.

This is the tenth meetup of the Cincinnati Bitcoin group.


Usually held downtown, we are moving North to West Chester, (33 minutes from Downtown Cincinnati, 34 minutes from Downtown Dayton) to try to welcome some Dayton Bitcoiners.  We picked a place right along I-75, for your convenience!

We know you're out there, Dayton, with your history of strong tech folks (WPAFB, Ham Fest, etc).   Hopefully you can come!



Details:

Wednesday Oct 30, 7PM

The Spot (formerly Cavanaugh's)
7340 Kingsgate Way
West Chester, Ohio 45069

http://www.thespotwc.com


Register not required, but is here:
http://www.meetup.com/Cincinnati-Bitcoin/events/145672872/


Cincy Bitcoin website:
https://cincybitcoin.wordpress.com/

Andy Schroder developed a bitcoin controlled Fluid Dispenser (Think "gas pump where you self-serve pay by bitcoin").

This 20 minute video is cool.
Unfortunately he's banished to the newbie area, so no one is seeing it on this forum.  His post is here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=274702.msg2943141



And here's what Andy says:

I've developed a mobile, automated fluid dispenser that accepts bitcoin as the payment mechanism. You can watch a video and see some pictures about the device at the following web address:

http://andyschroder.com/BitcoinFluidDispenser/

You guys have to see this!  Great work!

i saw this announcement in the Newbies section, and I thought I'd mention it here.


Bitcoin Users Group in Greater Cincinnati:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=209359.0

If interested, post a reply here or there (or both?) or contact my buddy qazwsx...
qazwsxedcrfvtgb@tormail.org

PS, I'm interested.

[Pay the Government with Bitcoin? Leading Municipal Software company announces support for Bitcoin]

Pay the Government with Bitcoin? Leading Municipal Software company announces support for Bitcoin


Press Release: http://www2.egovlink.com/press-release-bitcoin.cfm
Reddit Discussion:  http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1b63xq/pay_the_government_with_bitcoin_leading_municipal/


Thought you guys might like to know this.



We decided to integrate Bitcoin payments into our E-Gov Suite of products, so that citizens can pay for municipal services with Bitcoin.

This means that our customers - cities, towns, and villages across the US - will be able to accept Bitcoins for payments of services like permits, utilities, class or event registration, shelter reservations, or even parking tickets. We just use our favorite Bitcoin Payment processor to handle the transaction and the conversion to Dollars.

Thought you guys would want to know. I think that government entities accepting Bitcoin will continue the momentum for Bitcoin!

I bet you can't wait to pay a parking ticket with Bitcoin!

I wrote this up, trying to give an introduction to Bitcoin to technical people (specifically some programmers I know).   I figured I'd post it here, in case someone else can use it.

It's long, sorry.  Feedback welcome.



For the non-technical person, it’s best to think of Bitcoins as currency like the Euro or like Gold.  It has properties like both.  First, the price fluctuates.  Second, you can spend it, save it, convert back and forth between dollars.



For the technical understanding, you have to know a little about digital signatures and hashing.  You just need to know that there are “1 way” math functions where it’s easy to go one way, and hard (impossible, practically speaking) to go the other way.  Like factoring large numbers.  It’s easy to create a large multiple of two really large primes, and it’s hard to factor the result.   Public key encryption and digital signatures use this feature of math – that 2 numbers, the “key pair” have a special mathematical relationship to each other.

I think Bitcoin is a weird name.  Because it’s really not a coin.  I think looking at a paper wallet helps to understand.   If you go to www.bitaddress.org, you’ll see that you get a public key and a private key.   Those two numbers have a mathematical property such that it’s easy to have derived the public key from the private key, but hard to go the other way.  In addition, you can prove that you are in possession of the private key, without ever divulging it.



For a banking analogy, the public key is like your checking account number.  You can tell people your checking account number (like you tell your company, for direct deposit).  You can accept payment to your checking account, by giving people the number.  There's not a lot of risk in divulging your checking account number, although I wouldn’t post my checking account number on the internet, because spending (or raiding your account) in the traditional banking sense isn’t as secure as in the Bitcoin world.  But your account number is something that’s OK to share, for people to deposit to.  This is like your “Bitcoin Address” or public key.

The private key is like your Debit Card, Pin, CVV/CVC code and Signature all wrapped in one.  In traditional banking, if you want to spend your money, you usually have to give this information over to the person you are spending it with.  And by doing so, you are allowing them to raid your account, but you are trusting them that they will only take the amount that you authorize.  

With Bitcoin, if you reveal your private key, then the person also can take all your money.  But the beauty of the math is that you don’t need to reveal it to prove that you have it.  So in this sense, Bitcoin is far more secure than traditional banking.  If I want to spend money in account “A”, all I need to do is prove that I am authorized (i.e. that I have the private key in my possession), and I can spend money in account “A”.



