...except perhaps the amount of time that mining gear scammers vendors hold on to idiot's customer's ASIC pre-order funds.  In fairness, though, 'hold on to' is probably an inaccurate term.  I suspect it would be deployed towards hookers and blow pretty rapidly, and I bet a lot of it has been already.

It was not very long ago that one could buy a day's production of Bitcoin for $10k.  Now you'd have to actually obtain some ASIC gear and hit every block for a day to achieve the same end result.  Good luck with that since even if people end up with ASIC gear, a lot of other people will have it also at about the same time.

Oh, but this means thinking in years.  And some forward planning.  And balls of steel.  Sorry about that.

Ha.  They should have asked me...I could have told them that start-ups can squander money as fast as dumb-ass venture capitalist can take it out of their wallets.

I guess some pimple-faced code monkey gots his-self a new Audi on the state's dime.  At least the taxpayer money isn't going to poor people who need their houses warm-ish or sick people who need medical care or anything silly like that.

edit: grammar-ish stuff

You are right, but...

Some say that the reason for the drop in physical was that it was the only thing left of value and people who needed desperately to raise capital and had some kicking around were unloading it.  It's more than possible that that was simply the messages which resonated with me, though, as a physical gold holder.  One way or another, I recall being happier than my traditionally invested friends coming out of the 2008 event, and only several periods (including the last few years) when this was not the case.

As for the miners, it is exactly like someone (who's advice I took in the early 2000's) said...they are paper shares and will share the same fate as other paper shares if/when TSHTF.  So, I never obtained any and have never paid much attention to them.  I honestly don't know what SLW and GG even are except that they are not the phyzzz...nothing is (though Bitcoin is close enough for my tastes.)

I take some exception to the assertion that deflation will necessarily have a significantly negative effect on gold prices.  Certainly that is the conventional wisdom, but several things give me pause:

1) we had a hushed but very real deflationary event not long ago and gold prices did quit well through it.

2) more obvious deflation is not something we're familiar with (as you point out) and I suspect that it would be shocking and enough to call into serious question the stability of the U.S. economy (and thus solidity of our solution.)  This could create a much more broad demand for PM's.  And other alternatives such as Bitcoin of course.

There is, of course, also the possibility that deflation will be staved off at any cost.  'QE to infinity' some call it, along with whatever accounting rule changes are needed.  That too would likely result in happy days for USD alternatives such as gold and Bitcoin.

I figured you inherited some, and fished it a little bit about it one time for shits-n-giggles back when we were mortal enemies.  That was about the time someone fingered your real identity and his hit looked right.

Interestingly we might be in a generally similar wealth category in addition to our other similarities.  I happened to be able to do a reasonable well paying series of jobs reasonably well for the last 1.5-ish decades, and since I grew up poor I never broke the habit of living like a pauper.  Worked my ass off as well to in part to make up for a deficit in formal education...at least in the vocation I fell into.  G.W. Bush and his idiotic (or not) wars happened at an opportune time and got me researching things, paranoid, and sinking my excess funds into a couple of elemental substances which have panned out well so far.  I have more hope than ever that Bitcoin will be _the_ 'retirement event' for me, and it looks as promising as ever, but it is very far from something I am counting on.

The correlation between interest rates and gold prices clearly exists, but it's loose and with a lot of lag (particularly in one of the directions.)  It makes some sense that there would be at least some correlation, and also a fair amount of lag since people (with money) would need to re-train their brain to make investment decisions decisively favoring one vs. the other.  So, when I see real interest rates turn decisively I'll start to think about what the ramifications might be and looking for signs that it's impacting gold prices (and other things.)

Seems to me that the driving force behind gold demand is more global sovereign wealth concern about structural failures in the existing monetary regimes than individual Western investors hung up on interest rates these days also.  No matter what, I'm sure all stay pretty fully in physical Au until the U.S. runs out of German physical to satiate the Chinese appetite to see what kinds of fireworks transpire.


They've never hassled me.  Thankfully.  If they did, I'd tell them that I'm into Bitcoin and it's the next big thing and I'm certain to be rich like some king of antiquity because of it.

your persistence and attention to detail (snipped) is causing increased credibility in my mind.  Had I a need I would certainly be making partial use of your services by this time.  (I would always select multiple services and a carefully chosen scheme since as long as one of them were not a honeypot it would make the washing much more reliable.)


What a dirtbag.  In this circumstance and very few others, I think it would be kind of amusing if whoever had any info (ip addresses and such) about this guy to 'accidentally' make it public so if anyone had the time and interest he might be able to be identified and shamed, or at least tied to any other ventures that would best be avoided.


In a cursor glance, it looks to me like the link should be to his only other mod.

Hopefully it more like a bug than like a feature.  I wouldn't have an interest in Bitcoin if I thought so (using the term 'interest' in several ways.)

To me it sounds like a simple statement of fact by someone who knows his shit.  In all of my speculation in BTC itself considerations of the Bitcoin solution and of other possible similar solutions, I have deliberately made the basic assumption that Jeff's statement is true (while hoping it is not.)  This is why Bitcoin to be yet pretty experimental and a pretty risky place to park net worth.

Firstly, thanks Jeff for your explanation.  Without it one could reasonably hypothesize that a fair fraction of the rational behind the action was simply a personal agreement that Iran as a nation and the Iranian people themselves are in 'our' way and should be squashed.  Lots of people seem to feel this way and I personally feel that it is ugly, inhuman, and a crime against humanity (but that is neither here nor there.)


