I disagree.

I have seen  more than a few True Believers go down with the ship when they could have just stepped out of the bathtub. Good luck with all that.

Thank you, just what I was looking for as well.

I too was trying to figure out if it actually means something. If you apply factor-label analysis to it, you will find it doesn't, and your identification of it as gibberish is quite correct.

Judging from the the work we have shown so far, perhaps it just means that bitcoin, like lotteries, imposes a tax on people bad at math 

I'm not sure I understand the "effective swap" shown. I took this to mean:
effective_long_swap_per10k = swap_rate * total_btc_positions_long / 10000
effective_short_swap_per10k = swap_rate * total_btc_positions_short / 10000

This sounds a little too good to be true, in that it would allow one to infer total positions long vs short. Were my assumption correct the two swap rates being equal would imply a net flat position overall on the exchange.

I mention this in part because my normal reference point for my position is short equal to my BTC currency account balance. This allows me to stay more or less net flat against BTC price movements. I will then adjust my BTC short position so that I am net long or short as suits me.

If anyone can straighten me out on this I would be most grateful.

Damn, and I was so hoping for two albino hairdressers with a trained slug who holidayed at the Hotel Great Northern 

Oh well, back to living in disappointment...

That's only half of it, the other part is to sell when others are full of it

WTF happened with "Jon is leaving"? Are you really too weak to walk away from a place where you are standing joke?

Oh, I forgot, you're the one one who actually paid to post stuff that makes you look like the main attraction at a roadside geek show. Carry on.

ROTFLMFAO! THAT'S some feeble shit indeed. You are clearly confused as your limited knowledge and circular mental processes are not my shortcomings.

As regards Satoshi, the abandonment of public ownership for this 1.0 effort by a couple of Irish guys who worked in Japan or whoever they are does suggest that they do in fact know more than you or I about what bitcoin is and isn't. Good of you to bring this up.

Oh, and BTW, you can blow me any time, little girl, taking shit from inferior assholes like you just cracks me up, I can do it all day long. It's rather like the neighbor's chihuahua growling through the fence, all the time never knowing what a fine football he would make.

You may go back to being a loser now, you have plenty of company on this board.

This wouldn't be the first time someone here has implied or suggested I should STFU unless I have a better idea, it's such a gamma minus response. BTW I have the money I deserve, more than I ever set out to accumulate, I'm what you call set for life.

As the development work goes, I spent the first 15 years of my career as a software developer, architect, and development team manager, I can appreciate it for what it is more than most people.

It is axiomatic that software is the most labor intensive disposable product in human history. For example, consider this train wreck which I watched from an uncomfortably close distance but was delighted to have absolutely no responsibility for. Around 1997, a certain Fortune 500 bank launched a huge system development project that was to be greater than any sliced bread the world had ever seen before. The project was continuously infested with people who were not makers or builders or engineers or even accountants, they were hand waving career hoppers focused only on looking good for their next promotion. There were hundreds of people dedicated to the effort, including a couple hundred software developers and other technical specialists.

Five years and $500 million later, I found myself sitting in a meeting called by the most senior vice president in the firm to decide the fate of a system that was so woefully inadequate that you couldn't even say it any more, it was a given. I was there to offer my opinions and did my level best to come up with salvage opportunities. As it turns out, the desired goal was agreement to take the whole thing out for a nice drive in the country, shoot it twice in the head, and bury it in an unmarked grave, and that's exactly what happened. The good news was that this abysmal failure, the biggest I've ever seen, never made it's way to the front page of the Wall Street Journal. That wasn't just good news, it was the single most important consideration, throwing away $500 million dollars on a clown show was no big deal at all.

You wanna hear another horror story? I have two more just like that one but not as costly, under $100 million, where the outcome was to chuck it all and start over.

It is the lot of every software developer to at some point cast their finest pearls before swine only to see them ground under cloven hooves. It can be a tough thing to accept and and even harder to let go of, but, as Britney Spears so sagely taught us all, "it is what it is".

1) Subscribe to me? Pish, I'm as full of crap as anyone, but even a blind squirrel can find a nut once in a while

2) I think bitcoin is such a interesting phenomenon in so many ways, but I do have perceptions that make it difficult for me to get on board with everything that comes with it. My 30 year career in various financial services like brokerage, insurance and banking doesn't mean I'm the enemy, just that I may have another frame of reference from something I've seen before. In fact, I admire efforts like Dwolla that are attempting to cut the take of my former employers

My operations are 100% open source linux. I dig open source deep and heavy, man, it's produces state of the art software of high quality better than any other process I've ever seen I even released a little freeware app in the early 1990s. I recall having a firm enthusiastically pick it up and start using it ( it was a disk optimizer for the old OS/2 HPFS file system ) and they had the hardest time accepting that I wasn't in a position to maintain and enhance it but I was more than happy to give away the source code.

Thanks for the kind words. Who knows, one of these days I might find another nut I can share.