More banking analogy:   There are no coins in Bitcoin.  There are only ledger entries.  Picture a giant paper ledger at a central bank.  If I have money in account  “A” and I send it over to you, at account “B”, then there’s a one-line transaction in this paper ledger that says “debit column ‘A’ and credit column ‘B’”.  Further, you can look back in the ledger, examining column “A” and see that account ‘A’ has a positive balance by looking at the transaction that credited “A” originally.

A major technical breakthrough of Bitcoin is that they figured out how to implement all this, without having to trust a central bank to maintain the ledger.  Instead, the ledger is held in a peer-to-peer network.  Everyone can see the entire history of all transactions (if you want to), and follow any money from one account number to another (you don’t know who owns the account numbers, which is why they say it’s pseudonymous).  You can literally “follow the money”.



So when you spend money, you digitally “sign it over” to the other party.  Your digital signature proves that you have the right to spend it, and creates one transaction in the ledger that “moves” the money from your account to someone else’s.  And since people can own multiple accounts (“Bitcoin Addresses”), one transaction can move money from several accounts and to several accounts (including moving money internally from one account of yours to another).   A very frequent transaction that you’ll see is… say I want to give you 3.50 Bitcoins, and I have a Bitcoin Address with 5 Bitcoins.  I’ll spend the full 5, giving you 3.50, and another one of my addresses 1.50.  (Changing addresses adds to the anonymity.)  They call that “1.50” the “change”, just like if you presented a $5 bill from one pocket for a $3.50 transaction, got change back and put it into your other pocket.

OK, so you have all these transactions flying back and forth in a peer-to-peer network.  So how do you keep them all in sync and in order?   Well, each transaction has a random transaction number, so if a Bitcoin node gets a transaction, it can rapidly lookup to see if it ever got that transaction before.  If so, it can ignore this duplicate entry.  If not, it adds this transaction to the list of transactions, assuming that it looks legit (i.e. it’s a net-zero transaction – it debits the same amount that it credits, and the spending accounts are all digitally signed).  But this still doesn’t “sequence” the transactions, so wait, there’s more….

Here’s the magic part.  Again, picture the giant paper ledger at the bank.

The software is recording all these transactions on a page in the ledger.   Each transaction gets one line on the paper ledger, and each line needs to be logically consistent (i.e. net zero:  debit some accounts, credit others, for a sum of zero).  The software is also verifying that each transaction was legit, in that no money was spent that wasn’t available to be spent.  We really don’t care what sequence “on that page” the transactions are listed in, as long as we always look to previous pages to verify the account balances.  So we’ll consider all transactions on the current page as “unconfirmed transactions”.  And once we “turn the page” (moving forward in the ledger), they are confirmed.  So you can look backwards in the ledger to see confirmed transactions and make sure that the money is there to be spent.  And you can look on the current page to make sure that there aren’t two transactions that “double-spend” a balance.  And then the system can periodically “turn the page” to lock in the transactions.

So who turns the page, and what is the process of turning the page?   Well, people compete to turn the page, and get paid to do it.  They are running programs on their systems that do basically one function:  They take a group of unconfirmed transactions, and compute some math around it.  And the first one to compute the correct math gets paid.  This is the “mining” process  - another name that I dislike.

The algorithm is this:  they figuratively write one more transaction on the page that pays them a certain amount of Bitcoins (for doing the work to turn the page), and then append a “random” number on the page, and hash all the numbers on the page.  And if the hash comes up with a leading zero, then they can lock in the page.  They announce to the world that “This random number locks in page x”, and they get to keep the money, because they effectively “paid themselves” on that page.  

Of course hashing a page full of numbers to get a leading zero is not a hard problem – it’s a 50/50 shot in binary.  Hashing a page full of numbers and getting 2 leading zeros in the result is a 25% probability of success.  But hashing a page full of numbers and getting a series of 45 leading zero bits is a really hard problem.   And so the number of leading zeros required adjusts over time, depending on the success of these people who are securing the money system (called “miners”).  These people pick a random number, try the hash and fail the vast majority of the time.  But every ten minutes (on average) someone succeeds, and gets paid.

This is the way the money is initially distributed.  Those who perform this valuable service of securing the transactions get paid.

When someone announces that they have “locked a page of the ledger”, everyone else can easily check their work, and will accept it if it was done properly.  That is, verify that they paid themselves the right amount of money (which, currently, is 25 Bitcoins, but this ramps down over the years, plus any transaction fees on the page), and that the random number that they supplied truly does make the page hash to some checksum that has lots of leading zeros.

It’s a beautiful technical solution to the problem of avoiding double-spending of money.  There are some other conditions that are handled by the software as well – if two miners solve the problem nearly simultaneously, who decides who won?  Well, the overall collection of miners will proceed down both paths, with some miners believing that one person won, and others will believe that the other person won, depending on which announcement you heard first, and which answer is better in some technical tie-breaking sense.  

