You must be from Europe. Most of the world has some pretty insane ATM fees. I am not sure why there is no such thing in most of the EU but that is the exception not the rule.

Are you actually trying to make me pay you a fee to place YOUR shit on MY websites?

I have about 30k daily visitors on average on my websites. If you want to advertise or place your stuff on my sites then YOU will have to PAY ME for the privilege at rates comparable to any other advertiser.

My argument against it: The USD rally will probably continue after retracing the move from 80 to 86 (on the USD index).

A strong USD means a strong CNY and weaker oil, gold and BTC.

When? November 2013, that's when the distribution begun and the big players got rich.

Those who would become rich of BTC already are.

Exactly. The first thing that came to mind when I read about Circle accepting credit cards was "How on earth can they do this?"

Here are the simple facts:

- A CC transaction can be reversed.
- A BTC transaction can not

Do not get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE the idea of people being able to go to a website & type in their CC number & have BTC instantly. This is GREAT - while it lasts. How many times to they need to be scammed before they realize that these simple facts means that accepting CC payments (or EU bank transfers for that matter...) for BTC is a inherently bad idea?


This is true but the situation is very different. I can visit a website from a proxy or VPN or Tor and give them made-up information and a stolen CC and they are none the wiser. If I go to a webshop and buy a TV then I do need to provide an additional piece of information which is somewhat (but not impossible) harder to "fake": a delivery address. You can use a friend or drug addict or something like that to take delivery so this does not prevent fraud but it does make it harder: You have to tie a real-world location to the transaction.


I do not believe Circle is a scam and I do not think anyone has that concern. My concern here is what happens when they end up with losses because they are doing business in a way which - at first glance - appears to allow people to scam them.


This will obviously stop criminals because it is so hard to go to the local kiosk and pay $10 cash for a pre-paid SIM card.


I am not familiar with "3D Secure" but I am totally all for any working solution to the problem of "How to use credit cards safely on the Internet".

MtGox was 10-20% above the other exchanges for a very long time.

People at other exchanges looked at how non-existing BTC was bought with non-existing USD at emptygox at higher and higher prices and bought the other exchanges as a result.

There was also a handful of people allowed to do "arbitrage" (which really wasn't) and they market bought the other exchanges without a second thought since those select few could immediately sell at an immense profit at MtGox - which was great for them until that "profit" vaporized along with their initial investment.

MtGox bots were definitively a big factor. They were certainly not the only one (China was and still is the most important factor) but they did have a big impact.

Just a GUESS: Did you enter something like 380,10 (actually 38010 on the BFX system!) when you wanted 380.10?

If this is the case then you are not the first one who have learned not do use a , on BFX the hard way.

(if this is indeed the case then perhaps R should consider accepting , as a . or .. donno. consider writing something in the FAQ or something but I am not sure anyone would read that before after the fact anyway)

It could be that you did something else "not expected".

There is "nothing wrong" with order placements at BFX right now. It works just fine - yet this happened to you. This indicates that you did something different from the rest of us. Note exactly what you did and what you typed if this happens to you again. I am not sure this is true anymore but it used to be that if you entered $price (like $380) and not just a number then your order was made into a market order (not going to test if this is still true, but I do not think it is).

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/?sha256hr=1000.00

IF these numbers are anywhere near accurate then it appears that at CURRENT difficulty you need about 60 days to make 1 BTC with 1 TH/s, so 3 months would give about 1.5 BTC - and the market maker at BFX is selling these for 2 BTC right now.

I guess if you expect the price to go down more than 1%/day then why not. These contracts are clearly overpriced right now. What is a bit scary here is where do these TH on the askside come from? Apparently a pool market maker. a) why would they sell their TH instead of mining? because they expect higher profit from it. b) do they have to sell if they see that there's a lot of shorts? with BTC you can get outside BTC in, if you have a mining rig then there is still no way to "deposit" TH into BFX right so the supply side is basically in the hands of 1 party. What is introduced to the market can be traded around but there is 1 party controlling the supply.

I also have a hard time understanding why a short would have to pay dividends, if there is actual TH behind this then that dividend should come from the pool and the borrower only pays interest.

If these were naked shorts of TH then there would be no pool to create dividend and the shorts would have to pay that dividend since they sold a contract with dividend of a TH. Shorts would NOT have to pay interest in this case since they would not be borrowing anything.

As I understand the announcement you pay interest & dividend if you short TH and that makes no sense to me.

This is something I do not understand at all. If these are in fact mining contracts on a pool then this pool pays the dividend in the form of BTC. Why then would shorts also have to pay the dividend, doesn't that create a situation where there is 2x dividend?

This may scare a few of you who bought at this price or higher so you may not want to think about this but I'll throw it in your faces anyway..

The price of a BTC was around $100 when the "mtgox withdraw problems" begun. These problems created a constant 10-20% price gap between emptyGox and the rest of the world.

A few select people got to do what they wrongly called "arbitrage" - they got to withdraw some of what little fiat that was actually at MtGox from MtGox and buy BTC on other exchanges. This created buy pressure on other exchanges. People looked at MtGox and thought "that one must be leading" and "look at all that money in the MtGox orderbook". It turns out that "money" was just numbers on the screen representing long-gone funds.

The interesting questions then: Would BTC have gone from $100 to $1000 without this gigantic MtGox scam? If a BTC really worth more than $100 today?

BFX has historically offered great interest rates on USD. If you have a lot of USD there and you expect rates to rise at some point in the near future then it makes sense to leave the money at BFX - and 0.02%/day (which people fill on the demand side now) is more than 0%/day, right?

As you say, interest rates are set by demand and supply. Right now it's the bearmarket and the swap demand has clearly shifted towards BTC.

