I have been wrong so far this week. The bears are holding their ground. Every day in $100 reduces the chances to run to $150 this week, so I would be willing to bet 1:1 that we do not reach it. No actual bets though, just my guess.

Mt.Gox is no more representative of the OTC price of bitcoin, if anyone is interested.. Even if Gox hits $150, it is unlikely that OTC will follow.

One of the foundations of western legal tradition is that future pecuniary obligations are to be paid according to the face value in the currency quoted, irrespective of the real changes of the currency's purchasing power in the meantime. If this is meant to not hold true, it must be specifically mentioned in the contract.

Of course the forum can give out the tags for free if they like, but if ever its price were to be lowered to 100,000,000 or so, the minimum to retain equal terms between tagholders, would be to reimburse the BTC9 to the ones who had paid more for it. In fact this would not be a stupid thing to do, in the event that BTC10 buys you an island in the Caribbean.

Yes, we do. But don't bother to buy your way there. There is not much extra insight there compared to what you can find in the public area.

Yeah. I paid 1 billion satoshi for my donator tag, I am fine if you spend the money wisely, but I don't want the tag doled out to anyone who pays any less than a billion for it.

I sold 21oz of gold today, but would have sold anyway. The money will be used to pay trading debts from last week (i.e. has already been spent to buy bitcoins at sub-$100).

I am short term bearish on paper and physical gold, bearish on paper silver and bullish on physical silver.

I am usually not the one who eagerly wants to spend other people's money...

... but is there any quality discussion on HOW exactly to employ the forum's/community's funds (acquired through selling the vanity tags), to the best benefit of the members and Bitcoin (which, iirc, at least 50% agree) ?

The third option, why somebody would now have anything between a million and 25 million, is just being so ignorant to not care about the price or its swings. If you have other things in your life, and your investment was just a speculative longshot anyway.

Some of my friends who bought bitcoins last autumn, only checked the price in March, to find out that they were sitting on 500% gains. Even the following story is true: Easywallet started having a 12% APR storage fee for large balances in November. My clients still have anything up to 300,000 mBTC in easywallets (which they started to use before the storage fee), which now generate hundreds daily to the system administrator.

I am just too busy to call all of them and advice that Easywallet is not suitable for storing EUR 10,000s per URL, and it is also costly as you lose 1% of the balance monthly.

Nouveau riche and their problems...

Thank you.

I think the "tarnished reputation" thing was just in some Mircea Popescu rant... Sorry.

Otoh if you believe him, you would think that I have a tarnished reputation solely due to the fact that I sold silver at $29 and bought bitcoins at $79, which, so far is actually a profitable trade, albeit I am the first to admit that it was solely based on luck, and no serious market analysis from my part.

LOL I should not believe everything that is in the internet...

My new favorite chart shows some points:

- We scored a first weekly negative for over 3 months
- The price did not drop substantially, and is actually on the 50% monthly appreciation track laid down on January
- If you want to think of "losing" something, we "lost" the froth that was building during the last 2-3 weeks. A 50% monthly is hardly sustainable, a 50% weekly definitely is not.

My advice: if you want to sell, I think you should set your limit order to $150 now and lower it by $5-10 per day from now, until you have sold enough. This will likely net you more than $100 per coin due to short term swings. If you want to buy, do the opposite and put your bids to $60 range now, increasing them in predetermined order.

The above trick enabled me to buy BTC670 last Friday at an average price of $62ish, which I kind of feel smug about  None of the sells has yet gone through, though, I am waiting starting at $125... 
 

What mechanisms exactly would appeal to enough people, so that they would trade the guaranteed-less-than-100%-ever-more inflation of bitcoin, for something which cannot markedly appreciate in value over time, due to new creation tied to increase in userbase?

No trolling, but I can't currently see why anyone with a capitalist mindset would go after that with anything more than peanuts.. 

Those with a capitalist mindset tend to be those with the most money and power to make things succeed.

Me too. Even 130 covered call OK.

Yeah, the important facts about Bitcoin are quite easy to list:
- The protocol is working fine, and the blocks are 90% empty
- 99% of the world does not own any bitcoins, 99.99% owns less than BTC1, 99.9999% owns less than BTC131.

So you can choose to be among the rich 1%, the super-rich 0.01% or the ultra-rich 0.0001% 

The early adopter advantage is ruling supreme, almost everyone can still aim to be among the ultra-rich, and buying your way among the super-rich is not setting you back more than the cost of a decent meal 

Oh. What any exchange anywhere in the real world would have done, would be along these lines:
- Close trading for at least 24 hours to enable notification to all account holders
- Erase all existing orders
- Allow placement of new orders
- Execute an "opening", where all the bids and asks are matched against each other, and the market cleared with one price (and probably huge volume as all market orders and a good number of limit bids and asks would be instantly executed). Only after this the open trading would commence.

It is sad that they seem to have no experience whatsoever concerning the basics on how to run an exchange.

I also started my active career in the forum as a bear, but that lasted for about 2 days. After wising up, I have been right on everything, so welcome to the club! Except that my take for the next week is rise to $150 by Wednesday, and a muted dippish weekend as per the "normal order of late March, 2013". Only one of us can be right on this one, or perhaps both, what do you say?

Btw Tesla was a genius.

The physical silver dealing all over the world happens mainly in coin shops, which are generally mom-and-pop establishments doing a few million in sales yearly. They act as the intermediaries to the public, most can do about $10k-$100k or so orders from their own inventory, and if the order is greater, they dip into the "dealer network" (make a few phone calls, or use a dedicated market matching software, which is only open to the dealers, not to the public). This allows them to fill much larger orders, and charge a fee of typically 1-2% of the part that was acquired through the network. Their own inventory sells for 10% spread or more.

What is important, is that the prices can be locked in without any cash outlay. The members know each other, and it is a kiss of death (for the business, of course, not literally) if a price locked in is not honored. You are immediately out of the network if you do not honor your commitments, and then you may try your luck trading your peanuts in your hometown with no access to anything larger...

Bitcoin also needs an OTC dealer network! It would be easy to set up a members-only website that just displays the open orders. The participants agree on the other terms, although I am sure that some sort of "default terms" will quickly be formulated. Running the website is not a legal risk, and if it is DDoSed, the only thing that happens is that every dealer has his own orderbook in the notebook, and need to call each other for every deal. (Only for 10k-100k+ deals, since the smaller amounts they can just trade against themselves.) Dealers like calling each other, since that also distributes information. The others in Finland are not professionals and don't understand why I want to call them almost daily. I just picked the habit from silver 

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that silver DOES have regulated exchanges, futures, options and all that stuff. But it is as patently a joke as the exchanges in bitcoinworld. The manipulation runs rampant. I have never even seriously considered opening an account with a silver exchange, despite being in the trade full time for 7 years.

As outlined in the OP, this is binary options, which is of course 100% "initial margin"

Why is price not rising after forum is back up? 

The Long term chart shows many opportunities to get rid of your coin after either a runup, or a dip. I think what happened last week will be remembered in Bitcoin's history as an event as big as the crashes of November 2010, August 2011, September 2011, February 2012 and August 2012.

In other words, meh. Except for those that sold completely out, and are therefore completely out.

 

Noo... am I the first one to write here? 

Check