Yes, we are seeing lots of purchases 1 to 5c above the USD ask mini-walls.  This must mean that other currencies are leading the rally right now...

Yes, ironically, these very observations of what makes ideal money birthed a discipline which could be called the "science" of money.  Knowledge of what constitutes "perfect" money and how close bitcoin comes to it has caused people to value bitcoin for its future potential.  So "marginal utility" became unimportant. 

So knowledge of the definition of money rendered that definition incorrect (at least in a partial, relatively trivial manner).

I don't know what your issue is with JK, but it is clear you have one.  Try and rise above whatever spat I'm sure I'll find if I bothered to search the forums.

For the rest of you, reread this thread; it is clear he called Harnett out and did so in a reasoned responsible manner.  There are other people who called Pirate out and deserve the "Bitcoin Defender" tag: Vanderoy for instance.

Disclosure: I have made no investments, deals, PMs etc, with Harnett or JoelKatz and know them only through what I read in these forums.

that's pretty cool but 5 BTC!?!?!  That's outrageous and I'm not comparing this with Target.  There are lots of potters around where I live.

I propose a new tag for some members that is awarded to people who detect scammers ponzis and cons and intelligently argue the case long before the scam folds.  For people who receive mounds of abuse from said scammers and their shills but just keep selflessly plugging away.  Why?  I don't know.

Tag: "Bitcoin Defender"

First awardee:  JoelKatz

No, analyze fundamentals and potential.  If they remain sound then don't dump it all, diversify.

The much-touted-on-these-forums retail use of BTC may be promising but suffers from the network effect and its generally not worth the savings (3% + currency conversion) to evangelize for a one time purchase.  But if you have repeat international business (B2B supply chain procurement from china for example) then BTC is the clear winner and is worth pursuing.  Since it provides a valuable service and essentially "earns" you 3%-5% per transaction, BTC may be in a bubble today, but is not a ponzi.  You (the end user) will not see B2B adoption until its too late, except perhaps as an increase in the txns on the blockchain.

You are one of the lucky few who stumbled on this "edge".  Where else is this kind of financial marketplace innovation going on?  There's only one salve for the guy who bought the 10000 BTC Papa John's pizza order (that's what 62000 USD per pie? just 2-3 years ago), and that's if he held onto another 10k BTC...

Once upon a time I worked for a startup that was purchased for 250M USD in cash.  This was around 1999.  We just had to park our *sses at the parent company for a year or two waiting for our options to mature and pay out of escrow. 

One individual was sitting on 1M USD but he chose to LEAVE that money and become the first engineering hire in a new startup.  The company was a *SURE* thing...  until the market imploded.  5 years later I (and many of the same engineers) were working for another startup and it turned out the company he went to was trying to re-purpose their product to compete in our space.  They failed, we were sold for 100+M.

You may think BTC will fade away, but I hope you have the foresight to save at least 10%-25% just for your own mental stability a few years from now...

I'm going to pat myself on the back for predicting the dump.  We'll see if I'm correct about the next bull breakout run!  But actually the dump was less then I expected.  That is interesting... I wonder if people who intended to dump are still playing blockchain chicken?  Seems to me that that game would be over now... that could be a very bullish signal as people who expected blockchain chicken have to get back into the market, or are willing to get in deeper now that that danger is over.

Also something else has occurred to me.  Bitcoin has now moved from what was "officially" a hyper-inflationary currency to one that is merely high inflation (I've heard 12% on these forums but haven't bothered to do the math myself).  12% is in the ballpark of other (still viable) fiat currencies during certain historic periods (I'm thinking USD in the 70s).  This psychological difference will probably have a much greater impact then from 6% to 3% (say), and should calm worries that a temporarily stagnant bitcoin economic growth cycle won't crash the currency.

For many years people in the USA tended to start their xmas shopping the day after thanksgiving (since its a holiday day but the holiday already passed there's nothing to do -- its also a great bar night!).  That became called "black friday" because believe it or not its the first day of the year most retail stores end up switching from a loss to a profit (and a loss is traditionally designated with red ink, a profit black in handwritten act books). 

Back before the internet was ubiquitous it was at the workplace first -- especially the high speed internet that made looking a product photos a lot easier then using the "world wide wait" of dial-up.  So there was a good 5 year period from about 96 to 01 (your results will vary depending on how techie your location was) where people would do their online holiday shopping at work.  So online holiday shopping was easiest the monday after thanskgiving when everyone went back to work.   AFAIK, it is questionable whether many online vendors really saw a significant uptick on purchases on that day (after all, its not "really" allowed to shop during work except during lunch break or after hours -- but at the same time back then there was no infrastructure for companies to track employees web accesses anyway), but its definitely clear that the online vendors needed a marketing gimmick to raise awareness of online shopping and compete with Black Friday so they created the term Cyber Monday.

Back then, linking your bank account to paypal (so they could just automatically take money from you as you spend) was just as weird and scary as bitcoin is today!  Hopefully in another 5-10 years, this "pull" model of payment will return to its rightful "weird" and "scary" status!

the wave crashed against my puny wall last night and receded...

 Order Filled at: Mon 26 Nov 2012 03:40:02 AM GMT
        Amount: 36.87035251 BTC
        Price: @$12.64998
        Total: $466.40922

dammit I shouldn't have put it up!  This was only an arbitrage worth a few bucks anyway! 

Seems like we should start really simple targeted for the smallest USB device, like the cypress CY7C64316. 

