Whoa...  Prices dropped suddenly, what's happening?

I've stopped doing daytrading...  to chaotic... and I'm too nervous!  Well, I started on my national exchange (Virtex Canada), but with 3% fees it was way too much, so I moved to Mt.Gox.  Even if I can't easily send/receive fiat from/to Canada, it's good if you just want to daytrade, volume-wise and fee-wise.  I can accept a loss and only get a scratch on my BTC count!

Meanwhile, I got my BTC back by trading some to LTC when it was 0.005, and bought back LTC->BTC the next day at 0.0075   It continues to go higher, but I've stop touching LTC now, too volatile, too high!

Indeed, but with LTC, you also know that you're clear of FPGA/ASIC.  Although it would probably feasible with an advanced ASIC and lot of memory, the lack of in-between FPGA make it so that LTC will probably remain GPU-only.

I do have an FPGA setup (custom hardware, custom miner, re-using off-the-shelf telecom cards we build at our work, using Stratix-II EP2S90, running at a total of 2.2GHash/s).  It's much more cost effective than GPU, both hardware-wise (the FPGA cards themselves cost me nothing) and energy-wise (I use about 450W).  I can do BTC, TRC, etc...  but LTC is a no-no for my FPGA setup!  That's the advantage of LTC.  So GPU miners will switch to LTC.

What will happen to the prices?  It's a good question.  I would expect that LTC will follow BTC prices, hash per hash, but in fact, you won't be able to compare.  BTC will be ASIC only, and LTC will be GPU only.  So I guess people will trade LTC to BTC and make more than if trying to mine BTC with GPU.

So far, it's just a speculation bubble.  In reality, LTC reward should be the same as BTC reward with the same hardware.  So, someone with GPU 'X' should be able to make the same amount (in Fiat value) if mining BTC than LTC.  However, it's now around 1.85 time more profitable to mine LTC than BTC, although that exact number is hard to find exactly as the algorithm is different (SHA-256 vs scrypt) so the relative difficulty vary greatly depending on which hardware is used.

It's a bubble.  Although I would expect GPU miners to switch to LTC when a lot of ASIC make it impossible to GPU-mine Bitcoins.

The only Bitcoins "made" every day are the ones generated through mining.  That is, 25BTC per blocks.

Bitcoins are not "sold", but "exchanged".  That is, both parties agree on a common price, and "trade" bitcoin for fiat/alternate cryptocoins/etc.

It is possible that one would want to control many bitcoins and not exchange them away.  In fact, a lot of people are hoarding their coins.  After all, why would you want to trade off your coins for fiat/goods if you know that by holding to your coins, in a few months, it may double it's monetary value.

The more people who hoard their coins, the less coins are in circulation.  That limit the supply, and raise the prices even more.  In a similar fashion, when mining difficulty raise, it's harder to generate coins, and thus, tend to raise the prices even more.  Same as when the reward was halved in last November.  Although it took a months or two to reflect on the prices.  Now, just wait until ASICs come out.  Let's see the prices when difficulty raise from 4.5M to 500~800M...  That is coming soon... So, whatever we think about what prices it may be next week, for sure in a months or two the prices may be much MUCH higher.  ACIS is coming.  Same as when GPU came along, the difficulty will raise.  There are no turning back once ASIC are here.  You may see a 100 timefold raise initially, followed by smoother (relatively) raise when most every miners will be ASIC.  Got to catch that front wave!

I know    But as said, it's too chaotic, and I'm just too anger to make quick BTC 

I think it's better to just hold.  You see, I do have 40BTC and started hypothesizing on the BTC prices, and started to do some daytrading.  I only ended up loosing 8~10 BTC in the process.  You see, you CANNOT predict BTC prices.  At a moment, you think it will go down, you sell, and it continue to raise.  You then don't want to lose your investment, you buy back, and it goes down.  Repeat cycle a few times and you lose a portion of your investment each time.  It's totally chaotic.

You see, today Gox went up and came back down.  I missed an opportunity.  But now it's going up again, and I sold at 46.75.  It's now slowly rising since and touching the 48 mark.  What do I do?  Wait (it will surely go back down)?  What if that's a new low point, and goes for the sky?  Do I buy at loss?  I only hope to recover those lost BTC somehow, so I continue doing it, but you see, the only thing I ended up getting is more gray hairs...  And less BTC in my pocket.  To me it can be as worse as gambling for other persons.  It IS gambling...

Nice one-pager presentation 

Hello

I had an idea, I don't know if I'm totally wrong or if it make some sense...

Why in the first place do we need 6 confirmations to accept a transaction?  That is, the first confirmation comes when a transaction is hashed in a solved block.  Then when you find another block, since the block are chained and the new block hash is partly based on the previous block hash, this validate the previous block, and thus validate the transaction (2nd validation).  And so on...

So, you need to have:
- Your transaction getting inserted in a block, which block happen to make it to the blockchain (header hash is a solution).  This can take a while, even several blocks until it get into a block.
- After that, 5 blocks need to be found that are chained to that last block.

The second criteria I guess is to prevent against possible orphan block for example, in which case the transaction has to be validated in a block from the main chain.

Ok, so, 6 blocks look like a quick way to ensure that the transaction is validated.  However, when validated once (1 confirmation), why would it become invalid?  As said, orphan blocks.  But are there other reasons?

Now, as I understand, orphan blocks occurs when 2 different party find a solution at almost the same time based on the same previous block.  Both block will fight on the network.  Eventually, a solution (a 'next block') will be found based on one of those 2 blocks.  When sent to the network, that block will make it's predecessor part of the main block chain, and the other block an orphan block.

