I agree its hard to call something a bubble that settles 5 to 10 times higher than it started making it the years best investment.  So I spent the first year saying "bubble" in quotes or using terms like run-up but now I've just given up.  We are redefining the term bubble I guess.  Its a new phenomenon -- social networks have allows financial communication within large sub-cultures to happen faster then an exponential adoption curve, yielding super-exponential "bubbles" on top of a baseline exponential.  Someday some loser will write a book about it and get the Nobel prize in Economics...before Satoshi  .

No you cant vfy that miner checked particular nonces time and net bw efficiently.  But u can vfy miners hash rate.  Dunno how it actually works but one soln is to have miners submit solutions found of lower difficulty. Ave number of solns found or best soln within a time period can give you average hash rate of 5hat miner.

This is a traditional HNWI broker operation.   You can be sure they're on the phone trying to put together commitments to make a serious bid.

I wonder if the pause in purchasing is because of the govt sale... IIRC they had previously expressed interest in buying these coins so its quite possible that they got advance notice that a sale was imminent.

I wonder how soon you get the coins after your wire xfer goes through... could be important if your plan is to flip some.

Do USA merchants understand the value of Bitcoin?  AFAIK they ALL seem to only accept Bitcoins from US residents.  Overstock and now Expedia...

I don't get it.  What's forcing this behavior?  Obviously, the savings due to no fiat currency conversion provides a much bigger incentive to use BTC for international buyers than the incentive for US residents.

Who are the biggest merchants that accept international orders in BTC?

what kind of discount do you think they can ask for?  Its gonna be a real scandal if they do a private sale for something significantly less than the market price.  The fungibility of Bitcoin (as compared to houses, cars, etc) means that there's no excuse for a lowball sale...

http://time.com/2857448/mozilla-25-smartphone-firefox/
tldr: Mozilla planning a loss-leader $25 smartphone for 2nd & 3rd world countries:

I don't think you're getting a much of a straight answer and the reason is that right now is one of the most dangerous times to invest (or simply hold cash -- that's an investment in your fiat currency) that I've seen in many years.   QE or your local equivalent has created a situation called biflation. 

Basically here's the view:

1. Stocks are hitting record highs, not because actual profitability is up but because QE dollars need somewhere to go.  It could turn around very quickly.

2. Any money market, CD or term deposit will be a net LOSS when adjusted for true inflation.

3. Any safe bond has the same issue as 2.

4. The smart $ already bought gold and other PMs -- the price

5. Land might be a good idea but it always has had its own issues, like illiquidity (might take you 2+ years to sell it).

6. Bitcoin is of course very volatile and still in Beta.

7. Altcoin investments is frankly gambling...

Basically, its a bad time to invest because systemic issues with the economy and financial system are causing large waves of money to flow around.  These waves make it very difficult to see water levels ( the true value of a product).

I think that the best thing to do in times of uncertainty is to diversify... own a little bit of a lot of unrelated stuff.

You are right the key trick here is to identify hash that is under a single entities' control.  To do so in a decentralized manner, we must create an incentive to mine coins to the same output address (once a single entities' coins go to the same output address, its easy to make an algorithm penalize an output address that is getting lots of coins by reducing the mining reward or increasing difficulty for only that address).  

One way to do this would be to only allow coinbase transactions to spend to addresses with a long prefix (essentially a "vanity" address).  For example, all coinbase addresses must begin with "1coinbaseTxn".  So if you want to "look" like multiple entities, you must be continually devoting lots of processing power towards generating new coinbase capable addresses.

There are lots of problems with this idea.  For example, it encourages centralization because it could take a long time for a small miner to generate a coinbase capable address.

It is very possible that we are more like at Jan 15, 2012 at this point.  In other words, we've recovered from the oversold condition but will be basically flat (slowly creeping up) for another year -- probably until there's another minor meltdown in the traditional banking sector.

RE: gold mine, something smells in that one.  If you could "make your money back in 2-3 seasons" and the guy has been mining for what was it 20+ years then he should have plenty of cash lying around to buy bitcoin.

quote author=ihaveaquestion link=topic=178336.msg7223710#msg7223710 date=1402363155]
It is not useless at all. Everybody has his learning curve and some will need more time than others to understand the same thing, which is particularly true in maths. But you insinuated the idea of the relevance of Bitcoin, which might flourish on the future. Maybe they will need less volatility and more killer apps though.
[/quote]

Yes, and this is well proven by marketing.  There's a whole class of ads that just try to get a company name "out there" without explicitly selling product.  Like the GE add running during the olympics that was showing jumbo jet engines, wind turbines, MRI's etc... How many olympics viewers are in the market for these products?

Same with Bitcoin.  People need to hear the word over and over... then someday they'll suddenly bite.

RE: pure incorruptible mathematics...

What's really interesting about this is that all the theorizing about the strength of the algorithms may not matter in practice.  It is very likely that the blockchain as a record, as a memory of financial transactions, has grown to be socially more important than the strength of its mathematics.

The stake-holders moved quickly to preserve the blockchain during the fork event last year.  I think that in the event of a crack to 1 or 2 the same thing would happen to whatever extent is necessary.  Including halting or rewinding what is de-facto recognized as the Bitcoin blockchain until a new algorithm or even a centralized kludge is devised.  Of course as a distributed project the blockchain as we know it today could continue.  However if that one isn't what the exchanges, merchants, and payment processors are using then it is not the "Bitcoin" blockchain.


