What you need to do is to make them destroy the same value when they gain the coins. Digging holes, taking pictures of them and filling them? Slaying WoW monsters? Turning electricity to heat? Extract minerals from the ground?

This makes it equitable, and the rich will just buy it from the exchanges.

Even waiting in the line will qualify for opportunity cost..

Damn the fart of Keynes is suffocating me...

In 30% of cases, a number has "1" as the most significant digit, in all other cases it is one of the other 8 digits(, you serf).

Ever since Mt.Gox started, every early adopter had an actual chance to sell any % of their coins and receive dollars in return. So from that point on, they can be treated as investors, since the early adopter phase (in the strictest sense) was over. Every day that they decided to not sell their early-mined coins, they rejected the other investment/consumption opportunities in favor of holding the coins. This puts them at exactly the same level as me, who never mined or even installed the software.

I will strike when you least expect it. Hint: saturday night.

It is not that simple

- "My" holdings are held through multiple organizations, which also have other stockholders, and they all have their different targets for investment allocation.

- Then there are arbitrage, OTC, and exchange operations that require fiat capital and are more profitable when there is high volatility, prompting to have more fiat at those times since it generates more BTC as the arbitrages are juicier (while also providing hedge against catastrophic loss when most needed).

- Then there is our family target of having a balanced allocation of crypto, precious metals, RE and other. Since crypto is the only one that tends to appreciate, if I sell too much and the price-chasing does not work, the situation corrects itself naturally and soon I am again looking for a new bubble to sell into.

=> If I make a move, I do it based on thorough analysis (thousands of lines of Excel data and hours of analysis before this one), have considered all the possible outcomes and assessed the probabilities, found a positive expected value (where the value function is a complex aggregate of all the goals of the different actors whose wealth I manage) and a bearable worst case. Then I see how it unfolds, and pocket the profit or loss according to the plan.

If bitcoin goes up, it is a profit really, because it opens up new opportunities to influence the world to the better. Also in this case it rewards us with a 7-figure fiat position.

If it goes down, then my greatest pleasure is that my market analysis was correct, and I also get to cash out a small amount of fiat, and keep the bitcoin count the same or even slightly increase it. So this is also profit.

With bitcoin, you cannot actually lose, that is the beauty of it    

Bitcoin will spontaneously be distributed according to the same laws as other forms of wealth, ceteris paribus (ie. "given that the other parameters stay the same"). It takes some time to find the dynamic equilibrium, after which the situation looks static from a statistical point of view.


Value cannot be created by fiat. In a way or another, you have to sacrifice something to attain something valuable. The community that put 1000s of hours into Bitcoin software development, mining and forum in 2009-early 2010 did it in anticipation of a reward. Bitcoin was the most undervalued in its history in 6/2010, when it could still be purchased at $0.005 in OTC trade. Only then started they receive a reward for their investment. Mining coins was a useless waste of time and talent if the coins had no value.

In your proposed system, the coins would be distributed so widely that you would not attract the best and the brightest to participate in the beginning. Great expense of time would be invested, to get $20 per year in "free" coin rewards. Such a system attracts peasants, not kings. I have declined much greater offers of "free money" and so do most of my friends, all the time. We don't have the time to pick all free money that is available. I even waited for Bitcoin to prove itself by going up 100x and down -90% before investing.

I can already buy anything I want from peasants with my bitcoins, gold, silver, euros, dollars, and (new!) rmb. You are creating a 3rd world currency with noble aims but I highly doubt that it will ever fly, since it does not have a skeleton, which is required to direct the energy to the wings. Bitcoin has its skeleton (a community, early adopters, power law) firmly in place. Ripple is an example of how not to do it.

By trying to annul power law, you mutilate your creation so that it cannot function.

(emphases mine)


Man, Bitcoin distorts your sense of time beyond remedy...  

My first bearish post was this:


Check the timestamp - it is 43 hours ago. Not even 2 days!