BTC loans are at record highs http://www.bfxdata.com/combined/btc.php

What that guy who decided to sell 1600 BTC short at $469/$470 today was thinking is a rather interesting question - but I guess it's great risk/reward if you see the $200 in the cards..

I know it appears a bit sad and depressing that USD rates are this low right now. We who have been using BFX for quite a while remember the good-old-days of 0.99%/day and miss them. However.. we won't be seeing those rates again. Back when 5 people were using BFX it was possible to get those rates like that but the user-base at BFX has grown a whole lot and there are a whole lot of people who think 0.2% or just 0.1%/day is GREAT (and it is, when you think about it, pretty darn good compared to many alternatives).

I believe we have before us the opportunity to forge - for fun and for profit - an epic short squeeze.



* 1600 BTC sold short at $469/$470
* Flash pool at BFX as good as empty (shorts can currently add 2-300 BTC before there will be no more shorting)
* Total amount of shorts is at a record 9,249.08 BTC

It must be remembered that you can easily squeeze shorts but you can not squeeze SELLERS. Still, I do believe we have an opportunity here.

All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the GNU World Order.


We short term traders are not very consistent, now are we? That being said, I honestly do believe this is a long-term bear-market. Look at the daily. Are we above ATH? No, we are not. Do we have higher highs and higher lows? No, we do not. Bear-markets do tend to have counter-rallies before falling down again and there is nothing wrong with riding those waves.

LOL, what a failure to argue logical and rational.

The supply of new Bitcoins mined remains constant.

If the cost of a miner is $500 to mine a coin then he will simply turn this older miner off and the supply shifts over to miners with newer and more efficient hardware.

There is NO POSSIBLE SITUATION, even in theory, that the constant supply of new BTC will be reduced any time in the near future. The next reward halving is not for years. Thinking "the available supply is likely to deminish" because the supply shifts from one seller to another is not reasonable.

"if it were to cost a miner $500 to mine a coin" then mining it would be stupid and miners with basic economic understanding will simply turn their miners off.

Here is a basic example with just-for-fun figures:

- Invest 1 million USD in hardware & electricity for 3 months
- Mine BTC for 2 million USD during those 3 months
- Sell this BTC at market

Now you have 1 million USD in profit and 1 million USD you can use to re-invest in new hardware in order to do the exact same thing again.

How exactly do you believe this will "drive price"? That is among the most most ridiculous argument I have heard BTC bulls say.

Supply and demand of BTC is what drives the price. Shifts in the supply side (who mines the freshly minted coins and sells them) does not create new BUYERS and you need BUYERS to put upwards pressure on the market.

* The price of LTC is $4.9290
* LTC will have 4 x the supply of BTC
* Thus, the value of LTC should be BTC/4.
* The fair value of BTC could therefore be LTC/USD * 4

4.9290 * 4 = $19.7


My suggestion: Short the rallies, avoid buying back on dips.

This "market", and any market, needs BULLS to get in there and buy and keep buying for the market to move up. This is specially true in regards to BTC. I do not see anyone in their right mind looking at the daily thinking "I'll invest millions in this thing because the risk/reward looks so attractive right now".

The same is not true for the market to move down, any market will grind downwards as long as there is no buying pressure. This is specially true here due to the constant drips from miners and merchants.

The only really bullish factor BTC and LTC has going for it right now is the sher amount of shorts. Right now we are talking 8,356.52 BTC and 142,122.51 LTC at Bitfinex alone, see http://www.bfxdata.com/combined/btc.php for details. Now, you may assume that this means we will get a short-cover rally to the moon. Check out the 6 month graph if you believe this is true and notice that when shorts peaked at around 10000 BTC short the "market" actually went from $530 to $400.

The similarity between silver and the daily chart for BTC, LTC and DOGE is staggering.

"Verify Your Phone", who bothers having a SIM card in their (Android) phone these days, does anyone under 60 actually pay to talk to people these days? Most of us just use WIFI and apps and have no SIM. I guess I could get a prepaid one and "verify" at OkCoin and throw it away (see how utterly pointless that is? "verify" that I am able to pay $10 at the kiosk for an anonymous pre-paid SIM-card and throw it away?) but I do not think it is worth it due to the next point:

"Verify Your Passport (need pass through level 1)"? I actually don't have one (I do have an ID, though) and I'm not sure it is worth the trouble and privacy issues of getting one just to sign up at OkCoin. The local tyrannical regime - Sweden, it is within the fascist union (EU) - requires you to give them fingerprint scans in order to get one and that is a big deal. It is very privacy-invasive. It is not like they actually need them for anything, they just want to put them in their internationally shared database (what is actually stored in the RFID now in passports is just a number which the countries they share their database with can use to look up your file - which includes your fingerprint if you submit to handing them over). There is really no reason to get one here in the fascist union anyway since you can travel anywhere within the iron curtain as long as you carry any approved ID-card.

These issues make OkCoin international a non-choice.

Never forget this when considering where the market may go in the future: A lot of the rally to above $1000 were driven by China, sure, but a whole lot of it was also driven by non-existing fiat used to buy mostly non-existing BTC over at MtGox. There is a reason MtGoxBTC were priced $100 above the rest of the world quite a few times.

A few select people got to withdraw fiat from MtGox for a while and thought they did "arbitrage", in the end they too were severely burned (as they deserved) by their greed.

Why is this relevant? There never was any real demand for BTC at the $1000 price level, it was simply those with MtGoxUSD who would pay any price in order to get something out before the lit-match-game ended. What is most important to remember in this regard is that the emptygox withdraw problems started way back when the price difference between Bitstamp and MtGox was $90 vs $100 and the entire rise from $100 to $1000 should be seen in that light.

Thank you for your great analysis. Appreciated. Nice to see something actually useful here at bitcontalk for once.