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Well done, Melbustus.
I would like to add the argument that was instrumental in my "winning" (by popular vote, but it was full of silverbugs anyway, so by looking at the future I lost big time) the debate back then before the first runup:
- In the era of physical elements as money, the laws of physics dictate that only a certain number of elements exist, and the laws of economics dictate that after one gains the highest stocks-to-flows ratio, it is virtually impossible for anything else to surpass it. At least during the known history, gold has overcome all competition and is now 10-100 times more valuable than its nearest competitor, silver.
- In the era of digital elements as money, the laws of economics work as before, rendering it virtually impossible for a new entrant blockchain to gain enough traction. The existing money loves the low inflation of Bitcoin, and it is already in a dominant position. If you offer an alternative with even less inflation (to the theoretical maxim of 100% premined coins), you have hard time convincing anyone to buy your coins. If you offer a linear growth rate in coins, or exponential with a small exponent, or whatever really, the entrants must weigh between entering into Bitcoin with less than 100% lifetime inflation remaining, or to your untested high-inflation coin. There is hardly room in this for anything except pump and dump schemes, barring new invention.
- And THIS is the key. 5 years ago, or even now, for that matter, only a small number of people grasped how a cryptocurrency would work. If it is set to overtake gold in the next 20 years, who knows what the next thing will be. People can invent anything. The Pandora box is opened, and the world will not be the same as in the 1800s any more. If you invested in gold and silver, as they are now in realistic valuations, you have the long-term opportunity of making 0% real return with 100% security of your investment. (The room was full of astute and wealthy people, who understand that any long-term real growth rate above 4% involves huge risk, and that the tax laws are so strict, you will most likely end up losing in real terms, no matter what mainstream investment you buy or forgo buying.) If you buy into a cryptocurrency, in all probability it will be scrapped in the future and the only way you make your money back, is if you do it full time to decide when it is the time to jump off the ship into the next big thing. Cryptocurrencies are fine for extreme speculation but they will not be money in the immediate future. Investing a % of your wealth into speculation is all fine, but they will not threaten gold and silver or be any substitute for them. [Applause.]
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Tracking numbers sent to everyone who ordered so far. We currently have 5 orders in our first 7 days of operation.
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Sorry I have been slow to respond. A kind of apology follows: MPOE-PR has been harassing me, and I was featured in MPEx owner blog: http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/strategic-superiority-the-saga-continues/(I think the main point of his/her foaming is to make noise, which is a strategy I also employed with some of my businesses in 2011, which actually turned out not to be so useful, but fools must repeat other fools' mistakes. I hope his comment about MPOE-PR clones did not mean that he will unleash more in this forum. The ignore button of the current one is orange enough..) Also after I suspended the investment gold sales in one of my businesses yesterday (Melkisedek Oy, incorporated in Finland 2003), http://hopea.fi/, in 3 hours the leading Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat had interviewed me and put forth the following article: http://www.hs.fi/talous/Kullanmyyj%C3%A4+j%C3%A4%C3%A4dytti+sijoituskullan+myynnin+Kyproksen+pankkikriisin+takia/a1363789689013, English translation: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153959.100 (post #120) . Last night it was among 3 or 4 most accessed articles in their website. As if that wasn't enough, I got a call from the Finnish Police, concerning my alpha offer of options back in... March 3-8, with the total wagers of about BTC7. The friendly message was that we will not investigate the possible breach of Finnish law with this issue further, if you in turn take care to read what the law says before expanding operations. Well, in no way I have even dreamed of operating this business in my name in Finland, so we kind of agree on this one. By the way, what could be a suitable jurisdiction under which to operate? If we don't find one, somebody will just steal the idea and operate it anonymously. Our way of doing things is to post most of the plans publicly online anyway, and anyone with reasonable skill and capitalization can pick it up if we fail to do it because of legal challenges. In this case we would do all the work and get no pay  |
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I did some research a while back and came up with 25 billion oz silver existing above-ground (not just investment silver).
How do you come up with 840 billion ounces? Does that somehow include "minable silver" or something?
