I actually know someone who can pay their rent directly in BTC. That's probably the best route if you can do it.

Money orders/cashier's checks are a great alternative for bill payment, thanks. But I suppose for any major payments you should probably declare the income and pay the income tax for it ( even if you pay in cash or BTC ) since at some point someone is going to ask where the money is coming from.

Speaking as someone who genuinely *hopes* to earn their income entirely in BTC in the future, I am wondering something - how does one best use them to live off of?

Obviously, it's easy to meet up and exchange BTC for cash each month. But, unfortunately, it's hard to use cash to pay for many things, for example:

- Health insurance
- Rent
- Various loan repayments ( mortgage etc. )
- Other things that I'm probably missing ( buying plane tickets online, etc. )

I suppose the way to deal with this is to liquidate just the minimum BTC each month to cover living expenses that cannot be paid in cash, and then pay income tax on that money.

What about anonymous debit cards that can be re-filled with BTC to pay off things that cash cannot? The problem is that they're not anonymous if you keep using the same card to pay your rent etc, so you might as well liquidate BTC on gox and pay the income tax.

Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

As expected, we've been getting some nice rallies in our stronger assets. It just took a bit longer for them to occur than I initially expected, but the market is finally coming around.

NAV per share updated to 1.068447755

I will update the NAV per share again next week. Most likely I'll continue to do this every Friday.

Thanks,
-cyto

Same here. I'm making myself look foolish here, but I'm just having fun trying to figure this out. Not trying to spread FUD.

True, it could simply just be international transfer between legitimate business's. Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest laundering then. I was just trying to fit GPUMax into the picture and I didn't see any other way to fit it in. Either way I'm looking forward to finding out (if we do find out eventually) because I'm so darned curious!

This reminds me of the Penn and Teller episode where they talk about Area 51: whenever people don't know what's going on, all kinds of crazy theories come out. Maybe pirate is enabling money transfer between aliens from mars?

It's so simple now:

Person A wants to launder money to person B.

Person A gives pirate 100K.

Pirate takes a big fee, say 10K.

Pirate buys 90K worth of coins via person A's mtgox account.

Pirate launders these coins to another address in a manner ( using GPUMax etc. ) that makes it impossible to trace.

Pirate sells 90K worth of coins via person B's mtgox account.

Bam. Person A just laundered a ton of money to person B. The more BTC pirate can borrow, the more he can launder each week. Person A and person B pay him big bucks because he's "the computer guy" and they don't know how to do this themselves.

Wow. Just, wow.

No worries, everything is good . It's just that I had several others that were saying similar things to me over PM, so I decided to put it all to rest in a single post.

I think Pirate just has everyone all emotional, and for obvious reasons.

I had some fun dealing with FUDsters today. You can read my rebuttal here. Needless to say, I can answer pretty much any question anyone throws my way because I know what I'm doing and I do what I say.

In any event, we got a very strong buy signal on a new asset today! There are a couple other new ones that I'm also looking at as a long-term play, but my short-term indicators have not moved into buy territory quite yet. I may nibble at these anyway though.

Additionally, some of our assets which had sells on them have since moved into such strongly oversold territory that I'm holding them further since I believe they have bottomed out for now (i.e. their relative valuation is now in line with other similar assets). This is the main reason I expect this month to have significantly better performance than last, but as always, it's up to the markets.

Thanks for reading,
-cyto

Sigh... this is why I shouldn't have ever commented here, just to get mixed up in the morass. It was a bad move that I now regret. In any event, normally I don't respond to abuse, but I've decided to make a proper rebuttal so that I can link to it from my main fund thread if necessary.

See here for proof on where over a third of the fund is invested. Also, we will become a transparent fund when possible, and/or have a trusted auditor sign the monthly reports when the GLBSE allows for read-only logins, which is coming. Also, last month I purchased GIGAMINING shares directly from friedcat and COGNITIVE shares (in exchange for BDK.BND shares) directly from Kluge here.

So my operations are very glass-box since other members of the forum can see my activity. Nefario knows I've been pinging him with coding questions quite frequently, and of course he can view the fund's holdings himself.

I've been avoiding commenting on this stuff because it's best practice not to discuss your competition, especially with 7%/week which no-one else can possibly compete with. However, I think the above is the most reasonable explanation yet, but with 2 missing pieces.

First, why pay such high rates to investors? It could be that pirate saves in USD not in BTC ( because he isn't 100% convinced that BTC is going to be successful long term ), and therefore it makes sense to pay out to his investors so that his volume can increase, thereby earning him increasing amounts of USD with subsequent transactions.

Second, why does pirate not allow investors to change their deposit address? Probably because one of the reasons he can charge a premium is because he promises not just large amounts of coins at a good rate, but also because he can promise ( unlike the exchanges ) that the coins cannot be traced back to the purchaser. I don't know the exact mechanics, but tracing deposit addresses and also acquiring fresh coins via gpumax would both help to achieve the the goal of anonymous coins. It's also possible that the purchasers like to buy in blocks of coins, each "independent" of the other block ( I have talked with several very wealthy people who wish to buy BTC, and this is exactly what they wanted to do, so that if it was ever discovered they owned a certain btc address, they would have backups that aren't tied to it. I'm talking about protection against the potential for an all-out war against BTC by the Feds. )

Of course, existing mixing services can provide this protection, but not if your goal is to buy millions of dollars worth. I can personally buy maybe 15K USD worth per month outside of the exchanges and have it mixed properly for about a 5% total commission rate, but nothing beyond that, and not below that rate. And I've shopped around a lot.

