I only check the price itself once or twice a day.

But I check the status of my trading bot five or six times a day, which ends up telling me the price 

Right, I know what a CPN is. The point is that there are a lot of outfits who will claim to be establishing a CPN for you, and really just send you an SSN that is just new enough to have no credit history on it (i.e. belongs to someone three or four years old).

I want to be sure that this isn't one of those - that you haven't been tricked about its lineage.

What's the lineage of this CPN? From all my reading it seems like there's three ways to generate CPNs: stolen SSNs, ITINs issued to foreign persons who no longer need them (nontransferrable!), and EINs issued to legal entities (often an LLC created specifically for this purpose).

Only one of these is something I'd have any interest in buying.

Edit: If you don't know the answer to this question off-hand, it can probably be determined from the first three digits of the CPN - you can check to see if it matches a valid SSN or ITIN prefix.

There's notifications on the site that certain trees cannot be shipped overseas due to a "quarantine".

As a US buyer, would this be a problem for me?

Let's assume for the moment that nobody uses Bitcoins to buy or sell anything other than dollars. There's no bitcoin economy to speak of; it's all exchanges.

In the past thirty days, judging by the volume and a conservative fee schedule, Mt. Gox has absorbed 69k$ in exchange fees. Now, let's assume these folks are incredibly reckless, and every month they blow 10% of their money on exchange fees. This would mean that they have at least 690k$ that they're playing around with in the market. And here's the thing: I'm pretty sure that number would be the same whether we're trading at 5$ or 5c.  It's the amount of USD they have to experiment with Bitcoin. That's inelastic - what's elastic is the number of BTC to which that amount translates.

Now, there are about 8.5 million Bitcoins in existence right now. As everyone knows, a lot of that money is hidden or lost and hasn't moved in months. But let's assume that they're all actually in circulation, all theoretically available to buy.

If that optimistic assumption about the BTC in circulation is true, along with all those incredibly pessimistic assumptions about the value being traded in BTC? Even then, we have a price of 690000/8500000 = eight cents per bitcoin. And if you add in all the other exchanges, plus all the other currencies, plus the BTC that's out of circulation, plus the commerce that's going on in BTC today, plus the fact that most people won't be blowing 10% of their profits on exchange fees... that price has nowhere to go but up.

So five cents isn't a rational price. In fact, it's a darn near impossible price.

Deepbit, Slush, Eligius, Guild, Eclipse, Oz... all of them are still on the pie.
Certainly nobody able to throw around over 1TH/s has dropped off the map.

Seems that in the last 24 hours, almost 10% of the shares (an estimated 1.2TH/s) went to this IP address. The holder is unknown - blockchain.info at least associates it with no public pool.

Anyone know what's up here?

Earlier you said that a lack of ID would not in any way prevent withdrawls.
Did you change your mind? If someone without ID has been trading on Bitcoinica for a while, then leaves for a few months and misses all this, might they come back to find they have no recourse for getting their coins?

Or am I reading this "90 day grace period" wrong?

The funny thing is that if you trade goods and services for your coins instead of going through the exchanges, it's still anonymous and there's really no way to effectively regulate it. Giving up exchange anonymity really doesn't give any more information than governments could already get, and doesn't give up one whit of information about your use of coins that you never had stashed away at Gox Mountain.

So again, I'd go a step beyond saying it's a necessary sacrifice, and describe it as more of a necessary inconvenience. That which was really anonymous yesterday will also be anonymous tomorrow.

I was thinking along these lines as well. If Bitcoins aren't yet legally thought of as currency, and gold is a commodity, then a Pecunix/BTC exchange may not actually qualify as an MSB...

Singapore, because that's where Zhou lives.

Depends on the meaning of "reject". Also, I feel like it should be a multiple choice option.

Weren't there some dudes who were going to build a libertarian island off the coast of San Francisco? What ever came of that?

It is a gray area. But gray is better than black, especially if you have a lawyer who thinks it's a light enough gray to be feasible in court (and presumably Bitcoinica is in consultation with its lawyers about whatever actual issue underlies this poll).

