As in $1000 face bags of junk silver?  Please don't throw me in that thar brier patch Brer Bear!

My feelings on this project are evolving.  I'm glad I helped fund it, but I have some serious questions about whether it is doing anyone a favor to suck them into Bitcoin at this time, and I've had some discomfort here even when the project started to be honest.

I believe that at this time, about 95% of people are not ready for Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is not ready for about 95% of the population.

Of the remaining 5%, 4% they could probably handle it, and handle themselves, if they were started out with some very clear and non-sugar-coated information about the nature and history of the project and the motives of a certain segment of the community.  The other 1% would be fine even if they were guided straight into the tender and loving arms of MyBitcoin (or whatever the next one may be.)

I don't believe that some ultra-slick marketing campaign is likely to be terribly effective with most of these people, and I am not terribly surprised that trying to tap into some streak of visceral fear and hatred within these people was less than successful.

I continue to believe that the very best advertising for Bitcoin is simply demonstrating that it exists it does indeed work, and doing that through low-key support of their efforts.  That is what I will be doing going forward (if anything.)

One would presume that those who lost family members are 'experts' on the details the 'official version' of 9/11 and how the report was generated because they would have tended to have paid more attention to these details than the average Joe.

But almost all of them took quite a generous settlement from the US Government on the condition that they forget it and move on as I recall.

Heh.  It is indeed helpful to keep things on the private side when the motivation is to profit...especially when the design is to profit by ripping people off.

Developments out of the Bitcoin community generally are far and away the most closed source I've been mildly involved with and also the most scam infested.  But the 'free market' tends to correct for such things...and we are down to $2.36/BTC as I tap this out.

I do indeed hope you are right.  I've got a big bet on that happening eventually and working out in my favor.  But I consider it a long-shot.


My sense is that about half the people in these forums are to some extent, trolls (including myself), but I can detect very little evidence that there is any coordination here.

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To follow-up on your next post, I doubt that 'they' are under the illusion that they could 'kill' Bitcoin dead or even drive the price to to a significantly low level (the designers were to clever for that.)  A good policy would actually be to keep it cranking along on life support if need be even, monitor and catalog the participants, and generally study it for weaknesses and exploits.  That may (or may not) be the phase we are in now.  I'm undecided.

I dis-agree.  If "they" wanted a foot in the game, they'd have one for chump change.  The whole economy is now, what, $20 mill?  Taking a position would undoubtedly increase that somewhat even if they were careful, but we are still talking about a tiny tiny amount of money here.  Probably the cost of running just the US's military for a matter of seconds.

I expect some of them are actually anticipating an up-turn in the price of Bitcoin, eventually, and wish to take as big a position as possible.

If such an up-turn in Bitcoin occurs it will be kind of fun to see how many of the same people will come back and crow about how smart they were and how much the guided the herd over the cliff.

In fairness, certain of these people have been consistent and vocal in their warnings about the decline in Bitcoin prices demonstrating that it is good practice to listen to and weigh all perspectives.  Another fraction, however, seem to be more of the Johnny-come-lately type riding the down-wave and hoping they look clever.

Regarding exchange revenue, two factors which make it hard (for me) to do the math are as follows:

 1) who does dark pool stuff (at least CampBX iirc) and if anyone, is it possible to obtain some rough numbers here?

 2)  The overhead of dealing with funding hassles, fraud, AML stuff, etc must be significant.  I would guess that would even a majority of the operating expenses for an enterprise which is big enough to do it semi-adequately, and then even if it is about as well automated as possible.

Controlling the flow of dwindling energy resources creates a situation where we can extort other nations into supporting our monetary structures.  By 'we', I mean largely the US, but other Western countries can ride along so they can (and do) help pull the wagon.  While there is some 'collateral damage', I doubt that that is the extent of the story...brutalizing and murdering occupied populations is a time-tested and often effective way of maintaining control.

I believe that it is appropriate to label our actions as 'defensive' and that lacking them we would have been forced to 'retreat' from our position on the world stage.  I believe that our actions are also highly unethical...and one of the more valid arguments for weaseling out of paying one's fair share of taxes.

I believe that this has been more or less my sense from early in my exposure to Bitcoin (which was delayed until post-peak due to some other financial adventures), but it's hard to remember exactly.  I do believe that Bitcoin could function servicably in this role, for a time at least, but likely only if a void opens up due to some financial calamity.

A more recent epiphany (for me) is that currency generally is not a logical store of value.  It's value lies in how it moves things around, and that value is what I would like to see be more equitably distributed.  (It's also during this motion that it is most easy for third-party actors to reach out and grab a chunk, and Bitcoin is unusually good at avoiding this misfortune.)


(Forgive me if you've seen my elaboration on this before, or if I otherwise bore you, but...) I have had a vision about what I call 'block chain zero' serving as something of a backing store for a multitude of similar currencies each with it's own inflationary properties, transaction fees, etc.

Holders of 'block chain zero' value could choose which 'sub-currency' to support based on their reward (or politics or whatever) and similarly, users of the sub-currencies could choose which ones to use base on the benefit which it provides them relative to other sub-currencies.  Exchanges could value all of the currencies with probably more accuracy than any other form of rating organ.

In this way I believe that the holders of currency and the users of it would both have a pretty powerful hand and thus a fairly equitable solution would fall out.  In fact, it would not surprise me if the holders got a pretty raw deal as they would need to compete with their most altruistic of their peers.  That would be fine with me

My concerns are along the lines of whether coalitions would form and destabilize things, or whether natural oscillations in such a system would render it unworkable.  My current sense is actually that my concerns here, and other issues I've not dreamed up, would be terminal for an end-game such as I've described.

