Its downright insane. I never thought I'd see anything quite so insane as this. They literally shut down every single exchanger that was remotely trustworthy that allowed you to buy Liberty Reserve. Thats insane.

I cannot believe this has not had a significant upward effect on the Bitcoin price. The entire online payment systems network that isn't bitcoin or paypal-ish has been utterly destroyed with the shut down of Liberty Reserve.

Its not just Liberty Reserve. Its all the exchangers that went with it.

If I have money in one of the centralized e-currencies like Perfect Money. How am I going to get it out, exactly? There is no easy way. Aurumxchange is there, thats pretty much it. And it only exchanges, it doesn't allow redemption for a Bank Wire. I have to take multiple steps to get from something like Payza (paypal-ish) to Bitcoin. Egopay has gone derp and won't let anybody log in. Perfect Money won't allow US Residents to use it.

Online payments as of now are basically dead unless you are using an e-currency like Paypal with built-in consumer 'protection'. Other than Bitcoin, that is. How are people not making the switch? Is it because all the exchangers are dead? When the wires suddenly start clearing, will the Bitcoin price go on some crazy jump upwards? Or are people just freaked out of online payments entirely and are leaving?

News flash, bitcoin is far more like a commodity than a currency right now, at least in the grand scheme of things.

Calling Bitcoin now a currency is like calling Gold a currency in 2002 when E-Gold operated. It can be a currency, if somebody wants it to, but financially it will function like a commodity.

I want to long the Discussion-Between-ChartBuddy-Posting-Interval Index!

The issue is that the US government quickly dismantles any business that allows such a thing. Literally every single US based service ever that has enabled irreversible fast payments has been shut down. I'm not joking.

I agree, but you seem to forget that we always overshoot. It will probably hit like $200, crash down to about $150, and then slowly converge. In other words, I like the shape of your graph, I just think the zig-zags are smaller than they will actually be.

Better send him a personal message, his chart posting is automated. You're post might get lost in the flood of speculation.

I had money in LR

Fortunately I had exchanged the vast majority of my funds to Bitcoin. There was probably like 50-100 bucks hanging around in there, though.

Actually, the link is even stronger. Competition -> Race to improve -> Increased infrastructure. Just look what the intense competition between miners has lead to: The biggest computational network in the world created, biggest by a fair margin. Bitcoin naturally incentivises competition, due to its fast transfer times (making switching between competitors easy) and its open-source nature (meaning one competitor can't monopolize some part of the client in some way). Now with miners the competition is induced in the protocol itself. I don't think the competition between exchangers will ever become as intense as that, so the exchanges will naturally lag behind a bit. However, it still is only a matter of time before Bitcoin exchanges obtain the type of infrastructure that the miners already have obtained. As such I don't think there is much need to worry.

I think of Bitcoin as a sort of future. The pricing will always be ahead of actual adoption rates, because if people expect there to be more adoption in a month from now, people will expect the price to be higher a month from now, so they will buy bitcoins now to profit a month from now, driving the price up now.

To be honest I was completely confused at why the huge dip after we hit $165-ish happened in the first place. I mean, I expected a drop down to like $140, but more than that was completely unexpected for me. I still think it should be about $140 now, tbh.

I am pretty sure the time after the big crash when it went down to $2-$1 was "the chasm." It just kept on going down, and everybody had pretty much written it off as a fad. But it came back, way bigger and way stronger than ever.

$170 is one key level, but we've already scraped it. $200 will likely be the next such value.

So probably just below $200. My guess is $197.

Exactly. If there is, say, 4% inflation, then the 7% drop is actually a 11% drop in actual value. (Clearly there wasn't 4% inflation today, I was just using it to illustrate a point).

The issue is that they are printing a ton of money and the value in the money dropped 7%. Now, notice that it has gone up a sizable amount previously this year, but still.

When you take into account that there is not-yet-fully-realized inflation in the money supply, that loss ends up looking a lot bigger.

That only partially explains this. The issue is that dollar volume is still roughly in the same range it always was.

Considering the fact that the government retrospectively required them to get licensed, it would be ridiculous if they couldn't.

Something weird here:



Look at that chart. Both the bid and ask amounts are declining. But then you notice that a "tick" down for bids is drawn in such a way that it is much more than a "tick" down for the asks. Yet, the price is going up. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from this is that people are slowly realizing that being in the Gox orderbook (which is public knowledge and reported as market depth) is an inherent disadvantage, and thus while the bid and ask sums are declining the trades are still being executed through market orders or very-close-to-market-orders.

The reason why nobody (comparitively) uses Linux over Windows is because Windows is simply more supported. I have never once in 10 years wanted to change my operating system (except for removing the activation messages).

It would help if some government agency actually came out and stated what they wanted Bitcoin (or anything like it) exchangers/merchants/miners/users to do. Currently its just a vague mass of legalese.