Yes, I've spoken with them on the phone and they said BTC is toast. Just kidding. Shouldn't this be in speculation? As far as I can see this move would have yielded little profit, because of market impact. Pump & dump means you dumpy slowly, not quickly..

Then crosses don't work. A limit order book means that you can cross the orders in the book. The point of a market for a completely fungible good is that all orders can be crossed. Actually this is in a way what money is. Instead of transacting in pigs or horses you transact in a medium which abstracts from that. An order to buy 5.0 @ 120 BTCUSD is completely sufficient. So all you have in the system is a long list of buy and sell limit orders. And they meet at one central point. There is no way around that. But you have traders, brokers and exchanges who specialize in putting an orderflow optimally through the system. The question is how the fees are distributed. Perhaps one could somehow link the fees to the BTC network.

Sorry, but have ever traded with a LOB? As a trader I will got to the liquidity and low latency and low fees. One trade at MtGox takes 500-2000ms to get through. Actually with a proper run exchange this should be <50ms. A decentral LOB just doesn't make sense. What makes sense is to have brokers who in one market place. In the world there is one price for gold, copper, oil, EURUSD and USDBTC. No need for more than one price. Just think what happens if you two prices at two locations. Why would anyone sell for 100$ if he can sell for 130$? So what you have is a bunch of LOs at various levels which meat at one point, the mid-price.

What can and should be done is to create an exchange alliance, which interacts with community.

Yes, I thought of roughly the same. Problem is that a) identities are stored in one location (or worse at many openly) b) you still need a trusted network. There is no where around the fact that you have interfaces with banks or cash (and therefore regulation) every time you enter or exit the BTC system. The way I see it at some point AML kicks in. The people in this suggested network are really ML mules depending on the jurisdiction.

The most interesting aspect for me is that BTC is an alternative in case of a complete financial crash. And for this reason alone, even if adoption would stay extremely low, the value of the network is gigantic. My prediction is that BTC will emerge in countries where it has immediate value, and only much later in the richest nations. This will be truly fascinating to watch as it plays out.

and last not least (5) hire an army of lawyers.


I guess they figured, if they have a chance to make maybe 10-20m/year why opensource? In terms of architecture it is best to do the exact opposite of what these guys are doing.

You could theoretically have a network which operates within the traditional banking system. Instead of exchange BTC to fiat, you would a P2P network in fiat which mirrors BTC to fiat transactions. That would be a counter measure if BTC would be shutdown completely.

But if you would receive your money in BTC, there is no need to transfer it into fiat. Banks will certainly take counter-measures and they have already. So this means there will be many games played around this, i.e. transfers from jurisdictions where BTC is blocked to BTC where it is not blocked. There will always will be gateways unless you have a "darknet", which is what localbtc is. But imagine transfering more than 1000$ via localbtc. Pretty scary and dubious. I think the next wave of BTC will be in certain countries, which are not so heavily regulated. The price will be very volatile anyway, so few people will consider a safe store of value, and insurance will be too expensive. The potential benefit to countries with unstable money and unstable infrastructure are much greater at first than to US and Europe.

Do I have to keep a BTC balance for margin trading?  I have tried to convert BTC into $ in my trading wallet.

I.e. I'm long BTC in my balance and short with a margin trade. How do I convert my BTC balance into USD?

(Actually quite a bunch of things which are not entirely clear. "no reserve active" as a status order, ordercount, etc. The relationship between leverage and required margin doesn't make much sense. 10% would be 10:1, but it is at 2.5:1.)

Two questions:

1) Are fee rebates of MtGox (or Bitstamp) passed through?

2) Why do I have only BFX as a routing choice? The FAQ states: "You can choose to execute your orders only on mtgox, or only on bitfinex, for example; that's the routing feature."

That is not the problem. The problem is they are not running an open project. It is obvious they are commercial. Not that that is bad, but you have to be honest.

Well there is already MtGox and the others. A project like Buttercoin would simply be used by the exchanges, although perhaps this is only sensible as a commercial enterprise.

Any more advanced "scheme" might be a next step (although I don't think an orderbook can and should be "distributed"). Implementing a good matching engine is far from trivial, besides dealing with everything else.

Can somebody explain to me what these guys are doing? Creating a lot of buzz, then going dark after 5 days. what kind of joke is this? I think we need a new project, as they are clearly not committed to openness.

Ron Paul was asked about gold, but he said he likes to have gold in his pocket. Who wants to weigh ounces? It was always kind of arbitrary.

Max Keiser doesn't know that much about how exchanges operate. But, what's the question? who is chad? 


The guys at Buttercoin don't have clue. They might be decent computer scientists, but now they've gone dark, which is no surprise. Make an announcement, create some buzz, then find some guys with $$$...

The risks in terms of legal are huge IMO. If things get though a few people might go to jail, see Wikileaks & Megaupload.

You can easily subscribe to orderbooks on MtGox and Bitstamp...

Several problems. Last price is enough to broadcast. In most cases you don't need the orderbook. You also need 100% of the orderbook, otherwise you can't trade. Something like P2P EXC could work when you abstract the trading needs appropriately. Trading itself on an exchange is fine. The question is really about the interaction with banks.

You have volatility risk in the transfer. And you have counterparty risk. Which is the reason this is persistent since the hack at BTC-e.

B24 was closed down with the mention of money laundering and Terrorism. I'm not sure what happened to Bitfloor. This means if you operate an exchange you want to better have the acknowledgement of the government. But then BTC depends on these gateways. BTC could then easily be attacked by shutting down those single points of failures. I'm a bit surprised that people easily say BTC is legal. Most people (99.9999%) haven't understood what it is and certainly allmost all people who have something to say. It would interesting to track this on a global level but the b24 incident is telling. The question is: if you have fiat money in a bank or cash at hand how do you convert that into BTC independent of what anybody tells you what is right and wrong to do with your money. If you're rich you hire a bunch of lawyers who then use the superhighways to offshore centres. Apple Inc has all of it's money in an offshore haven called Ireland.

Solving the Fiat <> BTC gateway problem would essentially circumvent many banking regulations and be illegal in most countries. If you pool money, you're bank. Essentially any good system would work within the banking network which is not based on pools or central identities. But who watches the identities? A BTC exchange currently serves as a bank, a identification system and a fiat-BTC conversion. To take one example. A bitcoin adress can be easily shared, but running a bank account in a foreign name without declaration would be illegal. It will be more than interesting to see how this plays out. What a strange coincidence that BTC was invented shortly after the crisis of 08.

Number of transactions. Analyzing the type of transactions occur would be interesting in so far that's possible. Blockchain already filters for popular adresses. People can only bitcoins if they know them. These trends are only of predictive use in the long term, i'm sure. daytrading on stats would not make sense IMO.

http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

lol. is Mark Karpeles investing the money in sushi shops? must be sitting on a great pile of cash by now.


back up 19:28 UT 5 hours down.

Price went from 120$ to 110$. Outages at these volume levels are inexcusable. we will see what happens at the next volume peak.