Bitcoin Rally Song...WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN US???

BUY (at $272.5)

$90.11 / 272.5 = .330678 BTC

A rule of 'no more than 4 trades in any 24 hour period' is simple to enforce, and would allow for greater 'bunching' of orders.
You get 4 orders for each 00:00 - 00:00 timespan in your local time zone. Unused ones don't roll over. Each day at 00:00, you have up to 4 to use.

(I have no problem with the current ruleset, but I would personally consider this an improvement, as I like swing trading alongside momentum trading.)

Incrementing penalties work great, if the overhead isn't too much.
1% for first violation, 2% for second, 3% for third, etc.

Inevitably, a quiet period will come where little trading is done.
It might relieve your burden (and reduce the signal-to-noise ratio of the thread) if some sort of voluntary "I am still active" toggle were flippable, say via an automatically cleared, and re-checkable by users checkbox on the leaderboard.

The way you have it, with no changes, will work in the long run - usually once someone goes idle, they're gone for good.
The only place that the % amount will really matter will be for someone that lapses and needs a nudge.  In that case, ascending penalties is a stronger motivation to re-start today, and not tomorrow.

I was intrigued, I set up the same chart. There is a lower touch point. Connect the $2.22 on the logarithmic weekly.
Connect the bottom at 5/27/12.
This allows for the logarithmic bottom, today, to be around $149 without the trendline being broken.

SELL @ $277.38

bumpity bumpity bump

If it's not too late, I'd love to get in on this.
I'd like to execute a full BUY to convert my USD to BTC immediately.

The questions you are asking are excellent ones to ask. There is no right answer in my view, except the one that the consensus of the market migrates towards.  Debating approaches, and choosing what is and is not important to collectible value. This is what ultimately defines what the market is, and what it is not.

-Your ideas about automated price extraction, alongside broadening the net of sales captures would clearly be an improvement. I look forward to using it as an additional source of data. Feel free to throw us a link sometime!

-Seeing sales prices in terms of USD.  Build your site in whatever format you think will be most helpful to consumers.  If your approach varied from this threads, that would be great, it would allow the market to be more broadly informed, compare the two views.  Eventually, people will get a sense for which is preferable, and the reasons why.  This can only help move us (the market) closer to answering the question - How does one valuate a bitcoin collectible? I'll try to include a few rationale for why I (firmly, deeply) believe that BTC-based valuation must ultimately be chosen as the valuation method, or else the collectible market necessarily turns into a bitcoin anti-investment, and an alternative means to bet against the market without shorting on an exchange.

-Chain of custody/PGP docs.  I have not personally taken the effort to generate these for my coins.  The day I have a sale which is dependent on this additional security, I will take the time to generate them.  I'd encourage you to do a little more reading up on the subject.  The counterfeiting approach which used a hypodermic needle to inject a loosening agent left a barely-noticeable mark.  Many of our coins have scratches or scuffs. To be absolutely sure, one is putting the entire value of their purchase in the hands of their own expertise.  Not worth a thief's effort for the example you gave, where the bitcoin value is a small percentage of the net value.  Take instead the example of a 100 BTC Series 2 bar. The Series 1s may go for 300+, but I believe Series 2 regularly go for sub-200.  A thief could determine the private key, then sell the coin at a later date.  Days/weeks/months/years later, they could reserve the private key, and get the money from the sale alongside the bitcoin value on the bar.

This last part is an attempt at explaining the BTC rationale more fully.  I have thought on this for hours and hours and hours. I am still looking for an exquisitely simple way to condense the argument. This is the best I can present it to date.

Price Tracking in BTC, not USD
1. I find BTC as the best-correlated anchor for sales.  I have seen loose 1 BTC Brass S1 coins go for 3 BTC when Bitcoins were $5, $120, $600, and still today at $300.  Perhaps the numismatic premium went up 100x, cut in half, and all the while happened to track the changing BTC/USD value. A simpler explanation would be that valuation is held in buyer/seller's minds in terms of BTC.  Prices are "sticky", and a seller today was a buyer yesterday. When that buyer bought, in this market, there's a very, very good chance they used Bitcoins. This creates an anchor in their mind.  A future sale above that is a win, below is a loss.  I have personal instances of this same BTC-premium constancy, across large price variation, for 1 BTC, 5 BTC, and 25 BTC prices.

