After seeing so many people disagree, I just wanted to say I agree with the OP. Those who were here in 2011 saw a quick bust of a bubble. That is not the time-scale it usually happens on, and it already dealt quite some damage. A long bust of a speculative mania can be quite destructive.

But if it is about ideology, there's not much reason to be distressed by this. Bitcoin is just a tool, replaceable and one of many potential solutions. If it really is superior, it will survive anyway. If not, chances are it wasn't fit for the job in the first place. Time will tell, but one way or another, it is just one of many battles against insane financial policy. And Bitcoin alone can't win that war anyway.

Also, sane policies would render Bitcoin entirely redundant. Value can be stored in gold and cheaply transferred via banking -- at a better computational order than Bitcoin offers. If the efficient combination of the two classic methods weren't suppressed, Bitcoin could hardly compete.

So don't fret; let's enjoy the show and be curious how it turns out in the end.

Posts like this one should be quoted more. They can save a lot of people a lot of valuable time.

Sit back for a moment and guess the chances of either side persuading the other in this discussion. Or just giving in on one point after it's made. It just doesn't happen. The religion flamewar always looks identical and tends to be entirely unproductive. I'd not get too involved unless there's an unavoidable confrontation with it.

I really don't get what is going on in Venezuela. What are the government actors playing at?

It seems that most of the population there is mind-bogglingly stupid. They want to raid all the markets and retailers with no concern who supplies them the next day. Surprising, but still conceivable. But I can't really make sense of the government playing along. Looting shops has such a fast negative feedback that it should be a politically worthless move -- and this Maduro guy became president only this year.

From what I understand, the election victory was narrow. Even assuming the government's goal is solely to redirect funds via corruption, this isn't even close to an effective strategy. How do the players profit from this scale of economic devastation? Or did they somehow manage to get actual "crash and burn" mentally ill people into the leadership? It looks like a lossy game for everyone, which is weird. Usually there is someone who profits if there's this scale of damage. Even in Thailand's rice madness, a significant portion of the population gets a net benefit, even if at absurd costs to everyone else.

 

That is why this can't end in just a simple crash. The rally-to-mars opinion no longer fades that quickly.

No matter where a realistic target price is, the current mood will overshoot it, if it hasn't already. I doubt this can be corrected by just a short-term crash. In other words: I can't tell where the mid-term peak will be, there may be plenty of profit until it's reached, but I expect things to get ugly once it's behind us.

What, you sold the 1000 BTC Casascius gold coin? Apparently, it's 1000.2332 BTC now and hasn't been opened. (I saved the address 'cause it was one of the marker points where pirate funds flowed to.)

That coin is nuts now. One could trade that 1oz gold coin for 10 kg gold.

@Topic: My cheapest coins were less than 0.7 USD a piece. But I sold them long ago. I've been turning more and more bearish with every price hike, so I've not really profited off the recent huge ones. Not that I have a reason to regret that. Betting on things I can't predict would be pure gambling, which isn't something I like to do. Good job to anyone who did predict it and acted accordingly.

Disregarding the article and answering the topic question:

rapid price appreciation of the type we're seeing right now may be a negative factor for Bitcoin's success. Ultimately, Bitcoin's expected value stems from its ability to transfer value. If pure speculation drives the price up and then can't sustain the high price, this causes additional price instability for merchants.

Also, if we are to face popping macroscopic bubble, this can send prices falling for many consecutive years, which creates negative sentiment, possibly at a time crucial to success. If everyone's first associations with Bitcoin are "bubbles", "hobby speculators", and "crazy price swings", I doubt that's a good thing.

Nah, it's the other way around: I'm here because of my political position.

If politics were not bonkers, I reckon Bitcoin would be useless. It's only backlash against the insanity that has been compromising banking around the world.

It's not like humanity can't solve the issue of efficiently transmitting money. On the contrary, we need multiple hugely expensive police systems to prevent that. It keeps everyone occupied with anything but the actual criminals, while governments can set up absurd laws that favor their buddies on the markets -- with a glorious enforcement system "against terrorism" already in place.

I'm not under the illusion that Bitcoin is efficient. But what's happening in current banking might be so much less efficient that Bitcoin has a chance.

How can you have made money off bears in Bitcoin recently? They have certainly profited whenever they turned bears and won't buy back at higher prices. In a highly speculative market like this one, bulls are making profit when they turn to bears -- and that profit comes from other bulls.

@Quote by Boxman90: We have a lot of exchanges doing a lot of volume. Unless you have very detailed information on the trader, offloading 4-digits may be possible at the weirdest times.



