You mean roughly 1 satoshi per Dollar-Cent? It's as if Nakamoto had planned this in advance

I don't think we can stop this nonsense, it's just too appealing to "buy an island".

The value of a country is much higher than the M1 money supply floating around in it.

there will be 0.5 BTC coins soon. Still not cheap enough for just giving them away to random people.

That's very interesting. Gives one a feel for how expensive such accuracy is and what factors have to be taken into account in cases where such accuracy is necessary.

I think for the "detect fake silver coin" application using the described method (and ignoring pressure, temperature, water purity, coin uncleanliness, etc) and just getting a scale that does 0.001 g instead of 0.01 gaccuracy will go a long enough ways to be good enough.

Probably makes more sense to measure other properties in addition to density before scaling accuracy of density measurement, no?

The conductivity ideas (both of them) sound good. Still looking for something simple, though. I have a voltmeter but no thermometer... well, maybe I could build one using an arduino and some semiconductor...

I measured the density of one of these today (a pure silver one without the gold plating). Came out to be 10.4 g/cm³ (measurement error +/- 0.5%). It's a bit less than a pure silver coin (10.49 g/cm³) because of the hologram and paper/empty space behind it.

look for example at the 18 day exponential average in this chart:



I'm guessing people are waiting for a smack-down similar to that. They think the price is too high... until it gets higher. Then they think it was low before and why the f... didn't they buy and at some point decide to screw it and actually buy.

It's hard to believe bitcoin can just keep going up ("what goes up has to come down at some point")

Wasn't there a really huge bid wall in the low 30s a while back? That huge wall at 51.03 reminds me of that:

  price   |      btc       |          usd
----------+----------------+-----------------------
 51.03000 | 28045.91420000 | 1431183.0016260000000

That's 1.4 million USD in (probably) one order

Thanks. This is correct, I confirmed it empirically.

I put 2 orders, 1 open, 1 invalid:

[  4] {f994caed-d6fd-4e42-9fe3-c5e97e2513eb} | bid    1.0      62.62626 - open
[ 11] {16706be4-5953-4ad3-98e8-78c90c3d1003} | bid    1.0      42.42424 - invalid

only the open one shows in the public orderbook (fulldepth)

# select * from fulldepth where price in (42.42424, 62.62626) and poll_id > 2700;
    id    | poll_id |  price   |   amount   |      stamp       | type
----------+---------+----------+------------+------------------+------
 28529939 |    2718 | 62.62626 | 1.00000000 | 1364336282855010 |    1

So now I agree, this is humongeously bullish. At least 9.5 million USD on mtGox (6 million above $50).

which of these 2 is harder to fake (by using impure silver or using core of different material(s)).

I'd love to have some fake silver coins. Anyone have any?

Dudes, we're being trolled. No way this is legit.

if you're familiar with the voice of the person, I think it's pretty safe to transmit the public key via phone after having a conversation about the weather.

thermal or electric conductivity?

I'm not sure this measure (bid sum) makes much sense. I just cancelled about $2500 (a lot for me) worth of old bids that never got filled (between $20 and $45). I don't even have to fiat to support these on mtGox, you can just have "invalid" bids. I'm sorry, this is probably common knowledge, but are invalid bids shown in the public order book?

Not saying this is the case with taxes, but sometimes there might be a case for "morally obligative disobedience" (just made that up, I'm not a native english speaker). Think about a german soldier in a concentration camp with the order to kill loads of jewish people. That action isn't voluntary either. So I doubt you can say in general: because something isn't voluntary, you have no responsibility for these actions.

I guess that's how the future will think pogo (dance style) was invented: Someone dropped a tube of pogocoins in a club:

Wasn't the suggestion that there might be a moral problem if someone does pay his taxes?

Oh for fucks sake. That's it! I'm leaving... nothing moves in Bitcoin any more.

*goes look for other asset to swap his coins for*

Anyone want to sell some wall posts for bitcoin?

saw it and PMed you (and another person who wants to order) an address.

I don't currently sell any cases. It collides a bit with my shipping mode (I ship as a letter, so it has to be quite flat). I might think about changing that if more people request it.

I measured a densitiy of 10.40 g/cm³. Slightly less heavy than silver, as expected.

much better results using mintymarks method:


(click image above for google doc, these are single measurements of 7 individual coins)



As expected, the Casascius 10 BTC round has lower density than silver because of the sticker and space (filled with paper and maybe some air) behind it.

The scale zeroed in much quicker than with my first setup. I conclude that the higher weight of the water cointainer in my first setup (about 150g, scale max is 200g) as opposed to the weight of the frame used here (< 3g) really did add a lot of inaccuracy in the scale.

Repeated measurements had a variation of +/- 0.01g max (resulting already in a ~0.24% jump in resulting "error").

Thanks mintymarks, now I have a much better method at hand.