I know. He once mentioned my name on the Bitcoin show and look what happened to me

Bitcoin is not going anywhere because it's economically and technically flawed. That being said, a new bubble can very well re-emerge after the current one cools-off, successive bubbles are historically documented. The bubbly appeal is certainly still there: revolutionary, this time is different, game changer, paradigm shift etc.  Maybe we can see re-ignition in the pennies range, 0-20c, but that price will not be hit very soon, judging by the subjective interest I see a bull trap is long overdue.

However a second bubble with gentler slopes will not in any case comfort the owners of the 1 million or so coins sold in the 15 - 30$ range. Those are millions of dollars of wealth destroyed through mining overvalued bits, and millions of dollars into the pockets of a hand full of "early adopters" pushing the scheme.

Everyone,

My partner and I spent a week with Todd Bethell, developing the Bitcoin ATM platform from the ground up on a Kiosk in his garage. He's a big dreamer for sure, and is also unfortunately misguided. He had no technical understanding of how Bitcoin works, and was purely ideologically driven in regards to what he saw as the potential market size. What I saw as a prototype / proof of concept / 'cool bleeding edge, fun project', he saw as the answer to the economic ills of the world.

When we met Todd, we found his hard line Libertarian ideals endearing. When we parted ways, unpaid for services rendered, I felt differently. He'd spoken of Dustin and others as his big Bitcoin investors. Unfortunately, that money never materialized, and instead of dealing with us in an upfront and honest way, he instead insulted our work, competence, demanded that we sign a non compete agreement, and even went so far as to report me to the Bitcoin Police, while also calling me and Eric 'fraudsters' and 'scammers' to others. The offline wallet system listed on his site is my IP, as is the implementation description and backend services which we already coded for the Vanity addresses. Yeah, I'm the scammer and thief. *cough*.

So, when Todd didn't pay us, we pulled the kill switch on the software. Perhaps we should have just let him have it for free? What would you have done?

I think there is a really good lesson here for many of you in the Bitcoin community to learn. Bitcoin is very young, and the market size is nowhere near where it needs to be for brick and mortar solutions to be realistic.

Mr. Bitcoiner and others have made very valid points as to the coming obsolescence of ATMs. Bitcoin ATMs will almost certainly never find a mass market.

200 Bitcoin Kiosks @ $4000 / unit + Software, Monthly Support, Security, On Site Maintenance = Not Viable

video of the Bitcoin ATM in debug mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2tikxtviqQ

So.. You want to know why his site is dead? It's because the economic issues that the have been raised here are incredibly valid. The idea of 200 "Bitcoin ATMs" (really, Kiosks) being deployed worldwide is hilariously unrealistic and naive.

Frankly my experience with the fly-by-night operators in Bitcoin has left me with such a bad taste in my mouth that I prefer to only work in a vacuum, and do my best to just keep to myself. So many of you are liars, thieves and crooks, dishonest businessmen, and frankly, just outright criminals, that it's not all that surprising that Bitcoin has been suffering from an image problem.

I'm tired of being libeled. I'm one of the few people actively working on the building blocks of the Bitcoin economy while so many others are outwardly projecting their own insecurities about themselves by way of calling others scammers and fraudsters. I have never seen such a thing anywhere else. The ratio of of Bitcoiners who have psychiatric disorders relative to the general population has got to be massive.

TL:DR

Bitcoin ATMs will never come to market. By the time Bitcoin gets to the size necessary for their viability, smartphones and other POS solutions will exist. On the surface, Bitcoin ATMs seem like a good idea, but they are financial black holes.

-Jonathan

What are you talking about ? The Japanese stock bubble took 5 years to inflate and 12 years to reach pre-bubble levels, and that's patently clear form the graph. A similar shape can be seen for Japanese real estate, fast upside, long and drawn-out downside:



Notwithstanding, your definition of a bubble is arbitrary and wrong - the slopes of the upside/downside are irrelevant. A bubble is defined by speculative overvaluation of the fundamentals driven by herd behaviour, and we had and still have plenty of that in Bitcoin.

You can change your own definition, but that won't stop everybody else to call the bitcoin price evolution what it is: a speculative bubble.

Hypothetically, would your analysis change if the USD were to break below 73?

Thanks for catching my mistake, yes overbought. It can definitely rise for some time, but you can't deny that 61.72 is significantly closer to overbought than 43.65 for gold. In addition, RSI for the Dow:Gold ratio has spent the majority of time under the 50 level (and has only been over 70 twice in the past year - for about two weeks in January and one day in July) whereas gold has mostly been over 50. Also, if funds are flowing into equities, it doesn't take much of that flow into gold to keep the ratio steady.