As a casually observing bear, I wonder about these weird misconceptions about people being "butthurt" or "whiny" about "missing the boat" -- none of these applies here any more than on Google stocks, gold ten years ago or anything else one did not personally profit from. It's not realistic to assume that everyone suddenly realizes a past prediction as perfect and regrets not having acted upon it, i.e. believes it would have been easy to make that prediction in advance.

You win some, you loose some, and you don't play at all in over 99.9% of possible speculations. Though there can be some emotional attachment to a speculation one might have played in, that's a far shot from regretting not having done so. Could I have made a lot of money on the latest rise? Sure. Did I have a valid and significant prediction of it? No. Is it reasonable to regret not having profited off something that I did not predict? That would be nonsensical.

So when I read the numerous posts that implicitly insult bears for their missed profits -- as opposed to a lack of insight -- I feel more bewildered than offended.

lol... you don't seem to be aware what's going on at Gox.

I'm still missing transfers from June. Why do you think they trade above market price all the time?

Nja, wenn sich jemand in die Berge zurückzieht nennt man das auch nicht spirituelle Politik. Okay, um ganz genau die einzelnen Parteien einordnen zu können bräuchte man etwas mehr Detail, das war nur als grobe Struktur gedacht. Den "politischen Kompass" verstehe ich nicht, seine Achsen sind nicht einmal ungefähr orthogonal, da ein linker Staat automatisch authoritär ist -- linke Politik schreibt der Wirtschaft sehr detailliert vor, wie sie abzulaufen hat.

Bei dem monopolistischen Großkonzern ist monopolistisch das Stichwort. Kein normaler Spieler, egal ob groß oder klein, Einzelperson oder Konzern, mag es, wenn sein Eigentum zerstört wird. Ich denke, wir hätten viele Umweltprobleme nicht, wenn es klarere Eigentumsverhältnisse und faire Schadensvergütung gäbe. Sicherlich würde es die Zerstörung nicht überall aufhalten, aber das scheint ohnehin nicht die Absicht der meisten Menschen zu sein. Aber die sinnlose Zerstörung marke Tragedy of the Commons ist nun wirklich vermeidbar.

Welche Partei über 5% will unbedingt die Hürde abschaffen?


@Austauschbar:
Ich habe das Gefühl, alle Parteien lassen sich als Linearkombination von (ungefähr) Linken, Republikanern, Violetten, Tierschutzpartei und PDV ausdrücken. Eine Links-Rechts-Spirituell-Öko-Vernünftig Skala sozusagen. (OKOK ich nenne es "liberal" statt "vernünftig" weil's ja eh keiner wahr haben will.)

Die CDU ist zB ein Bisschen links, ein bisschen rechts, deutlich spirituell und etwas liberal. Die NPD ist linksrechts und sonst nix. Die FDP ist ein Bisschen links und halbwegs liberal; die Grünen deutlich links und öko und die ÖDP das Gleiche in extremer. Die Piraten sind halbwegs links und halbwegs liberal. Die MLPD ist so dermaßen links dass sie auch rechts gegen liberale werden muss um sich selbst zu organisieren.

Die Achsen sind nicht vollständig orthogonal:

• Links+rechts+liberal = konstant, denn für irgendwas muss man sich entscheiden.
• Rechts >= spirituell, weil religiöse Politik automatisch auch rechts (kulturelle Kontrolle) ist.
• In der Theorie kann man Öko sein ohne links zu sein. In der Praxis sind die Menschen unfähig, das zu verstehen. Ich würde der PDV trotzdem eigentlich ein paar Öko-Punkte geben, weil sie aktiv betonen, dass dauerhaft privates Eigentum zu mehr Achtsamkeit auf die Umwelt führt -- dem Eigentümer gefällt es nämlich nicht, wenn sein Grundstückspreis wegen Verseuchung sinkt.

Äh. Hm. Was mache ich hier eigentlich. Bin mal weiterarbeiten.

I only dislike Fiat because one instance of it is forced on people.

While I'm more Austrian than Keynesian, I do not acknowledge that debt-based, inflated money must be bad. Bad is forcing people to accept exactly one instance of it with no proof of its superiority whatsoever -- and bullying alternatives on a regular basis.

Isn't this the whole "meaning of life" question all over again?

If you inspect the question, it's semantically broken. A creator gives something a meaning, purpose, etc. If you don't acknowledge a creator of yours or don't acknowledge his ownership over you, making you his slave, the concepts of meaning and purpose do not apply. If you acknowledge both, then voilà, your meaning and purpose is what your religion commands.

The end. This type of discussion only proves that way too many people need to check their definitions and formalism.

You can do the same on "free will" (and "free"-a-lot-of-things) if someone spends the time to properly define them.

