I read in an analysis of the Wiemar Germany hyperinflation that savers got slaughtered of course.  Holders of stock in companies actually came out of the other side relatively OK.

The most interesting thing to me was rental property owners.  Apparently during the crisis they had problems in that rent controls came in early on creamed them over the course of the event.  On the other side, they still had their property, though it is my assumption that they did not do much maintenance during the event.

I expect that a problem in Oceana would/will be somewhat different (if hyperinflative at all.)  The people who got chased out of 'their' homes when the real estate bubble popped will be large in number and irritable about things, and the governments at all levels are particularly hungry for revenue.  I theorize that there will be a backlash against people who have more homes than they need and onerous taxes will be levied.

For this reason, I limited my own investment in this class.  I have only enough real estate property to fly pretty much under the radar (I hope) and/or assist my immediate family members should they happen to end up in need.

I cannot see that working very well at Tradehill, but could be missing something.  It takes a fair amount of time to get my BTC out of Tradehill.  (Getting money in via US domestic wire and trading is faster than getting my BTC out in my experience.)   I don't think they are optimized for this, and have probably been being extra careful for the last several weeks at least to watch for scammers (doing Dwolla's job for them.)

OTOH, at bitmarket.eu, I do have immediate control over an address there (so it seems.)  I can transfer any part of the BTC balance to anywhere I want (so it seems.)

I personally feel most secure when I have my own coins in my own wallet.dat files in my own places with my own encryption.  Unfortunately, arranging this is a modestly technical operation and I've fallen back on skills and understandings gained in the process of getting paid to work on computer systems for a while.

I love conspiracy theories (or hypothesis which almost all are in my mind), but...

It strikes me that the enemies of Bitcoin, so far, could rest on their heels and allow incompetence, naivety, exhaustion, etc to do the job.  Occam's razor suggests to me that factors such as these are responsible for the most severe issues...so far.

It does sound like Dwolla can suck whatever money out of Tradehills account they like and use it in any way they see fit, so it is hard to fault Tradehill for having trouble transferring funds through Dwolla.  One suspects that Dwolla has edited their books enough by now that Tradehill has a negative balance and if they tried to put money in to cash someone out, it would not work anyway.

Tradehill seems to have clammed up so I suppose they are finally in talks and we'll all have to just throw conjectures around for the fun of it.

For my part I have drawn my Tradehill account down just in case they 'see the light' vis-a-vis the 'proper' way to do business these days.  Namely, that the business partners remain solvent, the investors stay whole, and the end users take it in the hind end.  But I do retain some exposure on the strength of my success with Tradehill so far and Jered's communications on this forum.  As alway, no more than I can afford to lose and chuckle in the process of doing so.  Mostly it's way low bets in the case of a liquidity event which seems possible to me in this stage of Bitcoin's evolution.

Not sure about being forbidden.  Even 'registration' may prove problematic as a lionshare of it is likely held by a class of citizens who would not care much for that.  What I do think is fairly likely is that movements of PMs would probably be scrutinized, controlled, and taxed.  And capital controls will keep it in the borders (or at least the fraction of it which is in the hands of the plebs.)

But how on earth would that be achieved?  I think the infrastructure is being put in place for a while now:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-11/scanners-coming-trains-subways-and-boats-homeland-security-chief-says

Some things are not really jiving with other things I've run across (many of which may be wrong or overstated.)

I've heard that somewhere over half of the trades nowadays are algorithmic.  After a decade of going nowhere but backward, many flesh and blood people are exiting the game.

So, if 50% are high-speed algorithm trades and they have win rates of the numbers your friend claims, where's the money coming from?

Here is a hypothesis of mine which I believe is completely my own (vs. just thinking I invented it after reading or hearing it somewhere else):

What if the high-speed juggling act is a mechanism to deal with 'naked shorts' (aka 'strategic failures to deliver'.)  That would be paper which purposely was sold short and never borrowed.  Depending on who you listen to, the number of certs in that category is alarmingly large, and there is no way to determine if the shares in ones brokerage account are real or IOU's.   I hypothesis that keeping a large number of shares in motion helps avoid pesky reporting rules.  And the 'cops' are doing everything possible to avoid looking anyway.

In what way?  Viable?  Solvent?

What I would like is something in the form factor of a heating element which could be threaded into a water tank.  A couple of high current wires, and tough cable with a female RJ45 is all I want to see.  Actually, throw in a serial port on the cable as well maybe.  The whole thing should operate at something north of 100 C and shut down automatically if it got much hotter than that.

Can you do it?

I was not worried about either inflation or deflation.  I wanted to be sitting on just about anything but USD or instruments that I needed the help of a semi-functional financial system to capitalize on.  I thought about financing as a hedge if inflation occurred, but in the end the fees and interest made it not make sense to me...and it would have been counter-productive to what I wanted to achieve (e.g., dumping $$$)

I figure that a place to live is always worth about 30%-ish of a typical earners potential no matter what the economic conditions.  And if TSHTF, I'll likely have some family who could use a place to live anyway.  Prices where I bought seemed fair enough even if (both you and) I suspect they very well could be getting even better.

I do indeed remember his 'ownership society' nonsense.  Right when he said it I thought to myself that it was the poor saps who bought homes at that time would end up _being_ owned.  I don't guess that Bush-II was quite as dumb as people seem to think.  Mostly just neurological damaged from cocaine abuse is my guess.  I expect that in this case he knew exactly what was going on and that smirk came directly from his heart.

I bought a few homes earlier this year.  I am pretty sure that I could get a better deal near the end of 2012, but I didn't want to sit on USD until then.  I was quite uncomfortable earlier this year when gold and silver were on a tear so I jumped  (and missed out on the BTC spike due in part to being busy with that stuff.  I would almost certainly be sitting on whatever I had accumulated at that time but I would have gotten in cheaper and probably would have gone mining.)

