The dollar is a recognised safe haven in times of trouble.  Bitcoin is a high risk, highly speculative commodity.  Bitcoin is still recovering from its own massive speculative bubble and hasn't found its 'true' price yet.

Sure is.  I'm also enjoying watching the huge cluster of trades on bitcoinmonitor.com.

Trade is down almost 20% from its rapid peak.  I have to wonder what the large buyer's intentions were.  Create a buying wave of higher prices to later sell into?  It didn't last long if that's the case.

Kickin' in the up tick
Sweatin' out the down tick
Gotta make my mind up
Which trade can I take?

Sold at $11.25, put orders in at $7.50.  Hey, I can dream.

Rebecca Black says the rally is on Friday.  Friday, Friday.

I welcome it if it's trivial to implement.  Anyone done it yet?

I transfer money to friends on a semi regular basis within the country.  Instant transfers, no waiting.

Anyway, the rally seems to have died.  Up to $12 and back down to $10.  WTF.  I hope it's someone's buggy bot going nuts and emptying their USD into bitcoins :-)

If I purchase something on my credit card the other end gets confirmation within seconds no matter where they are.

Bitcoin displays the same slow speed whether you're transferring money to your next door neighbour or the other side of the planet.  At least it doesn't discriminate, I guess.

You're not the only one :-P

This is a bit annoying.  I'm trying to get bitcoins to MtGox to sell them into the strengthening market.  Been waiting 90 minutes and they're still not there.

Bitcoin's not very useful if you need to do anything in less than a few hours.

It is going nuts.  Someone really really wants bitcoins right now.  I wonder who, and how much money they have to throw at the market.  Most of all, I wonder why they want bitcoins now.  Nothing has changed since yesterday.

Someone just bumped up the market from $7.75 to $8.50 very quickly which is well above the recent trend.  There's a flurry of activity.  Use this opportunity well.

That's funny, people are flocking to the very thing that's supposed to be collapsing right now (the US dollar).

People are blaming MyBitcoin for the bitcoin crash.  Okay, maybe 20,000 bitcoins went missing.  How long does it take to sell that much?  A day?  A week?  Longer?  How much longer are people going to blame a possible one off event for the depressed price?

For those arguing all we need to lift bitcoin prices is to cancel the orders, I suggest they haven't been trading in other markets for too long.  It's quite common to see penny stocks with bids around $0.01 and asks at $0.10, with no action for weeks.  Just because the asking price is high doesn't mean buyers are going to flock to it.  Bitcoin is a high risk commodity that fits the penny stock model pretty well. It's common to see 20% daily swings in highly speculative investments.

I've been reading this same point on the forums for many weeks now: The price falls on weekends, traders don't have money in their accounts to buy bitcoins therefore need to wait until Tuesday or even later to top up their balance before being able to buy bitcoins.  Sometimes this argument is mixed in with complaints about delays with Dwolla.

Problem is, this doesn't make sense.  Why not keep money in the exchange ready for the dips?  Only reason not to do that would be lack of trust in the exchange, in which case it's not worth trading at all there.

I think gold is overpriced right now due to the share market and debt fear factor.  Platinum is much rarer and a more industrially useful metal.  It's also used as a financial instrument yet gold was at parity with platinum earlier today.  Either gold is overpriced or platinum is too cheap.  I wager on the former.

I would wager most people on this planet use USD.  Every day.  Indirectly.  Did they use any crude oil derived products?  Cook corn?  Bake bread?  Eat tofu?  All are priced directly in USD for the whole planet or tied strongly to US markets as market makers.

84.  You mine regardless of profitability and volatile price swings.

Oh, I know that.  By 'we don't need miners' I mean we don't need hoards generating bitcoins for little to no profit at current prices.  There will always be miners out there mining with very cheap or 'free' electricity, so transactions will always go through.

The hash rate has barely risen over the past few weeks so it seems we're well past the moment where GPU mining is attractive.  Next up is FPGA mining, assuming someone puts together an attractive package.

And this ladies and gentlemen, is a prime example of the Tragedy of the Commons.  A miner quitting as it's pointless mining for a return of cents per day is sarcastically thanked by other miners still in the game, who get very cheap or 'free' electricity.  Other miners are now less likely to quit as someone else will take their share, and it's a race to the bottom from here.

In reality we don't need any miners.  There are 7 million bitcoins in existence which is probably more than half what will ever get generated (early adopters who mined and thought the whole thing to be pointless and deleted their wallet, hard drive crashes, stolen and reformatted computers, deceased bitcoin owners not informing anyone of their wallet, etc).  More than enough bitcoins out there to satisfy speculators.

Bitcoin rising?  I swear they were worth over $20 two months ago.  Maybe I'm just imagining it.

I'm sure someone will point out that bitcoins were worth less than a dollar early this year, but that's about as useful to me as pointing out that the Dow Jones index was once less than 1000 points therefore it's still heading up today.