What if this is only required before you deposit or withdraw fiat?

Here's how I see it:

• If you're depositing or withdrawing fiat, that money has to go through a traditional clearinghouse, where you can be identified by "someone with a warrant" already.
• If you're not depositing or withdrawing fiat (e.g. using bitcoins as maintenance for going long), then your use of Bitcoinica isn't in any way touching the money to which regulation applies, until and unless BTC's legal status switches to being considered currency itself.

So, folks who really want to deal anonymously would still be able to use Bitcoinica for those purposes that make sense, and maybe whatever legal requirements Zhou is sweating about would still be fulfilled?

Just an idea.

If you really wish to speak of fundamentals...

Yes. By definition.

Miners are paying a certain amount to run their rigs. Because of the Difficulty, that amount is going to be the amount it takes to mint enough Bitcoins to pay for their electricity and equipment, plus or minus.

If there wasn't 840k$ flowing into Bitcoin in a month, in the form of the goods that keep the mining engine running, then the Difficulty wouldn't be such that the Bitcoins being generated in a month would be sold for 840k$. (This has nothing to do with mining power affecting the price, and everything to do with the price affecting mining power.)

The question you really should be asking is, "are people willing to throw as much money at this thing as miners are apparently willing to throw electricity?"

All that's necessary for Bitcoins to be worth $2 is for the USD value of the goods and services being traded in Bitcoins to be worth more than twice the number of bitcoins whose holders are willing to use them (i.e. aren't being hoarded). That doesn't take the average joe shmoe, although that'd certainly make it easier. That just takes some technology folks - people whose customers are at the level where Bitcoin is comprehensible and usable - adopting the thing as a payment method.

I'm "long-term bullish", as the saying goes. I think Bitcoin has material benefits over the currencies in use today, and there are people morally or emotionally invested in the project's success; as long as such people exist, and as long as there are demand for such material benefits, and as long as there's not a superior competitor, Bitcoin's gonna continue to exist, and continue to have a market value. So I've based my trading formula on the notion that while the currency may be volatile, it'll never depreciate to zero; as long as my buy-in someday returns to its amortized original value, every fluctuation will have been to my profit.

So where will I be? Riding the wave, as it were, or at least letting my scripts ride it for me. They'll have bought for me on the way down, and they'll sell for me on the way up. And meanwhile I can do whatever it is I'm doing with the other 90% of my life at that point.

If, at some point in the future, the USD value of the goods people want to exchange using Bitcoin exceeds the number of coins held by people willing to circulate them by a factor of about 30, then at that time the price will probably reach 30$ again.

The only way for it to happen sooner is by speculation that that time will soon arrive, and any such speculation has a chance of being a bubble (of the kind we saw in June).

So I guess my answer would be that it depends on how quickly the underlying economy grows.

My miner's reporting "connection refused". Anyone else having such troubles?

Man. Man.

Listen.

Nobody on this forum has the power - on their own - to swing BTC 50 cents. Or at least if they do, they aren't telling; there's someone with deep pockets who seems to enjoy pushing the price around, but we're usually just as annoyed by that guy as you probably are.

What's really happening is this: people think the price is going down and don't want to be left holding the bag. If someone you trust told you two days ago that bitcoins would be worth 10% less in a couple days, would you honestly have kept them in your wallet? Or would you have sold them while you still could?

It's the same principle. People are just trying to protect their money. And right now, there's so few people in the market that any shift, any movement of the crowd, ends up having a big footprint, instead of being the tenths-of-a-percent you see in "mature" currency fluctuations.

If you want to blame something for this volatility, it's that we're still so early in the adoption of it as a currency. It's not big enough or used enough for the price to stick. Until that gets solved, there's nothing that will keep the USD value of our coins consistent.

(In the meantime, if you want to make sure your coins don't decline in value, that's actually one of the non-speculative uses of Bitcoinica; taking out a "short" position equal to some percentage of the BTC you're holding means that any drop in value will be balanced out by the short. Might be worthwhile if you're worried about this kind of thing happening to you again.)