Man, how much would it suck to lose a bunch of BTC at the start of a run-up?

I guess when this hicup (or is it?) get cleared up there will be some abrupt shifts in the depths.  More on which side, I don't know.  My guess: drop on the sell side.

I'd give my left testicle for DSL.  Reliable DSL, at least, since I know other rural folks who have pretty poor luck with it...slower than ISDN and non-functional a healthy percentage of the 365 days.  I personally am way way to far from a CO which will support DSL for probably another decade.  Even my land-line barely works for voice and all the planets need to be in alignment in order to get 28k POTS modem speeds for more than a few hours.  We get about 2 trees/week (or drunk's and/or kid's cars and/or trucks) taking out whatever lines are not buried and at least one landslide/year getting those which are.  It takes it's toll on infrastructure.

The tweaker infestation has become bad around here for whatever reason.  Bad economy mostly I suspect.  I'm going to augment my 357 tweaker repellent with a 12ga pretty soon I think.  Thankfully I installed an alarm system some months ago and it scared a few off at 4:00am a month after I did so.  The upload speed of the satellite indicates that I can probably feasibly have a remote surveillance system which works and it would be fun to play around with.

I've got as much BTC as I need and want.  I got pig-headed and pissed off and just kept buying down to the $2.00 level.  It was fairly easy for someone who started at the $16.00 since one would get a shocking amount of BTC at each purchase.  That's why my cost-basis is around $6.00 in spite of my unfortunate timing on getting started.

I was ready (and probably still am) ready to by another load of BTC if it gets below $2.00.  I think we'll probably never see that again (absent a system failure) but one never knows.  Certainly it seems much more likely than that PM's will crash.

I was already on a trajectory to exceed my quota and had my service upgraded to 15G.  And I had not even started to do any serious porn downloads!  These fucking Windows and Android machines and bloated mail/apps services and the like really suck it down.  Of course I am also updating the source to re-build my primary BSD machine which I've not been really able to do on 9600 baud modem for 5 years now, and that's taking a chunk.  But for sure I'll be doing my movie downloads and porn surfing from my office in town!

Silverbox:  I think the new birds have flown just earlier this year.  The service is actually very usable, even doing remote terminal mode work (to my shock and amazement.)  It does drop out for 5 minutes or so multiple times per day which is, I assume, due to certain operations which cannot be done hot and brought on by a mass migration and sales to the new sats.  Will they oversell and hence the service degrade?  I'm expecting it but would be happy to be pleasantly surprised.  It will be interesting to see how Hughes responds.  I expect favorably to the delight of my neighbors with that service.


No.  I cannot make it to the big city with a load of cash in that amount of time   To tank up on the phyzzz of course

Happy days!  I'm finally in the black on Bitcoin (except for a brief period of run-up after the $2.nn days.)  Let's hope the trend continues and swells to a tsunami.  Bitcoin-wise that is...I'm happy with PM's doing as they do and do not especially need or wish to see any big earthquakes there.

BTW, I've been busy with various life-changes.  I've missed you boys over the last week or two.  I'm on 'excede' satellite these days and it's a pleasantly surprising experience compared to my other satellite experiences.  I can think of worse ways to waste my time than dicking around on the bitcointalk.org forum...especially in relatively exciting times like these when an important (to me) threshold has occurred in BTC price.

Yes Bitcoin evolves, but since it is such an important thing insofar as a lot of people have a lot riding on it, progress is necessarily slow and careful.  The BIP 16/17 issues illustrate this.  There are also a lot of architectural decisions that are very deeply baked into the cake at this point.

This reality has both pros and cons.  More pros than cons in my opinion, but it does nobody any good to paint over and ignore what cons there are.

Here's an idea:

Take one safe-ish strategy, advertise it publically, and play it.  Then state the win metrics, and also the win metrics for the better plays that you and your subscribers have going.  Like you say, if you are bullshitting, your subscribers will call you on it.

Hell, get a proven string going and even I would be likely to sign up!

To me, 'crypto fiat' is a bit of a nonsense term in the same vein as 'jumbo shrimp.'

Also, "Parallel crypto-currencies identical to Bitcoin" which are joined within a 'backbone network' had some hope of retaining true P2P (where the user's are P's) seems like an idea worth pursuing.  In this sense, they would be more a single Bitcoin though (as I visualize it.)

On the other hand, independent crypto-accounting solutions are more durable in that a failure of one does not impact the others.  A bigger win yet is that they can diverge significantly in the capabilities they offer and provide users with many choices to use the ones which work best for them.

I've thought about them a fair bit.

I actually see a scenario where a multitude of likely functional alternate crypto-currencies (which I prefer to call 'crypto-accounting systems' these days) are the best hope for Bitcoin.

The reason for this is that it would create a scenario where attack of Bitcoin by governments would simple produce for them an even more intractable problem.  Their only choice would be to really clamp down on the free flow of information generally but that is something of a nuclear option which would have a wide reaching and negative fallout which is hard to predict.

---

Separately, I also see having a single non-inflationary crypto-currency as not much more healthy for humanity than gold.  You know what they say about the 'golden rule': "those who have the gold, make the rules."...and it is human nature to make the rules in one's best interest.  Tragedy of the commons.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I personally hold what would seem to some people as a good bit of both gold and BTC.)