Socialist in my particular case.  See you on the other side.

Hopefully people who don't need their rigs any more will sell them...at a discount   Actually I did seriously considered this when I decided _not_ to build a rig.  And I suspected that a ramp-up in the manufacture of cards may overshoot demand.

I use a space heater sometimes.  I may as well be mining due to the nature of the laws of thermodynamics, but a space heater is currently much cheaper than a mining rig.  (Then there is the noise problem I suppose.)

I'm not even close to signing up with Paxum because I want to wait and see about some other stuff, and because I have no need for their service.  

But I will agree w/ Mr Katz (as seems to be often the case) that these issues don't strike me as the kinds of red flags that I would be especially  concerned about.  Indeed, it seems like they are practicing defensive programming in certain of these issues, and that is in my book a very good thing.  

Obviously it would be a good thing if the end user experience was better, but I personally would gladly trade this to avoid the hassle of being caught up in some fraudulent use fiasco.

Having a monopoly in just about anything certainly imparts a fair level of control.

I think the modern Rothchild would care more about 'who programs the algorithm' if a re-program of the algorithm (and sufficient adoption of it) could render their hoard valueless.

Back in the day, pitchforks were the answer when the pressure became to intense.  Normally it was fairly easy to mitigate the damages if you kept a low profile and planned sufficiently for an exit event.  The mobs tended to have a more immediate interest in food than in chunks of metal anyway I would suspect.

If the use of pitchforks could somehow shift to a method of paying attention to the options in terms of programmers and re-installing some software, I could see it as a good thing.  And a good reason why something like Bitcoin is unlikely to be very popular with any but the most benevolent of leaderships.

I've never taken an interest in trading before and am new at this.  Sort of learning by doing in some ways.  Probably I should dig up some non-bitcoin trading primers which I will do in a while, but...

I notice an increasing imbalance in the trading depth over the last several days looking at the bitcoinity charts.  It seems that there are almost twice as many total asks painted as I write this as there are bids.

I also notice when I look at just Tradehill that there is a similar, but less pronounced imbalance in the opposite sense (more bids than asks.)

I've seen this before in the last month or so that I have been paying attention, but not to this degree.  I just wondered if anyone had any theories about why this is (and what might come next

Also, as I understand it, dark pool liquidity is not painted.  Does anyone have rough numbers (or guestimates) about the percentage of dark pool liquidity vs. ah...clear pool liquidity on the various major exchanges?  Unless my math is way off, it is hard for me to see how anyone could be making a dime unless the ratio is pretty high.

The Chinese currently have a tool which gives them a means to control Bitcoin that the US and Western countries currently lack.  Namely, a revolver round applied to the back of the head.

I suspect that the Chinese government will not take to your idea, not because it is not a good one, but rather because it is simply the antithesis of orthodoxy to an authoritarian regime.

Don't get me wrong...I am not anti-Chinese or even anti-Chinese government in a 100% way.  I suspect that the current government since Xiaoping has in fact done about as well for their people as is possible.  But I do hope that the people attain the freedom they deserve when the time is right.

The Chinese government does seem both far sighted and astute.  I still expect that we'll see Chinese anti-bitcoin methods employed in the West before you idea is adopted by China however.

Do you?  I would not have been surprised if Mt Gox was pretty busy with other things, and their books got pretty scrambled in the fallout of their other recent issues anyway.

That Dwolla would be editing their books was kind of a shock to everybody and I don't think anybody would have expected it (and parenthetically, I have not heard *anybody* come up with a defense for this except for CampBX who seemed to be of the opinion that they may have a possible, if distasteful, 'out' from a legal perspective.)

Indeed it seems like Mt Gox and has gone through a 'no-problem -> maybe small problem ->stop using Dwolla' range of responses after being tipped off.  That tells me that they had probably something less than a full situational awareness.


You do?  Tradehill mentioned that they are hard at work finding a replacement for Dwolla which, as others seem to be finding, is not currently usable (and many others postulate never will be.)

The main thing which surprised me was how quickly they found a company in this business, and one who claims to have found a solution for the charge-back issue.  I'm dubious of that claim but would be delighted to see them prove me wrong.(*)  Also the outfit claims to have been setting up for three years before they went into action.  That's plausible I suppose, and I can understand it in some scenarios, but it also is something I would investigate.

* Actually, I personally don't care all that much.  Wire transfers are working well for me in my situation.  OTOH, I might someday want to use the service for things other than funding my BTC trading.

Sounds like you guys have the ACH thing (which I heard of for the first time several days ago) figured out somehow.   But also that you know something about the business.  So, a quick question:

Could one:

 1) limit ACH transfers in to, say, $1000

 2) specify a charge for an ACH reversal fee of $1000 or less at your digression?

That seems like it would be a pretty bullet-proof way to avoid this type of fraud and also allow legitimate reversals if there are not pesky banking regulations which would interfere with the strategy (and I suspect that there are.)

The cool thing would of course be that people who were not doing reversals would be un-impacted and not (necessarily) forced cover the risk as there should be none.

One possibility would be for the powers that be to adopt Bitcoin as legitimate.

Those who have a lionshare of the wealth now could transfer to having a lionshare of Bitcoin.  Bitcoin, like gold, is probably a better tool so subjugate the plebs with than is fiat currency.  Can be hoarded more effectively and it's release can have a bigger impact.

Then the question becomes, what are the plebs to do?

My suggestion would be at that point to vote to switch en-mass to abandon BTC and switch to BTC-II or whatever.  In that way, I consider BTC to be preferable to gold.

(Actually I've got a different idea which I am working on, but it's not mature yet.)