WIN.

I need 3000 carrots to buy a garden for mining, can someone give me a loan?

Given my record for selling low and buying high, I don't think making this sort of prediction is my strong point.

All I can say is, at the end of the year a bitcoin will be either more than $10 or less than $0.01.

Still wavering back and forth around GBP parity.... but I suspect we're not breaking 2 today.

Maybe tomorrow.

Yeah, things have dropped again, but I'm not totally sure they'll stay down. I'd like to see if things move up again, but I can't sit here all night, so I'll revise down to 61 USD for now and leave the offer open until midnight, my time (4:00 UTC).

I consider the offer binding, so please consider your acceptance binding as well.

American style.

Mt Gox if you've got it. ACH otherwise. Or PayPal if you're willing to send it as a "gift" or some other method with no fees. (If you charge back I just won't honor the options.) Post here to claim.

Extending this offer another thirty minutes.

I point out that this is a true offer: I am committed to sell these options at this price to the first responder.

Selling one contract for call options on 100 BTC at 150 USD---nearly a $50 intrinsic value! Expiry date July 24. Premium 72 USD (payable through Mt Gox).

I do not have 100 BTC on hand, but do have options on 100 BTC that I can call if necessary.

This offer expires in thirty minutes---who knows how the market will have moved by then?

If I already own Portal and you gift it to me, will I get a gift pass that I can sell later? If so, I might be interested (but I'm not 100% on that).

Yeah... a few hours ago I was wondering if we'd reach GBP parity within the year.... now I'm wondering if we'll reach it today.

While I'm not interested in changing the contract underlying the existing Bitcoin now that it's out there, I do think a less deflationary currency would have been nicer. If the network were to emit bitcoins at a linear rate, we would experience inflation when economic growth was sub-linear and deflation when it was super-linear; as it is, we'll experience inflation when the economy shrinks, and deflation when it grows. I think the former is more stable in the long run, though still ultimately deflationary unless the future is quite unpleasant indeed.

Some others have suggested that because of physical limits (number of atoms, etc), the overall value of the economy is limited and asymptotically constant, so an asymptotically constant number of bitcoins is only accurate. I respond that I know of no physical limit on the economic value of an atom, and I doubt we're going to run up against one in the lifetime of Bitcoin.

Private keys really need to be strongly encrypted. Like, yesterday. At the moment theft is much too easy considering how potentially profitable it is. I should have to enter in my passphrase every time I want to send bitcoins---a forgotten passphrase is unlikely if it's used frequently enough.

And there ought to be an automatic backup system as well. Right now I have an encrypted wallet.dat in my Dropbox which I update periodically (I deliberately produced a lot of keys up front), but I don't trust my mother or aunt to remember to do something like this. Even a centralized backup server is better than nothing.

I don't think this is the big rally that will bring us to 2---but maybe the next one will be---or maybe the next one after that. Before December? I'm almost certain.

Yeah, that's kind of worrying.

But hey, it's confirmed already!

High-level, definitely (though I'm also partial to the idea that 0.00000001 BTC should have been 1 BTC in the first place, it's too late for that now). People will accidentally enter transactions for 1/100,000,000 of their intended amount otherwise.

demonofelru and I have made a deal! I am buying two contracts for call options on 100 BTC at 150 USD, to expire July 24. Paying a premium of 11 USD per contract. He'll post to confirm this once he's been paid.

I think that offer was pretty sweet. Anyone else willing to take me up at only a 9 USD premium?

Send me a PayPal gift of $50 and I'll send you 33 BTC. I'm taking a risk in doing this---the surcharge is to make that risk worth my while.

EDIT: wait, you said $28 worth. Send me $28 and I'll send you 17 BTC. Send to ian.maxwell@gmail.com and post here.

I'm not offering you any reason to trust me---if you don't, don't do it.

dishwara: Can't you just max out a credit card or something?

I don't really know you, so there's a big risk here. That said, I'm interested in using this as a hedge, by offering a 300 BTC loan in exchange for the greater of 300 BTC or 400 USD in 4 months, based on the Mt Gox spot price on July 31. I don't have the BTC but do have enough Mt Gox dollars to buy them.

This isn't an offer yet, just a statement of interest. How does it sound?

I know the feeling, Script.

The funny thing is that a couple days ago I accidentally made a sell order on Mt Gox instead of a buy order, and sold all the bitcoins I had stored there... then consoled myself by saying, "Ah, well, 1.165 is a good price anyway, it'll probably be down tomorrow." Still waiting.

Well, I was looking for someone else to make the offer... but what the hell. Based on this calculator and some soul-searching, I'll start out at 11 USD per 100-BTC contract, paid via Mt Gox.

Some numbers to put this in perspective:

• At 1.50 or less, you gain $11/contract
• At 1.61, we break even
• At 1.71, you lose $10/contract
• At 2.01, you lose $40/contract

Hmm.... this feels fair to me as someone just coming in, but maybe not to someone who watched the exchange rate soar up from 0.2 or so a few months ago. I point out that I would most likely call if the spot price passed 1.9 or so, so the downside isn't quite as unlimited as it appears.