I previously was a bear for less than 2 days when the April bubble initially popped (correctly), then a short time at $48 last March (failed), a little bearish before the final capitulation in June (correctly), and during all of the bear market in 2011 (correctly, with stellar results). Even if this one proves to be false, I still have 60% track record. (52% is enough to make money, needless to say that the majority is not even close).

Even if I am wrong on this one, I will admit it latest next Monday. This leaves maximum about 10 days (out of 1000) that I have been a bitcoin bear with no reason. 1% of the time. Bear with it.

Back in the old days I was selling silver for bitcoins, and one shipment had delivery issues. A well-respected forum member started to pressure me via private message during a weekend. After several messages, I made a quick decision to refund him the order, since I decided I could not repair his broken time perception. (In the real world, sorting out a possible delivery problem with international postal services does not happen during weekend/night hours. Even the company of mine that was doing the shipping is 100% offline and unreachable until Monday 9 am, and it is in a different country than me. But telling the guy to wait a reasonable "2 weeks" would possibly have escalated the situation)

Soon we will have the resources to use sockpuppets on hourly pay, like they do.

But wait - since we speak the truth, we don't need to pay anyone to spread it, they do it willingly... 

If we go crazy from here (we are already well above/ahead of the long-term trend), the inevitable result is crash. That is the way turbulence works. This makes it relevant to try to estimate the top and the bottom.

My take:
- Top $2200, bottom $475. Before Christmas.

I have also devoted some thinking to the matter. Bitcoin's parameters are the most optimal that I have seen, if the objective is to get the currency off the ground and achieve the highest 'market cap' valuation:

- Initial creation is rather centralized, in opposed to distributed. (Nearly) Same amount of old world resources must be burned to create new currency.
- Most holders by number need to acquire their bitcoins from an exchange, giving them a fiat price.
- This leads to a power-law distribution in bitcoin balances from the beginning. This is the most natural distribution and minimum amount of trades need to be made in the aftermarket to achieve it.
- This leads to stiff but predictable supply inelasticity, which leads to high volatility mainly to the upside.

Compare this to the XRP distribution, which completely disregards all economic principles and thus was an utter failure, forever destining XRP to be a trading card game, and discrediting the (otherwise promising) Ripple network in the process.

Let's start working on the December 1 update of the list!

- A more careful analysis of the blockchain is in my todo-list. What I have in mind is a relation table of "holder activity profile" -> "number of accounts".

- Please check the TOP-500 Richest list, even though it is feeble what comes to accuracy. Apart from Satoshi, FBI and Loaded, no one has admitted controlling more than BTC100,000. (The BTC111,000 address is DPR's afaik.)

- My gut feeling is that number of bitcoin holders was estimated a little too small last time - an analysis of Bitcoin client and wallet software userbases, (Rassah!  ) plus Coinbase users, Bittiraha.fi users and Localbitcoins activity, and new user count in exchanges, is what we need to find more reliable figures.

3, 2, 1, GO!  BTC BTC

This seems like returning to the normal. Everybody: continue being rich!

Pretty lame imo.. the others didn't even notice.

The weekly chart is crazy. Weekend is known for flashcrashes, and there is definitely room for one.

Btw: Everybody count how much your coin stash is worth in dollars! What a nice surprise I really only made it myself an hour ago. My thinking had stayed on the September level.  

Ah, that explains a lot.

I have always wondered about who might be the coin-richest female on the planet, and with how many coins... I personally don't know many

I havent seen any correlation between my ramblings and the market this month. LTC will be mercilessly sold as part of an unbelievably complex arbitrage operation involving exotic countries and high-level government officials.

Is there anyone who wants to exit Litecoins for a nice profit?

I buy LTC in quantity and pay fiat currency your choice.

This will be answered in 24 hours.

I am already giving up the hope for double top, but it does not matter, since my strategy is intact.

How do you think you will get richer against us?   

Given the fact that ounces of gold outnumber bitcoins currently about 400:1, I expect ounces of gold to become increasingly more worthless against bitcoins.

Just in case anyone likes to see with their own eyes what really happened in Haikko...