Never mind on the question (about Bitcoinica...but I'm still interested in the address...)  After reading some of the material, I see the answer.

My main interest was in the stop loss to give me greater comfort in strategies on other exchanges.  But the spreads are to high.  Since I never had any interest in using margin and can self fund 100%, it seems that I am much better off writing a simple bot for this purpose.

Spending a little time and a few buck playing around with Bitcoinica was well worth it in helping me understand the mechanics of things.

In more or less the same way can electricity be a good medium of exchange of energy while being a shitty way to store it.


Evolve beyond thinking of paper price-tags hanging off of trinkets, and hold the currency for only as long as needed for a transaction.


I doubt that it can, but I don't believe that that is a show-stopper for a lot of things.

Firstly I don't consider such a thing to be 'competing' with Bitcoin at all.  Pretty much just the opposite in several ways.  1) by being backed at least in part by BTC, Bitcoin and the sub-systems which are backed by it would support one another.  2) it would lighten the load of a zillion little transactions for skittles and whatever.

Secondly, I don't really give a fig about what happens to the first coins and early adopters and such so I have not thought about that very much.  If the value of the currency is derived at least in part by Bitcoin backing, and especially if different inflationary properties are desired, it might not even make that much sense to issue coins on mined blocks.  Something would have to induce securing of course.  Possibly the reward would come out of the BTC backing pool.  Or be driven as a side effect of transactions somehow.

Bitcoin is indeed a pleasure to use to transfer value around.  My experience to date is that it just works.  Early on when I was buying Bitcoin, I got my BTC right away with zero hassles, but had to spend the next several days trying to get money to the poor guy trying to use PayPal.  I ended up taking a chance and loaning him twenty bucks so he could close one account and use a different one.  (And yes, he did pay me back.)

That said...I don't think Bitcoin will every be terribly successful in the real world for large classes of use cases without some sort of claw-back.

As a consumer, I want the ability to make someone's life miserable if they screw me over or at the very least make sure that they get nothing from doing so, and I would happily suffer a loss of time and money to make that happen.  I might capitulate in some special cases and use something like Bitcoin or cash, but I will prefer PayPal or Visa when I have the option.  And I am a giant Bitcoin fan even.

I continue to believe that Bitcoin would be most useful as a backing store for crypto-currency variants which include provisions for things that users may wish to have, and as a consumer, claw-back is high on that list for me.  I think that a nice user currency design would combine claw-backs, currency securing work, and a user-ratings system built right into the currency.

Listened to it.  Nicely done Roger.

Wasn't it about a month ago that BTC value rose 80% in a couple of weeks?  I would suspect that more and more people who are gambling types will be shifting their bets something like that happening again.  Far from being a big surprise that it might be happening, I figured that most everyone was just questioning when.

I'll take an active interest in elaborating on what an interesting, unique, powerful, and potentially game-changing system Bitcoin is.

Also in mentioning the preponderance of shitheads in the community...in case it is not immediately obvious.  When the initial awe of the system wears off it is not hard to understand why this state of affairs exists.

This is a cyclically stable solution when interspersed with various jubilees, pogroms, and the like.

I could see an argument that such a system provide the highest percentage of 'good times' in that life is generally more enjoyable in a rising economy, so if one has a saw-tooth pattern with very steep leading edges, that can be a good thing.

Although the gradual ascents phases represent periods of time when the majority are loosing their wealth to the wealthy, the wealth make life tolerable for peeps in order to facilitate the wealth transfer and get the peeps excited about various projects...like wars and such.


Or it could be that government is such a mess in order to make it hard to come up with alternatives...

The tips are helpful and highly appreciated.  Enough so that I'd send yo Libertarian ass a BTC if you mention what kind of a special address starts with a '9' char.  I couldn't figure it out with a cursory bit of searching.

QQ:  Is it undoable (and unnecessary) to convert some of the BTC I put in into USD?  Is it the norm for someone who deals exclusively with BTC to just let Bitcoinica settle negative USD balances (from losses) to zero?

I have accrued some losses in simply trying several attempts to sell BTC in order to have some USD balance in case I needed it...frick'n spreads take a bite!   I seem to dimly remember something about 'Bitcoinica is not a trading house' or something like that and I am now wondering if that is what they were talking about.

Pffft.  Freeloaders in the overwhelmingly Libertarian Bitcoin community?  Who could have imagined?

Well that's probably why you are not a manipulator.  Someone who gets into the position to be one probably didn't get that way by wasting their time on things such as these forums.

The real market participants are surely keenly interested in the disposition of their counterparts, but they are unlikely to glean any useful information here.

IIRC, the bid wall vanished for some time yesterday and the price rallied 5% or so.

The walls are just in place to help sweep up whatever lint is blowing around.

My take is that we have a small integer number of market participants only, and they are playing against one another...those of us who are not putting multi-K BTC block on the table are increasingly irrelevant.  That was plain to see in the latter half of yesterday.

I also doubt very seriously that the real market participants pay any attention whatsoever to what a few yahoos (myself very much included) write on these boards.  This aspect of the data is probably not even solid enough to get a feel for what lint is blowing around.

