I'm not trying to win any popularity contests here.  Obviously.

Trolling in my posts on this thread is actually fairly incidental.  I expect at most a handful of people to contemplate my conjectures.  Mostly I expect pom-pom wavers to do exactly as you'v done.

---

Rah! Rah! Rah!  Bitcoin is awesome and has no possibility of any defects whatsoever.  Keep stacking!

There.  Do you like me better now?

Not hardly.  I expect that prior to a collapse such as I've describe (as a possible scenario) BTC will shoot up in value.  I'll either capitalize then, or take a bet that controlling secret keys which are represented in what I call the 'Satoshi blockchain' will be even more valuable.  Probably I'll hedge my bets and do some of both.

I need BTC at around $100 per before I'm ready to sell my stash down to a nice magic number.  Ping me then if you are still interested in being a buyer.


Oh yes.  Absolutely!  Carry on as you will please!

I suspect that at the current rate of adoption, it will become increasingly expensive to run a full client and there will be continued drop-out.

If, for some reason, Bitcoin became suddenly very popular, I suspect that the rate of drop-out will become very sharp.  Only the people with the ability to construct and operate 'super-nodes' will be able to do so.  At that point, a relatively small amount of arm-twisting at the corp/gov level and DOS will spell the end of Bitcoin-I as a reliable solution.

Of course it will be re-born but it will be much more difficult to convince people that p2p crypto-currencies are a solid solution.

My gut feeling is that most of the dev team, and Gavin in particular, are way on the plus side in the Bitcoin community.  If someone choose to characterize the community and project as a cesspool I would have to stretch to come to it's defense to be honest.  But I probably would in many environments...just not on bitcointalk.org.

My gut sense is that due to the current dev team, Bitcoin will fail as a result of it's success rather than for less pleasant reasons.  That has a lot to do with why I keep a pretty significant bet on it.  The other reason is that I expect that having a foot in the Bitcoin door is the most likely way to move into whatever comes after be that an evolution of Bitcoin or a replacement which builds on some of the trails that Bitcoin has blazed.

This^  Just like ISP's may at most cry crocodile tears when their high-use customers threaten to walk.  They just move on to the competition and cost them money.

Off-hand the only thing I could think of as a way to get revenge would be to swamp them with sock-puppet type accounts which won't gain anything and cost them in processing.  Might be illegal and one would get in trouble over it though.  Not sure.  Don't care that much either since I never was, and never had any interest in being, a Dwolla customer.  I'd love to see them suffer, however, simply on the basis of what they did to Tradehill.

It's not clear to me that this would necessarily have the magnitude of desired (downward) pressure no the USDX that we (in the US) need.  Or that it would have the desired effect quickly enough.

My contention is still that we have current strong hand in fighting the currency wars and will win the race to the bottom on the schedule we chose.  Losing USD intermediaries in global trade is a hit, but that's a long process and we've got other arrows in our quiver which can be sharpened up.

About the only concern I have about the 20-ish million Bitcoin cap is that I'm not sure that is enough to provide the number of object lessons required for training.  Or re-training I should say since we've been conditioned by the current fiat systems and their various safeguards. 

Although it would not change the very cool things about Bitcoin, I don't believe I could have as much affection for the solution if a significant majority of the Bitcoin were in the hands of thieves, or had least past through such hands multiple times.  Indeed, this is one of the things I dis-like about our current fiat systems.

Praise Jesus!

My concern is whether the arbitration costs associated with dispute resolution will make it practical to protect relatively small value transactions.

We actually have something akin to what you describe in pay-pal, visa, etc as I see things.  They spread the cost over all of their customers in terms of fees.

My idea is to spread the costs around by having a 'jury duty' of sorts, and also to leverage the effort spent into a lasting body of data which can be used to make better business choices by all participants.

One of my biggest concerns is related to anonymity of the belligerent parties in a dispute.  That is, how are they to provide solid evidence of their case in public while protecting their identies?  I suggest that here is an opportunity for businesses to form up which would validate and scrub evidence.

I believe that there would be decent pressure to not 'start clean' with a new identity very often.  I personally would trust a long history of positive results and am suspicious of new users without much of a history on e-bay.

I do.  To me, giving anyone else control of my BTC is giving them the ability to take it and give me nothing in return...and to get away with it, unlike with most other instruments.  This conception of the Bitcoin solution probably has something to do with why I've never been ripped off, or at least not ripped off for more than I expected...Bitcoinica got like $9.00 from me for example, but I anticipated it happening eventually.

