If you can't reveal your company name, then how is your firm going to deal with a huge capital gains tax?

Are you trading as an individual or an entity?

If you are withholding the tax, are you guys doing some form of tax arbitrage? How do you intend to make a profit?

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If I'm trading from Australia, as a foreigner I can't get dividends, but if I trade with you, do I get the dividend?

For a normal foreign investor there is no point collecting the dividend or not because they can't claim any tax offsets (e.g. franking credits)... However, TorBroker may be able to claim it and benefit, but don't know the insides of the U.S. tax system.

I already sell and then buy back my US shares on interactivebrokers each time there is a dividend.

Interesting website. I wish you well.

The amount of U.S. dollars being printed is only a small tiny fraction compared to the total amount of money supply. That value was built up over many decades.

On the contrary, quark has risen in 6 months with 98% mined. A fascinating story, but has many caveats on whether value can be retained or whether the price will approach zero due to large number of coins that could be sold at any moment when buying support disappears. It might not happen for a month, but when it does, it will tank faster than any of the other currencies.

When those speculating don't see returns due to older holders selling more and more coins into the market. Finally the speculators will sell and this will reveal the true value.

Well at least I'm hoping it won't collapse within a month, otherwise I would have sold or be in the processing of selling now. ^_^

You know what is really funny about what is written above? If you have that equity in the first place and is it liquid, why wouldn't you just sell the bitshares and receive real cash rather than putting up equity, and then having to pay interest? It's not like a house where you benefit from holding the house rather than selling it, if you hold bitshares and bitcoins, they are basically similiar things. You don't get extra utility from holding one or the other.

No offence but wasn't the core premise of bitcoin to get rid of fractional reserve banking. Is it not implicit in the "note attached to the genesis block" The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. The idea we shouldn't be bailing out banks, the idea is that this can only occur if there is a fractional system. You can't bail out something and retain the same amount of currency and the only exception seems to be an entity like the G7 when they are in the mood to forgive loans, but that clearly isn't a bailout. Debt facilities fractional reserve banking, otherwise you could only lend out what you have...


Why would it be able to do that? Doesn't the market set the price of BitUSD and BitBTC? Otherwise how do we get the USD/BTC price that is mentioned in the video. It would have to deviate from that price in order for this to work, otherwise there would be an arbitrage opportunity and the BitUSD price won't move due to arbitrageurs pushing the price back down.

Feel free to add any further comments.

Looks like bitshares will flop, but protoshares still has something going for it. The total supply will be very low.

I guess no one is actually interested in the commenting about the bitshares component.

Protoshares Unusually Tricky Marketing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnNPX8wc1tc

Has anyone noticed that there are some inconsistencies in their marketing material. For example, USD/BTC is already a transparent price on each exchange. Just because you open another exchange doesn't mean that the price will converge to anything near that price. In fact most people already use a weighted average of the current exchanges. Furthermore, it mentions that BTC/USD would be devoid of any manipulation. What market isn't? If there was manipulation, wouldn't it be possible to manipulate bitshares as well? The argument is faulty.

Looks a lot like the same marketing style of Banners Brokers... BB talk up the prospect of earning advertising revenue and then overstate the earning prospects and the actual benefit which they provide to advertisers and consumers.

http://www.listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=gIAsHkU72B
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIAsHkU72Bc

Note it has been severely restricted on youtube, so a listenonrepeat link is included for your viewing pleasure and to avoid a nasty signup to Google+.

Furthermore, it really isn't a prediction market if no one decides to follow the prices. In fact the best prediction market is one exchange such as BTC-China going up in price and then the others following soon after. That's an efficient market. Bitshares provides no means to confirm any of it's theories.

We must all hang together, and we already do, with the current system. Why create a prediction market where it is devoid of any true meaning. You can take a look at the bets on earthquake insurance. It is no where near the correct price because not many people know when it's going to happen. A similar comparison can be made with predicting the bitcoin price, as the price rises dramatically at first, but that first prediction is very hard, it's like predicting the first shock of an earthquake rather than the aftershocks. The aftershocks are more likely a consequence of the actual earthquake, in relation to bitcoin pricing the aftershocks are the momentum that continues to push up the price after the initial shock. Another bigger problem is why would you speculate on a secondary market rather than the actual market where you can influence the actual price rather than playing with a phony ETF like option. Remember ETFs track closely but are not the actual prices. Worst of all, there is no theory to why bitshares would track anywhere near the actual prices.

