Oh, Blitz is absolutely right about a lot of things. But he's also completely full of himself (like probably nearly everyone in here, including yours truly). That's why windjc's little spiel was so funny.

Blitz, my apologies, I totes love you, in an almost non-homoerotic way but I have to say this:

This is the funniest shit I've read in here for a long time.

Spot. Fucking. On.

(except for the "non moderating". He's doing a good job, imo)

So.

Will things get in motion over on stamp?

I kind of think so.

Say bye to 600 for the near future, I suspect.

(EDIT: not that we won't touch it. But I suspect 600 will become resistance, unless something truly magic will happen tomorrow over at gox)

Haha, how is that bucketshop of yours going, kakobrekla? Made it to 10 BTC daily volume already? :D

Agreed.

The jury is still out (IMO) to which extent their problems are due to incompetence though, or actual fraud.

Or maybe that's a dinstiction that is hard to make in our little wild west BTC economy...

Full agreement.

How can people still unironically defend gox in this case?

How come they take so much longer to fix the withdrawal problem despite the fact that their volume is actually lower than that of stamp by now.

It really doesn't make sense.

I'm not sure if it's malintent or incompetence, but in either case, they're deservedly going down as a business.

Well, they *should* ask themselves that. Just withdrew a larg-ish amount from stamp, arrived within less than 2 minutes.


I'm not going to join the pitchfork crowd and attack Karpeles personally, but two things I'm sure about:

1) If you continue trading on gox, and you get burned, you receive exactly *zero* sympathy from me. You have had ample warning.

2) The sooner gox becomes a historical milestone of the BTC saga, rather than a still (somewhat) influential exchange, the better.

Good article (as was the last one I read, about optimal position size, even though we disagreed perhaps on the conclusions).

I don't have the tools or the intuition to say if we're seeing a potential reversal in a few weeks, but I will note the following:

In the current 2 week downtrend (starting from 800, stamp prices), the minor retraction on Feb 14 (EDIT) was the first sign of life of the market that I've seen.

(don't waste your breath, Matthecat, I'm pretty bearish as well, just noting subtle differences).

I've said that much 3 or 4 days ago: the charts continue looking ugly, but volume based indicators started looking a bit better, as did bid/ask ratio over time.

Now the most recent drama on gox certainly put an end to that possible recovery, but my point is, I will be watching for similar signs in the coming weeks. At some point, we will probably turn around, and pent up buying pressure tends to show itself in volume based metrics rather reliable in Bitcoin markets, in my experience.

That said: for now, the trend is pretty clearly further downwards.

Larger BTC withdrawals work too, and extremely fast as well.

Here's your new slogan:

Bitstamp. How an exchange should be run. :P

I'd help you out, but I don't get the question. You mean "site downtime"? Far as I know, gox has been up the entire time.

If it's about the drop, I don't see where's the big surprise... it's not as if there something out of the usual happening since yesterday that didn't start almost 2 weeks ago.





Or maybe I'm really not getting the question?

Good point. Selling late into a trend is sheep behavior. Then again, depends on what time frame you're looking at, and how long you expect the trend to last. If you think the latest developments will put us into another month of bear market, then selling now might make sense after all.

You really don't get how markets work, do you?

It is not "making it worse for yourself" if you sell now and, in case price continues to go down, re-buy lower.

It's a decision, as always: stay with what you have, staying the same denominated in BTC, and going down in terms of USD, or taking additional risk and seeing your BTC total going up, and preserving its value in USD.

Nobody forces you to sell, but don't pretend it is "sheep" behavior to sell in a downtrend.

I'll play devil's advocate for a moment. Note that I don't consider the following the most likely scenario, but possible it is:

Gox re-opens withdrawals. Arb opportunity appears, dominantly in the form of outside fiat buying up "cheap" gox coins. The buying pressure removes the doubt about whether we've hit bottom, and we go back into rally mode (similarly to how the "bad" news of Silk Road last year actually marked the starting point of our rally that concluded in the December ATH).

I would add, "medium" term as well. I'm waiting for any kind of reversal signal in the form of really clear buying pressure, but I don't see it yet. So I can easily see us trading sideways-tending-downwards for another month, maybe two. Not the end of the world, if that happens, by the way, I'm long-term bullish as always

Agreed, mostly.

For very obvious reasons, gox price is *justifiedly* decoupled from stamp price.

If however the situation on gox continues, I don't think stamp will entirely stay unaffected. Not for practical reasons so much as for psychological reasons: gox price is still quoted in the world, and at some point, the nervousness will translate into selling pressure on stamp as well. Not enough to go sub 500 maybe, but enough to bring the two exchanges a bit more in line.

Late reply, because, well, time zones. Not sure if we can pick up the discussion again.

My first question was, when would you consider Bitcoin a success. So "success" of btc would be, in your eyes, it being a useful (independent of political ambitions) Internet payment system. Fair enough.

It is, in my opinion, a bit silly to be *negative* about this aspect after a) btc only being around 5 years, and b) after a number of rather positive developments in the past 2 years.

To go into more detail: True, you cannot pay for your hotel room in China yet with Bitcoin, but that would have been a bit like asking Tim Berners-Lee, after he introduced you to HTTP, if you can already stream high-quality porn on it. He couldn't, so why not continue using VHS, you could have said. No improvement there.

