One can plot the Google Trends volume for the bitcoin hieroglyphs and a similar volume worldwide indicator, like "mtgox". You will soon find out that China was in perfect sync with the rest of the world, with a mere lump when the now famous programme aired. It quickly faded away and the volume is back to it's post bubble decreasing slope.

The whole China hype plays perfectly into western stereotypes about simple minded savages that need to be saved and educated, or in this case, dragged into a pump and dump shady investement. Most of the time the African, Asian or Southamerican savages know much better than the fat westerners what their problem is and usually the root of that problem is precisely some form of western intervention.

"Sideways" is a movement that can be recognized only in retrospect. What we see here is that the reflexive market believes about itself that it has settled for a price around 115 and it cancels the sideways motion, acting as a faux market maker.

IMHO this price is not sustainable without a bubble, china hype, ATMs... as the market will soon realize.

Litecoin will not disrupt Bitcoin because it's not sufficiently different. It will eat away at bitcoin's market share and prove the point that there's nothing special, magic or "gold-like" about the current chain. The crypto periodic table has an infinite number of elements, and the scarcity can be customized at will: fixed number, exponential increase, just one etc. And if it's scarce, easy to transport and well distributed, then it's money. Litecoin will inflate Bitcoin, it's already a practical crypto that you can use instead of Bitcoin for many things: buy drugs on Atlantis, store in a cold wallet, send fiat around the world with high privacy etc.

Bitcoin's merchant deployment is a shallow moat: it's only a matter of time until folks like BitPay etc. add more payment options shielding away the merchant from the details of the actual crypto the user is paying with. Even homebrew Bitcoin payment systems can be easily retrofitted to support Bitcoin forks.

If Ripple takes off it will be a Bitcoin killer, not a metacurrency. There's absolutely no reason to prefer to use BTC instead of XRP aside from speculation. XRP is a better currency than BTC because they can control the price and make it stable, with a gentle upwards slope guaranteeing a nice return in relation to the risk, say 10-20% per year. For people wanting to use it as a currency, that's a major improvent over BTC.

They don't market themselves as Bitcoin killers because they want to leverage the bitcoin community for their own profit, but make no mistake about it, Ripple is not "a distributed bitcoin exchange". Think of XRP as an improved bitcoin where the early adopters are the developers, committed to build and extend the ecosystem instead of simply hoard BTCs and wait for others to do the work. It's improved in many ways: instant clearing, high scalability, no need for a mining race, built in distributed exchange and many other features in addition to fixing the "Bitcoin early adopter incentives" problem.

Most of the crap on that website is just FUD or false, with one large exception: Ripple is centralized in it's bootstrap phase and is vulnerable to regulatory pressure for the first few years.

Edit: On the open source front,  they have little incentive to release it now in alpha phase, when most innovation takes place, pantents are being filled etc. and they are at high risk from disruption by someone who copy pastes an "open ripple". Once they are established, I agree with their website they have a major incentive to release the source, as long as there's no longer any direct threat from copycats.

To correctly ride the bubble on the upside I should have invested 100K last year and extract a few million dollars last month. Of course I did not do that, I only invested petty change in what I saw and still see as a high risk greater fool game. That being said, I'm happy with my analysis since 99 times out of 100 it will me keep from losing my shirt in shady investments. The bitcoin billionaires are exactly the type of suckers who usually fall for these schemes and they have little merit of being among the first suckers to head about bitcoin. Their long term success is completely dependent on the supply of future suckers.

To ride the bubble on the down slope there's no precise timing required: wait for the burst and a suckers rally, like that peaked on 160, short and hold for a few months. I can't daytrade and profit from the high volatility, but I'm pretty sure a few months from now the price will be much lower than 150$ where I shorted. Easy money.

@ineededausername: I see you found an older prediction of mine anticipating another bubble. So I'm the only poster in this thread that actually predicted something. So believe me when I tell you that this time really is different: due to significant competition and innovation spurred by Bitcoin's success, we will not see another bubble into 2015. XRP, Litecoin and many other improved currencies that are to be released in the immediate future will take care of that.

This goal is provably impossible in itself. The CPU/GPU is an ASIC. The best you can hope for is that your hash schedule explores ALL the features of the CPU at MAXIMUM efficiency, making an identical CPU the only possible ASIC design. All the features: FPU, MMX/SSE2, memory segmentation and virtualization, all of the cache, branch predictors, debug and JTAG registers and the myriad other tiny atavisms that make a modern CPU work.

