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I've been having fairly consistent problems accessing bitfinex for a while now, is this true for everyone?
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 I'm such a weirdo. |
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Hello, I just finished with the second of these, and am selling it. Therefore I'm reopening this thread. Please feel free to PM me if you're interested. The server will once again be available in my home in the bay area within 1-2 days max.
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Hello lets say I have 4 addresses used on Electrum
But one is address number 1 (i.e, first one generated from this seed), another is address number 15, another is address number 100, and another is address number 2000.
I could scan for all these addresses by doing gap-limit 2000. But then synchronizing would take very long time. But in my case I know that address is 1, 15, 100, and 2000. So any way to just import those, without checking for all the other unneeded addresses 1-2000?
Thanks.
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the average (western) person does not matter in the gold market. You have just to look at Asian imports to see who is buying.
The average western person surely mattered after 2000. Why else would an ETF GLD (used mostly by westerners) coincide so directly with an increase in the gold price? They used to matter because they were accumulating gold. Now they can't, because they don't have enough income, and that is downward pressure on the gold price. |
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the average person simply cannot afford to accumulate any gold whatsoever. Meanwhile, gold is secretly near an all time high in value, once you take into account the deflation the dollar has experienced.
What in the hell are you talking about?
I was reading along until these little assertions and then you went right off a cliff.
let me simplify. "Meanwhile, gold is secretly near an all time high in value, once you take into account the deflation the dollar has experienced. " There is a dollar bubble. Gold is denominated in dollars. Therefore, even if the price of gold in dollars has fallen recently, if the dollar has bubbled more than the amount that gold has fallen, then gold too is overpriced. "the average person simply cannot afford to accumulate any gold whatsoever." Wages are too low for the average person to be able to accumulate any non-trivial amount of gold while still paying his or her living expenses. |
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One may argue that the USD is -more- overvalued, but with wages what they are right now, CPI-inflation (and the price of gold) are both very unlikely to take off in the near future. The only way would be because of the influence of foreign central banks. One may have to prepare to wait 30+ years to ever get the same purchasing power gold currently has, again in the future.Why? Here:  Gold's recent collapse in value has done nothing when compared to the absolute slamming American workers have got since 2000. Right now, the average person simply cannot afford to accumulate any gold whatsoever. Meanwhile, gold is secretly near an all time high in value, once you take into account the deflation the dollar has experienced. This graph actually makes it look -BETTER- than it really is, as this measures wages vs. gold, as opposed to cost of employment vs. gold, which is a better measure of the total benefits a worker receives. I would have used cost of employment vs. gold, but there isn't enough historical data to have a good reference point. Anyway, the real cost of employment vs. gold is even worse, as people have been shifted to part-time and thus no longer get any benefits outside of wages. Now one can speculate that gold is in fact cheap as it makes up a small portion of american's savings. However, this is not true either.  Its not quite as dire looking, but still, not very pretty. We're near a long-lasting resistance point that has only been broken once in history. And notice that corresponded to what was almost surely a bubble in the gold price, even when looking at the first chart. In short, there is no way gold can rally right now unless foreign entities can suck out all the gold from the American economy, since Americans simply don't have the financial capacity to absorb any supply placed on the market. Also, let me remind you of the absolute lack of correlation between the value of gold (in both charts) and recessions. Gold seems to hold a relatively constant -average- value whether or not the US moves into a recession or not, unlike the US Dollar. However, in return for its constant value, gold is much much more volatile. One may have to prepare to wait 30+ years to ever get the same purchasing power gold currently has, again in the future. |
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Hello all, I am trying to determine how the cost of employment is changing year over year. In other words, if I wanted to hire the average American to do an hour worth of work right now, how much more/less expensive would it be than if I wanted to hire the average American to do an hour of work 2 years ago? Note: I'm looking for TOTAL COST. This means ALL the costs of hiring a person, including insurance, benefits, etc... NOT just wages. Why do I want this? Because obamacare, among other things. Now I've found two different places to get this information, and they give drastically different answers. The only logical possibilities are either (A) corruption or (B) I don't know what I'm looking at. Observe: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/eci.t01.htm (Source: US Agency) These guys show the cost of employment going up about 0.5% each quarter, leading to a huge 2% increase in the cost of labour, or even more. Compare to: SUPER LONG LINK (Source: International Labour Org.) These guys show a different story, and more volatile too. Also, there's a typo (lol). Its supposed to be 22.3 but its written 12.3 for 2011. Which is more trustworthy/comprehensive? Is there some better source? In other news, apparently the mechanics used to be making an assload of money but no longer do. The best jobs are technical, followed by financial. The worst jobs are hospitality related, with artistic jobs being a close second. |
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There are two different types of loans, made by two different entities. The amount that can be earned with this spread is so little that many banks do not try to take advantage of this, as they can put their money to better use by lending to consumers who will pay a much higher spread
 ? Federal Funds Rate is the rate at which banks lend reserves to each other. Interest Rate on reserves is the rate at which banks earn money for having reserves. Why would you lend reserves when you could get more by not lending them at all? Even if it is a small spread? |
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I was looking at the bitcoin and gold charts recently, and they're actually ridiculously similar, if on very different timeframes.