I finally decided that if I continue to play around with Bitcoin trading, even if it is just for accumulation, I should learn to leverage some of the features of Bitcoinica.  It is hard not to be impressed by the professionalism and skill displayed by Zhoutong over these last few months so while I will as with any other Bitcoin outfit trust them with as little as possible, I am confident enough to have an account and possibly a fair amount of value in it on a transient basis.

I played around with stop orders and lost close to the precise amount of money I expected to...around two cents

Several things of note:

I was under the impression that I needed an Mt. Gox account for some reason.  Something about redemption codes or some such.  Not having been an Mt. Gox customer (again until last night) I did not really understand what they were and didn't feel like trying to.  But it seems that I had a misconception about the necessity of having an Mt. Gox account.  It seems like I can both add and withdraw BTC to arbitrary addresses though I have only tried the former as I write this.

I seem to have been 'blessed' with 5:1 margin unless I am reading the UI wrong.  I actually think that it is good practice to start people out with something lower if it is easy to set it to whatever the customer wishes.  (If as a customer, I wish to be suicidal and can do so without risk to Bitcoinica, so be it.)  In order to thwart those who would game the Bitcoinica user base, a good policy might even be to set the margin ratio randomly.

I did not feel comported by several pieces of text that I found:

  "Why not place an order now?"

  "If you just want to make some quick bucks in the hot market, Bitcoinica is definitely for you!"

  "What are you waiting for?"

I think that the Bitcoin economy needs a professional no-bullshit platform in order to have a hope being a usable economy (because it is natively volatile and unstable as a currency at this time) and Bitcoinica has some real potential to take an unassailable lead here.  I guess that is why the text I have mentioned bothers me personally just a bit.  But I'm no marketing guru.

I'm not trying to 'profit' per-se (though it would not break my heart to do so) but I choose a radio button anyway.

At the end of the day, I am trying to balance out the wealth I have between a number of things which I anticipate could be of value under a variety of scenarios.  BTC is one of these and my main goal at this time is to get a certain percentage of my 'net worth' into them.  Fiat is the one thing that keeps coming in by virtue of having a job, so inevitably and periodically I am pumping USD into other things.

I also happen to be drawn to Bitcoin for the potential that it may have to play a part in the betterment of society generally and would be happy to take a temporary or permanent loss if it contributes to Bitcoin living up to that potential.

All of your points are valid as are most others made on this thead.  But this one really stands out in my mind.  There were many things which induced me to finally start figuring out Bitcoin, but this one was possibly the biggest.

I would have thought that this feature in and of itself would have launched BTC values to well in excess of the $30/BTC bubble with no where near the correction we've seen.  In fact, I did think that.  I was wrong and am sitting on a sizable loss in USD terms because of that.

I guess I am about the only person in America who does not believe that the full body scanners popping up like mushrooms are necessarily there to look for bombs.  I do buy into the idea that these scanners exist to identify 'terrorists', but only because the word 'terrorism' can be applied to almost any activity, and most certainly to activities involving monetary issues.

I cannot recall who to credit for this bit of wisdom, but some observant person once stated:

  "The vagueness of the term 'war on terror' is not a bug; it's a feature."

I'm not sure what is more difficult to believe:

1) It took you this long to figure it out, or

2) you have enough outrage to start several thread per day about something which you would do yourself....and publicly wet yourself over your own cleverness about it to boot.

On the plus side, I would say that the kind of people that you might lasso in would tend to be among the most capable of looking out for themselves in the Wild West that is the Bitcoin world at this time.

On the minus side, the higher the percentage of tax cheats and so on that compose the Bitcoin community, the easier it will be to make the shit which is thrown at it stick.

On balance I think that the project would be better served by not becoming to much more Libertarian heavy, but I could be wrong so I do wish you the best of luck.

Yes.   I don't care why it is volatile.  The fact that it is makes it so that a person who is not interested in speculating needs to hold BTC only as long as they need to to perform a transaction.  e.g., a few minutes to a few hours.

So happens that a higher price would likely lead to less volatility since the bar would be higher for those who are able to move markets around, but that is beside the point.


I said nothing about changing the reward structure.  I like it fine where it is personally.  The economy is simply not big enough to warrant the kinds of values we need to see in order to have a stable currency.  Sad day.  We'll either get there or we won't.  If we do, I suspect that it will have more to do with a failure in other systems than success in this one.

To be useful as a currency, BTC needs to be up closer to $100/BTC if it has any sort of volatility.  The reason is that it needs to be obtained shortly before it is needed and gotten rid of quickly after the transaction.  Either that, or pay someone like Bitcoinica a lot to hedge.  When the price is low as it is right now, attempting to acquire or dump BTC for one silly little transaction moves the markets noticeably.  If volatility increased to the point where this was not the case (at the current prices), then most of the value of the whole system would be sucked up by the exchanges over a fairly short period of time.

Currently Bitcoin is being used mainly as the only thing it is good for.  An entertaining novelty and study.  All my opinion, of course.