That seems to me a bit like being thinnest kid at fat camp.

You da man!

I'm not sure what you are trying to mean by 'lack of implementation' (I suspect you are trying to glue random word together to be honest), but in fact it has held up remarkably well given the technical problems it seeks to address.  Even the some of the primary developers seem to be somewhat slack-jawed about that.  As long as that holds, I would anticipate a steady increase familiarity and in utilization for various things, and subsequent increase in demand.  If there are shocks to our existing mainstream monetary systems, I could see Bitcoin going into another rapidly increasing demand cycle.

Indeed.  History shows that wealth does get distributed periodically through one means or another.  I'm a Socialist very much for practical reasons associated with the frequency and manner in which the deed ends up getting done.

As fond as I am about your message generally, I cannot help but come away with the general perception that you call(ed) the bottom practically daily.  This makes it a somewhat hollow victory to have picked the circa 10/20 event.

OTOH, a lot of people have been calling for another (or continued) break below the 10/20 lows.  So far they have been not even close to correct.  I continue to anxiously wait to pick up another batch of coin.

If the (apparently very real) 20k BTC ask wall on Tradehill continues to exist and move sluggishly, it looks like I could pick up coin for a pretty reasonable price at my leisure.

I think you've hit the nail on the head.  Rich people will buy most of just about anything which pops up.  A fascinating aspect of  Bitcoin, for me, is that it is ultimately supported by users and they can withdraw that support much more practically than they could under a gold-backed system or one enforced by entrenched political apparatus.

My idea for a solution:

1) consider and treat BTC (and other currencies) as a solution for transferring value rather than holding it.

2) use BTC as a 'backing store' for an almost endless variety of cryptocurrencies which evolve and are adopted based on their usefulness to the end user.

Being the grand-daddy of cryptocurrencies with a strong existing block chain, a good history of security, and being 1/3 through it's development into maturity (once the time domain is switched to inflation), it is a natural choice as a backing store.

The value that BTC would have would be in lending support to alternate crytocurrencies, and the successful cryptocurrencies will be the ones which strike a good balance of reward to all of the users of the system as a whole...particularly the end-users.  The holders of BTC will be forced into competition with one another and the more 'altruistic' they are, the stronger their competitive edge will be.

As much as it pains me to admit it, that is a very good point.

Someone trying to snatch enough BTC to transact a couple of Krugerrands would impact the market, and possibly significantly so unless one were using Mt. Gox.  This is pretty lame, and some months ago I would not have thought it would be so so my estimates of a floor (and liquidity) have been way off.  Oh well.


I think one would be fool to either rule this out or to take it as a given.

I don't expect the exchanges to shut down without being forced to by the various arms of the corp/gov systems which mold the behavior of the peeps...or attempt to at least.  I am suspecting that it would be quite a challenge to shut down the system totally since it would require good coordination between a large proportion of the world's governments.

At that point I could imagine a pretty strong interest in having some BTC under one's control, particularly since a shut-down attempt is unlikely absent other kinds of monetary crisis.  It would be recognized immediately as an act of desperation.  In that scenario the value of BTC could shoot up much like the value of illegal drugs.  A big difference is that the kinds of people who are interested in pot often don't have a great deal of money.  Those who would be interested in BTC are likely to have a great deal of money.

I would council the powers that be that the best strategy to deal with Bitcoin and control it's potential would be to try to limit  the number of exchanges to a small number and obtain control of them.  Simultaneously obtain as much of the currency base as possible as quietly as possible, and tag and monitor the participants of the community to the highest degree possible.  It's all a matter dealing with emerging threats to address issues of national security.

Loosing a lot of money by buying BTC is probably about as damaging to a lot of relationships as being caught buying a pocket-pussy.

I think that buyers who have not planned ahead or get to anxious run out of money and that force tends to depress the prices into the weekends.  But not always.  I think it happened to some extent last weekend, and we saw evidence in that the exchange arbitrage fell apart, but it did not have the effect I had hoped for on spot price.  I'm hoping this will be a good weekend (for a down-leg) and if so, that I can end up playing it right.

Never.  I've had one or two people attempt to cheat me on e-bay, but have had no trouble getting my money back.


Not from a Bitcoin vendor, or at least one which did not have a long and stellar history.  The ethics of a high percentage of the people in the community are appalling to me, but this is not surprising when one thinks about it a little bit given the nature of the strengths of the solution.

I'll start to think about patronizing Bitcoin merchants when they start to think about sending my the item first then I pay when I receive it.

I would suspect that it will be a fairly long time before BTC is good for run-of-the-mill mail-order crap (absent an undesirable scenario where it is highly regulated.)  BTC strikes me as being pretty good for either paying periodically for services (e.g., a shell account) or for face-to-face transactions.  And not much more.