Check out a 5 year chart of gold, versus a 1 year chart of BTC.
Both started out very low, and rallied to a new ATH. Then, a crash, then two tries to hit that new high both of which failed. After the second fail, the prices goes into a downtrend. First there's a brief crash, and both create a sure bottom followed by a bounce. But, after some idling, the two got roughly in sync, with both tanking toward that recent low again, gold at 1210-ish and BTC at $360-ish.
What do you think will happen from here, and do you expect the two to move in the same direction from their low, or in opposite directions?
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The Citizens United ruling states that "spending is speech". Ignore the "corporations are people" bit for now. Point is, that spending money is a form of speech, according to the US supreme court. Also, slightly more dubiously, but still with fairly strong precedent, anonymous speech is protected under the free speech amendment. Its pretty much a given that one can make anonymous speech whenever, one can't be denied the right to speak because he or she did not present an ID, for example. However, there have been cases in which anonymous speakers have been compelled to release their identity after the fact if their speech was false and supposedly caused monetary damage to a third party. Given this logic, doesn't it seem incredibly hard to legally justify AML laws, which in cases can specifically state: "Required the verification of identity of purchasers..." (Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988) Do you think there's any chance these laws could actually be eventually overturned if brought to the supreme court? I'm not going to doubt that anything can happen, AML could be overturned. But the an argument against overturning AML is that you have the freedom to spend your money anyway you want it, but you aren't compelled by any law to have a bank account, bank accounts are privileges, not rights. Now it depends what's money and what's a product. I'm pretty sure super pacs didnt go around accepting envelopes filled with cash. Yet that was considered a form of speech. So clearly checkbook money, not just m0, is money, and therefore is speech. So, given that I have the right to anonymously transfer checkbook money, now what? Maybe some AML can live (they can regulate the sale of equities if they like, that's not money so they can require ID for people to buy them just like if people were to buy cigarettes) but clearly most of it goes down the tube with the citizens united ruling, no? And even if they could regulate banks, and get my ID, it wouldnt do any good. If the bank wanted to allow me to donate money to terrorists, and I did too, surely the government couldn't stop me, the same way the government couldn't stop me if I wanted to support terrorist groups by distributing pamphlets describing how cool they are, no? |
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The Citizens United ruling states that "spending is speech". Ignore the "corporations are people" bit for now. Point is, that spending money is a form of speech, according to the US supreme court. Also, slightly more dubiously, but still with fairly strong precedent, anonymous speech is protected under the free speech amendment. Its pretty much a given that one can make anonymous speech whenever, one can't be denied the right to speak because he or she did not present an ID, for example. However, there have been cases in which anonymous speakers have been compelled to release their identity after the fact if their speech was false and supposedly caused monetary damage to a third party. Given this logic, doesn't it seem incredibly hard to legally justify AML laws, which in cases can specifically state: "Required the verification of identity of purchasers..." (Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988) Do you think there's any chance these laws could actually be eventually overturned if brought to the supreme court? |
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The phenomenon of "crowding out" explains lots of price action on the stock market. Crowding out is basically when the government goes in and starts buying up stuff, and borrows money to do so, draining liquidity out of the system, driving interest rates up.  As you can see, normally, around a war there is a period of no gains in the stock market. Note, NOT a crash. Just flatness within a range. Also there is typically inflation, although note in the past this was generally not money-supply inflation, but price inflation, caused by scarcity as resources are diverted to the war effort. How can stock prices not bubble up when all that inflation is going on? Well, its partially due to uncertainty, which helps keep prices down. But its also due to crowding out: The government sucks up most the money, so not much of it is left for stocks. And the amount left, generally isn't invested in stocks, because companies have a hard time keeping up with the massive interest rates themselves, think of the internal rate of return. So the market remains flat, despite the inflation. Then the government pays back the money at the end of the war, rates fall, and there's nowhere near as much demand for credit. So, its AFTER the inflation do stocks start making their big gains. Also note, the inflation is generally permanent. In other words, once scarcity goes away, there has to be more money made in order to compensate for the increase in supply just to keep purchasing power flat; look what happened when they didn't do this: The Great Depression. However, this is all old news. I'm saying that the phenomenon of crowding-out died with the free markets. When the Fed stepped in with ZIRP, there can be no crowding out since the rates are fixed at 0, and you can never run out of liquidity because the fed will just keep printing even more. So, if there were to be a world war right now, not only would there not be a crash, but there would be a huge rally in the stock market, as all those bonds have to bought out with fresh money to preserve ZIRP. This flushes the system with liquidity, and also causes inflation. The stock market thus turns into an supply-inflation-protected savings account, as well as benefiting from the scarcity effect. Finally, with ZIRP, stocks won't have to compete with any rate whatsoever. So that begs the question, why the absolute heck is the market selling off. I think it might be irrational fear, and people misunderstanding the new normal. BTFD. |
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Market cap based Indexes make the most sense. If you were to have an index that measures it's price any other way then it would not be able to truly measure the performance of the companies in the index.