Define a protocol that could sign a bunch of outputs; and not even keep track of the act balance.

Base it off of a "transport" that consists of 2 APIs:

send(buffer, length)
recv(buffer,length)

because any underlying transport can implement these 2.


Then additional protocol functionality can be layered on top (to support more advanced HW wallets)... and additional transports can be layered below.

In a related note, is there any web service that will just post an arbitrary bitcoin TXN to the network based on some RESTful probably binary-coded API?

Yeah you're right about the numbers (6 per hour * 24 hours * 50btc)... I'm recovering from surgery and so typing and thinking :-) is hard.  Its interesting that SR might occupy that much currency per day.  But the currency can be reused so something else is going on to actually consume it.  That something else is likely primarily long term investment (hoarding), but it really does not matter what it is; whatever it is, it has been a steady demand for 6 months or more and there is no socio-economic reason why that will change any time soon (other then grow) since the global economic situation remains on its current trajectory.

 

As many of us predicted  months ago, we seem to be in the lead-up to the halving where ask depth is drying up -- people are thinking "why not wait and see what happens?"   

So what will happen? 

Frankly, a lot of the volume on Gox seems to be due to short-term speculative action.  This is just the "fog of war"... but it cannot hide the fact that a much lower volume of long-term activity must be sequestering the 9600 BTC produced each day which is keeping the price stable above 10.  This long term activity is expected given the positive press and growing legitimacy of the currency.  So I believe that the blockchain halving is going to place a small but significant upwards pressure on the price, since there is clearly demand for 9600 a day but only half that many coins produced.

But its very possible that the lack of a pre-halving "breakout" will cause short-term speculators to dump some coins near the halving mark.  However, many of these speculators are going to be the sort that keeps fiat on gox for reinvestment.  So a dump near the halving is just $ that will be poured back into the next breakout. 

TL;DR; the bull breakout after the halving will be a big one...

Ente since you seem to be self-described as a terrible trader let me suggest a trading strategy that works if you are a long term bull (if you believe in the long term success of bitcoin).

1. Don't sell at a loss.  If you get caught in a bull trap, move those coins into your long term holdings.
2. If the price declines significantly (by 25% or 50% you choose), buy what you can and trade those until this $ is caught above again (see 1).
3. If the underlying security really is a very long term bull, the lower it goes the better you'll eventually do...
4. Profit! :-)

Note that this degenerates in a bear market (if you keep getting caught) into the well known long term dollar cost averaging strategy

A similar, more constrained strategy is when the price drops in half, recheck fundamentals (i.e. is the outlook still very long term bullish?) and double your investment.  This can be a very lucrative strategy because you end up with twice as much at the lower price as at the higher so if you get a full retracement to your original price you are way ahead.

If you pick the wrong security and it ultimately goes out of business... well, you lose! :-)

Welcome to new hampshire!  You saw the fall colors, you bought some real maple syrup.  Now go back to your high income tax nearly bankrupt state and take your opinions with you.

Folks, a semi-competent script kiddie can drop a billion IP packets on the internet directed to btc-e (for example) with any "from" address you want (like mt-gox).  All the responses will go to the "from" address... so its pretty useless for everything except DDOS attacks.  Smart routers might drop the packets, but I guess not in this case.

This is the most likely explanation...

It reduces the cost, increases the speed, and increases the potential user base of payments, especially international.  The efficiency savings allow businesses to hire more people, and the speed/availability allows the business to reach markets it may otherwise not have access to.  This access allows the business to grow, or even exist.

Whether you believe in commodities (BTC & gold) or just BTC, its interesting to see that the (previously tin-foil-hat) ideas thrown around this forum about fiat currencies are so mainstream now that they are simply referenced, not the core subject of the article (which is on estimated gold holdings and appetite broken down by top nations).

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/10-nations-that-control-the-worlds-gold-2012-10-20

Interesting.  You have a great point that with the fed owning so much debt they would want to cause deflation.  But I forget, they don't benefit from profits like this do they?  I don't agree with you about the debt contraction within the next 4 yrs, except possibly in the short term, neither US candidate seems that committed to reducing govt debt, for example.  But I can see that it could go either way.  I think USD will attempt to remain the reserve currency simply by failing slower then everybody else... 70s style inflation, not hyper.  And remaining the currency of last resort will help reduce apparent inflation by expanding the defacto scope of the USD even more into other countries.   But a significant hidden inflation will essentially transfer value from international holders of USD (China and countries that end up using USD due to their currency failure) to the USA, and from holders of USD or USD denominated instruments (mostly middle and low income families, the gold and farmland price appreciation is indicative that the smart money has already moved) to debt holders (US government).  This will ultimately reduce the tax burden for the very rich because while they may pay a lower % of earnings if I remember correctly they pay a higher % of all taxes.

cypherdoc, I've been reading this thread for quite some time and find your comments insightful but it seems you think that gold will descend significantly vs. fiat currencies long term.  But that certainly is counter the typical expectation on these forums which seems to be predicting hyper or high levels of fiat currency inflation long term.  This of course would mean both BTC and GLD increase against USD... although BTC might increase much faster then gold as adoption increases.  Can you clarify what you think bitcoin and gold will do against fiat (long term, i.e. 1+ years) and against some classical commodity like milk or oil and why? 

Silverbox jokes about gold "collapsing upwards" but is that your actual position? -- i.e. the buying power of an ounce of gold in other commodities will collapse while simultaneously its price in USD increases?

Thanks!