I think the blockchain technology has significant advantages over other clearinghouse technologies. This gives me long-term confidence in BTC as a currency which has nothing to do with its current price movements, or aversion to fiat, or anything like that.

Technically, I suppose this falls under the "investment" option, but saying that you're buying and holding something "because it's part of your investment portfolio" is like saying you like lasagna "because it's tasty". Not really useful information on why you think it's worth the investment to begin with.

I use "Bitcoin" when referring to the technology. When referring amounts of the currency, it's "bitcoins" when speaking in terms of quantity (the more normal usage, to me), and "bitcoin" when speaking in terms of volume (unusual but grammatically valid) or a single 1BTC parcel.

My impression was that "squeeze" specifically meant the effect of margin positions getting liquidated by a big move, necessitating market action by the margin lenders to recover their principal, leading to a multiplication of the move.

It seems I was mistaken!

No such thing, unless you know of a BTC exchange that supports margin trading. (In which case, being out of USD wouldn't be keeping theymos from buying!)

Interesting times.

There's a lot more ask depth these days, though - I doubt it will be a straight shot from 27 to 32 this time around.

4chan also went with Coinbase for its captcha pass, for whatever that's worth.

Okay, I realize this is a joke, but if you think there are 200 million internet users for whom $10,000 is a "small amount of their retirement savings", you're out of touch.

Whatever happened to Proudon, anyway? I liked that guy.

What's this "panic selling" you speak of?

When I invested back in... I wanna say May 2012, I wrote off my investment as my wager that the price of bitcoins would not fall to zero - a wager I considered relatively safe. There's nothing to panic over because there's nothing to lose (other than unrealized gains, which may as well be imaginary).

My algorithm did its profit-taking at $25.50. Bring on the crash - it just means another opportunity to buy.

Are you suggesting to use bcrypt's parameters as the means by which minutes-per-block is normalized? Because I'm really apprehensive about that idea. It seems to me like it'd introduce a kind of double-vulnerability to bcrypt's effectiveness as a proof-of-work function; if someone compromises SHA-256 and it only provides 192 effective bits against a partial preimage attack anymore, well, the difficulty can adjust for that. But if an attack reduces the effectiveness of the bcrypt parameters, the difficulty adjustment process itself gets compromised, because doubling the difficulty won't actually halve the rate of block gets.

If I was going to use bcrypt, I'd rather choose big numbers to begin with, and then adjust difficulty by setting the maximum hash, just like we've been doing all along.

I can't give any reason why Bitcoin is "special" here, but I can give two cents about why a high hoard/spend ratio is not good in the long term.

The way I see it, currency derives its value from two things:
1) What you can trade for it now, and
2) What you think you'll be able to trade for it in the future.

Let's be frank. Right now, the bitcoin economy is still foetal. There's plenty of things that you simply can't buy for bitcoins - you have to "cash out", whether to fiat or to fiat-denominated prepaid access (e.g. Amazon gift codes). So most of the value of BTC is not in "what I can trade for it now", but my expectations that in the future, BTC will bloom into a currency in its own right, and I will be able to trade a bitcoin for far more than dinner for two (the current cash-out exchange rate).

But that trust in the future can't hang on as trust forever. Sooner or later, people need to start trading valuable things for BTC. If they don't, then sooner or later the people waiting for BTC to become valuable will lose interest, and sell their coins. Speculation is speculative - tentative - able to create a downward spiral if long-term confidence that the bitcoin universe will become an economy proper ever runs out.

Whereas, spending BTC today helps create that future world for which the speculative players (and, frankly, most of us on this forum) are hoping.

Now, I'm not saying speculators are evil. If I didn't have the bulk of my BTC tied up at an exchange, I wouldn't be able to "bet on volatility" and thereby help the price stabilize. But a high speculation-to-physical-economy ratio is worrying, because it's a pattern of doubling down on the future without really doing much to help that future arrive. And even though there's not really a way to change it, I can understand why that would make someone bearish on BTC as an asset.

If you think the price isn't right, sign up with Coinbase or BitPay or one of those services. Give your customers the option to pay with BTC - be part of the solution - without exposing yourself to the risk of the fluctuating exchange rate.

I think bubbles are mostly unavoidable right now. The market isn't mature. But that means that if you take a strategy that bets on volatility, you can help stabilize the price and make money at the same time. And the more people making money that way, the more stable the market becomes.