Having at least the ability to destroy the BTC if I feel that the recieving party did not live up to their end of the agreement would go a long way toward my considering it a usable solution for a lot of things.  Somehow that idea seems wildly unpopular with sellers...

Not content to simply whine about things, however, I posted an idea in the 'market' section the other day to have a trust web which probably has a realistic potential to allow a cash-like cryptocurrency solution to be used with some modicum of reliability.  And requires zero involvement form our various judicial systems to boot.

Ya, looking more than a few months ahead baffles and confuses a large majority of humans.  What can ya do?

When it becomes commonly accepted that transmission nodes in the Bitcoin network are feasibly mainly to those with dedicated or specialized hardware in environments where network connectivity significantly exceeds what joe-sixpack has access to, I doubt that it will bounce back (to 'users run nodes') no matter what the theory says is possible.

At that point Bitcoin is, to me, a much different solution than the one which initially appealed to me and one with a different set of dangers.  It will also be at that point that I will be on the lookout for a good point to bail.  That is, one which maximizes my profits (or limits my losses as the case may be), and that has not been the overriding factor in my interest in the solution to date.

There is not much to actually argue about here since this is just my opinion and mindset.  It also seems that I have a lonely position here which is not representative of the user-base.  But just in case, I state it in case it has an impact on development priorities.

I'm guilty as charged for the most part, though I don't necessarily believe that people who disagree with me are doinks.  It mostly has to do with the quality of their arguments which I believe that I usually try pretty hard to analyze fairly.

The only thing I have 100% confidence in is that some of my beliefs and projections are wrong.  That is why I focus my efforts on providing counter-arguments if I see them, and try specifically to avoid giving concrete finanacial advice.


You and I were both pretty vocal about the possible upside to BTC when it was up in the $10 range and falling if I recall correctly.  If I had liquidated PM's in order to take more of a possition in BTC at almost any time since I became significantly involved with it, I'd have ended up fucked like Hogan's goat.  As luck would have it, I had USD to burn though at times considered shifting a (fairly minor) part of my portfolio along these lines (Au|Ag -> BTC.)  Thank God I didn't.

Even if you can provide a steam of solid evidence of distinct calls which would have made someone wealthy (and do so without leaving out similar ones which work against that) I know enough about the likelyhood of hitting tops and bottoms in such markets to believe that it would still have been a chance-ee set of gambles with a significant percentage of luck.  That might be fine for some, but it's not what I am interested in personally at these times.  For those who really are: God bless, move forward.


I was planning to try to control myself at one point (after one of our earlier goings around iirc) and almost immediately you seemed to do some victory lap about some little blip, and I even took it to be potentially taunting (rightly or wrongly.)  So I decided to not feel guilty about making a game of things.  (Before you ask, no, I'm not going to dig through 1500 posts to find it.  Probably somewhere in the 50-ish pages if you really care.)

I think I saw somewhere that the buyer managed to suck up a healthy percentage of the asks at one point.  Now it looks like it's back to pretty much 50% balance volume-wise.

In my '2a' hypothesis defence I got to thinking about the utility of harvesting an exchange-worth of inventory for mixing operations and the coin-history varieties one would be likely to obtain in doing so.  I have not studied the analytic tracking methods in looking for taint much, nor the implementation(s) which exchanges use to manage their inventory though so I don't know whether such a haul would be of particular value or not.  Interesting to muse about though.

As I gaze at my creation here, I see a much stronger coorelation (negative) between BTC and Au than I had sensed by looking at the raw numbers.

Maybe our 'Three Marketeers' are on to something in that people who can be chased out of their PM positions can have a notable (and exploitable) impact on BTC values.  If so, carry on.

I honestly believe that almost anyone who is reading this should have some speculative exposure to BTC, and anyone who is prone to put all of their eggs in the BTC basket and discounts Au as a sure-fire barbourus relic which will fail spectacularly would probably lose said eggs in another way anyway should Bitcoin fail.  And, of course, if Bitcoin succeeds we'll all be smiling.

After re-orging the data in order to get multiple lines as:

d1,f1,f1
d2,f2,f2
...
e
d1,f1,f1
d2,f2,f2
...
e

and using the following gnuplot:

  cat bg4.csv | gnuplot -p -e "set terminal png size 800,400; set datafile separator \",\"; set xdata time; set timefmt \"%m/%d/%Y\"; set ytics 1 nomirror tc lt 1; set ylabel 'b' tc lt 1; set y2tics 100 nomirror tc lt 2; set y2label 'g' tc lt 2; plot '-' using 1:2 with lines linetype 1, '' using 1:3 with lines linetype 2 axes x1y2;" > output_file.png

the results look like so (public google-doc link since I don't have a better place to post images) :

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B9ysaVeRnZElcVJHLV9uRURZT28

The goal here would be to have a simple script (or one-liner even for live x11 work) which would produce an updated chart based on the current data in Stephen Gornick's spreadsheet (or one like it.)

