I'd say that the odds of BTC reaching 30 cents are about a 1000x greater than silver hitting $5.  Assuming a constant $ value of course...and physical silver rather than paper.  All of these scenarios represent system failures of some sort, though in a very healthy economy with a good outlook, many investment opportunities and a lot of confidence in fiscal leadership, I could see PM's drop down to their 90's values.  I don't see this rosy scenario our horizon.  There are a lot of questions about the future of Bitcoin and very likely some new bugs to be discovered (and indeed, introduced) which is why I rank the risk as so much higher.


I think that when one is to emotionally attached to an idea or solution, it is very hard to make sound 'trades' around it.  Of course that can and does work to one's advantage on occasion, but one is no better off than going to a casino in that situation.

No shit!  I've finally got to sawing up a mountain of logs with a sawmill I bought 10 years ago and have not used having got sucked into software engineering.  And a crane I bought late last year.  It's done wonders for my attitude about...well...everything.  And it's starting to have a positive impact on my waistline.  Out the door now to do another days worth of real work.

I would have bought one more 'double-down-but-not-fully-double' somewhere in the $1.20-$1.80 range, but we didn't get there, and my exchange of choice shut down.  I agree fully that the way to make money in this game is to kiss everything one puts into Bitcoin goodbye and reduce the temptation to sell to near zero.

I sold enough at 10x so that I have no net money in and a pile of 'free' Bitcoins.  Now I wait on 100x if it ever happens.  If not, I'm fine to simply not lose money.  Since I do pay taxes as appropriate, it is not in my interest to hurry things.  I'm by no means confident or happy about certain of the possible political and technical directions of Bitcoin's future.  If I do liquidate significantly, it will likely be driven by these factors more than it will be by economic considerations.

Best-case scenario is that I draw down Bitcoin as something of a 'pension' in the coming years, and it becomes well enough known so that I can buy interesting 'toys' (machinery, labor, etc) with it directly to avoid the various hassles and grief associated with official fiat money.

Gornick is amazing.  A top notch participant in the ecosystem.

Some guy called BTCurious or something like that always had good stuff, but I've not seen him in a while.

I often find something of interest in 'molecular's writings.  'greyhawk' and I seem to have a similar sense of humor and possibly a similar type of footprint in the ecosystem, so I find a lot of his stuff worth reading.

When Garzik finds the time to post something, I often find it well worth reading.  Same with Maxwell and Todd.  Gavin and Hearn are similarly well written and thoughtful, but I happen to disagree more with their direction for the project.

I'll maybe edit in other names here as I remember them for the fun of it.

It's a start.  If we do another 2011 pattern it could get down to $20-ish in a quarter or two.  Then (hopefully) upwards and into the next spike.  Thankfully I took advantage of the last spike to zero my USD investment so I can be more comfortable to sit on my hoard for a few years to see how things go.

Now I can choose between Gold, Silver or BTC (or property for that matter) to sell if come up short of spending money.

Probably uncertainty about Bitcoin's trajectory.  It's starting to smack people between the eyes that some of the promises of the solution are mutually exclusive, and it is not nearly clear which way things are going to go.  It strikes me as a reasonable hypothesis that certain of the promises (high scaling, low fees, de-centralized peer2peer, anonymity, etc) were simply marketing hype to draw people into the solution and thus pump up the price.

I've not sensed much price buoyancy for the last few weeks.  I think maybe we are in a genuine bear market like around this time 2 years ago.  If that pattern repeats, in another quarter or two we might see $20 BTC, then a year or two long slow ramp and hopefully another spike.  Of course there is always the possibility for external events like a currency crisis in mainstream-land and that sort of thing.

Bring it!  Bitcoin is getting boring and disappointing and we need someone to breath some life into things.  Up?  Down?  Who cares.

I wouldn't hold your breath for real live women to come.  Might I suggest inflatable women?  That way if one needed to get off the island one could lash their harem together to fashion a raft...and as a bonus, have a way to kill time the long float.

Trying to scale is what pilots refer to as a box canyon.  Once you turn up it, you will not be able to turn around.

