Accumulating (not on your list.)  Being a 'bag holder' as worked out well for me in other speculative adventures, though the damn things are heavy.

I was not clear that I doubt the conspiracy angle.  I expect that they are independently operating jerk-offs, but I don't see that they limit themselves to the speculation board.

But I do appreciate all the lessons on these forums.  One of the first lesson I learned when scouting around here was that some people make noise about being on the cusp of starting up a 20,000 GPU server farm when the actual fact of the matter is that they cannot even come up with one fucking BTC that they clearly owe to someone else.

In case anyone is following only this thread in the 'trading discussion' board, Jerred did provide an update on the main board that they are under DDOS.

a)  Being down so often and for so long, no matter what the cause, is a relatively big deal to me as a customer given the dynamics of the market, and I think that it should be taken seriously.  Particularly since there is so much fraud associated with Bitcoin.

b)  It is more natural for me to follow threads on the 'trading discussions' board rather than the main one.  A note saying which one of potentially many threads will be updated was, I felt, appropriate in earlier times.

c)  Why the blog, which seems to be hosted by blogspot and not impacted by the DDOS, could not have been updated to mention the current service problems is beyond me.  It's probably a more logical place to distribute Tradehill news than a forum owned by a competitor anyway.

d) Whatever the cause (except simply pulling a B7), I would anticipate that the Tradehill staff might be busy and servicing a bunch of individual e-mails to support would be less efficient than having a global status update.

e)  I don't use Twitter, but a heads-up there seems like it would be a worthwhile few seconds spent as mentioned by someone else.

f)  I would actually be fine being inconvenienced by DDOS from time to time if 1) I knew it was somewhere between possible and likely, and 2) some benefit of the cost savings (vs. using a DDOS protection service or rolling your own solution) was passed on to me as a customer.

Seems to be back.

I don't even want to log in until I can understand what caused the 12hr or so unannounced 'maintenance window'.

I would suggest to Tradehill that they provide a public and very detailed post-mortem of the events of the last couple of days.

Probably the one of the strongest hypotheses.  A lot of geeks are probably somewhat PO'd that they missed their chance to get in as early adopters (I know I am) and a bit of lulzing could go a long way toward easing that pain.

Yup.  Here too.  It's been down long enough to have re-built the server (if they are set up proficiently) and depending on the nature of their problems of this morning that could be a prudent thing to do.  It's annoying that they have not put anything on their blog.

Some of the limitations of physical are part of what made me so interested in Bitcoin early on (in my actual study of it.)  At first I really didn't understand the animosity, but it seems to be primarily among the silver people and there are some real mouth-breathing day-trader caliber folk in that camp.  I don't get the sense that Bitcoin is even a term known to a lot of gold people, much less any real understanding of cryptography.

I personally doubt it.  Looks to me like a small number of people and their sock puppets with a long-ish term goal of engineering a short-squeeze and some late-to-the-party copy-cats.  This kind of thing is at least as old as the dot-com bubble days.

I see now that he was right all along.

I'm so happy that Bitcoinica exists so I can get back my money by shorting.  I really didn't understand that stuff about stop-loss, but it sounds like something for woosies and I don't see why it would be necessary since so many really smart people are saying that Bitcoin is dead and headed to zero.

Pretty soon I'll be riding around in my new Ferrari with a real live woman and laughing at all you looozers.

---

Update:  Please help!  They stole my money    'Migraine call' or some BS like that.  Can I get some more advice form the the wise and experienced bears who bless this forum with their insight?

Interesting.  Keiser/Herbert seem to have been fairly mute on Bitcoin after some early and generally supportive mentions.  I sense that it alienates some of their PM-centric friends and detracts from the 'buy silver' campaign (by competing for speculative funds of course.)  Or maybe they are savvy enough to have noticed the likely decline and wanted to wait for more opportune timing so as not to tarnish their reputation (which is pretty stellar IMHO.)

This could be a fairly big deal I would suspect.  They have quite an audience at this point, and the audience is already pretty aware of and agitated about the banking shenanigans.  Also, I imagine that a fair fraction of the audience actually has both some bucks and some gonads.  If some of them took an active interest I could see it being somewhat bullish for Bitcoin.

Now that, if done well, would be very cool.  Especially if it set a precedent.  I'm sure that it will be ripped at by a lot of people, but it's usually fairly easy to separate the wheat from the chaff on these forums.