 

There is one HUGE difference between the technology bubble of 2000 and bitcoin.  And it is this:  if you added up the projected revenue of all the tech bubble companies in any particular industry you got a number that was orders of magnitude higher than the most optimistic projection.  Basically, all 10 competing companies were priced in the expectation that they would get 100% of the market.  But of course only 1-2 companies were going to "win", and the rest fold.

Now, in the Bitcoin case, projections take a SINGLE market (store of value, or international payment, for example) and assume that Bitcoin gets a small % of it (say 10%).  With this, we get a number MUCH higher than its current market cap.  Only when you start reading the "to the moon" projections of 300000-1000000 per coin do you see people starting to imagine significant (> 50%) market penetration in multiple markets.

we are now in purgatory.  Will the weekend whale strike?  Long interest on Bitfinex has been incredibly high and shorts extremely low this week.  These are weak hands and they are getting nervous at the triple-top-that-is-really-so-close-in-time-its-just-one-top.  And they are looking at the periodic bubble chart and noticing that after such an epic peak (10 to 1000 in a one year mega-bubble), minor bubbles occur -- minor bubbles like 450 to 680 perhaps?

At the same time TA followers are salivating at the long-term cup-and-handle currently drawn in the 4 month chart, and the accelerating march of adoption is telling people that these could be the last few $600 coins.

Who will flinch first?

How did I miss this epic debate? 

The essential issue here is that structure and formations of thought between people from science and religious background is so different.  This requires extremely precise wording which is difficult if not impossible in rapid or verbal debate. 

1. For example, let's address fact vs. theory and the unexplained in science:

There are no general facts in observational science.  There are of course specific facts like "I found this rock at GPS coordinates XXX".  But for ideas like evolution or global warming there is only theory.  However some theories are supported by so many diverse and unrelated observations that scientists name them "fact" as a kind of verbal shorthand.  However, that does not mean that these fact-like theories will never be changed.

Actually, theories like the Newtonian equations and evolution are often changed.  BUT in a way that is hard for many religious people to understand the theories were not previously wrong.  What happens is that the theory is found to be imprecise or apply to a narrower environment then previously supposed.  For example Newton's theory of motion turned out to be not perfectly precise at slow speeds and to be so imprecise as to become inapplicable as speed approaches that of light.  And as we all know, it was superseded by relativity.  But for all cases that Newton could see and to his measurement accuracy, his theory was correct.   

Also, mathematically if you take the equations of relativity, and assume that the maximum speed is MUCH slower than light, certain terms become 0.  What's left ARE Newton's equations!  This is probably the ultimate demonstration of my point...

Similarly with evolution.  Punctuated Equilibrium is evolution with more detail.  Also, today biochemistry researchers are discovering that the cell has clever chemical ways of mixing and recombining mutations to make them less lethal.  Additionally, the cell is structured so that mutations occur more often in stressed environments (using a mechanism that is not really understood).  So maybe there is some "design" in evolution after all...

There are some facts in mathematics or other abstract disciplines.  A better term would be "proofs".  For example, if you take as given a whole host of assumptions we call the "Cartesian" coordinate system (i.e graph paper) then Pythagorean's Theorem is true (a fact).  But if the REAL UNIVERSE is NOT Cartesian then it is not true in this the real universe (and right now the shape of the universe is a matter of great debate).  So you see the entire fact must be written "If this and this and this, THEN this is true".  But lazy people (and people who want to argue with science) shorten it to "...this is true".

2. The unexplained

It is true that there is the unexplained in science.  Science does not claim to have all the answers.  Often religious people make the mistake of pushing "answers" onto science that scientists did not really say (they skip the "if this and this and this" part of the fact).  Scientists who say science has proven that there is no God are making the same assertions-without-proof as religious people.  A better statement would be:

Historically, many phenomena that were attributed to the divine have now been explained by science.  However, some questions (and many new questions) remain unexplained.  These questions may never be explained by science and we may even discover God in them.  However, the existence of questions not explained by science does not prove that there is God because these questions may be scientifically answered in the future.

3. Science allows for God

Einstein had a famous anti-Quantum Mechanics quote "God does not play dice" because quantum mechanics is all about probabilities.  For example, there is a small probability that atoms "tunnel" through a classically-impenetrable wall of other atoms and can magically appear on the other side.  In theory at least there's actually an infinitesimally tiny chance of any particular miracle (say trillions of water molecules jumping to the side, or light deflecting in a manner to form a figure) happening.  So miracles actually CAN happen without breaking the laws of physics!  Of course, the existence of this possibility does not mean that

Additionally, from an abstract direction, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem basically shows that any sufficiently complex logical system can posit a question that is obviously true but cannot be proven from within the system.


4. Additional fun:

Researchers are evolving algorithms in hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvable_hardware
I read some of the early research.  One fascinating result is that the circuits that evolved tended to create small groups of high-feedback logic.  The groups were then loosely interconnected.  This result is very similar to what people see in cellular chemistry, genetics, and the structure of the brain.  However it is VERY different from a computer program or human-made electrical design which tends to be very linear -- like the "TODO" list you might make for yourself before going on vacation.


Congrats and thanks to anyone who slogged thru all this!  Mostly I wrote it for myself :-)  After all, I will likely never meet you!

chip chip death by 1040 cuts?

Read about the tech thru a slashdot article but took one look at the price and said to myself "Bubble"  .  Revisited and read the whitepaper (actually understood the awesomeness of Bitcoin as opposed to the media misreporting) 8 months later... joined bitcointalk a month+ after that.