If you don't use them all with maximum efficiency, then a stripped down CPU or GPU optimized for the specific features you use will have a better performance at the same density/power/price point. In practice it's unlikely you hit even less than one order of magnitude gap between a software version on a generic CPU and custom software on a custom ASIC.

So I'm not sure I understand the appeal of ASIC resistance. The most you can achieve is to make the ASIC design very expensive. This will hold ASICs at bay for a few years, but if the currency is successful and the mining market is large then an ASIC will eventually be designed. When someone does it, it's game over, he controls the mining market. A huge entry barrier will dissuade other competitors to do the same because the potential benefit is lower.

If you absolutely must do proof of work, for example to control the currency price like in Eltase's design, then a simple scheme for which ASICs are easy to make or already exists (like bitcoin PoW) is much better from an economic standpoint.

You are confusing the genius and highly successful bitcoin cryptocurrency design with the obnoxious anarcho-libertard crowd that pushes the current chain as an investment and get rich quick scheme. I will continue to inhabit these forums because I'm a crypto and economics geek, and simply ignore the fools.

As for "investing", I rode the bubble on it's upside, then shorted like a boss from 150 down. And I'm gonna keep shorting until  the price hits 2-3x it's winter value. Now that's what I call a profitable bubble !

Never. The bitcoin experiment has ran it's course and will be replaced by better, more scalable, more stable, faster cryptocurrencies. Those left holding bitcoins into 2015 waiting for the next bubble will be the last suckers standing.

That's what daytrading is, for most small fish: a roulette. At best, if you can escape the psychological games manipulators play with you. Nothing you see is real: walls, price movements, volumes, resistance lines and trends. News reach you when they were already priced in, so you can only lose by acting on them.

Always trade on fundamentals: speculative bubble, rapid rise when word gets out, needs time to deflate. Go long on the upside, short on the downside and you can't miss. Mark your short profits at each rapid bear trap, most of the time price will recover since people need time to accept the idea of a burst bubble (but don't bet on recovery unless you like being the greater fool). Rinse, repeat after 6 months - 1 year.

The link clearly states that gold farming is allowed. It's a 9 digit export industry, it would be foolish to ban fat western geeks from paying money to the chinese game farmers. What it's forbidden is using the virtual currency as real money outside the specific context it was intended for, like game items or voip minutes.

That means mining Bitcoin is not illegal; exchanging to and from real cash and owning bitcoins are also legal. There are no "in game" purchases for bitcoin, the whole point is real world use as a replacement currency and that it's specifically banned in China. So chinese can only speculate, not use bitcoin for purchasing anything directly. Bussines as usual for bitcoin, China is a huge growth market (/jk).

Here we were, worrying that US might introduce regulation that dramatically affect the acceptance of Bitcoins. We had no idea that one of the last totalitarian regimes on earth who's censors the internet and does not recognize basic human rights is ready to embrace, get this, an anonymous internet currency !

The chinese leaders will crush anything that stands in the way of their iron-fist control of the populace. They will literally throw you into a dark cell where you never again see the light of day. They don't like freedom because freedom means the end of the party-state. And they will not like bitcoins, I assure you of that.

Yes, the fact that 20k was stolen out of a prototype locked in some lab clearly spells the end of this ATM folly. The fact that you heard it from "friend" is conclusive proof. You seem like a legit and upstanding guy.

Except this "product" is something that can be hacked in two days by a  bunch of students with the right tools and hardware. BitcoinATM was never about the device itself, it was always about the business model and the regulatory aspects.

So he was fired. For being a tool:


The ATM exists, and will be demonstrated today. It's obviously far from conquering the world, and will have zero impact on price.

Actually, $20 x 11.000.000BTC would support quite a bit of economic activity. About 1 Billion dollars per year in trade, at typical money velocity. That's still much higher then the actual Bitcoin economy. 10 Billion dollars / year for a 200$ fundamental price ? You must surely be joking.

So the valuation was always about the future perspectives of Bitcoin, not it's real world, actual use. And with XRP, LTC and the lot sneaking up to crash bitcoin's party, it's a folly to think exponential increase can continue. The onus is on the proponents of this "bitcoins can go only up" idea to prove how the outdated bitcoin experiment can forever resist disruption from later and better designs.

This time is different, but not in the way permabulls hope.