I honestly don't remember, which is why I didn't include a link above. I read it somewhere and now I can't find it. Thanks for providing support for rpietilas figure. It is probably more accurate, although my points remain valid even with only 1000 times as many silver ounces as bitcoins. I have written a book about it, in Finnish though. The mined supply is 45-50 Boz, of which about half has been consumed practically irrevocably (since recycling is an order of magnitude more expensive than mining more from the ground, this supply will not be tapped). This leaves about 20-25 Boz of silver, of which only about 2 Boz can be identified. Most of this is in the form of U.S. pre-1964 coins, the other large forms being Good Delivery bars, and 1oz investment silver coins. The amount of physical investment silver that physically changes hands annually, is minuscule, perhaps as small as 200 million ounces. My company, Silvervault, warehouses about 1/20000 of all investment silver in the world, and funnily enough, owns more than that percentage of all the bitcoins.  |
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Thank you guys,
We have been thinking about the confidence of our customers that their coins are safe and cannot be hacked or stolen by the operators. The track record of the other similar services is just so awful that discussing this matter in the open is the prudent thing to do.
However, the actual implementation is not so easy yet. Our own expertise is from the finance, not from bitcoin technology. I don't say that it would be difficult for us to implement just about anything we want, but we want to not compromise the casual user's ease of placing bets. Our spex says that the site needs to be usable in 3 seconds after clicking the link, and in 3 minutes the joe6pack would have been able to figure out how to fund the account, to have done it, figure out how to bet, and to to have done that. Complicated technical solutions must be implemented without any extra effort from the user's side.
In the beginning we wanted to use the blockchain for registering bets, but needed to scrap the idea for 3 reasons:
- Blockchain bloat and sharply increasing tx fees
- We want to appeal to more people than the number of current bitcoin users, so it must look good and be easy to use
- Compromising the payouts for users using shared wallets (educating an increasing number of less technical users does not work)
If there is a fair implementation for blockchain escrow, we would jump on it, to offer it for our advanced users, who use the service for hedging and seldom do anything but the maximum (BTC100) one time transaction, and whose position may rise to 1000s. It is unlikely that a casual bettor would profit from this, except if it does not cause any extra hassle whatsoever.
Our current risk management approach leans on the following pillars:
- Strict maximum one-time bet of BTC100
- Our trading engine adapts to bets and changes the rates according to bets placed so far
- Widening spread in times of high volatility
- Possibility to hedge with other exchanges (unlikely to work in practice, as with all probability they have the same skew in their orderbook as we do)
- Underwriting system, where the total orderbook risk is insured with bondholders as in MPEx or underwriters as in Lloyds (or both). We consider that the prudent way is to insure all risk beforehand. We would never sell a contract that, if winning, would lead to insolvency. We have sufficient BTC to ensure this, our first worry is rather to grow a healthy userbase soon enough to capitalize on the opportunity. We believe that it anyway takes some time for the big money to find a new service because of trust issues, and accept it. The first months are needed for our odds-calculating software to adapt to the market conditions, and we don't even want to have too high volume when our system could still be exploited by a nimble trader or ruthless manipulator.
Please elaborate further, how this could be done. We have no need for the coins before the maturity, so if there is no risk to us, or hassle to the user, we certainly want to give it a shot.
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I casually hit the market order button for EUR 420, and...
...end up buying 8 bitcoins!
... ... making a new ath in the process.
WTF, WTFF!!!
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Umm.. sorry to disturb, but:
why was it gold, that you are denominating bitcoin in? Why not silver, or stocks, or RE?