But it would be trivially easy for Bitcoin to scale massively and allow low fees.  You just monetize the information coming off the network.  PayPal sized outfits could handle the capacity, and Google-sized ones could handle it easily and make the best use of the info.  With some strain and focus, Dwolla-sized entities could run a pretty good size Bitcoin node, and they could just sell the info to Google so subsidize their operations, so that is another business model which could work.

By-n-large the WWW and e-mail already run on this model.  Bitcoin can also.  It isn't the end of the world or anything, and it would be dandy for getting 'Bitcoin Up'...to get this conversation back on topic.  Might be the best thing for distributed crypto-currencies.  It think that Bitcoin has the potential to be the trusted reserve currency, but a purpose oriented design would have many advantages might ultimately that might be a better focus of energy anyway.

I've predicted for some time that if Bitcoin tries to compete in the space where end-users make small-ish transactions, it will be a catastrophic failure.

Bitcoin will never be able to compete with large and highly capitalized players on usability, polish, or end-user security (e.g., stolen wallets.)  Trying to do so will bloat the solution toward centralization which will destroy it's credibility as a reserve medium as well.

Bitcoin had a window of opportunity to be a 'free' currency used as a scaffold upon which other 'free' solutions could be built, but that window is either rapidly closing or has already closed in my opinion.  (By 'free', I mean free of central authority of course.)

The best hope now is on the marketing plane.  If Bitcoin can still be marketed as a credible non-aligned solution and obtain marketshare for the probably minor segment of people for whom that is important, then it could have another pop, but I expect that it will be transient and I'll use the opportunity to pull some money out.

I'm not angry at all.  I'm heartily amused by the whole thing.  Lots of us (mostly others) have been very active at saving would-be victims a ton of money over the last year or so, and it seems that some of the newer participants in the economy are recognizing this and appreciating it.

I am pretty disgusted at BFL's business practices.  I see no way to argue that a lot of the crap that Josh has spewed has not been bald-faced lies with no hope of being true.  Similarly, I went all the way to the point of paying for their high-end item with no indication that it was a 'pre-order'.  These guys are scum-of-the-earth in my opinion and anything that anyone does to make their scams less profitable for them is A-OK with me.

The only saving grace that these guys have is that rather then victimizing senile oldsters as in the last rendition of Sonny's scammery, they are victimizing greedy Bitcoin miners.  It still suck though.

As Yifu points out, such a small advantage going from 110nm to 65nm indicates some serious problems...or deceit.

In fact, by my read of both ~ngzhang's characteristically up-front comments and the numbers, Avalon's chips themselves are kind of a quick-n-dirty hack.  So, using them as a baseline at the 110nm size makes the BFL handled chips look even worse.


Pffft.  How could anything 'damage' BFL's reputation at this point?

Yifu seemed to have a fairly high opinion of ASICMINER.  I do also.  Their 130nm chips strikes me as the most impressive.  Avalon's 110nm second, and the supposedly 65nm one being pawned by BFL is either not 65nm, or is a steaming little piece of shit.  Or both.  I'd certainly be writing this into any escrow agreement although it doesn't actually matter exactly why it sucks so badly I suppose.

If BFL is going to go with 100% escrow, I would say there is a damn good chance that whatever they deliver would otherwise be thrown into the dumpster.

You think that somehow you are going to preclude that outcome be leaving it out of your silly little bitcointalk.org poll?  Pffft.

You've outlined your absurd pipe-dream before which is why I snipped it.  I still cannot tell if you are being earnest and naive, or nefarious and self serving.  But at this point, who cares?

My best hypothesis is that Dan said that for 'attention whore' reason, but also to light a fire under those who need to be thinking about this stuff.  And it has had that effect...or something has.

The primitive proof-of-work based on sha256 has had the effect of lending enough credibility to the system to allow it to get big enough to make some people some money.  But it's weaknesses are becoming apparent to a segment of the community.  Whether a more well thought out scheme to keep Bitcoin credible into the future can be transplanted in at this point will be an interesting thing to observe.