Prices are only accurate and effective in trade for a specific time. Otherwise why wouldn't people create a prediction market, i.e. not a futures market, but a prediction market for agriculture. It doesn't work, the actual tool is broken.

Discuss. By pointing out the flaws of the system, we are colloborating rather than keeping the flaws hidden and laughing behind our backs.

Apparently by people power, bitcoin's block size has now been cleared for an increase in the near future. Let's see if we can't fix the concept of bitshares before it is finally launched.

I would expect more coins to converge to bitcoin's value. This includes litecoin as their architecture improves and it becomes mainstream  whilst the flaws of bitcon are revealed. It will be good until litecoin's flaws are revealed and it moves onto another coin and then another one. The problem at the moment is that some coins should be going backwards due to their flaws but are instead going up due to speculative actions...

Eventually a perfect coin will be found that will retain it's value.

Fontas is real. That evil twittering chicken!

The problem will be when he announces a pump and then he starts dumping.

I found this thread:

http://forum.goldentowns.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=102

Might be useful.

Yeah, well, I'd assume it would be like bitcoin now. Not everyone would put all their money into the system backed by "gold". Most would store it physically. You only need around $10,000 to conduct most transactions. This could be lifted for business owners. There would be public service annoucements made on the website and youtube videos to advise people of what the system is actually used for.

Either way, I'm starting today.

Jesus Bitcoiners, argue the paper not the person!

Peter Schiff had a massive comeback.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=0L7SOPDOvvI

Turns out he believes in digital gold too. He wants it to happen. But bitcoin isn't gold. Digital gold was E-Gold, backed by physical gold.

Digital gold would be a currency that is backed by the commodity that is used in jewelry, medicine, electronics, nanotechnology, space travel, catalytic converters. Like paper money backed by gold.

Looks like all the gold-bugs should be investing in an electronic gold structure. I know I will be looking at coding a prototype in Assembly x86, buying some equipment and working with some chip designers to ensure integrity. I'm thinking of taking the mintchip idea and sponsoring my own prototype and then partnering with a non-profit group.

Either way I have a lot of time on my hands as I am retired. I've seen a lot of things change in this world, and after I leave this planet, more will change. At the moment I'm thinking of using machine learning techniques to do proof of stake, i.e. you will have to physically deposit gold at a place to receive a share which can then go through a bitcoin system. The owners themselves would have no control or ability to manipulate fictional amounts. Although, when E-Gold was around, we didn't see Douglass Jackson just printing money for himself. Either way for confidence there will need to be a system for this. Unless I team up with the Mint, but I'm not sure they will accept the proposal as it would require worldwide acceptance with all the other mints. We would be effectively creating the gold standard again.

No need to mine, with servers located around the world. No transaction fees. The only startup costs would be the chip or software which should realistic only cost $25 like the raspberry pi. Servers will be funded by donations wikipedia style. All transactions will be publicly published unlike E-Gold. If you get scammed, you will be able to identify and sue the party on the other side. It's going to work. Either way, best to have something in the making in case bitcoin fails. Hopefully ASIO won't knock on my door.

I look forward to creating a thread and/or forum to discuss this soon. The one thing I believe mintchip did wrong was not backing it by gold. There were no benefits to using digital cash because we already have digital cash in the form of debit cards. What we don't have is a good trusted low transaction fee digital gold. We have some gold wallets, but their fees are too high. E-Gold was big and had relatively low transaction costs, bullion storage costs were low due to economies of scale. I should know, I used it a lot until it was taken down. If an old grandma like myself can get involved in e-currency, then I'm hoping others with less skill will use proper digital gold.

I also hope to exceed bitcoin's R&D budget due to the lack of need for mining. Lots of money going into bitcoin R&D was actually going into GPUs, FGPAs, and then ASICs. None of it was going into developing the actual coin. The developers aren't even bothering to sell their coins to fund further development. Either way, bitcoin has taught me a lot of why some things fail. Knowing how to fail, let's you know how to succeed.

What about all those advocating altcoins that do exactly the same thing... Then price does matter. One could be cheaper and less volatile. Less prone to any pullback.


In fact due to the price rise in bitcoin, are people producing too much of these other coins? The problem is that it is not just bitcoin, it's the whole crypto industry. You could argue central bank policies are allowing others to create more altcoins and guess what, the fear of central banking probably is. Furthermore, the altcoins are retaining their value!

Also the Bubble effect is not important if it is something like Enron. Some people argue that bitcoin is Enron, and it will fail due to the flaws...