Of course this is as close to raw default gnuplot generation as possible and all kinds of beatifications are possible...with enough experimentation.

1a:  Depends on whether the thief likes fiat more than BTC.  One way or the other, I would suggest that the thief would be better off to have any form of money that is not tainted, or at best has taint which can be written off with plausible deniability of responsibility.

2a:  Really?  I can think of no better a dilution pool to have then 100% of the inventory of users who happened to have coin for sale on an exchange.

3a:  OK.  Good to know that no hacking originates in China.

4a:  The most critical aspect would be how reliably the exchange maps it's large users to a positively know individual in the real world.  Mt Gox seems to be getting pretty good at it by now.

5a:  Does not seem like me to be a lot of money for someone who was well connected to criminal adventures...and/or good at his job.

6a:  That forms the basis of something to look for as evidence to strengthen or weaken the hypothesis that this event is somehow associated with the Bitcoinica thefts.

7a:  Some people are content to simply 'go with what they know'.  Others are more trail-blazing.

8a:  How well known is the operator (and operations of) BTCChina?  I've not cared enough to study it, but I didn't see any info on this thread yet.

9a:  I would say that the explanation that propels the belief and hope that an explosion in Bitcoin value is eminent is the one which usually wins out.  And any others will be roundly attacked.

---

My musing about whether this event could be associated with various thefts was, if anything, a 'hypothesis'.  It was certainly not a 'theory'.

As you (cypherdoc) know, I sincerely hope that this is exactly what a lot of people want to think insofar as it is innocent and organic demand and indicates the start of a march upward to where Bitcoin deserves to be.  My nature generally is to take a close and jaded look from many angles before getting my hopes up.  While I like old adages generally, and the "Don't stare a gift horse in the mouth" one in particular, I often do just that.

cat bg4.csv | gnuplot -p -e "set datafile separator \",\"; set xdata time; set timefmt \"%m/%d/%Y\"; set yrange [0:10]; set y2range [0:2000]; set ytics 1 nomirror tc lt 1; set ylabel 'b' tc lt 1; set y2tics 100 nomirror tc lt 2; set y2label 'g' tc lt 2; plot '-' using 1:2 with lines linetype 1, '' using 1:3 with lines linetype 2 axes x1y2;"

Well, umm, ya.  Most market theories assume due to the definition of a 'transaction', there is a buyer for every seller, and a seller for every buyer. FWIW.  I'm not up-to-speed on the Libertarian economic theories so they may differ.  Not sure.

Also, an utterly swell way to avoid potential taint problem is to mix things up in an exchange where there are a lot of honest actors.  Or at least that is what I would be my line of thinking were I a thief.  I happened to be quite active on Tradehill when there was a pretty strong suspicion that the former 'allinvain' coin was tossing around.  I expect that my cold-store wallets are somewhat more warm with these.  People who took BTC straight from Tradehill to Mt. Gox at around the time I was a heavy buyer got harassed until they explained to Mark the situation.  The cool thing was that whoever was unloading the coin was willing to do so at a noticeable loss...which also rung a bell when I read this thread about the BTCChina goings on.

This is very cool and an ideal source for easy data acquisition.  Lotsa people seem unaware that Google spreadsheets like this can be queried like a database.  In case anyone is reading this, here is a command line demonstrating...sorta...

  wget -qO- --no-check-certificate "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/tq?tqx=out:csv&tq=select%20A,J,M%20where%20A%20%3E%20date%20'2012-01-01'%20&key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHJuUE1mUkFxa3A0eHBDQkxZLVVFZmc#gid=0"

yields on stdout:

  "Date ","Close ","Gold "
  1/2/2012,5.2168,"$1,565.80"
  1/3/2012,4.8808,"$1,599.70"
  1/4/2012,5.5738,"$1,611.90"
  1/5/2012,6.9476,"$1...

cleaned up, the query is:   select A,J,M where A > 01/01/2012 order by A
Also the output is csv of course.

I'll piss with feeding this into gnuplot (maybe through AWK or some python formatting) later when I've got some time.