You seem to be implying in this and other threads that Bitcoin will turn into something which is used by a different class of users, and in different ways, than is commonly assumed.  I'm fascinated because fairly early in my studies I theorized about this (and it bothered me.)

I sort of gave up on the line of thought because it seemed like a good part of the strength of Bitcoin would be lost if it were not in fairly widespread use among numerous people with a good understanding of things and with conflicting interests.  Any one faction gaining significant advantage would destroy the whole thing.  I assumed that if Bitcoin were deemed to be of high value to wealthy individuals or intelligence agencies or whatever, it's use would need to be fostered amongst the general population.  One of me 'evil self-interested' thoughts was to hope for this and ride such a wave, but it seemed like such a long shot that it fell off my list of plausible end-games.  I see no real evidence of it other than possibly some surprisingly positive mainstream press.  The market is so small now that anyone with any power would have to be trying pretty hard not to destroy the system or demoralize the participants.

I would not say that at all.  Whoever believes someone who says that Bitcoin is dead may be.  Or not.  Time will tell.

...and they are bye-bye. gone-ski. Audi-5000.  In fact, as I read ~weex's goodbye note, they will be requiring some additional info for at least some people who want to collect their $$$.  Unsurprising really.

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On a totally different tangent, what is the availability and status of your FPGA boards and setup?  I was researching it last night, but I don't think I happened across anything real recent and I don't think I discovered a web site for your stuff.

For the system I was thinking of, I'm not expecting that it would be an exchange or anything resembling one in a structural way.  It would be more of a place which would assist in laying out plans and schedules , and provide users with an ability to review one-another's performance.

The system I am thinking of would bend over backward to avoid any sort of tracking, and would not provide any escrow-like services or deal with user's money in any form.  Possibly it could check things out in a block-explorer manner, but that's about it.  Escrow services could be arranges with third parties if they are desired by the participants.

A different (but related) class of problem then exchanging something like Krugerrands on a 1-to-1 basis would be something like this:

 - I want an old motorcycle engine that can only be found in Thailand and I want someone there to go through a sequence of steps including locating a shop, finding out prices for various kinds of work, commissioning the work, arranging shipping, etc.

 - I would be happy to pay incremental fees as the work proceeds, particularly if it were clearly layed out and agreed upon up front.  If a suitable item cannot be located, the transaction can stop, but the party in Thailand will have gotten some reimbursement for his efforts.

 - If things are proceeding well, Bitcoin would allow multiple transactions per day so the whole thing could be expedited relative to other solutions if things are going smoothly.

A framework such as I am envisioning would allow me to obtain hopefully valid feedback on the person I'm dealing with (and he on I) in addition to helping lay out and agree upon a plan of action.  Common things would probably develop templates and require not very much work at all.

~weex could pop up and say that this is utter bullshit if he wanted to.  It would be unlikely that he would be obligated under the 'top secret NDA' to actively defend the 'conspiricy'.  Though possible I suppose, especially if there were some kicker involved.

If I were in his shoes, however, I would stay mum and try to derive some enjoyment out of whatever whacky theories crop up.

I don't believe that it is terribly far fetched to believe that aggravating funding is a good way to damage an effort, or to note that it can and does happen on occasion.

But I agree that the simplest explanation tends to be the strongest one, and in this case it really does not seem to be the case that the money was there to support the enterprise as a money making effort.

I finally got around to re-compiling on my FreeBSD system last night off of Trunk (I think    I did it in part because I wanted to be sure I could re-compile in a hurry if need be.  Binary seems to work, though I have not tried to transfer any BTC with it.

Seems that I had to include some extra system header files in protocol.cpp for AF_INET and some other symbol.  I don't have the details in front of me, and I cannot say for sure that this was the fix or that I did it correctly, but after doing this I got a binary that appears to have download the blockchain as I slept and be processing transactions.  Didn't even try the tests.  I might be inclined to do so if someone takes enough of an interest in this platform to support it more cleanly.

It has always struck me that Bitcoin could be very useful as a medium for transferring many things, but particularly PM's, across the world.  Provided that there are parties in both locations who want their PM's in the other.

A transaction could be 'ratcheted in' is what I mean.  So, if we are doing 10 Krugs, some BTC is transferred, then one KR is handed over and BTC (plus some more) is transferred back.  Rinse and repeat until the transaction is done.  No one party can rip off the other party for anywhere near the total value.  Could be done with other types of money than BTC, but Bitcoin is probably the best choice at this time due to the speed, robustness, and privacy properties that it has.

A bonus is that it would not be illegal (as far as I know...and if it is, it shouldn't be.)  Should work as long as the exchanges are open so that, of course, a person left holding BTC as the result of a ripoff would not be high and dry.

I even registered a domain name the other day in case I someday decide to build a platform to facilitate this class of transactions.  Likely I'll never do it though.

It's plausible enough (to me) to earn a spot in my list of hypotheses.

Concern over just such a thing caused me to start accumulating more aggressively than I would have otherwise some months ago, and contributed to my decision to just go ahead to fill up my desired quota of BTC last night.

A major on negative concerning this hypothesis is that it is not really needed to explain ExchB calling it quits.  Unless they have significant dark pool activity it doesn't seem like there is much money in things and all the AML stuff must be a true nightmare to deal with.

If there is an element of truth to this hypothesis, I would say that, ironically, what badly wounded Bitcoin was probably the 'money bomb' for the Occupy-X stuff and funding of stuff like Wikileaks.  It is actually one of the few things that Bitcoin is genuinely good for as long as our fiat systems are working well enough for Joe Sixpack.  IMHO.

Tradehill actually broke the $3.00 barrier briefly.  I went ahead and filled my 'round number' quota just so I didn't have to worry about it and could do my deep storage work.  Time will tell if I'm happy that I kept some powder dry this weekend or no I guess.  Anyway, bed time.