That's gold, why not gold then??? We need something like e-gold that is hedged to gold, but is also electronic and can't be taken away by the government. When that happens, pop, due to technological change. Remember, the change from walkmans to mp3 players? You can already transact with vaulted gold. "Gold certificates". I'm surprised we aren't using something similar already...

Come on entrepreneurs! Then again e-gold wasn't really that popular in that it didn't go mainstream at all. So, I don't know about whether the arguments the article puts forward are even valid... Are we really interested in the:
If anything, something trusted like you local mint might provide a gold transaction platform in the future. Something like mintchip but with gold. Would you abandon bitcoin then? Most people probably would. Gold is backed by physical vaulted gold. Bitcoin won't be...

Don't discount the prospect of technological change.

Either way, you can't buy drugs with mintchip, not without someone knowing. So, bitcoin still has something going for it.

Does China really print a lot of money to pay itself? What about all those excess currencies reserves? They also have a current account surplus, so they are always bringing in extra money. Why the fear of governments printing, especially when it will be unwound at a later date?

Exactly, I'd rather use MasterCard PayPass or Visa payWave.

If we have to install bitcoin acceptance machines at Starbucks, that's going to add to costs. People forget that and point to the fact that it is cheaper theoretically, but not practically. Add wifi, a terminal and the need to secure the machine and lost business due to people waiting in line for confirmations before they are allowed to leave. You can argue to use off-chain transactions, but why not use cards that are off-chain too? It defeats the purpose of bitcoin, it isn't even using bitcoin to be technically correct. You aren't transferring anything, you are just changing numbers on the screen like the card companies do when you buy something.

Wealth store? Bleh, that's fake. Remember you can only consume more in the future when there is real economic growth. If people start to create less things, you should actually consume now rather than put your money into assets. If no one can buy those assets in the future, your wealth is eroded anyway. The only reason why gold is going up is because people can afford it. If they can't, then it can't go up.

The best solution is to invest in real economic growth. That's why you have the shale industry evolving even though it's short lived. It's so there is more stuff to consume. The fact is we are running out of things to consume, that will destroy wealth. Not the fact that your money or bitcoins are worth less. That's just the symptom. If we all created more things to trade with, we wouldn't be worried about hedging wealth.

You can't store wealth unless you believe that there will be a similar amount of production per capita in the future. Even then it's not really hedged! Climate Change and Famine. That's going to screw us all up.

Thus the only true users of bitcoin are the consumers. People that need to buy drugs without entrapment and more. People that can afford to use it.

Most people now would be late adopters in terms of the amount of money you can make.

You can no longer turn $27 into $800,000. That would require the price of bitcoin to rise to $29,629,629.63. $29 million dollars per bitcoin.

So, yes it's pretty late to come into the speculative game. You can make larger volatile returns with a lowered chance of pullbacks in other instruments or angel investing in other businesses or financial instruments that will appear in the near future. There is always going to be something new. Either way, it looks like it's "Who you know, rather than what you know", when it came to picking up bitcoin.

Well DPR did say he went on to create an economic simulation in his social media account.


It would have been pretty hard to know or get involved with bitcoin in the early stages. I think it would have been spread to close friends of Satoshi, which undoubtedly could be one of themselves. It was some time after that it was posted to a cryptography BBS.

Yeah. well, ANZ P2P payment system is free. lol. You can't beat free. That's the future, it's probably in America, Europe, and China already. You can already buy items using direct deposit. That's like using bitcoin. Furthermore, most bitcoins sold on bitcoinlocal use this method too.


It is analysis. If you don't understand it, then I can't provide any advice other than to try and learn some valuation methods. It's all there and is conducted by one of the largest holders of bitcoin. It's one method of analysis, you can use technical analysis, but that too has flaws, it can be a straight line up or a straight line down.

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As for that link you provided, there hasn't been a solution. In fact there is evidence in that thread that states there will be a new fork, a new bitcoin chain. People will try and fork the chain but only if the miners consent to it. It could happen if everyone wants the faster system rather than the slow system. But if it doesn't happen, then we are stuck with the old clunky system that doesn't confirm enough transactions per day.


No rebuttal to this argument.

Then it goes on about forking and whether it will be successful.

It doesn't take into account which part of the fork will be most accepted but states that there will be two or more blockchains forked. But let me put it simply:

If there is majority consensus that the block size needs to be increased and the normal developers don't accept it, then the validating nodes will become the new nodes that are running the bitcoin-2.0/fast software to allow more transactions. This is kind of obvious. Majority rules. It will fork but everyone will lose confidence in the original one because it's flawed and limits the number of transactions. Only an idiot would stay with the old one and wait several days to confirm their transaction. Either way the original bitcoin would have lost enough confidence to screw itself over and the new one would be the one that would be used. Who would use the old one that is slow?


