Wow, that wall actually refused to surrender and held out for hours, not bad.

And what is even funnier: had the bears unloaded all the bitcoins they dispensed with in the series of dumps we have seen in one go, they probably would have already created the crash they want to see, now probably they are just out of ammunition.

I think it will be somewhere around $64, pretty much all important long-term resistances were at somewhere near a power of 2.

Looks like people couldn't care less, new ATH? Oh, cool, yawn....

GBP, EUR, CNY market price all above $35, and even $35.5 now, wait to see what will happen after America wakes up.

CNY,GBP,EUR, all broken $35, will USD follow suit after America wakes up?

Better said than I ever did, bro, this is essentially my view ATM. The concept is all fine and dandy, but in the real world people always tend to abuse such a system, you will find out the very trustworthy counterparty you are borrowing to is overleveraged to the brink of collapse, because, well, other people found him trustworthy as well. And Ripple is not helping here by trying to do what Wall Street has tried to do for years but failed: simplifying and evaluating the counterparty risk as a single number. I am not saying that the software creators should be responsible for these things, but I strongly dislike the philosophy that software should ever try to be helpful in the very complex human business of risk assessment, all the algorithms created by the quants are neutral after all.

As for the poor Indian friend: it's said somewhere in the Ripple webpages that in the old system banks only evaluate the risk with quantifiable terms like income, while disregarding important things for human like love and trust, etc, well in this spirit I guess I should not treat my poor and wealthy friends purely based on their financial conditions, otherwise why not just use banks as they are, at least theoretically, more professional in risk assessment?

First, Bitcoin is llike a cutting knife, it enables you to do many things, including killing, but I don't think anyone would say owning a cutting knife is problematic because it could be used to kill. While Ripple's IOU system is just like a gun, which is clearly designed and manufactured for one single purpose.

Second, I was talking about how Ripple's IOU network could possibly cripple due to abuses, which is probably not a problem bitcoin has to face, as it doesn't have to rely on anyone's trust to work.

That's essentially why I believe a software should not try to be helpful here, it's a completely human issue, a person should always take any lending activities seriously, come to know the person and talk to him/her, especially if it's someone you don't personally know. In fact, try to assess the counterparty risk of some unknown entities is just what all those MIT Ph.D quants in the Wall Street have been trying to do for years yet completely screwed up, and you guys maybe bringing more variables into a already complex formula.

Without Ripple's convenience people have been unable to curb their urges to lend/borrow(or you could call it invest) irresponsibly, which creates the recession we are now in, I doubt with Ripple it could be even better. If an abuser screws up hugely and leaves the network with a huge web of debts, it seems to me hardly any new capital would risk to get into it again. Bitcoin on the other hand doesn't have to face such problems.

Remember as a startup you have to offer clear advantages over the established, if people should be left to figure out if you have anything clearly desirable, they most likely will choose to stay with the established.

Thanks for clarification, but unfortunately this doesn't completely solve my problem, the said brilliant kid could set his threshold reasonably high, with the belief that his elite friends are gonna borrow from other elites, who could be trusted to pay back, yet have not anticipated his poor friends to borrow from him en masse out of coincidence/some other reasons(e.g., I find out I could borrow from wealthy people, good! My friend as a guarantor? Double good!). And our assumption is that all entities act out of goodwill, we have not touched the possible scenario of abuse yet.




I did not mean that it's not a good idea that you go ahead and create it, I just doubt it would be successful, cause you will have to offer a competitive advantage over the current system of trust to make it successful, but I could hardly see any such advantage offered by Ripple from the information I have gathered.

Let me show you another case:

A brilliant Chinese/Indian guy excels academically ever since he is a child, and goes all the way to graduate from a prestigious American university, then finds a job in a big investment bank, and starts hanging out with all kinds of wealthy elites.

One day, his poor relatives/old buddies suddenly find out that they could borrow massive amount of credits, all thanks to this brilliant kid's social network, and they immediately start borrowing with joy, then this poor kid wakes up to see himself accumulating a mountain of IOUs, all simply because he hasn't properly configured his Ripple client, you could hardly say it's his fault, it's very hard for anyone to foresee such a thing. Well aware of his old  chaps' payback abilities, he figures that he has made enough in the America to live a comfortable life in his home nation,  and most likely the court there would not hold him responsible for such things, it's better to leave this nation immediately than being chased around by his elite friends ever since, so he books a ticket immediately and leaves the nation, leaving his American friends to f**k themselves.

Now of course, you could argue his American friends should not have trusted him so much, but what if, let's say, there are one or two more additional intermediaries in between? Things will get a lot more unpredictable.

The moral of this story is, when you deal with an exchange, you are always expected to willingly enter into contract with another entity, while using a P2P network to propagate debts/credits will very likely get some innocent people caught in a pile of debts, hardly with their knowledge.

It's not an assumption, we should take it at its face value unless proven(nobody cares to do I guess) otherwise.

And you could be right about his motives, but unlike proudhon's trolls, he used some serious amount of left-brain power to come up with some very scientific-sounding bearish arguments, his bear post thread is one example, although I have noticed from time to time he has (maybe) willfully neglected evidences people confronted him with. My guess is that he may wanted to talk the price down, but loathed to use the kind of tactics other bears employed.

Huh? That's where he comes from? Hmmm, that may explain everything....

I don't really think we need to explain to Joe Sixpack yet, just ask how many of your geek friends have not jumped on the bandwagon yet? The number of people understand public-key cryptography is way larger than the number of bitcoin users. And once you get even half of the geeks on boat, the market will be big enough that serious investors get in(the Wall Street moguls have already get used to doing business with completely inscrutable math day in, day out), and  then the mass will follow suit.

ANd buy wall as well, now the drove is herded into this narrow space, one side must break as a result?

No no, it should be "last chance to sell under $35!" Coz there ain't no chance you could sell it cheaper on Mt.Gox anymore! Saw that wall in Saturday?  

It's called stagnation, and that's how bitcoin is going to die. Nobody wants to buy, nobody wants to sell, GAME OVER!

Bitcoin is not easy to understand, but Satoshi published a paper of academic standard to explain the mechanism, before the  implementation is available. People who are not willing to open source their code could do this, and they have been doing this all the time.

Could the people behind Ripple do the same thing as well? Bitcoin forum is by no means the best place to distribute information about Ripple, and nobody who wants to do peer-review of the system should be expected to come here to read the threads.

I wish all people were like you. And that's why I want the price to at least climb a bit more, to more than $40, before it takes a nap. Lots and lots of people are putting too much weight on the 2011 high of $32, they use it as a reference point to judge if the price is too high, if the market will get more volatile or not, etc, If we stay here for too long, they may not just be able to get rid of that piece of disaster memory, while over a long time, this particular price point should be considered meaningless and be forgotten.

How I miss the days before the rally when the price could stay stable for months, those were calm, good days....