cypherdoc, the creator of this thread sold most of his metal (correct me if I'm wrong) in 2011 swapping it for bitcoins. He has been "propagandizing" that bitcoin would outperform gold and has substantial (in my mind) arguments. Some of them are contained in this article: http://web.archive.org/web/20120403154846/http://bitcoinmedia.com/bitcoin-vs-metalsI think cyperhdoc had mostly gold and less other metals. That probably answers the question? Thank you. I also remember in our investment club we debated in Jan 2011 about the merits of Bitcoin vs. Silver. I was the one supporting silver. Had I not won the debate, perhaps more of us would have invested in bitcoins back then, and we would be a formidable force in shaping the new economic landscape, instead of a sorry collection of old farts that tries to buy its share now... |
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English translation: Hopea.fi, a vendor selling investment gold and silver, is suspending the sales of investment gold for now. The reason is Cyprus bank crisis. "This has become too risky. In dealing with gold, the money involved is bigger than in dealing with silver, therefore I need a lot of cash to operate it. At the moment, having big accont balances in Euro is not prudent", says Risto Pietilä, Managing Director of the said company. Hopea.fi, est. 2006, has annual sales in the tune of EUR 1 million. Due to the small volume, the financial situation of the company warrants being cautious. The banking crisis has further increased this. The selling and buying of investment silver continues unabated, because in silver, the average trade is smaller and markup is higher. Also the selling [actually: buying] of scrap gold is unaffected. Last time the company saw suspension of gold sales, was in autumn 2008, also then due to worldwide banking crisis. Pietilä thinks the gold sales will be restored in maybe a few weeks. "It is dependent on whether there is a bank run in Euro area. I consider it possible. The foreign depositors may withdraw their money from Cypriot banks as soon as it is possible.", Pietilä says. "At any rate, having large EUR balances in this situation is stupid. If the Russian depositors are bailed out using ECB funds, the markets get the signal that the easing will continue, leading to erosion of the value of currency. On the other hand, letting the Cyprus banks fail will induce fears that also our deposits will be cut in the future", he continues. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! My eyes are bleeding from seeing Finnish!
Levity aside, were you basically saying that holding gold instead of Euros was safest at this point?
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just sayin', since you published my PR, my spam folder is blowing up.
never had ANY spam whatsoever.
some of your affiliates are selling their users' customers adresses to the spammers.
Ummm. this is bad, hopefully you can fix it before my next big thing goes live in Apr-May!! |
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How does one get into the WOT, and do you think it could benefit me OR the community? You know, if it requires time, can I hire a PR representative to do such things for me?
No pun intended.
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Guy's been reading the old MPOE threads, it's how you used to pay for options back in 2011.
If anyone thinks I have invented anything at all as regards to Bitcoin, he is mistaken. Whatever I do, some great mind has been doing before. Except this, as far as I know: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=154258.0 |
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Right now I would consider selling the stash at $42. I think there is above-average chance that you can buy it back at $29.
(Don't be greedy and believe the ones that say it's $20 - they themselves will buy at $25 and leave you nothing..)
How much are you selling at $42? I never got the chance. Price shot up soon afterwards and is now even though I enter $42 to the "ask" field, they keep on giving me 55 or 60 for it. Bitcoin is broken, qed.  |
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Stunning resultss... The one voter who has confidence in silver, come and buy some from me at the links below! |
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Yes, well, you will need a lot more than a bitbillions clone to compete with Bitfunder, BTCT, Havelock et al. Why not start small, see here. Thank you. If you feel the options trading idea is bad, please state your opinion in that thread. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153742.0 Better still, make it better! After all, this is a community effort, with BTC400 already going to the ones that contribute the most. In this thread I intend to discuss the very foundational principles of a corporation. If you have a comment on post #7, please express it. (or anyone else with competence, for that matter.) |
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That's not quite how things work, but by all means, knock yourself out. Flavor of the week by now this "I've made a website so therefore I have a business" thing.
Oh no, I don't have a website, I don't even know how to make one. In fact, and funny indeed, one of the biggest companies that I own, does not have a single website, yet is able to churn a six-figure annual profit. |
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LOL, I am commenting in the thread with my own name. Read that first. Sad if you cannot read it, it seems Finnish is more difficult to understand than Romanian, which is pretty easy for anyone with a basic command of Italian.
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Overextended banks need to fail and people who were stupid enough to trust them with their money need to learn from their mistake (or repeat it, whichever they like!)
It is not about insolvency of Cypriotic banks. It is about insolvency of Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, Italian, French, Dutch, German, Britsih, American and Japanese banks. Get it? Yes. All banks should fail, because: http://www.professorfekete.com/The Greatest Living Monetary Scientist. |
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Everything in this community is private.. Those two are the least suspicious and centralised that I could think of...
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There are 40k times as many ounces of silver above ground now as there will ever be bitcoins.
Nah, as for the facts, there is quite exactly 1000 ounces of silver above ground per 1 bitcoin, of which about 10% is identified. Most of the supply is hidden and not tradable, as with bitcoin. |
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