This doesn't take into account that if everyone pays higher tx fees, then it will just bid up the price and transactions will still be left unconfirmed... But there is a mention that ganging up could change the limit if there is enough consensus. Of course it wouldn't be called ganging up, but rather progressive change that makes bitcoin more user friendly. But then the developer comes in and says that it won't happen. Wrong I say, because majority rules.


No rebuttals. It seems like they don't care, but there will soon be a new thread with the same issues. All of the ideas would create a fork, but it doesn't go anywhere to determining which one would be accepted. It could well be the one that is not on bitcoin.org...


The only rebuttal is this:


But what if most of us decide to validate it? That's why it's either open source (Let us fork), or it's closed source (bitcoin.org only). So with this in mind, this software is more closed and totalitarian than I would have originally thought. The developers even believe that it won't happen, that's the kind of thinking that would imply we can't fork it and they want control... By why? What if that control hurts the users? Why would we then decide to use it? You don't hurt your clients and expect them to come back, that's just poor business management.

My opinion is with the white/black hats. Hackers would state, nothing can't be broken. We either let bitcoin be controlled like the Fed, like I mentioned above, it's centralised, or we fix it ourselves.

Yeah, it's beautiful, but beautiful things can be dangerous.

Prostitutes and Guns are some well known examples. Gambling too. x_X

But yes, everything else makes sense. However, you would probably be interested in banking apps which your local banks provide.

Take a look at this. http://www.gomoney.anz.com/ Definitely worthwhile looking at how normal organisations will compete with bitcoin.

Seriously, bitcoin is up for some tough competition. Personally I don't believe it will flourish because there isn't enough R&D. The flaws in bitcoin haven't been solved yet, the biggest one is the transaction limit issue... Banks can just scale the number of servers they have. It's a bit like how we don't see any mini inventors, but large corporations like Sony, Samsung, and others are doing all the research...

Furthermore, Banks can lower fees, Bitcoin can't really lower them anymore without starving themselves. Australian banks used to charge for dishonoured cheques, now they don't. Most accounts had a monthly fee, now most of them don't.

Time is also money. It's easier to use the tradtional banking system. If your time is worth $20 an hour, then you will just use SWIFT. Take a look at the number of people that want ease. People choose Apple over Android.

The problem is naturally if you bought something with your BTC. You would be less well off as it has moved up. Vendors will just charge more BTC if they believe the BTC price will fall. There isn't a proper way to hedge bitcoins yet and when that method does come, everyone will have the ability to short bitcoins... The devil is the cure.

It's all good when it's going up, but you would have been angry if you bought at $30 and then watched it fall to $1 and then subsequently bought a t-shirt. The same happens with the housing crisis, everyone is happy when it's going up, but when it comes down, everyone is doom and gloom. As for business cycles and speculative bubbles, they all cycle... It's human nature.

Watch closely at what those Winklevoss Twins are doing.

It doesn't really make any difference whether it is decentralised or not. You would know that western union and paypal are actually decentralised entities with various stores and entities around the world. Bitcoin itself is centralised through the main website where you receive updates to the main client. Bitcoin is centralised through it's exchanges. You can say bitcoin is P2P, but isn't the printing of money which is outsourced to firms also decentralised, that's P2P too? I know the reserve bank of australia doesn't print the money, it gives the contracts out in a decentralised manner. So, it's all the same, except bitcoin is very unstable at the moment.

Bitcoin can be forked if the current developers don't wake up about the transaction limit issue. All there needs to be is a majority that decides to use the new system. It's open sourced and destructive in this manner. I'd rather transparency and trusted parties rather than open source where anyone can come in and decide to change the protocol. If you say this cannot happen, then it really isn't open source at all. In fact you can argue Bitcoin has closed it's doors.

Whilst with the cash system you can vote your politicians out, create governmental inquiries, audit your institutions and more. Everyone knows what is happening if they want to ask for it. I'd take cash and a transparent central bank over BTC to store a portion of my true wealth. At least we know how to game the central banks.

Don't forget whose analysis that transaction fee comparison is.

It's SecondMarket's Bitcoin Investment Trust - One of the biggest wallets with bitcoins.

I merely changed a few constraints with the transaction limits.