Are you trying to reverse psychology the market?

Sure, why not... worth a try.

Hey, market. I don't even want $100k coins anymore. Not ever.

Ah, that senseless optimism

But seriously, the last period of major volume  was on June 12, and we went down to 550. If the next swing down (and unless a miracle happens, there will be a swing down in the coming days) doesn't fall below 550, I'd consider that a very reassuring sign.

Or both.

Would be preferable if all sides could tone down a bit... I really don't see the reason for all the aggressiveness.


Anyway...

@maok

I understand your point about early investors also being the ultimate risk takers. However, that wasn't my point, to claim that there is a guaranteed profit. Neither is there one, btw, for the 2nd line of investors in a malicious pyramid scheme.

I'll try to paraphrase to clarify my point: the ultimate goal of Bitcoin as it is widely understood is reaching a capitalization that does not only represent the intrinsic value of the transaction network itself, but represents the global economic output (or a fraction thereof).

To get there, Bitcoin needs to successively reach global acceptance. Any speculative value in excess of the current usage + acceptance level will melt away should it ever become apparent that global acceptance isn't attainable. In that case, the earliest investors will quite likely sit on a healthy profit, while the latest investors might well face a substantial loss.

So far, no different from a stock, right? The difference is what I describe in the 2nd paragraph: stocks only measure the intrinsic value of the company they represent (plus hype, plus some industry wide multiplier perhaps). They don't require a growing user and investor base to hold a price (unless the price was vastly inflated by speculative mania). Bitcoin, from day one of trading, has been understood as a global peer to peer currency -- and its speculative value represented that. Should our little experiment ever fall short of our expectations for good, the price deflation would probably be so vast that at least the last 2 waves of investors would face a loss.

tl;dr Intensionally, you are right: Bitcoin isn't a pyramid. My claim is that extensionally, it is indistinguishable up to the point where it succeeds.

The term "pyramid scheme" is charged, and often equated with "Ponzi scheme".

At least as an investment, Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme (though not a Ponzi scheme), in the sense that the earlier you got in, the more your investment will be worth, and without new blood entering, your investment doesn't grow.

The big difference to the usual pyramid schemes though is that in our case, it is just the bootstrapping phase of a peer to peer currency/store of wealth. In other words: it has to be a pyramid scheme, because it needs to start from nothing, and aims to grow to capture a huge market.

Like I said, some of the reactions in here are actually really pretty disappointing in their aggressiveness, including a number of posters that I thought would be better than that.

That said, your OP is a bit of a red cape: you're telling a forum full of (by and large) holders that a) you sold a substantial part of your holdings, and b) that you did so because you believe price will most likely not continue to go up in the near future.

What I'm trying to say is, some amount of disagreement is to be expected. But, yeah, the aggressive, personal tone that developed pretty soon isn't your fault.

ITT lots and lots of extremely skin thinned bulls in here. The rally so far not to your liking, gentlemen?

Anyway, ignoring all the bile being spread in this thread... enjoy your time off, mmitech. I agree what some have pointed out, that there would have probably been better times to sell than right now, from a purely economical perspective, but you don't need to justify your decision when and how much to sell one bit.

I think it is far from a consensus view that 0 conf transactions will become widely accepted for amounts larger than micropayments. Luckily, that's not a problem, since there are payment providers (bitpay, coinbase) that will take that risk, for a premium that minimal compared to that of traditional payment providers.

That was the peace Nobel prize, not the economics one. The former is well deserved imo (hey, 60 years without wars on our continent is kind of a big deal), the latter would have been a joke.

Maybe I should make one thing clear:

I'm personally not anti-academic.

I'm just anti-'economy pretending to be an empirical science, when in reality, the field is better described as: ethics, with a thin veneer of empiricism'

I kind of doubt it. He's not an academic, so he has really zero obligation to stay "up to date" -- while tenured economists are expected to follow recent developments with at most a 10 year delay

As long as Buffet is able to bring in profits by other means, without jumping onto the crypto bandwaggon, he can afford to do so. He will just be known as the "guy who gets everything, but tech". Which is what his reputation is today already.

Funny you mention Krugman. I remember reading an article a few weeks ago where he, as well, seemed to backpedal a bit already. I'll do a second part when I stumble across it again.

They will all cave in, eventually

Are we seriously discussing whether r "uberbull" pietila has been, consistently, way overconfident in his price estimations?

So please don't be a lazy ass, blatchcorn... If you're seriously in doubt about that, go to his post history. Examples of "that's rock bottom, we'll never go this low again" will be easily found. He also stated during the February drop that this was the end of the correction (when we had another 2 months left). And let's not even talk about the 2013 era when he claimed there's no way we wouldn't hit $100k by the end of the year.

He was right about going into the 400s, but even that was too optimistic as we hit the 300s after all, and he was far from being the only one in here who predicted lower prices. That said, I do give him credit though for saying the above, considering that this was a "bearish" target coming from one of the most bullish posters in here, so it added some weight.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Mr. Bob Shiller, Nobel prize laureate in economics of 2013.

Here's him, in a statement in January 2014, at a Davos conference:




And here he is again, less than half a year later, in an interview with Forbes (link)




Notice how you do it? Never admit you were wrong, always gradually backpedal. From "It's a bubble, and not that interesting.", to "It's pretty interesting, but still needs lots of work to become usable". Expect "It's going to revolutionize the financial world, and I _TOLD_ you so years ago." anytime soon...

JorgeStolfi, maybe a role model for you as well? ^__^

Anyone read the Eyal/Sirer proposal to fix the hashing power centralization problem?

http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/06/18/how-to-disincentivize-large-bitcoin-mining-pools/

Looks good to me (apart maybe from the 'high variance for solo mining' issue which drives miners to pools in the first place).

Anyone else got some deeper thoughts on the proposal?

Elliptic curve. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_DSA

What's wrong with "wasteful mining"? A) In total, it's almost nothing compared to the energy demands of other services we consider useful, and B) the alternative, proof of stake (instead of proof of work), comes with its own disadvantages (see Gavin's comment for example: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1oi7su/criticisms_of_proofofstake/ccsd6rm)

Probably this is the reddit post you have in mind. You'll note how he doesn't say that they completely discoupled. In fact, about 3 weeks ago, there were signs that during high volume periods, that link might still be active - see the discussion in the wall thread

Not all votes come through payments. But you're right, looks like XMR votes through payments amount to about 15 BTC currently. Not bad at all. But not really a problem either, it serves its purpose to get a view of how much money (and thus: volume) is behind an unlisted coin.

Friendly advice:

I think your post belongs to those 90% wrong ones as well.

Not sure I get your point. The order book history I posted doesn't denominate ask sum in USD. It's misleading perhaps that the two are shown in the same chart, just imagine them to be in two different ones. The point I made isn't affected by that.

I disagree. Real volume analysis right now is difficult without some form of aggregating over exchanges, but if you'd have to pick any one exchange, I'd always take stamp. The main reason is that their volume is consistent and transparent. Bitfinex still refuses to distinguish between routed volume and in-house volume, so I know it is inflated, at least on days when they have to route to stamp. How often does that happen? Anyone's guess.
Chinese volume is tricky because of zero fees. I've said more than once: I don't dismiss it entirely as "fake", but I certainly don't count it 1:1 either. So stamp and btc-e are left, and in my opinion, btc-e rarely if ever starts larger moves, so picking stamp is (still) the default choice for me.