I rather small minority of people seemed to have some concerns in the discussion about the formation of the Bitcoin Foundation, and this event seems to be among a class of issues that I had some qualms about.  Whether Jeff's actions had much if anything to do with the Bitcoin Foundation I don't know.  I do hope that as Bitcoin Foundation evolves some of the potential liabilities that it brings into existence will be considered and some thought put towards how to minimize them.

Later than expected by whom?  Probably a year ago when I was pondering things, I figured that ASIC would be probably be between 2014-ish and never.  I figured that there were probably ways of burning hard-copies of FPGA, but that they probably would not be particularly optimal in either price or performance.  I knew (and know) close to zero about the technology however.

One thing I have and do take an interest in are the various 'free energy' machines.  How they have sprung up and faded away, how they have been marketed, and the personality types who tend to get swindled.  The little bits of marketing I've seen associated with ASIC mining gear reminds me of the 'free energy' stuff a lot.  The main difference between the victims is that in the case of 'free energy' they seem to be of the naive do-good variety; in the case of Bitcoin they seem to be often characterizable as greedy assholes.

Trouble is, you are kind of grinding us goldbugs 'up' in the 'upward collapse' of valuations.  I'll agree that gold has been in a grind for longer than I expected before the next major leg...not that it has been impacted by your statements however.

Unfortunately BTC also has been in what I consider to be a 'grind' albeit punctuated by an occasional exciting price move.  As you know, my expectations for volatility in Bitcoin are vastly higher than for gold/silver, and my qualifications for 'success' of this speculation are at least an order of magnitude higher than what we've 'grinded' along to at by this point, and indeed, more like several orders of magnitude.  That's my reward for speculation in an unproven technology.

I'm a fairly patient person when it comes to both my gold 'investo-savings' and my BTC 'speculation' (and silver 'invest-o-specul-o-savings') and expect to wait many more years for results.  Actually, I'll probably have little choice unless I want to set up a business venture or something like that.

Seems to me that if anything he is a professional financial specialist and inventor.  Former at least, and I infer (possibly incorrectly) that he was good enough at it to make some money and switch gears to doing something he seems to enjoy and which, imho, adds value to humanity.

It's amusing to see news clips dredged up from his stock broker days...he's changed very little in terms of style.


That Keiser is no libertarian is what gives him credibility to me.  He and Stacy rarely waste my time with Austrian School hokum and bunkum.

I like 'collapsing' better than 'down'.  And as a bonus, it is antagonistic enough to create 182-page threads even as a demonstrably inaccurate characterization.

I've got just the thing for you!  The truck had a home-made set of outriggers.  They weigh about 1000 lbs and are very heavily built.  They were very handy when I changed the front wheels.  They hung way over the front wheels and had very bad clearance so I removed them and mounted a standard-ish bumper as I don't need to or expect to need to work off the front of the truck very much.

(Just kidding, BTW...they are pretty unsatisfactory for almost anything but one could put a 40,000 lb winch on it and remove the cylinders to make a couple of log splitters...)

If someone ends up sitting on your 'asic pre-order' for several years before getting something out the door which is pretty capital intensive and at least as high-risk as Bitcoin itself...you deserve to be screwed.

I diversified into a 10 ton crane on a semi sized truck.  And, unhappily, a class-A commercial drivers license which I'll be keeping secret so people don't try to rope me into driving their trucks.  Part of the justification would be to have something to pull the excavator which silverbox and I were discussing 100 pages back in this thread, and which I have not yet identified.  My hope is that I can get such a machine for a Krugerrand or two...or better yet a couple of BTC if I can hold out that long before legitimately needing the thing.

I think you are basically right (insofar as the USDX will only be allowed to exist at a certain level on the high side) but I don't think that it is possible to avoid spikes above the desired level high end.  The drop-dead number I've pulled out of my ass is 80-ish.  I suspect that QE3 was implemented in such a way as to pull the USDX down to that level for starters, but also to provide a little less latency as future necessities pop up.

My personal sense is that the architecture of QE3 was implemented with some haste and probably without a full study of the corner-case dynamics.  It would be interesting to find out if adversaries of the US can twang the strings in such a way to get a destructive harmonic going (if/when it suits their interests to do so.)

I'd happily buy 100,000 BTC for $8.00, so that's the way I voted.

That said, I won't be buying any more BTC for until the rate get's below $2.00/BTC.  That was my plan when I made my last acquisition (in the near $2.00/BTC range) and has not changed.  What has changed is that I don't keep a store of fiat entrusted to an exchange in order to make the next purchase since I don't see the rate I want as being eminent, and if we do get a sudden down-spike to those levels I may wish to re-evaluate since it may indicate a problem with the Bitcoin solution itself.

I've sometimes mused about what set of events might be capable of separating Oceania and Eurasia from one another (thus completing one of the dwindling loose-ends of Orwell's dystopian vision), and wondered if a forced change of ownership of a large percentage of the physical gold holdings of one group to the other would be sufficient do produce such a rift.  Under a regime where physical gold is the commonly recognized base-line for notating the wealth of political bodies, I would not rule it out.

Nor would I rule out the potential that the EU find might find some utility in attaching to Russia in order to address a deficit in real estate and strategic nuclear capabilities.  Given the choice of joining our (the US's) future and likely ill-fated exploits in the Middle East or forging a different set of relationships I could see the latter appearing to be more palatable...for long enough to make it happen at least.

The analogy would be a little more accurate if 'landspeeder' were substituted for 'car'.  I've seen no compelling evidence that custom Bitcoin mining ASIC chips currently exist in the real world at this time.  Admittedly though I have not looked very hard since I would not have even a potential interest in obtaining any until they are demonstrated.  I don't even follow the mining forum normally.