If the index used share price (like the DJIA does) then companies that have a high per share price would have a greater effect on the index then a company that has a low per share price, even if both companies are otherwise exactly the same.
Another option would be to have all companies be equally weighed, however this would make it unfeasible to effectively be able to invest in the index as small companies in the index would not have enough shares available.
Why not earnings as I said before, or even PEG ratio? |
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Shorting Gold ETFS/Futures/CFDs or another liquid & tradable proxy for gold is probably the absolute safest bet you can do right now.
Why?
Its clear to me that prices are manipulated downward. Banks simply won't allow a big upward spike in Gold prices for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is that they stand to lose a huge amount of money if they do so. So, instead, they double-down on short positions accumulating more paper profits from the slippage of their own orders, eroding confidence, and increasing the problem down the road whenever they want to get out of the huge short positions.
Pretty much the bull story for gold is that suddenly gold prices will rocket upwards when these banks will cover their shorts. The answer is, they won't fucking cover their shorts. GLD is non-deliverable. You can't ever demand delivery of physical gold in pretty much any of the products I just listed. You can't arb these products. If physical got out of wack, then all that would happen is the demand for gold would further shift away from the products I just listed and into the physical gold market, further tanking the ETF/Futures/CFD price.
There's basically no reason to ever be long the CFDs except if you think in the short term that people will use them to speculate on "flights to safety." However, more and more people are recognizing that buying these contracts don't amount to flights of safety; in fact, they can actually result in you taking on MORE risk, since you're now assuming the counterparty risk of whoever issues the contracts. If you're a Russian, whose to say your futures will even be honored, even for non-physical settlement, if more sanctions are put on you? The value of gold is in its perceived value, its limited quantity, and its purpose as a flight to safety asset. Gold contracts still have a perceived value, but lack the other characteristics of gold. The more banks short the contracts, the less perceived value they have.
Because of all this, there's literally NO reason not to short gold contracts. Either everything is peachy, and gold continues falling slowly, or everything goes berserk, and banks have to quickly dump gold contracts, and it works, in which case you're in the red for a few days but you recover, or everything goes berserk, and banks have to quickly dump gold contracts, but people don't fall for it, in which case the contracts go to 0. It gets even better when you realize that you get paid to short gold contracts, since gold doesn't earn interest & USD does. This means that contracts are usually in a state of contango, making shorting profitable even if globex is flat.
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Buybacks tend to help current top management when it receives compensation from stock options. By "returning" capital via buybacks the stock price increases, when doing so via dividends, the price declines.
Until the Bush administration dividends were taxed at ordinary rates while capital gains were taxed at a lower rate, so there was some reason to do buybacks. However, as you note, almost always investors would prefer cash in hand via a dividend.
I generally view buybacks as fairly self serving.
Preferred stock is basically just an unsecured loan.
The reason to do buybacks is as I noted the potential to defer taxes . . . And as I noted after a buyback, one can simulate a dividend by selling a proportional amount of stock... Also theoretically (only in theory, in practice it doesn't work out this way) buybacks shouldn't raise the price because the company is spending a proportional amount of value, reducing the equity of the company proportionally to the number of shares it bought back. Unless people sold proportionally, to simulate a dividend, in which case the price would go down. Same thing for dividends, if people reinvested dividends. Although point taken about the options. And preferred stock is different from unsecured lending for a variety of reasons, the primary of which is that it isn't unsecured. You need to remember the NPV of cash today, even if taxed, is still worth more then the NPV of cash years from today, still taxed. An investors income from a stock is going to be taxed regardless, it is just a matter of when, but in both scenarios the profits will be taxed when the investment is turned into cash. This is a very good point. Dividends will generate cash for shareholders "today" while share buybacks will generate "cash" "tomorrow" in the form of higher share prices over time and higher earnings per share over time. Additionally companies tend to purchase their own shares via share buybacks when their shares are expensive and issue new shares when share prices are cheap, thus destroying value for shareholders. Actually its a terrible point for reasons I just finished explaining. Say you hold $11 in stocks today. Or you hold $10 in stocks + $1 in dividends. The NPV of BOTH THESE ITEMS is the same, even though the $1 in stocks is in stocks not cash. Why? Because if the NPV of that $1 worth of stock wasn't $1, then it wouldn't trade for $1. Yes, the NpV of $1 today is worth more than $1 tomorrow, but the NPV of $1 today and $1 in stocks today IS the same (primarily because you could just liquidate the stock if you really wanted to. |
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Not to be a buzzkill, but other than the network that paypal has of people willing to accept it, and maybe a nice name, paypal offers nothing to BTC. You can already transfer money from BTC addr to BTC addr for free, why would you possibly want to pay 3% and do the same thing with paypal? Maximum they could do is offer a competitor to Bitpay with some merchants already "pre-accepting" it.
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I'm looking for a loan of $0.05btc for 2 weeks
You need to post your address if you wish for me to accept your offer. |
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