The ask and bid walls are  theatrical props. They have little real life meaning. A sucker rally could start any moment, there really are tens of millions of dollars dormant in the exchanges which aren't making up any walls.

That being said, each day that passes the bubble is getting colder and the chance for another one is dropping. People buy because they expect profits. No short term rally, no media attention, no potential profits thus no bubble. Regular people will not use their money to day trade.

I'm not very concerned about the 5-20 million $/day figure Mark dropped. I don't accuse him of dishonesty, just that he's a bit creative with the numbers so it sounds like his company is bigger than it really is. My interpretation: at the peak of the bubble there were 20 million dollars flowing in per day, including bitcoins at bubble valuations. Later the torrent of fiat and bitcoins dropped to 5M/day, including fiat that was in transit during the burst (we know depositing money in the gox can take 2-3 weeks). So what will the fiat figure be when the hype cools down ? Maybe less than 1M/day, inssuficient to cover people cashing out and miners covering their bills and profits ? I would certainly expect that. The bills and profits of miners alone are around 500K/day at current valuation.

Actually, there is no lag and the price is dropping. It's normal, we are in the long bear market that accompanies a burst bubble. There is allot of resistance, the occasional pig rally, people really want to believe the dream. Slowly and surely they adapt to the new reality, somewhere in the $20-$40 bracket.

It's actually possible that everyone benefits: when governments print money out of thin air they can spend it's value without anybody losing anything right then. It's called seigniorage. Of course, there no free lunch and eventually someone will foot the bill, usually the people left holding the worthless money when the currency is debased or abolished.

Bitcoin tries to move that seigniorage profit in the hands of the early adopters. In theory the losers would be those left holding bitcoins in the far off future when bitcoins are superseded by a better wealth transfer system. In practice that future is much closer than most people expect.

That may be true in a market driven by fundamentals, not hype. Compared to it's fundamental current use for drugs, donations, bitpay etc. Bitcoin is overvalued 100x-1000x.

For Bitcoin there is no "stability", the most stable 6 month period had about 50% swings. What's true for any bubble is true for bitcoin: when the hypemachine stops and greater fools supply dwindles, the price goes down.

I'm shorting and hopping a new bubble does not explode in the next months. It's a major gamble tough, with bitcoin it always is. I have a cash buffer up to 250$, if price goes higher I'm loosing my shorts.

I've been toying with this idea for some time, and I've changed my signature to "Satoshi Nakamoto is Roger Dingledine" for a month or so. Great video find, to hear what could be the author of Bitcoin talking about "coins" in 2009 is surprising to say the least. Here it is again straight from the horses's mouth in Jan 2009 (arma=Roger):

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/two-incentive-designs-tor


There's also an early paper (2003) Roger coauthored called, suprise, surprise... "On the economics of
anonymity" which talks about the issue of incentives in a mixminion type environment.

Roger or someone in the Tor team (Nick Mathewson, Jacob Applebaum, the Tor collective as a whole) certainly match most of Satoshi's known characteristics. Both on the the technical and the ideological sides. I've compiled a list of circumstantial evidence which I've been rotating in my signature:

• Roger is the leader of the Tor project, a privacy buff and a cypherpunk
  
• Tor and Bitcoin are distributed applications written in C++, employ OpenSSL and BSD-type licenses
• Distributed algorithms for solving the byzantine problem, pseudonymty, etc. are essential for both Tor and Bitcoin; many of Roger's papers are published in financial cryptography publications, it's his life work
• Satoshi was a native English speaker who worked on US hours
• "We can win a major battle [...] Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own." - Satoshi
• Roger is highly respected in the security/cryptography community and has little prestige to gain from coming out as Bitcoin's author (he's one of the precious few in this position)
• Conversely, associating himself with the currency of SilkRoad could spell trouble for the Tor project, partially founded by grants from the US government

I could add at least 10 other similar points, all circumstantial. There is of course no smoking gun, and with someone like the authors of Tor, there never will be.

This is a circumstantial evidence in itself: the fact that Satoshi managed to lead a world class project for more than a year without leaking information about his real identity is proof in itself that he was an anonymity mastermind. For example, one of the techniques employed by Satoshi to hide his location in his emails, namely resetting his timezone to UTC, is exactly what the recently released TorBirdy email privacy plugin does:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/torbirdy-our-first-beta-release
(ioerror = Jacob)