OTOH, there may be other reasons why it is not worth the bother.  That is to say, if there is no real hope of Bitcoin remaining de-centralized then who cares what the proof-of-work scheme happens to be?  If a battle between Titans decides who's property it becomes, I personally could not care less which one happens to win it.

30 years is asinine.

Further, you left out the option for Bitcoin being a 'reserve currency' which is trusted enough to form the basis of value for many off-chain solutions.  Including other specialist cyrpto-currencies which are particularly suited for one role or another.  Say, not needing to wait for confirmations, providing genuine anonymity, etc, etc.

But whatever dude.  Your shtick is pretty transparent and stupid anyway.  When Bitcoin becomes something that no self-respecting Libertarian can look at without vomiting we'll have folks like you to thank for it.

I was involved with the internet in the mid 90's an following some of the cypherpunks work, but was not involved aside from piddling around with early versions of PGP and such.  I've been a politically aware US citizen since that time.

I can tell you that there have been notable shifts in popular opinion and expectations over this 20 year preriod.  There have been even more significant shifts on how the internet is used and viewed.

If you get complacent and think that what the cypherpunks achieved is sufficient to stand in stone forever more, you may very well be in for a rude awakening.  Certainly the Obama admin does not accept that military grade encryption is without a backdoor to assist  our fearless leaders in protecting us is the right path forward (see the EFF story I posted.)

As I mentioned, it is clear that we need SSL and probably SSH for business reasons.  That is NOT the same thing as needing these two to be capable of resisting 'authorized' analysis.  If you are going to stand up and say you don't trust the FBI, NSA, etc, your message is not going to resonate with either the legislative bodies or a healthy percentage of the population who is scared shitless by the 'Christmas bomber.'

Not true in my case, but I am way out on the edge compared to most people.

Getting rid of encryption on the public internet won't fly.  It is far to critical for security.  What could fly, however, would be only allowing encryption which was 'certified' in some manner.  Namely, in a manner which would provide a back-door which would allow analysis and capture.

I hypothesize that this will go down by having ISP's and network carriers use devices which will be able to detect and block encrypted data which is found to not be 'compliant'.  Or encrypted data which was carrying a payload which is not authorized.  And do so in close enough to real-time so that it could not be argued to be a show-stopper from an economic perspective.  This could explain some of these observations:

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Obama-Set-to-Back-Fines-for-NonCompliant-Wiretapping-ISPs-124163

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/05/nsa-bluffdale/

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/government-seeks

If this is true, then yes, there still _may_ be jurisdictions where it is possible to operate and access a high data-rate crypto-currency, but it will be a somewhat dangerous cat and mouse game reserved for specialists to even actually use them much less to operate them.  Actually, the same applies to low data-rate systems as well, but it becomes more practical to operate them in a wider range of places.

If large countries who's leadership most fears their own populations decide to cooperated within their own jurisdictions and put pressure on their smaller vassal states to do the same, it could become for all intents and purposes, impossible to run a viable system at high data rates.  I could imagine such cooperation being of enough mutual interest that I certainly would not rule it out.

Out-of-band communications like 'mesh networks' are not completely without hope, but it is critical to realize that even unmolested they will be WAY less capable, performant, and reliable than anything like what we are used to today.  If they are attacked as subversive, which seems highly likely to me, they may not work at all.

I would not anticipate such a dystopia to be a permanent thing.  People will eventually get fed up and make some changes.  But it could easily persist through a period of economic chaos, and that is exactly when we'd be in the most need of a functional and independent currency solution.

Erik.  As Pope to an army of tards and thus the commander of crack legions of SPV clients, you are a king-maker in Bitcoin-land.  I council you to distance yourself from ~vess.  I mean just publicly or course...to preserve your power for when it really counts.

Hear that Cypherdoc?  Time to man up and change your avatar to some other color.  My Krugerrands will remain a funny off-gold hue due to the alloy which imparts extra durability.  I think I still have some Maples which are more 'pure' as it were, but I've not checked that SD box for many years and cannot remember exactly what the hell I have in there.