It would be nice if there were a way to exclude a subforum or three from the unread topics and updated topics.   Is there any way to do this?  Pointers to greasemonkey scripts along these lines are also welcome.

Thanks for the pointer to this interesting post, which I had ignored until now because I'm mostly paying attention to bitcoin.  It sounds as though you were actually thinking about gold's potential, and had thoughtful, substantial arguments behind your assertions.  I wish your posts about bitcoin were as thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Yes, the escrow is the really tricky part of this.  I doubt that any consumer-oriented escrow service could be turned to this purpose.  (Though I would love to be proven wrong.  If there were a safe way to escrow the money, I would definitely go for this.)

His claim is that bitcoinica always wins, because his customer's orders are decorrelated and he takes the spread on trades he can resolve internally.  He has made arguments in the past that his business is robust to the kind of correlated order book you would expect to see in a massive price swing, but they haven't been clear/convincing to me.

Following up from I. Goldstein's response in newbies:

I investigated diaspora when people were slamming it the other day on HN.  Installing it took some unix experience and reference to bug reports, but that is not too surprising for alpha software.  I got it running in developer mode pretty painlessly, seemed to work pretty well.  There are people actually using it for its intended purpose out there, and a large group of volunteers contributing to it (my wife has a friend who contributes about half a day a week to QA and tech support of the diaspora software.  At the time I investigated, I knew of his interest in diaspora, but did not know about his volunteering for it.  I installed it without his help, using only documentation available on the web.)  

There is an account of how they used their earlier funding and a summary of their expenditures and progress linked from their donate page.  They have been drawing a salary of $28k each plus a housing allowance, which seems very modest and worthwhile, considering the progress they have made.  It seems like a vibrant project with a good chance of meeting its intended goals, goals which I fully support.

I investigated diaspora when people were slamming it the other day on HN.  Installing it took some unix experience and reference to bug reports, but that is not too surprising for alpha software.  I got it running in developer mode pretty painlessly, seemed to work pretty well.  There are people actually using it for its intended purpose out there, and a large group of volunteers contributing to it (my wife has a friend who contributes about half a day a week to QA and tech support of the diaspora software.  At the time I investigated, I knew of his interest in diaspora, but did not know about his volunteering for it.  I installed it without his help, using only documentation available on the web.) 

There is an account of how they used their earlier funding and a summary of their expenditures and progress linked from their donate page.  They have been drawing a salary of $28k each plus a housing allowance, which seems very modest and worthwhile, considering the progress they have made.  It seems like a vibrant project with a good chance of meeting its intended goals, goals which I fully support.

  How do you know?  What is your connection to bitcoinica?

  Thanks.  Lower graph looks kind of like the support/resistance components on chodpaba's graphs.  Maybe it's a representation of the order book?

I am in cash, but I would be grateful if you have any market advice for us poor slobs who have no idea WTF your point is.  The first graph looks like a standard price/volume chart, but not with contemporary data.  Is it historical, or are you just making shit up?  What does the second graph represent?

If your point is just "sell!" that's pretty lame.  The bull/bear wars here are really dragging the quality of the forum down (and it was a bit weak to begin with.)

  Curious about bit-pay's role, since the diaspora donation site seems to contain a fairly typical bitcoin address.  Does bit-pay automatically pay out USD when bitcoin arrives at that address?

You are essentially proposing a deletion experiment which should provide a pretty strong test of the predictions' impacts on price behavior: just keep track of prediction accuracy when publishing/not publishing.

Yes but you only ever predict ralliies in the near-term, sometimes with amusing inaccuracy.  So you predictions are not very informative.

Thanks for the explanation,Dan.

Yeah, Dan.  How'd you do it.  Even if we don't reach $3, that was a remarkably specific and accurate prediction.

I actually learned a lot from the $1 Zhoutong gave me to play with on bitcoinica.  I do think the interface is kind of confusing.

Well, there was a huge purchase a little while ago, so who knows?  You could be right.

This has nothing to do with the Fed...

The animosity towards shorts is understandable, but I am about 80% confident that the recent crash was not caused by shorts, but  a big dump from a long holder who decided to flounce away from the bitcoin scene.  I am by no means a skilled trader, but  I would assume that the most effective short strategies involve relatively short-term positions, and contribute very little to overall price movement.

Hope and fear keep people from seeing things clearly.  I'm just continuing to watch.

There is no safe way to short bitcoin.  Bitcoinica's fortunes are just as uncertain as MtGoX's.