I am looking forward to the post.  I'd would not mind replenishing me depleted account so as to have the option to take advantage of any opportunities which may pop up, but it's pretty easy to be paranoid about exchanges these days.  The diversification angle you allude to is particularly interesting to me.

Very true indeed.  I took an interest in mining for the first time just a few days ago and started researching what was available in FPGA-land.  'winning' a few BTC now and then is very much a secondary interest of mine (no pun intended.)

I have an internal debate about whether it makes more sense to go for some big-iron GPU machines to use periodically in times of crisis.  Maybe if some demoralized miners are giving there gear away I would think about it, but Moores law and supply-chain factors tend to argue against this investment.

I choose a percentage of my 'wealth' that I want to keep in various things.  USD, property, BTC, etc.  Sometimes I change my mind about the percentages I want, and there is a natural ebb and flow to adjust for as well.

So, the price of BTC on exchanges is not very relevant to me.  I decided some time ago that it would be nice to have a certain number of BTC and I've been working toward that for several months.  I finished it up with a bang on Monday morning.  Am I in the red?  No Duh!

I may decide to increase my position to either keep my own portfolio balanced or not.  If the price gets low enough, I may try to get a whole (2011) days worth of BTC just for shits-n-giggles if nothing else.  I've got a weakness for unusual and interesting things.  The current price would have to drop pretty significantly before I do this however.  I'm unlikely to 'cut my losses' as I've mentally written them off already.

I consider my 'investment' in Bitcoin to be obtaining spots for secrets keys that I alone control in the block chain (or ledger.)

The block chain itself represents a huge amount of investment in time, money, energy, etc.  My gamble is that this will make it a likely starting point for future efforts (or potentially a continuation of the original.)  It's not unlike gold in that while a lot of substances could serve in the role that gold does, someone it always goes back to gold since there is an 'infrastructure' of sorts existing for it.  This infrastructure is as much as anything a shared mental scaffolding, but it seems to be effective.

A giant flaw in my logic (or one of them, at least) is that there is nothing to enforce a condition where my entries in the ledger are honored in any what that would further my goals even if the block chain were the basis for further developments.  That is, to me, one of the most risky part of my gamble here.

Just checked again from a new location, and I am back to being able to sign in.

But is it now 'under new management' after the downtime?  Maybe Mr. Are_You_A_Wizard can bless us with some entertaining hypotheses.  Or maybe Tradehill make a surprise appearance and produce a plausible explanation (e.g., 'front-end server re-booted'.)

As a point of reference, late last night PDT I was able to make a purchase for some BTC I needed and transfer them home.  I've been taking BTC home in this way in some quantity since the weekend.  At least three times.  I try to keep as little $$$ and BTC out of my control as possible of course.  All of my requests for transfer were handled quite quickly in this last round of activity.  A few months ago Tradehill had seemed to have gone through a phase of taking a fair amount of time to ship out BTC.

Netrin's probably gone to bed (as I should) but let follow up on one thing.  My beef was with the 'huge' characterization of supply, and I unfairly took the liberty of taking that to mean the 7200 BTC/day in the system.  I would still argue that that is not necessarily 'huge', at least in a lot of plausible scenerios.

Supply and demand are impacting the price negatively at this time (as always) to be sure.  If we look at Mt Gox's numbers and do some back-of-the-envelope calcs, it looks like maybe 40,000 BTC/day change hands, so one could take such a number as a source of supply, and that dwarfs the 7200/day being injected by the system.  If a decent fraction of that supply dried up for whatever reason (e.g., the people panicing or whatever ran out of BTC), that could change the supply side significantly, and that is just one factor which could do so.  I'd be uncomfortable to be short at this point for that reason.

I actually don't think so (that the supply is huge I mean.)  7200 BTC/day does not seem like a huge supply to me considering that the market is global.  I think it is mostly a matter of

 - tiny tiny percentage of interested people (on a total population of earth basis.)
 - even worse store of value than most currencies
 - mainly good for corner-case uses (relative to more mainstream currencies.)
 - very significant concentrations and shifting of wealth.

most of these things are related to one another.  I suspect that it could blast off at some point for one of several reasons, and if that happens it's probably lucky for a majority of traders and speculators that it is relatively more difficult to short than other more established markets.  It's probably at least as likely to go to zero for one of several reasons though.

I appreciate the pointer to that.