Zhoutong has said that most of his users are long right now, and I presume this is on the order of tens of thousands of coins.
Based on a little correspondence with Zhoutong I have no reason to be overly critical. In fact I had a very good customer service experience with him with regard to a short liquidation that seemed overpriced. His explanation was honest and informative as were the actions he took to address the matter. I couldn't give him anything less than a grade of A on this particular situation along with hearty encouragement to keep up the good work. However, IMO he should probably tread carefully around making statements such as the above, assuming he actually did. It would be best to either keep the pool dark and the customer's positions private, or to make systematic disclosures in a consistent fashion visible to the entire customer base through the web site. Statements like "most of his users are long right now" are not particularly helpful without quantitative grounding and worst case could certainly be construed as attempts at manipulation. In this example, on the one hand one could conclude that there's a lot of coins long as you do. On the other hand. the net customer positions at any brokerage are nearly always going to be long, except in the specific cases of securities that are heavily shorted. The statement could therefore be entirely true and also quite devoid of useful meaning. One of the basic principles of successfully handing out financial analysis is to always have an explanation no matter what may actually happen. If you follow the U.S. stock market you may know of a fellow named James Cramer, he's a master of this. He often has 2 or 3 explanations such that one can be dredged up to support just about any viewpoint or outcome. At the same time he's well known for a track record that has been flat over time. Since he makes his living not from investing but as a sort of entertainer/stand up comedian/raconteur this is ideal, it makes any suggestion of manipulation hard to substantiate. He's a crafty little bastard, and no one should take him seriously other than as a data point regarding a certain type of hustle  |
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Ignore this test message.
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I'll try and not use the word manipulator becuse too many people don't like that here. However, I still see clearly that that people are trading for price changes only.
My take on the price is that it is forcefully trying to be pushed higher. For example, I predicted the high push during christmas, the reason being the people trying to push the price higher would try and do this on a down day, when people are busy with christmas. The pushers also got hit hard when someone decided to dump a few times like 50K coins. But right after that dump, they were right back in with their bid walls.
What I still don't understand is that they have to be buying lots of coins to get this price push higher. And now they have to maintain the price at an even higher level, paying people more and more for bitcoins.
I can not see how long they could do this. I think many sellers will sit on the sidelines with the recent price hike, but after a month or so of the price not going higher, they will start to sell their coins.
Still nothing has change like cluster2K has said. Bitcoins are for the most part as useless as they ever were. There is no shortage of these coins also.
The only unknown here is how much these people trying to control the price can control the price. Bitcoin is limited enough for there to be much control of it. Even gold is said to be easily manipulated. I mean many things are manipulated, just think diamonds. When you can create a shortage, you can control. And bitcoin is limited enough for this to happen.
++1++ The tiny size of the bitcoin marketplace would be the elephant in the room if only it were much, much bigger. The marketplace that is, not the room When the subject is bitcoin discussions about market "fundamentals" like supply and demand are only slightly less deluded than the misapplication of technical analysis ( Elliott waves, Fibonacci ratios, voodoo milkshakes, etc ) to what is clearly a game that is easily amenable to being moved and dominated by a few entities. Far larger marketplaces with many many more players than bitcoin is ever likely to see are routinely steered to the advantage of manipulators, for example the silver craze of the late 1970s which was wholly orchestrated by the Hunt brothers. For all practical purposes the only reasonable and prudent assumption is that bitcoin exchange rates and trading are a rigged game, a sham market. Acknowledging this reality doesn't make it any easier to profit by it, but it does strongly suggest that any asset allocation to bitcoin be small and regarded as purely speculative. I may borrow your quote "Bitcoins are for the most part as useless as they ever were." as a signature line, the more elaborate bitcoin becomes the truer your observation. So, who wants to start writing phony insurance on bitcoin positions with me, at least until someone pulls the plug on shoring up bitcoin's value? Then maybe we can swing some sort of government bailout and thereby completely relive the U.S. financial meltdown of 2008 but in a safe, simulated World of Warcraft fashion. I know, let's call them Bitcoin Default Swaps, it's best from a marketing viewpoint to apply the same lack of imagination in copying existing financial instruments and institutions that so characterizes the rest of the bitcoin infrastructure  |
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Nick Cave - O'Malley's Bar
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I've followed the gold bugs since the 1970s, the message never changes, you couldn't have picked a better illustration of a stopped clock being occasionally correct. "Safe haven" is a bit of stretch when applied to gold or bitcoin.
