also, I was playing the drop-outs on Tradehill over the last week and made a little bit.

I imagine that a lot of people don't want to get left behind and are at least hedging in.

But why would one want to respond to your query?  I mean if you wait until after the fact, you can come back on these forum boards and brag about what a genius you are no matter what happens.