Extreme lows in daily RSI for gold are not the same as extreme lows elsewhere. There have only been three other periods where RSI was below the current level, and they were all short-lived. You're right, though - these indicators are minor next to the price. That looks like it's heavy, but there are an awful lot of long tails on those candlesticks - talk about tension.

Besides, how many times has the gold price looked heavy and sprang back up to new highs? I count at least three times just on that daily chart and those weren't even instances where other factors were as bullish as they are now.

Touche. Gold was my focus, but I admit silver is a more volatile animal and the price looks heavy. If we go to weekly or longer charts the uptrend is intact. Gold fell out of channel and is riding along the underside, but it's done that before and broken to the upside; it's set to do so again. The only class that's been defiant is treasuries, but we see the weakness there.

Consider this: if sentiment is such that the global economy is going to pick up, silver will benefit from its industrial use aspect. Equities will rise overall as well as mining operations - gold would have to fall off a cliff for that to change, not so much silver. Since silver will be buoyed by expectations of industrial demand, neither rising nor falling precipitously, silver miners will remain profitable as well.

Mining companies are well into the black as things are now. Many are raising dividends. Few things draw institutional investors like increasing dividend returns do.

Then there's oil. All that has to do is remain above ~$70 to maintain elevated input costs across the board. Production expenses will prevent most goods from falling in price, including precious metals. If precious metals aren't going to fall apart, miners won't crash and a worst case scenario is a range-bound price level.

Or any number of factors could trigger a panic, sending gold and silver to new highs. How about the most relevant: the threat of COMEX default? If that happens, the world's financial glue disintegrates. If standing open interest for the December gold contract isn't reduced well below ~30k, that will happen - started by a run on banks for the wealthy. I think (hope) that can be put off for at least one more year.

And the rest of the world: civil unrest and riots, food shortages, terrorism, Venezuela's gold repatriation, Skynet or... Justin Bieber. At least a few of these are already here and getting worse.

Nice. I don't agree on gold being a bubble yet, but I respect that assessment.

not good..

Hey cypherdoc: why do some governments seem keen on making precious metals hard or too costly to acquire/hold/use?

The same applies to gold, only none of the indicators are against the uptrend (volume, RSI, MACD). For the Dow:gold ratio, the RSI is approaching oversold overbought. The MACD is already at extremes, and the ratio has retraced to about 50% of the decline. I won't even get into the weeklies other than to say that looks even heavier.

Note the MACD and RSI which are at extreme lows instead of highs. MACD has crossed over to the upside. The dollar is in a much weaker position with RSI in the middle and MACD having made a decisive crossover to the downside.

It would also be wise to remember the basics of higher highs and higher lows.

I have one question for you, cypherdoc: do you think the markets are being intervened in by monetary authorities?

It is something my bank (USAA) offers.  Initially the offered it via a scanner (called deposit@Home).  You type in amount of check, scan it and then once accepted void the check.  They credit your account electronically.  About a year ago they added smartphone feature which works the same way except you take photo of front and back of check.

Pretty cool.  It happens in realtime even the OCR image analysis and instantly tells you the deposit cleared or to scan again.   Pretty cool stuff but USAA is an awesome bank and it is owned by members.

Has anyone used goldmoney.com before? It's a way to avoid taxes on silver.

There's not enough benefit in this. Most short sellers were shorting since long ago. One of my customers has already made 230% profit. The recent crash only induced more long positions.

Short sellers are far from being liquidated because they have a lot of profits to back their positions.

I dis-agree.  If "they" wanted a foot in the game, they'd have one for chump change.  The whole economy is now, what, $20 mill?  Taking a position would undoubtedly increase that somewhat even if they were careful, but we are still talking about a tiny tiny amount of money here.  Probably the cost of running just the US's military for a matter of seconds.

You have Solidcoin salivating and planning his revenge over and over with the doublespend attack when the network power drops to that level.

Hey, if Bank of America can go from $54 to $3 and still not be done, why can't Bitcoin?

I've been doing it at Walmart for over 5 years. I hand them a check, they scan it, and had the check back to me. According to the timestamps of my receipt and my back statement, it was all done within one second.

Now, I'm going to try to do this one more time. MtGox showed me a way to deposit USD into my account with it showing up quickly. Great! Now, I want to withdraw funds from MtGox and have it show up at my bank within the same amount of time. If they can't, then I say that their only looking out for themselves. Get your USD here quick, but we'll still take our sweet time giving your funds back to you. That's the point I was trying to make from my very first post on this thread.