Well, in hindsight preventing any hack is simple. But game engines usually show hundreds or thousands of cases of undesired behavior. IIRC a lot of public Minecraft servers have given up on trying to secure anything but identification -- with varying results -- and fight cheaters using booby traps and manual bans.

I admit I don't know how much money clients of BitVegas put in. But if it is to become anything like other gambling places the problem becomes incomparably harder than keeping "normal" Minecraft servers safe.

Minecraft servers have been repeatedly hacked and exploited in the most ridiculous manners, with no money involved, just for the lulz. It was clearly not designed with security in mind -- if BitVegas becomes successful, it also becomes the premier target of all future Minecraft hacks. As soon as there's enough money around there will be no warning period, all "zero day" exploits would strike BitVegas first.

Oh well, I guess I'm getting a bit off topic here. Anyway, good luck with keeping things safe.

Yep, that's the right step to take.

I'd really recommend to at least modify the login or command-giving process of admins to include a booby trap. If admin commands are normally input in a weird manner, a hacker who tries normal methods would trigger the trap. The server would then shut down immediately and wait for an admin with local or SSH access. (This may or may not have prevented this incident depending on when the hacker logged in as an admin, not just as users withdrawing their "own" funds. But at least then he would've been stopped.)

Of course, this would still be security by obscurity. The professional solution is a back-end that executes withdrawals from a more secure interface, so that the game engine cannot just dump all user wallets or things like that. But anything that makes a hacker's life harder is a good start.

Sorry, but... the images in the OP are hilarious.

Direct management of BTC using Craftbukkit, with no back-end system that has sanity checks or at least a booby trap? And then not reacting to a known fatal security hole?

I'll be frank, that's asking for it and should be treated equivalent to the owners stealing the money. (Those cases are indistinguishable anyway since an admin could have pretended to be the hacker.)

Hm. Hier auf dem Forum bekommt die FDP zwar gar keine Stimmen mehr, aber die PDV schafft dafür die 5%-Hürde. I'm OK with this.

Ich frage mich, wie die Koalitionsverhandlungen aussehen würden. Nachdem die linken und linkrechten vermutlich zu unkooperativ wären, blieben für Verhandlungen Piraten (36.1%), PDV (8.2%), CDU (6,6%), SPD (6.6%), Grüne (6.6%). Rest schafft nach aktuellem Ergebnis die 5%-Hürde nicht.

lol... stellt euch eine Piraten-PDV-Grüne oder Piraten-PDV-CDU Regierung vor. Vermutlich ginge Piraten-CDU-Grüne auch weil die 'rausfallenden Parteien eh nix mehr ausrichten, aber buuuh.



Jedenfalls wären die Wahlen hier viel spannender. Und die NPD würde ihre Wahlkampagne mehr auf Trolle ausrichten. Gäbe sicher lustige Spots.

Es ist richtig, ihn als umstritten zu sehen -- in einer echten Freihandelszone gibt es wirklich sehr viele Möglichkeiten für Währungen. Man sollte nicht von vornherein eine "richtige" Lösung festlegen.


Quelle: http://www.parteidervernunft.de/sites/default/files/euroflyer_bund_2013.pdf (Flyer für die Bundestagswahl 2013).

Die PdV möchte explizit Bitcoin und andere private Währungen als gleichwertig zu staatlichen Währungen ansehen und den Markt entscheiden lassen. Bitcoin wird auch auf ihrem Flyer erwähnt.

Nicht, dass ich sie nur deshalb wählen werde. Ich glaube halt an Freiheit. Aber wer Bitcoin mag sollte allen anderen Parteien ihre Einstellung zumindest ankreiden.

Freiheit in Bildung, Handel und Gesellschaft sollte nicht gegen jeden fadenscheinigen Unfug kompromissbereit sein. Mich hat die PdV sofort überzeugt. Dass sie sich mit Klimawandel-Anhängern streitet ist irrelevant, Deutschland subventioniert Kohleabbau und die Menschen verbrennen eh alles was brennt. Die existierenden Parteien haben da ohnehin keinen realistischen Ansatz. Das Wirtschaftssystem der PdV kann dafür mit wesentlich mehr Situationen umgehen ohne uns um die Ohren zu fliegen.

Calling weird order placement "market manipulation" is very questionable. If actors trade in an insane way, it's the market's job to take their purchasing power and use it in a more intelligent fashion.

I thank analysts who stabilize markets against nonsense. They win in a fair manner and deserve the returns. Influential orders are not fake orders; any large player who believes them a bad move can take them as long as they exist.

Arbitrarily calling foul play is just being a bad loser. Spreading false information, that is market manipulation and should be punished just like other lies and fraud. But that is not at all the same as reverse-engineering bots or people who cause unnecessary volatility and reduce market efficiency.