Not true.  If you hedged effectively on your short, I personally have some admiration.  I'm not at all a trader so it's an impressive feat which I am incapable of.  OTOH, a big win would also be attenuated it seems to me.  I guess my style is mostly to go all in for the longer haul based on fundamentals.  Neither strategy is either right or wrong I think.  Just depends on the person and his/her situation.

I would suggest that an inarguable example of one of your trading success (that is, one which was stated explicitly ahead of time) in public might induce more people to be interested in your for-pay newsletter.  I have to say that it was a little questionable to publicly announce your short but keep the hedge in your box of tricks to pull out if needed.

Au got down to $1580.  Where did you cover, CD?

Interesting read.  Thanks!

I've never been totally comfortable with my grasp of money markets and yield curves and such, in part because I've never played around with them.  But I understand what you are saying here and it makes a lot of sense.  And sucks.  Someone made the point that what we moving fairly rapidly into is a 1% vs. a .01% world, and whoever it was was probably right.  Throw some trinkets (new cars, big screen TV's, etc) at the 99% and they'll stay mostly content.  It doesn't even take that in most of the world outside of the West.  But in a non-growth environment I don't think that there will be enough excess to even allow for trinkets.  Bulltet-proof boot?  Ya, probably.  Cost of doing business.


I never figured that the Chinese would be happy to slave away making tennis shoes for me forever even if it were the key to unlimited status quo.  Even if the fruits of their labor were more evenly spread about the globe it never struck me as a likely perpetual motion machine to keep the globe in blissful abundance.

As for Africa, I am guessing that the competitive gang-rape can (and will) render her quite repulsive within a timeframe measured in years.

As I have said before, I believe that at some level it all gets back to very basic thermodynamics in the end.  Measuring energy input and distributing it over a population.  And again, I suspect that the results of us humans running out of energy will be a startling mirror of bacteria running out of nutrients in a petri dish.  Environmental contamination, warfare, and death for all but those individuals who have some sort of an advantage or an extraordinary level of luck.  I suspect we'll see this type of misery before we figure out nuclear fusion.

The mechanism leading to re-distribution (downward) would be the that the 'pressure' I talked about would build to the point that it is more difficult to retain and there would be explosive failures.  In a growing system everyone can 'have more.'  In a static or shrinking system this is not possible.  It may be that the 'haves' would be willing to 'have less' in the interest of self preservation, but history doesn't argue for this.  The haves are at least as prone to the old tragedy-of-the-(not-so)-commons as any other group.

I personally am totally down with the 'local community currency' idea.  Accounting has always been an issue with such things (as have laws) and this is one reason why crypto-accounting systems hold such a draw for me.

To me it means increasing pressure for re-distribution of wealth.  This pressure is quite moderated in a growing system by letting some of the excess trickle down.  Absent that things could become quite ugly.

Gold and 'the one true crypto-currency' both fail miserably in such an environment.  Both for the masses, and most likely for those who managed to win (or be born with) all the chips since they are in constant danger of ending up on meat-hooks in the town square and it will come to pass on occasion (absent and unfortunate de-population event.)

Giving the majority an option to freely select a currency solution which happens to be working for them strikes me as a pretty good solution in that the 1% either has to make it work for everyone, or everyone selects a different solution and the 1% join the 99%.  I'm all about the freedom to choose.

I would conjecture that VPNs and similar solutions for secure communications might be authorized to be run only by licensed operators (and that part of the licencing requirements would include a functional back-door for what's known as lawful intercept.)

I also suspect that one may need to establish identity via bio-metrics or some other fool-proof method prior to being able to access the internet at all.  It'll be sold as big brother's helpfulness in overcoming the problems of identity theft and stopping those bad bad terrorists and the massive amounts of kiddie porn hiding out in the ether.  And I figure that it will be massively popular with the sheeple.

I'm not saying that such things are eminent or certain, but it does seem to me very possible that attempts in those directions will be made.  In conjunction with draconian penalties they probably could be fairly effective.  Certainly enough so to put a damper on so-called 'intellectual property theft' which is driving corp/gov crazy and something like Bitcoin in it's current implementation.

Effectively hiding would necessitate a lot of bandwidth overhead (my theory mostly) which means that whatever traffic one wishes to transfer better be a smallish fraction of what one uses.  Streaming porn might be a good carrier.

Secondly, it might take balls of steel to risk getting caught if the penalty is being hauled off to some work camp somewhere.

While these are theoretical issues at this point, and probably will remain so, they are not improbably enough to completely ignore.   IMHO.

Some aspects of our present condition when compared Orwell's material are so striking that I have to wonder if the story has been used as something of an inspiration to certain segments of our leadership.

Whatever the case, comparing the book against reality (and especially as reality evolves) is one of the more chilling and awe-inspiring things I can think of off-hand.

"...at any moment there might be a special bulletin from the Ministry of Peace. The news from the African front was disquieting in the extreme. ..."

 - Orwell

I'm totally happy with my old 80's Toyota as my footprint in the 4x4 space.  It's easy to change lanes because people don't figure you have insurance.

I splurged and got an almost new Yaris which does not have the same advantage, but get's nice mileage.