He's right on the money

Great interview, really drives the implications home.

According to Yahoo Finance, there are 2170 billionaires in the world now. A few done, quite a few to go.

Yeah I found it on TV Tropes in an article on inherently funny names, including Humperdinck. It struck me as the funniest, so I kept it as my own. If it were my real name...well that would be pretty fun.

The blocksize issue is one huge ceteris paribus fallacy.

He owns some. How many billionaires is that now? Branson, Palihapitiya, Novogratz...?

Is this their address? And why was most of it just moved?

Any cryptocurrency aiming to have low volatility will have low adoption. It seems the creator doesn't understand economics.

Shakeout successful. New money locked and loaded, coins to dry up again soon.

Well I cheated, I got the pic from reddit, where it's No. 1 on /r/bitcoin today. Just looked like it belonged here.

Altcoins are an essential part of the Bitcoin infrastructure. They are a testing ground for new innovations that could later be incorporated into Bitcoin, a backup in case the worst should happen to Bitcoin, a hedging vehicle (not great because they're often correlated with the BTC price, but they make up for that with the frictionlessness), a tool for very fast arbitrage on the BTC price between exchanges (as soon as a major exchange besides BTC-e adopts them), and another way to tumble coins.

Expect the altcoins that are the most useful for one or more of these functions to grow with Bitcoin, and as better altcoins for a given function emerge expect them to surge in value even faster.

Right now Litecoin is the leader in all those functions except for new innovations and tumbling. Namecoin and Peercoin are arguably more innovative, as well as Primecoin. A more untraceable altcoin could prove to be superior for tumbling in and out of (though CoinJoin may render it obsolete).

In conclusion, I can see reason to invest in Litecoin (most established, dev is brother of BTC China CEO), Namecoin (distributed DNS idea is potentially awesome), Peercoin (different mining system could possibly prove useful), and Primecoin (advances mathematics, which is at least interesting and should generate some interest from academia at least). The rest don't seem to offer any kind of promising innovation or aid in the above functions any more than Litecoin already does, but I don't know much about the more minor altcoins.

Nice contrast:



Well, at least copper's up 

The Japanese girlfriend thing is only half in jest. The trust dynamic can be easier to assess if you're intimate. But yeah, not a great idea relationship-wise.

I'm in Japan and I don't even want to bother with arb. Too much work, too weird for taxes in both countries, and having fiat tied up in transfers while Bitcoin skyrockets would be too painful.

If only MtGox had added Litecoin, then arbitrage between BTC-e and MtGox would be a breeze, at least during those times that the BTC and LTC prices aren't very connected (and also assuming that whatever caused the BTC price differential didn't also cause a similar one in the LTC prices). Having at least one viable altcoin is critical for Bitcoin infrastructure.

In fairness: find a Japanese girlfriend on the net, fly there or get her to fly to you to consummate, have her be your arb partner.

Bitcoin won't bring about NWO, anymore than gold did.

I think if Bitcoin is doing enough business to be a credible scapegoat it will already be too late for them to do much.

Note you have to be a resident in Japan, with a visa.

And I've never heard of anyone having problems with MtGox withdrawals into yen. 1-2 business days baby!

Like clockwork.

Yeah that's what I'm thinking. As the rats jump from the ship, the S.S. Bitcoin will be waiting for them with open arms. Not only that, its very presence will allow people to secure their exit before they've actually taken the plunge...and make money even in the interim while they're making up their minds.