Evidently the OP's question was well-timed. There goes the neighborhood

Announcement: A public company is being formed to enter ASIC Bitcoin Mining marketplace.
https://bitcoin.org.uk/forums/topic/486-announcement-a-public-company-is-being-formed-to-enter-asic-bitcoin-mining-marketplace/

I love the lack of focus I see here. Take all the obsolescent 19th century economic theories you can find, hell, even throw in Marxism, and they aren't enough to make bitcoin a successful payment system, they are quite simply irrelevant to that goal. So often when the topic of a competing payment system comes up here, discussion descends into still another circle jerk around these irrelevancies.

It's evident that this "odd assortment of uber-geeks, anarchists, libertarians, scammers and forex traders"¹ have little to offer or to inspire folks who would just like to pay for an ice cream cone using their phone, nor to folks who would just like to sell one that way. What I have seen instead is a loss of momentum towards using bitcoins for normal everyday aboveground transactions since 3rd quarter 2011.

Six months of at best sitting dead in the water is a long time, enough to give the competition a significant lead, particularly given the competition does not carry the reputation risk of bitcoin and is focused on the payment system application rather than fears of econopocalypse, zombie uprisings, or having nothing to take with you when you die 

All that said, bitcoin has been successful in three areas:
1. Speculation
2. Money laundering
3. Contraband trading e.g. Silk Road

IMO, it rather looks like bitcoin is headed towards the magical status of being an object lesson in "Be careful about what you ask for, you may get it". If you can't have the success you want, you may have to settle for the success you actually have.


1. Naomi O'Leary, "Bitcoin, the City traders' anarchic new toy"
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/01/traders-bitcoin-idUSL6E8ET5K620120401

The use of supernaturalism to manipulate and control people is the world's oldest confidence scheme, it relies on the ritual abuse of children at their most impressionable stage by adults who have themselves been made childish for life by this primitive nonsense.

Racking up losses ends up being more of a long-term benefit in that an individual can only claim a net capital loss of $3000 per year, so the major benefit to losses is offsetting taxable capital gains. Personally, I think $3000 is a ridiculously low number that must be a historical artifact, but I can also see some obvious opportunities for abuse were one allowed to use unlimited capital losses as an offset against current income, as all it would take is a little collusion to make it a win-win for the participants.

I don't pay American taxes either, at least not for the past 4 years. 10 years ago I fantasized I might actually have enough historic losses racked up to never have to pay taxes again, but then I screwed that up by achieving the best investment results of my entire life in the past decade, now it looks like I may actually have to make a tax payment in the next 5 years or so. Given my survival expectancy to that time is less than 20%, I'm not worried about it 

Yup, some time last year I started CPU mining with about 16 Mhash/sec. I was making more per day than I make now with 340 Mh/s. My total capital investment to switch over to GPUs was zero as I already had ATI video cards in two boxes here which serve other purposes 7x24 and are not in any way dedicated to mining.

Obviously, I'm only a hobbyist. Mining has provided me with a few bitcoins to play with. I just point my miners right at a Bitcoinica account and mostly maintain a flat position in dollar terms by shorting an amount equal to my BTC balance, a condition which also earns a little swap along the way.

Without even running through some numbers my first concern would be the time required for recovery of initial investment.

Recall that the unbounded arms race model of bitcoin mining is such that as capacity is added to the network the payout per hash decreases. Any revenue projections based on current results should be discounted for this fact, the problem would be what rate to discount them at.  Worst case, some technological shift like ASIC greatly increasing the global hash rate could leave you with a bunch of lumpy hot plates that have absolutely no alternate utility. When CPU mining was blown out of the game by the higher hash rates of GPUs, at least CPUs were still useful or resalable.

I would also want to anticipate the halving in mining yield that is anticipated to take place in the latter part of 2012. I've seen some rationales here that would have the value of a bitcoin automagically double to compensate for this, but you might as well expect it to brutally blow out less efficient miners first, for example ones who had bought FPGAs before ASIC takes over, if it does.

So, my didn't-run-any-numbers suggestion would be to:
1) Plan on full cost recovery within 6 or 7 months in order to avoid The Halving Of The Bitcoin completely.
2) Project a declining payment rate per hash over time. A straight line between the current rate and half of it would be an overly conservative projection to the time of the Halving were the global hash rate to remain constant. This is only because I have no clue as to what a reasonable projection of global hash rate growth might be.

I'm not saying you shouldn't pursue this or that you can't make money at it in the near future. If you are really thinking about living on mining proceeds you need to consider time frames and declining mining revenue over time in your analysis.

Uh huh, right. You don't have to thank me for this opportunity to engage in such self-indulgent public masturbation, just send your bitcoins of gratitude to the folks at MintChip. I certainly wouldn't have anything better to do with them other than gamble at Bitcoinica

LOL. I'm sure that's a real feel good for a lot of folks 

Odd coincidence, I'm on another message board right now discussing why being ignorant, superstitious, and unacquainted with logic or reason has now become a mark of virtue amongst so many Americans.