2. Let's walk through an example of what happens to the market if, instead of BTC premiums, the market chooses to use USD valuation.
Bitcoin price is at $100.
Ekko decides to invest.  With his $1000, he buys 10 electronic BTC. Ekko pays $100 for each bitcoin, $100 being the bitcoin value.
Colin also decides to invest. With his $1000, he guys 5 of the 1 BTC silver pieces at 2 BTC apiece. Colin pays $200 for each coin, $100 being the bitcoin value, $100 being the numismatic premium.
Years pass, and bitcoin price reaches $10,000.
Ekko sells his 10 electronic bitcoin and receives $100,000.
Colin sells his 5 collectible bitcoin, and receives $50,000 plus the numismatic premium for his coins.  That premium went from $100 / coin all the way up to $1000 / coin! He gets another $5,000 for this, and receives $55,000 in total.

What if instead of selling once it hits $10,000, they HODL?
Ekko still has 10 BTC.
Colin would be able to sell his physical for cash and/or trade for electronic. His holdings would increase from 5 BTC to 5.5 BTC.

Bitcoins is a paradigm-shifting technology for which exponential rises, Elliot Wave theory, and sigmoid curves can apply; it is entirely reasonable to assume exponential growth.  This is far less common within a collectible niche.

If the market adopts USD premiums for the collectible value portion of a bitcoin's valuation, an investor looking to hold bitcoins long-term will come out best avoiding collectible bitcoins, unless the numismatic appreciation of collectibles outpaces the appreciation rate of BTC itself.

I believe markets are efficient, and practical. A market will not take a 'suicide pill'.  I believe that in time, as 1000s of collectors personally grapple with the same decision, and realize their reluctance to sell a piece for less BTC than they used to buy it, that eventually, this mentality will become adopted.  

We'll see.

I'd love to update the initial price listing, there are a lot of people with no idea for valuation.  If you can find 1 or more past instances and shoot me whatever level of details you and the buyer are comfortable with, I'll update the transaction history and price charts accordingly.

Congratulations on the 0.5 low-mintage sales! I'm sure it is exciting for you personally; I find it exciting for the marketplace as a whole.  As you pointed out awhile back...I take it as another indicator of a maturing market. One that realizes the numismatic premium comes from a number of factors, but mintage counts being a very, very important one.  I view it almost hierarchically.  Germane, common sales (maybe a loose 1 BTC Brass coin) provide the comfort for someone to make a 20 BTC buy like the 0.5 BTC rare piece.  One of those sales may set up for a 25 BTC S1 sale, which may set up for a 100 BTC Bar sale (x of 17), a 1000 coin or bar (x of 1, 2, 3, or 5).

That notion you mentioned about "having to sell a few to get to where we are"; I've experienced that. I took the other approach; defining the valuations I believe they are worth. The market does not currently agree.  I'm fine with that, they are my 'make me sell' prices; I don't really plan on parting with the pieces for a few more years.  But the net effect is different.  For my coins, there is a chasm between buyer and seller price. As a result, the market remains stagnant.  You chose to offer the coins at what the market was willing to pay. This sparked further interest. And with a limited supply, the price successfully came up.  Fortunately, you were not then undercut by a large number of others running into the same market you just created; which is again a factor of the extremely limited distribution of the coin you have.

I am of course talking my book here, but I anticipate that within this collectible community, we will see a greater normalization of prices, with mintage and wow-factor being the two key determinants.  A next evolution from there would be more sensical prices as we move up the grading scale.  It is oversimplistic to simply say that all MS-66s should have an xxx% premium relative to an MS-65.  Each piece is different.  Years from now, with proper tracking tools in place, I envision something similar to what we have with the coin grading sites today. A place where you can see the total mintage for a certain coin, but that mintage is then further split out based on the known quantities in each grading.  An MS-67 1 BTC Silver S3 is a pretty common grade.  Yet I don't think we'll ever see an MS-67 25 BTC S1.

So to get there, current traders are acting amidst uncertainty.  First-day runs, misprints, limited availability blanks, coins, bars, interesting external addresses.  We don't know which things will be generally prized by the market. We're sort of inventing and defining that, as we move through the trading process.  As we keep tracking that data, patterns should start to emerge.  Every transaction further informs the market.  To get there, the speculators that anticipate the future direction of the market correctly will profit.  The profit will come from those that chose wrongly.  For those that want to do their homework, further informing them themselves, and the market as a whole at the same time - welcome back :-)

I'm going through and removing sales postings. If yours was deleted and is still for sale, please feel free to re-submit. I occasionally do a sweep to ensure all listings are current and valid.
Anduck - sorry for the lapse, and thanks for the kick in the shorts.  Feel free to re-post yours. I hope to complete cleanup yet today (12/24/14).

It helps prospective buyers if you use the standardized format for your listing, and include an asking price.  You can certainly include a link to the thread that offers your item exclusively - that way you can upload as many pictures and provide as much detail as you like, while letting this thread provide a high-level description for those shopping.