Would you save in lumber if the lumber yard were on fire? All fiat currencies are burning. Gold is as financially sound as granite bedrock. Bitcoin has the same potential within a decade if it can survive any further exogenous shocks until it's about 5-10x its current capacity (~USD$25mm); a probable tipping point. Hysteria is an overrated emotional state. At 10x ~= $25M, the bitcoin universe is still far too tiny and easily manipulated to be taken seriously as a savings vehicle. What is your valuation/comparison metric for asserting "gold is stable compared to all other asset classes"? Saying that gold always has the price of gold is a useless tautology. |
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Getting all the adulation with none of the ownership, not bad for an orphaned prototype which one would hope will not be his last decent idea. Very prudent to not burn his identity/brand on an initial effort.
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Fractional reserve banking consists in creating new money from loans, and Bitcoin does not allow anyone to create new Bitcoins at will. Therefore, implementing fractional-reserve banking with Bitcois would involve creating another monetary system in which Bitcoin would be just a monetary unit, and no longer a monetary system. Finally, although the two monetary systems could eventually coexist, they would remain distinct: there is no such thing as fractional-reserve banking within the Bitcoin monetary system. Fractional reserve is an enormously popular topic in circles of jerks everywhere. The web page you link to is probably helpful for someone although one might conclude from it that the differences in the two viewpoints are mostly semantics around the definition of money supply. IMO, the Keynesian model seems much more in contact with behavioral reality, it's based on observations of what people have actually done for thousands of years, practices predating Keynesian ideas like actively managing the money supply through lending. The Austrian school strikes me as one of these prescriptive ideologies like Soviet-style Marxism that establishes a "rational" model ( by some definition ) and then tells us it should be how the world is made to work because of the internal "correctness" of the model. In any case, bank lending is not the only way that leverage can be used to create money. For example, margin lending can have the same effect. Such lending does exist in the Bitcoin world at the exchange site Bitcoinica. The hedging that inevitably is done by keepers of large concentrations of money ( e.g. Mt. Gox ) almost certainly involves the use of leverage. One way or the other, all lending can create more money in circulation, not just the evil deeds of fiendish central banks |
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Us property owners just voted to take your guns away and use them to force you into a gay marriage. How do you like us now? Everyone take a number and line up, the bride is getting antsy  |
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+1 Funny thread title. I don't suppose I should start a thread entitled "Quit Whining You Subhuman Pigs" as it would only further decrease the already low signal to noise ratio here |
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Zero. Zilch. Nada. None. Sell into all rallies.
Surely you must be very short then at this moment? I sell what I mine almost immediately and I have no hardware investment allocated to the purpose of mining as I started only when I had to replace a failed video card anyway. I have never had a reason to actually purchase bitcoins, and expect I never will. It's all lunch money anyway, it helps me pay attention to the curious world of Bitcoin which is very much involved in self-adulation lately, a characteristic that has led me to good shorts in the past. However, unlike common stocks where there's always another short around the corner and the practice of shorting is adequately funded, if bitcoin shrinks to a point Bitcoinica will go with it, and there will be losers in the race to cash out in time. It feels great to not be someone who has any serious amount of asset exposure to Bitcoin, long or short. It's just too small and opaque to be taken that seriously. |
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Until the mathematical foundation Bitcoin has been built upon is proven to have failed, it will continue making progress as a safe haven comparable to gold. [/quote] I've followed the gold bugs since the 1970s, the message never changes, you couldn't have picked a better illustration of a stopped clock being occasionally correct. "Safe haven" is a bit of stretch when applied to gold or bitcoin. I'm glad I focused my efforts elsewhere since then, notwithstanding the Hunt brothers silver pump and dump was a little fun. I stumbled across a crafts store that had pounds and pounds of little silver beads *that they thought were shiny coated plastic imitation silver beads and had priced accordingly*. I backed up the truck as they say and immediately turned them over before the silver market collapsed. I sure am glad I didn't makes those beads part of my savings plans. |
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Zero. Zilch. Nada. None. Sell into all rallies.
