Rawdog said that too in one of his videos

Please make this thread sticky until the next version and keep repeating that
There is so much traffic now many people might not see this thread.

That's not how it works, thankfully. You can grab all of the coin creation and prevent transactions from going through (until you get nuked from orbit), but you can't reverse most of the transactions (exponentially more difficult the further you want to go back) or steal people's balances because you don't have their private keys to sign transactions with. For other things you could do you also need control of the majority of the clients, which controlling all the pools in the world will not help with.

The European greeting could be "hi-de-hi campers!"

True, but the wording was obviously meant to inspire FUD. Also, 'they' implied Tradehill, which may not be the case, but rather the entity handling it for them. Then again, you never know these days, when the secret service nabs you for committing an art project..

I never said the price needs to be actively manipulated down either (and you would have to be a fool to sell 25% below current price). Just don't engage in televangelist drive type pricing mania. Buy what you need, don't manipulate the market, it should settle to normal levels by itself (remember the inflation is still fairly high this and next year). Once it does, exchange rate will increase gradually.

Better ways to help the economy:

a) if you're a merchant, accept Bitcoin
b) ask the merchants you deal with to accept Bitcoin
c) try to enlighten people (particularly traders) about the dangers of a disconnect between economy size and exchange rate
d) tell everyone else about Bitcoin

I don't think there are a lot of people wishing for the complete and utter demise of the USD as that will have global consequences. Nevertheless, it's a real possibility the way things are going.


You might be right on the second part, a collapse can be prevented by what they are trying to do right now. Raise the debt ceiling and socialize the debt. (Most) US citizens will earn less and less and move towards Chinese wages/standard of living ($2000 a year or something, last I heard). This basically means a reinstatement of feudalism, citizens will work for food and a place to live with little chance of saving anything, just like the Chinese factory wage slaves do now. It's possible, and seemingly in progress already, but obviously not exactly desirable.

Investing in gold will not prevent any of that BTW, there will be plenty of laws to divest you eventually. Maybe there is a chance if you settle elsewhere, provided they don't manage to do the same there. Learn Chinese possibly

Does the app allow you to select transaction fee? And what about wallet encryption?

For the record, I never said anything about the price going down. I said plenty (in other threads) about the price needing to follow the economy, meaning it should go down, for a healthy Bitcoin future.

Keep guessing how much coins I hold.

Journo troll: writes hit piece from premade conlusion and headline to make Bitcoin look bad (not posting on this forum though)

Oh, and the obligatory rick roll troll, of course.

Not to mention the bump troll, teehee.

Guess how popular this is going to be You forgot:

trader troll: it's only going up up up baby! BUY BUY BUY (so I can make my cash out target)
statistics troll: technical analysis of this tea leaf pattern predicts it's going up/down/sideways/nuclear!
miner troll: another 400 gamers stopped playing Farmville, and everybody knows price follows difficulty!
early adopter troll: we are the new elite my friends, I predict BTC to go to $10,000 by next week!

LOL, the last hour the market has gone completely flat, is everyone holding their breath or something?

Oh wait, so you actually concede it's not working right now? Impeccable logic.

You mean like the 35% swing on tuesday/wednesday? Yeah, it's working fantastic Sherlock.

Then you are naive because a speculator will aim to maximize profit, not 'be rational'. That means striving to control the market to the detriment of all others, eliminate competitors etc. 'People' like Goldman Sachs have been expertly subverting the market for quite a while now (starting with some deregulation in the Reagen era), it's anything but rational now. The result is that the economy and the government are taken financially hostage, if they don't cooperate with the robber barons they simply threaten to let the whole thing collapse.

Otherwise I agree with the rest of your points The US Dollar is dead and buried and quantitative easing is just the last round of wealth redistribution. There are some long term economic problems with the Bitcoin model that I have no answer for, but it's a helluva lot better than the untouchable vampires controlling the economy now.

BTW, the fundamental problem is uncontrolled greed in human nature IMHO, not decentralization.

NY based Lawyer has never heard of prior use:
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/11/07/07/0326213/Lawyer-Attempts-To-Trademark-Bitcoin

I guess you replied to me. I'm not saying the exchange rate needs to invariably reflect the current economy size (though it would be great if it did that), I'm saying it needs to keep within a safe distance to it, or you end up with a bubble that is far more likely to burst and destroy value for everyone. Also, as a counterweight I would pose the extreme risk in using Bitcoin as a store of value right now. The bankster thugs are only slowly waking up to this, when they get going tough times are ahead. That has to depress exchange rate and consequently either you are supremely confident in Bitcoin surviving in its current form so your investment is retained many years from now, or you're a fool. Or a speculator with an exit strategy that in his own words doesn't care what happens to the system itself, as long as he is covered.

Not very consistent on the argumentation though. First I don't know what kind of strategy I'm using, now I don't know what I'm doing because I'm not invested. I guess the only way to win this game is not to play.


And you seriously think I'm 'losing' something because I'm not making a profit where one could be made? You obviously don't know anything about me, maybe you should stop speculating. Heh.


From what I have seen so far you are here for the quick buck and need the price to go as high as quickly as it can for that purpose. Or wildly bounce around at least. None of which helps the Bitcoin economy in the long run.

And you are speculating on how old I am too I guess

Take a look at the Wiki list of companies taking Bitcoin and sum their total estimated turnover. Obviously this is highly imprecise since there is not a lot of information available, most if not all are privately owned etc. but I would not estimate more than a couple of million USD a year. Even that is highly optimistic because most are likely only taking a fraction in BTC right now (e.g. I would wager memorydealers currently loses money on promoting Bitcoin). The list doesn't contain any seriously large company, or even medium sized company that I can see. Tradehill proxying Amazon may be the largest, though I doubt they have had more than a few hundred customers for this so far.

If you take a highly optimistic 5 million USD, then at 7 million BTC the exchange rate should be around 0.7 USD/BTC now, not $15. Since it seems obvious there is a lot of work to be done before Bitcoin can even be technically conscionably accepted
by less than adventurous retailers (like Amazon), it will take that much time for the economy to grow by those numbers. Until then, the speculative ratio is over 20:1. If it goes to $30 again, that's over 40:1. $60? 80:1. How much is not ludicrous?


Neither of which reflect the actual economy size. As long as it's worth it, new miners will join, but they are speculating just as much as traders.


Are you looking at blockexplorer and a known exchange wallet address? Otherwise it could be anything but a cashout. It could be the exchange moving funds between wallets for all we know. If you're looking at the exchange turnover, how do you know it's not just a few traders trading the same balances back and forth? None of this has any correlation with the actual economy, which consists of people paying eachother for goods and services. Couple of years ago everyone thought mortgage derivatives consisted of real value too.


Obviously I completely disagree with this. By this argument the economy has grown incredibly fast over the last couple of weeks and will suddenly stop growing much between the next 2 increases (according to chodpaba's numbers).


Hah, Wall Street is not interested in real numbers, you should know that by now. Some bank got sued by its own shareholders because they paid out almost double the bonuses (4+ billion USD) than they actually made (2-ish billion USD).


Hopefully because the underlying system is more robust. As the real economy around it grows, bubble type activity should subside, but it does need to survive that first. If it fails on that count, Bitcoin will be remembered as a classic ponzi scheme, albeit a brilliant one.