I didn't mean to (and did not) dog on your service specifically.  After having a peek at your site it seems like your prices are not totally out-of-line, though it is in fact the case that I can obtain the same items with less expense, more speed, and more safety at this time.  That is a simple fact of life even if the 'must use Bitcoin only for buying stuff right now' people don't want to face up to it.

I hope that your business succeeds and may in fact patronize it someday.  I have a bad feeling, though, that at about the time it is truly needed it will become unavailable.

Semi-unretract.  Looks like the amazing ask-wall on Tradehill may actually be for real, although I cannot see signs of it on the UI.  I think it may be for real, and currently set at $3.18 since there have been some fairly monster (for Tradehill) buys smacking into it and dying there.

If it is for real, the size, sign, and price are all very interesting, in addition to the fact that it happened on Tradehill.

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

Just to set the record straight, you mis-quoted me.

But I will chime in to point out that the (mis-quoted) text is exactly why I continue to feel that calls for Bitcoin to only be used for buying shit are misguided at this time.  I'm not going to be ripped off on trinkets just for the sake of 'supporting' the Bitcoin project, especially when the buyer takes on a hell of a lot of the risk when using Bitcoin relative to using something with a charge-back potential.  (I just got back from a pleasant transaction obtaining the material in question and payed a premium of around 13% which was exceptionally high because I wanted specialty items.  My risk of getting ripped off was near zero, and I got to evaluate the items before my money was taken.)

And I would posit that if it were not for 'hoarders', the current rate of inflation in Bitcoin would render it's value vastly less than what we see today.  There are, I feel, legitimate arguments for a much lower value of BTC being a good thing, but I hear next to nobody trying to make them.

You seem to have the same old simpleton understanding of banks relying on Grandma depositor's money for much of anything.  It makes enough intuitive sense that Joe Sixpack will buy it, so that is the story line which is pushed.  That's true to a tiny degree insofar as they (sometimes) have some capital requirements, but that is largely a quaint reminder of days gone by.  Banks primarily play around with debt (aka risk) in the OTC markets these days as evidenced by the notional value figures of the derivitive markets.  True, there are some pockets of 'hot money' value (pension liabilities, depositor funds, etc) which are particularly valuable poker chips.  These have already been lost so the only thing we have to look forward to now are how to break it to the losers (who didn't even know that they were playing) that there is nothing left.

I'm happy with my conception of how money works.  It has, to me, remarkable explanatory powers when it comes to providing solutions to the puzzling things that pop up.  As for being some sort of a 'puppet of the financial elite', I think I hardly qualify.  I've bent over backward to avoid sitting on USD for the last almost decade, and I don't play around with 'mainstream' financial instruments since I has zero confidence that the likes of Harvey Pitt, Mary Shiavo, or Tim Geithner to 'have my back'.  I laughed my ass off all the way through 2008, and have every confidence that I will do so again in 2012.

Can you just get a cheap shell account (with BTC) and do a socks proxy via SSH?  That is what I did when I was in Beijing.  I sort of assumed that the authorities were aware of my tunnel but probably wouldn't harass me since I was a foreigner.  I always wondered if it were relatively safe for a native to do that, or would it result in re-education camp or some such?

Thread is to long and tedious, but I'm betting that you end up being wrong, and possibly amazingly so.

I see Bitcoin mostly as a currency (means of transferring value) and not so much as a 'store of value' although given the inflationary aspects of Bitcoin, I would not rule out it serving reasonable well in that capacity.  One of the biggest draws of Bitcoin to me is that it offers the ability to more conveniently move value around.  Gold, OTOH, is a true store of value in my book, and a bigger interest of mine than is Bitcoin.  I got into gold earlier than you it sounds like, and unlike you, I'm not even close to bailing (which I will do in a heartbeat when if/when I sense that the time is right.)

I may part with an once or two of gold (or some silver) in trade for BTC, but only if/when the conditions are extremely favorable to me.  That most likely means finding someone who happens to have a lot of BTC and no reasonable way to convert it other than a face-to-face meeting.  Like if the exchanges lock up for instance.

First...and second...and third, etc, etc.  Any day now dude!

I thought I could trigger something by capitulating and making a purchase last night.  Usually that brings the price down nicely.  Still waiting.

Correct, and I should welcome it for several reasons.  But in reality I'd rather have some excitement even if it means losing money...adrenaline junky I suppose.

Retract.  I think it is just a mess-up in Tradehill's feed or Bitcoinity's charts or something.  Back to business as normal.  That is to say, boring these last few days.