As has been said many times before.


Bitcoin price is a good indicator of Google trends for keyword "bitcoin".


Use this powerful knowledge wisely...

I have been thinking about this idea more and would like some suggestions on how this could be done in an automated way without the need to have too much trust between co-investors.

It may just need to be separated out at different levels but have everything centralized. That way you can have a one stop location for wholesalers, distributors, retailers, etc. All paying in BTC.

I wrote a computer program to run through a game of roulette over and over using the doubling method starting with a million bucks on a $5 minimum. It would go up for a while then BAM...hit a huge losing streak and lose it all.

I think of it like an opposite lottery. Take $175 million and bet on a number. If the number does not hit, then you win a dollar. If it hits, you lose it all. Sure, odds are that you will probably win that dollar, and win it many times. But there is always that chance that the number hits and you lose it all. And at the casino, the odds are in favor in the house.

I vote for all three choices.

You can think of MintChip as a monkey while Bitcoin is like a gorilla.

Only the gorilla has a hat on. And the monkey is missing an arm.

But the monkey can play the drums. He plays for Def Lepard.

But the gorilla is on Broadway and is a huge hit.

And the monkey can read sign language but has difficulty signing because of only having one arm.

The catch though...the gorilla is actually a man dressed in a gorilla suit. And the monkey is his pet.


That about sums it up.

Here is how you use Bitcoinica.

You put a huge margin and a lot of money into which way you think (and as it should) the market is headed.

A lot of small trades by regular Bitcoin traders moves you into that direction and you come close to the break even mark waiting to start making money.

Then, as Bitcoinica sees a bunch of people all margined out in one direction, Bitcoinica buys or sells a buttload of BTC on MtGox and the price either spirals down or skyrockets to a new price which you can not maintain because of the huge spread and margin.

You lose your Bitcoin.

Bitcoinica profits.

The price eventually makes its way back to where it should have been because the market intervenes.

Shoot the moon!

In my opinion it would be best to influence all of those people between you and him to use Bitcoins. People like your friend, his godson, other people who regularly interact with him.

Go for the most likely users, maybe e-mail them a few Bitcoins to spend as a birthday gift.

I see...so they could flood the network with fee-less transactions back and forth between their own addresses but it would take so long because of lack of fees that it would not be possible to flood it to the point of harm.

That is good to know, I am sure that as regular transactions take up hard drive space over time the hard drives will grow at a fast enough rate where it will not have much affect.

I am by far no expert on the inner workings of Bitcoin but I have wondered about ways in which an outside entity (The Federal Reserve) may try to take down Bitcoin.

I do know that all transactions are stored in the chain. And also that you can get as many addresses as you want. I see these as potential weaknesses against an attack.

For the first one, I may be off but when you download the Bitcoin app you are also downloading all transactions that have taken place right? (I may be way off there). But if someone wanted to attack, they would just create millions of dummy transactions back and forth between two addresses so that the size of the download would get so huge that nobody would be able to load up the client because of the hard drive space needed. Again, I may be way off on how that works but it seems that hard drive space could potentially be an issue if someone went about it right.

As for the BTC addresses, yes I know that there are billions (trillions?) of addresses, but could someone not set up thousands of bots to just keep creating addresses at a speed where they own all BTC addresses after a few years? What is preventing this from happening?

Those are my major concerns. I know that there are major forces out there that do not want Bitcoin or anything like it to succeed, and we are probably off the radar for now as a "currency for trading drugs" but if/when Bitcoin becomes a competitor, we will be attacked.

So, the left side of mtgoxlive is filled with false walls?

This.

The reason it is called the TEA PARTY is because it was based off of the Boston Tea Party where they tossed Tea into the Boston Harbor in protest of the British tax on Tea.

What part of the celebration of that act promotes anything but a protest against taxes and a tyrannical government?

Obama WILL get a second term because Ron Paul supporters and true Tea Party patriots know that Mitt Romney is no different from Obama and will be voting for neither.

No One But Paul!

They do not see it.

The price to pay for their ignorance?

4 more years of Obama.

Bitcoin is definitely not yet ready for prime time when it comes to large companies where several people have access to the money with no paper trail if it goes missing.

I am going to inject a million dollars into Bitcoin in order to get the price to $250 just in time.

Then I will celebrate my 2 BTC victory!!!

It does mean that there will be more spending and potential hyperinflation.

Having your money in Bitcoin or gold or anything non-USD makes sense.

So, it appears that Obama will be winning a second term.

How do you believe this affects Bitcoin over the next 4 years?

Honest assessment. A lot of up and down through the summer, a lot of second guessing and jumping around going up until the end of 2013 when mining pay out halves, then a steady climb up with some drops followed by steady climb to 50 by 2014.

The Bitcoin price is about to go without people shorting for a while...


Price spike inevitable.

Or maybe...


the day is not yet over