For going into the red trying to break Bitcoinica, or for DOSing the withdraw machinery with a shell script?

Zhoutong seems to have the patience of a saint.

Seems like one needs to have a pretty broad 'personal tolerance' zone these days else someone (or coalition) is likely to pop you and eat your lunch.  I doubt that I would play this market even if I _did_ know what I was doing.  But knock yourselves out.  I sincerely hope that somehow the price takes at least one more giant hit so I can top off my tank.

Not at all (though some may.)  Different people get greedy about different things.


In my opinion, the best thing that could happen for Bitcoin is that it lays low and remains off the radar until such time as it is actually needed.  I doubt that it will ever die of old age since it is to interesting to to many geeks.  Whether corpgov could do the deed I am not sure.  I actually doubt that they could at this time.  It also could get a terminal zero-day sickness, or be hit from within by development sabotage or splintering.

Was toying with a %100 increase, so ya, not bad.  Certainly enough for me to feel OK about putting in another largish chunk of fiat if we are lucky enough to get into the sub-$2 range.

An alternate projection is that over time people with different means and agendas will supplant, as primary holders of the Bitcoin currency base, those who are impressed by a stack of fiat bills and pre-occupied by thoughts of the trinkets that that stack represents.  It will be much harder to shake these people out.

As long as it is qualified with a set point in time, I suppose it is.

I think that Bitcoin might be as good an opportunity as any to get people using scientific notation.  That could be shortened to something like:

    ' 20 neg-threes'   (e.g., 20E-03, 20x10^-3)

About the price of a decent car maybe.  Really just pocket change to a lot of people.  If a single person in the proverbial '1%' took a serious interest in Bitcoin we could see moves like this quite regularly.  And it is likely that such an individual would retain the services of a trader who understood the market and was able to move gracefully in it.

We might be in one of those time periods when people should not be putting up bids or asks that they do not feel pretty compfortable making.  Unless they have a personal relationship with the owners of the exchange at least.

I think that at this time, a good percent of the people who have the number of BTC that I would want are perhaps not the kind of people I would wish to spend a lot of time hanging out with.  I'd just as soon pass on being the target of a 'three-pronged attack', for instance.

Hmmm...it would be quite interesting if this formed some sort of a nuclease of a system whereby value was held as PM's where transactions within the economy were performed with Bitcoin.  In other words, Bitcoin is backed by PM's and is used mainly as a transfer and accounting tool (what I consider to be a 'currency') rather than a store of value in and of itself.

I better go read the article now...

...and...I've had a long-term dream of Mt. Gox 'crashing the train' and increasing the value of my holdings greatly.  It would have been quite something if they'd used this code to do any big internal moves like their famous 414141 one or whatever it was.

Damn.  A quick peek at bitcoincharts and back-of-the-envelope calc after my above note lead me to believe that they could make it back in a week.  More luck than any real understanding though.

There has been some recent whining about people not recieving the BTC from Mt Gox.  Hmmmm.

Did you do a preview?  The own this forum you know

(* Though my best guess is that they are pretty hands-off, and I find their tolerance for criticism so far to be laudable.)

I am envisioning a situation where I have, say, several thousand cash, or some PM's, or whatever.

When the other party and I meet, I give him some cash, he gives me some BTC, then I give him some more cash, he gives me some more BTC, etc.

At the end, he is in the same position I used to be.  That is, he's sitting there with a wad of cash and is vulnerable.  So, meeting in a public location is desirable, as is having the ability to incrementally deliver both BTC and the goods in a fairly rapid-fire and secure method is what I would be looking for.

I believe it to be the case that transferring BTC from one instalwallet to another is rapid and reliable.  I would probably be immediately transferring value out of my Instawallet even as the transaction was underway.  This would be at best cumbersome to accomplish by handing over pre-generated wallet.dat files.

The best technology to bring to a face-to-face BTC transaction is enough muscle to make it not worth the risk to attempt a robbery, and a location where one would be cumbersome.

Beyond that, I should think that a simple transfer using something like instawallet would be fine, but have not really researched the service for larger BTC transactions.  If Instawallet pulled a MyBitCoin in the 20 minutes or so that I would need them to be working, that would suck, but a risk one takes I suppose.

I've figured that it was just a matter of time before it gets quite challenging to move chips from our debt-based monetary systems to and from the Bitcoin network.  The paranoia cost me dearly as I moved into Bitcoin faster than I would have otherwise.

I suspect that at some point, the most practical way to obtain BTC will to meet someone on the street in a situation where you don't know anything about them other than they have managed to obtain a lot of BTC somehow, and they have a pretty good idea that you have something of significant value on your person.  Fun!

Looks like for all intents and purposes you are right and I was wrong.  At least given my white lie about being on a Linux box.

I actually do perform a similar operation not irregularly.  The reason why is that I prefer to have a large number wallet.dat files with a relatively small number of coins (associated with the addresses) in them.  This, in part, as a theft mitigation strategy.

I read through the various thoughts on this and considered things a bit, and have kind of concluded that I don't think there is a big win here.

I would like to see a 'core team' structure of knowledgeable and active contributors, or I should say, the transparency into the activities and decision making processes of them.  This would allow me to make the best decisions possible should the project splinter.

I think that it is a bit of a pipe dream to hope for Bitcoin to become anything other than a 'guerrilla' currency in a world which looks anything like ours today since as soon as it starts to pose any credible competition to mainstream systems, it will become labeled 'terrorism' or some such.  In that event, any formalized advocacy group would be a big fat target, and any reliance which developed around such a group would be disturbed.

I would favor one-off fund raising for smaller targeted efforts like retaining an attorney to accomplish exactly 'x', 'y', and 'z'.  I realize that this would not be as efficient in a 'typical' project, but I really don't find Bitcoin to be 'typical'.  I think this particular project and it's participants will ultimately be better served by fairly loosely coupled.

I could be wrong...I often am.

The substance (know as 'outamyassimine') can crystallized and desiccated, then alloyed with unobtainium to create an emulsification which can catalyze and ultimately transmutate BTC into USD.

Price is going up again and it's 22:30 here on the West Coast.  I hope that people had the foresight to pump a little extra into those maintenance accounts before hitting the hay.  I guess we have another 10 or 15 cents before we hit the day's peak though.  I think it would put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day if I woke up to find my account liquidated.