In any event, you won't hear anything more from me on this, but I just couldn't help but give out my 2 cents into the crowd since I find the topic very fascinating. However, I'll also take this opportunity to make a shameless plug for my fund, which is 100% pirate-free so it's perfect for skeptics. As for myself, I'm agnostic on it being a scam vs being real; as with any investment, investor beware. But I never invest in things when I don't know what the business is doing as a rule, since my fund always errs on the side of prudence. Many thanks.

watching

Lol, of course the day after I post results we get a nice market rally . In any event, this is just more evidence that this next month should be a significant improvement, since we picked a low point in the NAV per share to do the report. I will start updating the NAV per share more frequently (once per week) to ensure that we do not dilute when raising money. This will also keep everyone more up-to-date with the fund's progress.

I had some spare time today so I'm issuing the monthly report a day early. I also decided just to go ahead and make everything public, it's just easier this way. If you spot an accounting mistake, please notify me ASAP. If you want shares bought-back, just PM me and I'll buy them this week at the buy-back price.

Also, as a note, I take my fees in terms of shares (since I would just reinvest them anyway), rather than as BTC. I always round down when I do the calculation to favor my investors.

MOVETO.FUND Monthly Report 7/1/2012*
*Report issued 6/30/2012 (one day early)

Portfolio (Using last trade prices as of 6/30/2012)

SYMBOL	SHARES	PRICE	VALUE
TYGRR.BOND-B	10101	0.101	1020.201
COGNITIVE	1560	0.57786	901.4616
FPGA.CONTRACT	62	0.319	19.778
BDK.BND	5946	0.101	600.546
PUREMINING	3209	0.2299	737.7491
TYGRR-TECH	153	2.05	313.65
GIGAMINING	247	0.9702	239.6394
NCKRAZZE	2000	1	2000
BTC	0.06467349	1	0.06467349

Valuation
Total: 5833.08977349
# Shares before fees: 5687
NAV per share before fees: 1.0256883723
Last HWM: 1
New HWM: 1.025688372
Earnings per share: 0.0256883723
Fees per share: 0.0051376745
NAV per share after fees: 1.0205506979
Buyback Price: 1.0103451909
Fees in BTC terms: 29.217954698
Fees in share terms (rounded down): 28
# Shares after fees: 5715

Summary
We are experiencing our first bear market on the GLBSE, and therefore it has been a difficult month for nearly everyone involved in the Bitcoin financial markets. We were up significantly last week, but some of our assets took a bit of a dive over the past few days. It is times like these that I am happy to have a system to rely on since it takes the emotion out of the equation. Luckily, most of our portfolio maintained strength throughout the entire month, and therefore I am happy with the majority of our purchases and the future stream of profits I expect from them. The model issued a sell signal on only about a quarter of our holdings, and so for these assets I am attempting to get out of at reasonable prices. Unfortunately, this is nearly impossible given the lack of liquidity on the GLBSE, so until then all coupons from weak assets simply get redirected to strong assets.

At the moment, there are very few quality assets on the GLBSE. I am continuing to pull down data every day for analysis, so hopefully some new promising opportunities will present themselves. Until then, we will remain fairly concentrated to protect ourselves from the potential for further declines in the majority of GLBSE assets. I expect a much higher return during the next month of operation, but even with a small return this month I believe we did well considering market conditions.

I will keep you posted. Take care,
-cytokine

Start my own business with zero overhead. In the "real world", the companies I've helped launch all required me to sell off major equity just to pay lawyers and accountants. With Bitcoin, there's none of that nonsense.

Well woop-de-doo, I got in this morning after trying 5 times.

I think the problem is that I suck at solving the captcha, so next time I log in I should watch the google auth timer to make sure the code stays valid during the login ( and thus avoid a failed login which would require another round of captcha solving... )

thanks anyway for the responses

were you using tor as well as google auth?

Do you use google auth though? I think that's what is causing the problem here. Maybe the server time is out of sync or something, or maybe it has something to do with logging in via tor while running google auth locally?

but I've done this many times in the past...

Is anyone else experiencing login issues?

I've never had a problem before, and now today I cannot log in. I've tried about 12 times. I know my email, password, and authentication token are correct. I was able to log in just a few hours ago.

I have emailed support but have not heard anything back.

I'll be going over all of this stuff in the monthly update on Sunday, but it seems that I should say something now. We are relatively safe from most of the storm: I have sell signals on only approximately one fifth of our holdings (that is, for these assets further price declines are expected), whereas we still have strong buy signals on the vast majority (~80%) of the portfolio which is continuing to deliver gains.

That said, I can certainly see from my research that there is a strong bear market right now in most GLBSE assets, which is precisely why I lifted the 20% per asset allocation limit - so we can avoid the mess and find the few pockets of winners and focus on those.

Also, regarding liquidating holdings - as per the FAQ, just PM me with how many shares you want bought back, and I'll buy them back at the NAV minus 1% the week of the new month. As of yesterday when I updated the NAV each share was valued at 1.0755 BTC, but of course I'll be updating this again on Sunday. So I wouldn't be selling at the crazy low prices that other people are trading shares at... the only reason this is occurring must be because some people don't want to wait for the next buyback period.

As always, I will keep you posted.
-cyto

For some reason twitter wants to replace "ASIC.COOP" with "http://t.co/HqBwgQHl"

Why twitter, why? Just give me the raw text data that I asked for, please!

In any event, for now just building a look-up table for the symbols that twitter thinks are urls, a la text.replace('http://t.co/HqBwgQHl', 'ASIC.COOP').

Sry, just wanted to vent about how much twitter pisses me off. That is all