I'm being a bit facetious here, but I'm sure you'll get my point: there is a time to declare an attempt dead (like, say, Sanger's Citizendium, which started with a great idea to improve on Wikipedia's sometimes anti-academic climate, but which is absolutely going *nowhere*, for years), and then there's *prematurely* declaring something dead. If you already want to declare our little experiment failed, 5 years after introduction, after reaching a market cap north of 10B USD, VC funding probably in the range of a few hundred million USD, and a so far small, but not completely uninteresting group of merchants accepting BTC, then I think that squarely falls under "prematurely declaring it dead".

In other words: being skeptic is recommended. And if the question is, "should you invest in it?", then there are good reasons *not* to invest... there's still a very real chance btc will be replaced by an alternative currency, or will only stay marginally useful. But that's the answer to the question "should I put my money into it, right now". Which is heavily dependent on your personal risk preferences. While the question that you seem to bring is subtly different: do we have evidence that Bitcoin is going nowhere/is most likely going to fail. And for that, I have yet to see any real evidence (neither the US nor the EU have taken a prohibitive stance towards it, not major flaw in the protocol has been revealed -- those would be "catastrophic" events, imo).


About your 2nd point, in response to my question, when Bitcoin would be a good investment, you answered that you cannot determine the probabilities of an event like how btc will develop, so any post hoc reasoning is moot, and then you go on to compare it to Russian roulette.

That is a straw man if I have ever seen one. According to that strict interpretation of probabilities and their application to real life events, *all* investments are equally good or bad, and there is no way to make an informed decision.

And just like that, our market driven economy just crumbled to dust. Hope you're happy now

Where I'm going with this is:

Cut out the investing rationale. Simply *assume* for a moment that (through intuition, or TA) an investor has a way to roughly predict the price function of USD/BTC. My question was: which USD/BTC price function would qualify as a good investment of that (perhaps hypothetically knowledgeable) investor.

Obviously, if price kept on falling now, never to reach 1000 USD again, everyone who invested in the last 3 months could conclude it was a bad investment. If however price recovers, and keeps on rising, there is really no meaningful way to declare it a "bad investment" until at some point it doesn't recover anymore.

That was my idea behind the second question: if there simply never is a point during our life time where btc price will fall so drastically that it never recovers, then it is plain bizarre to call it a "bad investment" in retrospect. The comparison to lotterey tickets or Russian roulette is not applicable, because in those cases the EV is known to be negative, while in all economic decisions, the probabilities are not known, and the risk one takes on in investing is directly related to the possible returns he expects to see.

So that *still* doesn't say you should invest in btc, but it is at odds with assumptions about economical behavior made in any other market to basically say that, no matter how btc price develops, it will never "have been a good investment, because it was impossible to know the chance of success ahead of time".

In even simpler terms: if, say, investing early on in Microsoft was  a "good investment", then investing in Bitcoin (until now, unless we never recover from this correction) was a "good investment" as well. If, on the other hand, because of the inherent uncertainty re: outcomes investing in Bitcoin can never be a good investment, then investing in MSFT wasn't a good investment either. And in that case, all of stock trading essentially became meaningless.

Coming back one more time to this topic...

I've made use of the 'report' function a few times now, and it works well enough for new, spammy threads.

But it basically completely fails for the (low level) noise that is unhelpful comments, in my opinion.

A semi-smart troll will simply avoid the most outrageous forms of trolling (like being racist, etc), and so will usually avoid his comment being removed. More specifically: it's not the trolling itself that's the problem (a good community can "support" a number of troll posters), but the overall signal-to-noise ratio. Which dropped sharply lately, and in my opinion, that's at least partially related to the lifting of the "newbie restrictions".

Several threads I kept reading for a long time are now littered with 'ignored' posts (and I'm not actually very trigger happy when it comes to ignores), and I'm sure others will have a similar experience (judging by how almost no one answers to the ignored posts). But that's not a solution either: it changes the atmosphere of a thread if it's an ignored comment graveyard.... I notice that I feel less interested in actually adding to the "discussion" if 2 out of 5 comments are extremely low quality.

Sorry if all of this sounds like elitist newbie bashing. It's really not meant like that. We obviously *need* new input, and I'm not around that long either. My point is simply that a *completely* open access model (as we have it now) seems not able to cope with the large amounts of newcomers who don't feel like contributing properly. A way to make at least a small effort at preselection is necessary, in my opinion, and like I said before, I would suggest to allows mods to set  a 'minium activity' level for boards, that can start rather low, if for no other reason than to see it as an experiment, and whether it helps in combating the Eternal September we see right now.

Sooo....

(assuming that's actually Reggie Middleton posting)

... mind if someone edits your Wiki bio, to add your involvement with cryptos?

@JorgeStolfi

I'll ask you the same question I've asked a few times before, when people seem particularly negative about the prospects of Bitcoin. Here it goes:

You probably think of yourself as someone who, by and large, believes in/follows the empirical method, right? As in: you let external data dictate and change your models, not the other way around. Correct so far?

If so, under which circumstance would you conclude that you have been wrong?

Can you describe (not fully formalized and quantified, but approximately) what would qualify as:

a) a "success" of Bitcoin and

b) Bitcoin being a good investment.

Unless you're a dogmatist, that should be possible, right? To define, before the fact, the boundaries of your current assumptions/your model, and the point at which the new data requires that you adjust your assumptions/your model.

That's what I'm asking :)

Update:

Manual or not, my btc withdrawal just went through.

Good job, guys.