As for crooks... I think the biggest suggestion I have is to rein in the ongoing meme of selling Bitcoin based on its potential for growth. Most of us are bullish here. Some think BTC can take over a significant fraction of the online payment universe, in which case bitcoins will be worth hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars. Some think BTC might start replacing fiat currency wholesale, in which case you've got an even bigger growth potential.

The problem is that getting new people into Bitcoin via these kinds of arguments is screwing up the community. There's a lot of folks who aren't technically apt but are smart with their money, and if you tell them about Bitcoin's growth potential their HYIP flag will go up and they'll stop caring. But if you talk to someone with a lot of hope but not a lot of hard knocks, it sounds like this huge, awesome idea, and they'll buy in. And that's the kind of person that has attracted conmen to the community ever since things took off in early 2011.

So I guess my specific suggestion is, if you're evangelizing, evangelize about how it's a currency that can be transferred online, without having to trust a third party that (coughpaypalcough) can freeze all your money arbitrarily when you need it most. Evangelize about how you can use this system even if you don't trust the BTC/USD exchange rate, because there's services that'll automatically turn your internet monopoly money into "real" fiat as part of checkout. If you focus on the huge growth potential, no matter how true it might be, you will attract naive fools and conmen, and repel smart money, and that's a great way to turn an economy and a community into a scam-infested byword.

Edit: In response to the original post, I'll just echo what other people have been saying and point out that the price of peanut butter hasn't doubled in the last two months.

That's your prerogative. But remember, faith in an idea doesn't preclude skepticism about its prototyped implementation.

Isn't that a problem?

I mean, sure, you can make arguments that on the fundamentals BTC is a better currency than FRNs. But right now FRNs have better purchase utility, so the fact that it's hard to exchange BTC for fiat... doesn't that hamper BTC's usefulness?

Unless this was just a throwaway line about how BTC is so cool that you should never want to cash out.

If we're talking about trading strategy, I've sold about 75% of my coins since I bought in at $5. I'll sell half of what I have left by the time we get to $44.

If we're talking about selling coins and exiting the proceeds from the Bitcoin economy, it'll only happen if something comes up in my day-to-day life that requires me to dip into my BTC investments for cash, or if for whatever reason my long-term confidence in bitcoins goes away.

You can't put Bitcoin in an IRA.

Yet.

Hey, that's markets. It's not like the Bitcoin I keep on Mt. Gox to trade with is any safer.

About 20-25%.

I'm long-term bullish on Bitcoin as a technology, but since its corresponding market is still foetal, I know there's going to be all sorts of fluctuations on the way up, many of them severe.

So I keep enough Bitcoin (and fiat) in exchanges to profit from those fluctuations.

That said, I recognize that I might be too starstruck by the Bitcoin concept to properly determine its worth as an asset, so I haven't invested any more heavily than that - I prefer to put most of my savings into sectors that correspond to the things I'd like to buy with them eventually (e.g. I'm saving for a condo, don't want to lose buying power, so invest in REITs).

The short answer to your question is "yes".

You see, any transaction output has a ScriptPubKey field - a script indicating the conditions a later transaction must meet to spend that output's BTC.

In 99.999% of cases, the script just says "the spender must sign their transaction with the private key whose public key hashes to {ADDRESS}". In other words, it provides an address and requires that the spender prove that they own the address.

However, it's totally legal to require something else instead, and in a few cases, that's what someone's done, and what they've required is something I can provide, even though I don't know them or why they made a transaction like that.

I'm asking about those cases.

How do you tell how many users are using a particular fork?

What's a user base? How can you tell whether people trust A-Bitcoins or B-Bitcoins or R-Bitcoins or... et cetera et cetera? Today, we trust a hashrate-weighted poll of miners; whichever branch has the most hashing power determines the "true" blockchain. If you have a better proposal for choosing which ledger is communally accepted, let's hear it, because if it's good enough to solve this problem it's good enough to use instead of mining.

They have more hashing power than the rest of the network put together, or they couldn't execute a 51% attack to begin with. Thus, by definition, they can mine in parallel with the rest of the network and keep up. So however many branches exist with someone else mining on them, this adversary is able to equally mine a branch of it.