I've updated the initial posting to reflect the new data ducatitalia provided - thank you so much for that.  Over the next few days I hope to:

-Remove all old for sale listings. (If you receive a 'Deleted' notice, and your offerings are still current, do feel free to re-post. This will ensure all listings are current.)
-Remove most of the conversational posts.
-I'll see if I can provide more mintage data; we have more resources available today than when I created this thread.

Going forward, the last page or two of the thread should serve as a current for sale list, with the initial pages preserving a small snapshot of the collectible market's evolution over the years.

If it helps, I used Chrome version 38.0.2125.101 m
When I ordered, it showed 28 left; it is now 17.

...the difficulty to order, to be honest, was part of what pushed me to pick up a few.
A barrier to entry into a market, while frustrating, will result in a lower number of people holding the coins. No different than an initial run of a Christmas present being undersupplied. The market was willing to show us that demand outpaced supply.

I liken this to the 0.1 BTC silver coins.  For almost their entire mintage, they had an overhead markup - maybe 0.35 BTC for a 0.1 BTC coin, if memory serves. Nobody ordered them for months. When Mike dropped the premium, the limited quantity got snapped up almost overnight.

In hindsight, the market will not care that it was an undesirable purchase for the first 99% of its offering time. It will care how many people have them for sale, relative to the number of people that want them. In both the silver coin case, and again here, the distribution was not to the masses, but to larger-scale purchasers buying with anticipation of favorable future market conditions.  Because of the web page ordering problems, aftermarket buyers will have a smaller set of buyers from whom to choose, which allows for but does not ensure rapidly appreciating prices.

Also - beautiful coin, looking forward to having it in my collection.

I used credit card.
An error overlaid the processing screen with some XML output, but the screen beneath showed successful processing, with a confirmation message sent to my email address.
28 are left. Might be worth taking another try at it, if you had errors before.

Oh yeah.  It's rally time.

The Bitcoin Rally Song, of course. Intermingled with an occasional playing of Mt Gox Erupting for kicks.

It's rally time.

It's time.
Bitcoin Rally Song, do what you do.

Orymh's link (one post above) will take you to a handful of Bitcoin songs.

Alongside the Rally Song, there is the Slump Song (don't you dare think about playing that right now!), and of course, Mt. Gox Erupting.
Now that there is _some_ path forward defined, with Kraken taking the reins, I find the song stings less, and is more nostalgic.

Mt Gox Erupting lyrics:

What a great idea: start up a Bitcoin exchange
You've got one for trading cards, I'm sure it's pretty much the same
With security about as good as putting all our money in a closet in a cardboard box
And I'm the sucker who sat right down and signed up on Mt. Gox

Now there's yet another bug in your half-assed trading engine and the prices start to slide
And the wheels are just spinning cause the system's in a loop and I guess we're all along for the ride
The API is crashing and I wish that I could cash in but the whole damn thing is locked up
So let the pressure keep building until we can watch Mt. Gox erupt

Keep up the great PR campaign, you sure know how to communicate
The only thing you've ever had to say about anything was always too little too late
We're done being strung along it's time to show your hand and give up the bluff
Now we all know the cards you aren't holding we're gonna watch Mt. Gox erupt

But isn't it fun to watch Mt. Gox erupting
Finally self-destructing
She's gonna blow

And even though it's our money burning
At that price we're earning
One hell of a show

Blame DOS attacks and hackers for your bad business practices you aren't fooling anyone
The only service anybody wants from you any more is a complete withdrawal of funds
If you'd have fixed your shit six months ago you would've been six months behind
You had your chance to be number one now you can go stand with Ripple at the back of the line  
Are you talking to your lawyer? Are you talking to your priest? Should I be talking to the FBI?
If there's a heaven somewhere for great CEOs it sure as hell ain't where Karpeles will go when he dies
We've all seen the smoke and we've all heard the rumble, now the whole thing is blowing up
And even with the lava raining down on me I'm gonna laugh my ass off as Mt. Gox erupts

----------------

Our job for the next few months should be pretty easy:

1. Play Rally Song multiple times daily.
2. HODL
3. Profit!

I think we're gonna close the gap, touch $259 in the next few days, then finally, the rally can begin.

I'd love to watch a voiceover video of both this presentation and the Ernst & Young presentation, replacing any usage of 'Bitcoin' with 'cash'.
I mean, as a company, they seem to have strategized on an attack vector, but this seems to bring to light both the ridiculousness and luddite nature of their stance better than anything else I've been able to come up with.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Hard to argue we've moved on to the fight stage.
One step away.

I remain in a frustrating holding pattern.
A case _is_ ongoing, which is why I haven't shared more details.
I asked for an update a few weeks ago, and the update was that there was not an update since I had last asked.

It's only 8 pages away. I hope you all have your images ready...



And here I'd held out hope I'd get to use it for spot price before page count