That's not certain.  It could be some millionaire who wants to stabilize value to bolster confidence in the currency.

Even if you assume it's to get rich quick, "How" is the big question.  The strategy isn't obvious to me.


Sure, here's most of November, 30m resolution from $1.00-$4.00, ticks every $0.50:



I don't have time to analyze it, but let me know if you want any detail charts.

Unfortunately MtGox screwed their SSL cert when the big clock ran out and my script quit getting data.  So I don't have anything for December yet.  It's fixed now, but if anyone else happens to have a copy of the data from 12/1 through 12/7 I'll import it and make some charts.

It's a strong opinion.  I apologize for the overly-harsh choice of words, though.


That's fair.  I'd still think someone ought to point out that accepting coins costs them nothing and could bring in some no-strings-attached donations.  Where Regretsy take it from there is up to them.

There's nothing fake about it.  Someone's using a very real bid wall to artificially shove the market around.  The motive is still unclear.

Option A:  It can solve it the same way we do security in meatspace: rent itself a facility and hire armed guards to keep thieves out.

Option B:  A distributed algorithm to generate keys might be possible.  Sort of like a multi-party PKI variant of  Diffie-Hellman key exchange, resulting in all parties knowing the public key, but the secret key is only recoverable when all nodes agree it's time to perform a spend.  I wonder if anyone has created such an algorithm.

Don't be a bitch and downvote just because you disagree.  Reply instead with a link to bit-pay or something useful.  Censoring people sure isn't gonna change their mind.

Fundamentals Bear here.  I've said for a while that the fundamental floor is in the low cents range.  The bottom will be an order of magnitude higher - tens of cents - at which point it may be cheap enough for the permabulls to hoard enough supply to keep it propped up.

Right now the price is stable because a few people (perhaps even just one) with a lot of money is gently nudging the price around.  It might be philanthropy.  It might be a market maker creating controlled volatility to exploit.  As long as they're willing to keep doing it the way they have been, the market will stay where it is.  Ultimately the high price will just over-subsidize mining until people get tired of wasting money.  Once they pull out, the price will head toward fundamentals.  The only thing that will intervene is a large hype campaign to launch another bubble; but regardless all bubbles eventually burst.

Long term the growth has to be driven by fundamentals, which are driven by increasing commerce.  Until I see that happening (or we finally reach the fundamental price), I'm keeping my bear hat on.

If you have Bitcoin on your desktop, do "cd Desktop", then "cd whatever your bitcoin dir is", then "./bitcoin -rescan".

MtGox buys Dwolla.  Except that was supposed to be on the 15th.

The addresses themselves are completely independent but you can see if the coins that go through them come from or go to a common source.  If you see a transaction that spends coins from two addresses you now know that those two addresses belong to the same person.

Try looking up the addresses on blockexplorer.com.

Are you primarily interested in using or investing?

I'm into using it as a currency, and I'm following the same strategy as you have been:  I keep a little pocket money in BTC, but almost all of my wealth stays in USD.  If value stabilizes I'll gradually let the BTC side grow by not bothering to trade back to USD, but that's a long way off.  I don't consider the friendly side of the next bubble to be stable, and I won't be buying into it - again, I'm here for a transactional currency, not an investment.

If you want to invest...   Well, that's a whole complicated game with even more strategies than there are players.

As for which exchange to use:  Pick one located in your country (As I said about Exchb, they were in a convenient location for me to go burn their office down if they screwed me), owned by someone whose name you know, with fair T&C, and reasonable fees (about 1% round-trip is typical).  Other than that and doing some background checking on them (read what's been said about them here), trust is subjective.

I drew this up back in September:



I'm a fundamentals guy, but I still believe in wave patterns, even in something as small as this.  Like you say, large players can easily create false signals so it's foolish to rely too heavily on the charts, but the underlying market psychology still exists.

But the waves still start with an event.  There were a bunch of them there.  It'd be nice if someone could make another chart with more recent news.

Way ahead of you:  EnCoin / GEM / RevCoin.  Take your pick. 

IMO there's no point in rebranding until the problems that created the bad image are fixed.  The boom/bust economics may be fixable by technical means (any of the above coins), but the wallet hack problem is pretty fundamental and can only be fixed through education.  To fix that, people need to know the history and rebranding now will be counterproductive.

The way I see it we're still in the beta stage.  Don't rebrand until we're ready to launch for real.

... sometimes.

I've seen a lot of growth of Bitcoin financial services, but I'm honestly quite disappointed by the lack of growth of commerce.  It's become an amazingly sophisticated currency that still has very few realized applications.

Nail, head, hit.

WITH THE POWER OF MY MIND.

(You're missing the obvious scam:  I can promise anything if there's no cost to me if I fail.)

You are correct, sir.

I don't have to dump anything.  I can crash the entire market by pure force of will.  People are understandably skeptical, so my offer includes a 100% money-back guarantee if I fail.

25BTC with a warranty from me, or 200BTC and no assurances at all from some guy named bitcon.  Choose wisely, people.

Oh, I think you misunderstand.  I'm not pledging anything.  I'm undercutting your price. 

What prevents me as a verifier from just saying "oh yeah, looks great!" and then going back to using my GPU for mining?

Part of the security of the network is that everyone can verify everything trivially.  Every relay node verifies all transactions and blocks before forwarding them, and every client verifies the entire blockchain as it downloads it.  If you couldn't do that, how could you trust anything?  People could create nodes to feed you bad data and tell you it's verified 5x.


Nothing is defeated by a low price except get-rich-quick schemes.


You're basically reinventing options, but paying the premiums through mining work.

Why would I do that when I can start my own pool selling work?  I could keep the money AND the coins, and if I decide I want options, I can just go buy options.


And I'm not trying to be snotty.  I apologize if I am or if I come across that way.

We've just given these problems a lot of thought already and haven't come up with any workable solutions.  That doesn't mean it's impossible, and we need people like you (and me) to keep thinking about them.  Just don't be surprised that we have scripted answers to most suggestions. 

I'll do it for 25.