So, the chances to have several successive blocks fighting in parallel is pretty low.  And if after 5~10 minutes, everyone agree that only a single block is found (no potential orphan block), why not detect this and say that the transaction is valid?

I just sent them an e-mail at the address you provided.

That is pretty crappy though.  I was accessing the site, did a BTC transfer, watched it arrive, and did a small trade, confirmed it went trough, and bam... down...

Thanks for the info.

Edit: I can confirm this, as I can access the site from another IP.

Edit2: Up again...  Took 5~10 minutes

It's down again...  Not pinging at all. 

Yes, I think that prices will stabilize for some time.  People don't want to see another bubble.  Although it goes along with the Bitcoin news.  The last one was triggered by a series of good news (mainly Mt.Gox goes North-America, but also Namecheap, Amazon, WinPoker, etc. all in a few hours apart).

When difficulty start to rise though (ASIC), I suspect there will be a dramatic raise in the BTC price, probably followed by another crash/correction.  The difficulty won't have to raise so much though, that bubble will mainly be driven by the speculation and hype about imminent difficulty raise.

Also, throw in some major bad news and people will lose confidence in BTC and price will go down.  BitInstant is just a glitch, and it was surrounded by good news. But what if it occurred while there were no other news, while the mediatic attention would have turned solely at it?

So, it resumes to this...  If you want to know if BTC will raise or fall, you must not attempt to predict it directly, but you must instead be able to predict news surrounding Bitcoin.  That is the driving factor in the end.

Look at it, the last raise from 35$ started to happen suddenly and sharply.  Here on the forum, everyone was asking 'Why does the price raise suddenly?".  I didn't saw much anyone writing that it could be due to the Mt.Gox news until a day or 2 later.  People just looked at the prices rising and massively bought.  There's always a reason behind every moves.  And if people can't find it, and see that the price raise too quickly, then it leads to inevitable correction.

However, Bitcoin is much more mature than in 2011, and have a lot more attention and investors, so I don't think we'll see a crash like back then, unless something really bad happen to the Bitcoin network itself (which could be a possibility also...  51% attack, yet to be discovered vulnerability/security breach in the Bitcoin protocol itself, etc.).

So, always keep in mind that Bitcoin is play money.  A curiosity.  It may get you rich.  But it can make you bankrupt.  It's a game!  If a breach of Bitcoin is found, there's no turning back.  There's no one who will stop accounts in hope for better days.  It will be game over.  So invest wisely, always knowing that it's a gamble.  Don't ever invest money/mining hardware/etc that you're not ready to lose.

LOL   And he let us down!

Bitcoinity is pretty much the best companion site for realtime MtGox trading 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but both Mt. Gox and all the API clients in the world are using the same socket.io server.  So the lag experienced yesterday, due to a probably very large amount of API calls, was probably mainly caused by the non-MtGox API calls overloading the server.

A very first step would be to ensure that when the trading server load reach a certain point, the non-MtGox requests get discarded (not delayed, but discarded) past a certain request queue size to prevent server overload and keep priority to MtGox site trading to take place.  And when network congestion occurs, do similar and give higher QOS (Quality Of Service, a priority scheme in networking protocols) ensuring that requests from MtGox site get absolute priority.

With the above, yes, probably the third-party sites (and user applications) relying on the API will get longer lags, and possibly "can't get result, server overloaded" type of errors, but this ensure that a trade entered at MtGox get executed in a timely fashion, and also ensure that the information displayed on MtGox site is accurate (including their mtgoxlive applet).

After all, having a lag of 5 minutes or not having results is pretty much the same.  At least, this ensure, for 3rd party apps, that when a request pass through (does not get discarded), it do receive a response in a timely fashion.

This is a more advanced networking topic, but pretty much basic concept, and a must to ensure stability.  Think about it, when you call somewhere with your phone, it most certainly now somewhere along the way get transformed to IP traffic (same as with regular Internet data).  And that voice data pass on the same wires/fibers as the regular PC to PC data.  You would not want to hear your interlocutor at the other end burping and lagging as soon as you have network congestion.  So that is treated the same way.  Absolute real-time priority for voice data.  The network could be 100% overloaded, lot of regular data lost, even denial of service, but not a single voice data packet will be lost or even delayed.  The network switches ensure that - 1) the voice data have absolute priority, bypassing any data with lower priority, thus eliminating lag, and - 2) the regular data get discarded if network congestion occurs and not the voice data.

Not mine, but I made two transaction from caVirtex to Mt.Gox yesterday.  The first one took under an hour, but the second one took quite a few hours (Yes, there was a Tx fee attached).  My only taught is that it was probably due to the high transaction volume.  Yeay, it was really bad yesterday!  Hope you find him...  Was it a bit Tx?

Don't spread FUD...  There's an overload since the crash correction...  

That suck big time, there's huge jumps 45, 35, 45, ...  all happening in a minute or two, but lag is killing the whole thing...

Every minute, the lag is increasing by a minute... 

In Canada, the only real exchange for us is the Canadian Virtual Exchange (caVirtex).  However, a year ago they raised their BTC trading fees from 0.5% to 3% (2.5% if you have 100BTC transaction in the last 120 days, 2% if you have 300 BTC transactions, etc) based on dodgy basis (to supposedly cover their fees for trying to establish with the government laws/paperwork).  So us, Canadian, really get stealing fees.

So, it's really bad for trading, especially if you want to buy and sell later (or the inverse) and make profit.  You basically can't do short term trading since this need BTC to fluctuate like 5~10 points for any profit to be made.

Most other exchanges have like 0.X% fees.  Mt. Gox base fee is 0.6%.

Now that they (Gox) are coming to North America, and promise easy trading for Canadians too (even if in USD), caVirtex will eat their shirt ...  finally...