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Your response completely overlooks the consequences of the uneven concentration of economic power within the tiny world of Bitcoin in the form of exchanges. In this area the author of the article makes a point which is valid, not to say obvious, irrespective of what the alleged thoughts of Nakamoto may be.
I have never used any exchange to either obtain bitcoins, nor cash out into any other currency. Considering that I'm surely far from unique, by what logic do you state the above? Given the orphan status of Bitcoin's design and implementation, it makes particular sense to look at it as it is, not as it is *supposed* to be. So far it certainly doesn't have a flexible history of adapting to unintended consequences, and explanations to the effect that consequences are within the design are entirely too convenient to spin up out of whole cloth.
I do not see the unintended consequences that you seem to see. Of course you don't. You are at the center of a perfect universe. Enjoy it while you can  |
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A mention of Bitcoin by Forbes blogger Andy Greenberg A meta-article on this.. with a bit of a dig at bitcoin at the end(?). This Christmas, Forbes Magazine Suggests Bitcoin 2011-12-11 http://getoffmyinternets.net/2011/12/11/this-christmas-forbes-magazine-suggests-bitcoin/After promoting a five-month old Boycott of PayPal – the one that Regretsy and its members ignored — Greenberg closes with this gem: For those who want an alternative, check out WePay, Skrill, Ukash… or the decentralized crypto-currency Bitcoin. Ah, Skrill. Which prominently serves a list of the states in which it’s legal via a domain that doesn’t match its rebranded name. Or Ukash, whose most recent news entry (from six months ago) contains the phrase “DO NOT SEND UKASH.” Leaving Bitcoin which, like all decentralized peer-to-peer services, surely provides awesome customer service in a pinch. What we need is a shameless stock tout like James Cramer to come out for Bitcoin, then we will know to sell into any resulting tulip time, for his recommendation is the original Kiss Of Death |
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Any new digital currency is going to be worth right next to zero at the beginning. And therefore anyone who invests real money on a new highly speculative currency is going to make a lot of money if it succeeds.
Since you aren't offering any grounding for your assertion, I won't trouble myself to ground this one: Betting against bitcoin has a greater expectation of profit than "investing" in it. If you have a bitcoin, sell it now for your preferred currency, as bitcoins will eventually be of negligible value. |
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I can't say I understand all of your statements completely, but I do see things I rather like. Thank you for making an effort to communicate with someone like me who only has a couple of languages and nothing like Hungarian There don't seem to be many people on this forum prepared to reason outside the Bitcoin paradigm. The request to "Just tell us how this differs from BitCoin clearly and in as few words as possible" illustrates the mindset you are most likely to encounter, many folks actually seem to want to treat the current Bitcoin framework as being a desirable end state. I'm not suggesting that you are casting your pearls before swine, please continue to refine and share your ideas. Do not take the language criticism seriously, many of these folks can't reason in the king's english either |
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I know an alternative that wouldn’t have done so. It’s called a sigmoid curve ...
fair enough. indeed, Bitcoin could have been allocated differently. but you do understand that the past is history, and that we are not going to change it, don't you? Intractable past circumstances are evidence of failure in the original implementation, which nonetheless remains unchanged. Bad ideas that can't be fixed get replaced. If you think there's any value in Bitcoin you should hope it can change and adapt, otherwise it's just Flooze 2.0 implemented by parties who weren't quite as naïve as the implementors of Flooze 1.0. It's not clear to me that there's a shared definition of fairness in this discussion. It's hard to decide if it's even relevant if it is undefined. Statements like "capitalism is fair" are good for their humor content, the same thing was once said every bit as earnestly about witch trials by ordeal. What's the weather like in the 17th century? |
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