Further to my above post I suggest that if you are already wealthy from bitcoins, it would be appropriate to convert a portion of that bitcoin gains to hard assets, eg gold or silver which by any stretch is looking remarkably cheap at the moment. Bitcoins may yet have another bubble or two, and rise to even greater heights however in the end it will either be an unwanted unwieldy currency or it will be the money of the new world order and have morphed into a centralised network.

In the UK gold and silver sovereign coins are not subject to capital gains tax however silver does have VAT tax when you buy it! Which is the way the powers that be try to stop investors buying silver.

Its a great opening post but I don't think bitcoins will fill that void. There is a flaw in bitcoins which is that the blockchain is increasing exponentially in size . So far it doesn't look like a problem but with compounding it will become a problem, that is certain and might hit sooner than we think. How it is going to be handled is not yet established! At the moment 14G is already a hassle, it takes days to sync with the blockchain. What when it is 14Terrabytes ? This will be too big for peer to peer decentralisation. More and more specialised bitcoin nodes will be needed or to put another way more and more centralisation of the bitcoin network. I'm on the bitcoin bandwagon for now as the profit potential is still there but this concern has bugged me for a while. I've yet to see a response that makes sense.  If I put a tinfoil hat on I might even think this has been a design feature that centralisation will eventually be required.

Do you know how many times i've heard ripples mentioned in mainstream media? zero.

Its just not interesting

This is a bitcoins speculation forum. What the f*ck has ripples got to do with anything. Thats not paranoia it boredom if anything. I'd rather talk about other alt coins if I must divert from bitcoins. Peercoins are interesting

Why does ripple keep popping up here? is there not a ripple forum somewhere else on the internet? This is bitcoins. I've listened to the ripple arguments why its so good and I'm not interested.

I called for a bullish rally around the time of silk road siezure, just before actually. Looks like a good call I'd say, price has risen about $1000 since then

  

How high is this rally going to go ? $2200 ?

Been a little while since I posted on this thread, however heres the fork I'm now following on my blog.

Hows the bearish scenario working out ??

    

I think bitcoins is the closest thing there is to a free market today. This is because there are no significant bitcoin derivatives yet. In silver for example the price of physical metal is diluted a hundred times by paper derivatives traded in the futures markets and ETFs.  Only manipulation possible in bitcoins is to pump the price up then dump the price down which increases volatility but doesn't supress the price.

Oh no here we go again. Time for another  Ripple debate is it.   

Financial institutions will support Ripple, because it can be centrally controlled. There is no surprise to me at all in that statement. If Ripple does not succeed then banks will support the next fully centrally controllable debt based version of something thats a little bit like bitcoins to try and hoodwink the populace to swap free money for controlled money. Its exactly the converse of why they will never get behind bitcoins which cannot be centrally controlled. Which incidentally is what gives bitcoin such tremendous value to humanity.

Not sure I can be bothered with the argument again though. Ripples you can keep it.

If a big sell happens on one exchange the price falls on that exchange, if it is significant enough then tranders will see the cheaper bitcoins on that exhanange and buy them. the price will always tend to equalise between the exchanges. Its called arbitrage. (except Mtgox is a bit different because you can't easily sell for US$)  

I think the price may fall down to about $260 ish over the next few weeks in a mini bear trend. After that next leg up may take us somewhere near or beyond $600. Thats based on my idea that we have a cup n handle formation, with the handle being formed just now.

I wrote about it here
http://afbitcoins.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/mtgox-price/

I hope not. I think New World Order currency will be a chip embedded in your flesh which controls how much credit you are allowed. ie Fiat and debt based just like now, except with different branding. They might need to partially back with gold or something for a little while to get confidence restored.

Unless you are one of the elite in which case gold is the money, always has been and always will be.

When I first came across this research paper i was slightly alarmed, worrying that the bitcoin programmers might be hoodwinked into making the modifications that were proposed.  but after seeing other reactions of bitcoiners on this thread and elsewhere don't think i needed to worry so much about this threat. People seem very wise to this kind of tampering. Great community.

Thanks for the links. The community is onto it, nice to see.

Research by the Department of Computer Science, Cornell University suggests bitcoin is vulnerable to selfish miners gaining more than their fair share of the spoils of mining.

Allegedly a selfish group will quickly become a majority as individual miners seek to join that cheating group to reap the higher rewards, like a snowball growing bigger as it rolls down the mountain. This group will then become the controllers of bitcoin and it will become effectively centralised and controlled by that group of miners rather than the decentralised currency we all value.

heres is a link to the research paper if you are interested, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0243v2.pdf

It is claimed by the same researchers that they can also implement a modification to bitcoins to help resolve the problem. I think this would be a huge mistake and I’ll explain why.

First such pools with greater than 25% share of mining already exist. http://blockchain.info/pools
Therefore if the patch was implemented now it would mean instead of anyone being able to cheat only those big pools could cheat.

The proposed patch takes that away freedom to choose to cheat replacing it with a crippled network in which small guys can’t cheat, but the big guys can. In other words it is the software patch that guarantees the snowball effect, not the strategy of selfish mining.

I'm hoping to stimulate some interesting debate here about the problem, and the proposed patch and hopefully spread awareness about the danger of the patch and why it would be suicide to implement it.

Thanks

--
full article on my blog http://afbitcoins.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/selfish-mining-possibilities-discovered/

I asked about it on the economics forum and all the feedback there was avoid.

A new mining strategy has been discovered in which 'selfish' miners can benefit at the detriment of others.

Heres the research paper from the boffins at Cornell University
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0243v2.pdf

 My opinion is that the proposed 'solution', a modification to the way bitcoin works, would be suicide.

I've written more on my blog here about why I think that but in short, they propose to make it so that only big mining pools can 'cheat' instead of everyone. No more level playing field for mining pools.

This gives incentive to everyone to join a big mining pool in order to reap the benefits of the selfish mining strategy. In other words the patch, far from helping things would almost guarantee centralised control to appear in short notice.

The alternative is that everyone can mine 'selfishly' if they choose to opening up interesting possibilities but hopefully allowing the network to remain decentralised.

Hoping to get some conversation on the topic here.

Thanks

http://afbitcoins.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/selfish-mining-possibilities-discovered/

Not sure if my silver cup and handle image worked! I can't see it anymore, heres another attempt

Just read this link about coinfloor, a new london exchange allowing high frequency trading.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/london-bitcoin-exchange-opens-business-145000999.html

Wondered what people make of this? Could High Frequency Trading be a tool allowing big interests to push the price around or supress the price?

Heres an update to my bullish scenario -Think i was right to be bullish 

Theres a closing wedge forming at the moment by look of it. Resistance at a line drawn from the all time high to last weeks high..