This probably won’t be a 50/50 split because of peer-to-peer networking, you are going to hear one first.  So, as the subsequent  page of transactions is getting locked in, different miners might be working on different problems.  And chances are that the part of the network that has more nodes believing in its path will lock the next page.  Eventually, one of the two paths will emerge victorious over the other, and one single ledger will again be considered accurate.    So the more confirmations you have on a transaction, the more “pages” have been locked in, and so the more certain you can be that it’s permanent in the ledger.  Six confirmations is considered to be perfect confirmation, in a practical sense.

Ledger Pages in my analogy are called “blocks” in Bitcoin language.

Bitcoin software and websites hide all this complexity from you.  But it helps to understand it, because it adds up to real money!  If you have a significant stash of Bitcoins, you need to know who you are trusting, and it all comes down to who is holding the Private Keys.  If you keep a balance on a website (like Blockchain.info, or Mt Gox, or Coinbase or Instawallet), then you are trusting them to protect the private keys.  This has proven to be disastrous in some other instances in the past.  But as time goes by, the weaker, less trustworthy players seem to be falling out, although someone new (trustworthy or untrustworthy) can pop up at any time, and old favorites can screw up and lose everything too!

If you are running the Bitcoin software on your local PC, then you need to protect your own private key(s).  Note that the software can generate billions of Bitcoin Addresses from one private key.  But you are trying to protect your Private Key, which is contained in a wallet file on your local PC, if you go this route.  So you would want a good backup or two of your wallet file, and you want to encrypt it.  And keep your PC free of viruses and key-loggers.

If you are holding a substantial sum of money in Bitcoins, then you may consider an offline wallet.  The concept here is to create a key pair “offline” so that no key-logger, virus, or untrustworthy website can steal your private key.  You can send money to the offline wallet without ever having the Private Key online.  If you trust bitaddress.org (and it’s all open source!), there’s a way you can print a paper wallet, and never have those digits of your private key ever appear on a pc that’s connected to the internet ever.  

And since Bitcoin is just a giant ledger, then funding that account is just a matter of paying the public key (Bitcoin Address), and you are all set.  Put your investment away for a few years and see what happens.  When you want to “spend” it or “cash” it, type in the private key (or scan it in), and you can spend it.  In fact, you can check your account balance over the years without ever having your private key touch the internet.

It frustrates me that Blockchain.info can't provide accurate pricing data with their API.

Currently their API is reporting a most recent 24 hour price of 14.308837101763865
 http://blockchain.info/q/24hrprice

This is annoying!  who do I talk to?

[tradehill]

Does anybody know why Blockchain.info gives inconsistent results for their 24 Hour Average price in US Dollars?

Example:
(A) http://blockchain.info/q/24hrprice currently shows $21.0
(B) http://blockchain.info/ticker currently shows $20.36


I see that the simple Javascript lookup, www.btcbal.com , uses the first one, which seems to run high lately.

From documentation:

(A) says:   24hrprice - 24 hour weighted price from Mt.gox and tradehill
(From http://blockchain.info/q/ )

(B) says:   Returns a JSON object with the currency codes as keys. "15m" is the 15 minutes delayed market price, "24h" is the 24 hour average market price, "symbol" is the currency symbol.
(From http://blockchain.info/api/charts_api )


Could the tradehill data be messing up the first one?

[Background on Digital Time Stamps (skip or skim if you know this):]

What do you guys think of this idea?

Using Bitcoin as a Decentralized Digital Time Stamp Service.
This has been kicked around a few times in other forum posts (like here and here as just a couple of examples). But I think I have an implementation proposal that may be original.


Background on Digital Time Stamps  (skip or skim if you know this):

The problem that would be solved is this:  You have created some digital work (perhaps a photograph, an MP3, or a signed contract, or a word document, or a scanned document).  You want to be able to prove that it existed prior to some date.

The old fashioned way to accomplish this would be to snail-mail it to yourself in a sealed envelope, and use the postmark as your proof.

A newer technique is to use a digital time stamp service such as digistamp.  Digital time stamping Protocol is described in rfc 3161.

Costs to time stamp something can range from about 40 cents for quantity of one, down to about 4 cents or less, at higher quantities.


Proposed Bitcoin solution:

If you have a digital file that you wish to time stamp, perform the following steps:
1) calculate a digital hash of the file, to generate a unique Bitcoin Address
2) pay that address some very small amount of Bitcoins (somewhere between .00000001 and .01 BTC, along with the appropriate transaction fee).

This payment would effectively be destroyed, as the likelihood that anyone has that address in their wallet would be extremely small.  The value of everyone else's Bitcoins would rise ever so slightly (as supply would be reduced), which should make many of you happy.  There's no extra burden on the Bitcoin system (as would be if you stuck additional information in the transaction record).  The only burden would be a small transaction, which would be funded by the transaction fee.


To defend your claim of the time stamp, you'd simply need to show that the digital hash (fingerprint) of the file equals the address that the coins were sent to. 

To prove that you "own" the digital file (if necessary), you'd simply need to show that you are in control of the sending Bitcoin address (so you'd need to save your wallet file).  This claim would obviously not be as strong as the timestamp claim, as you could have stolen the wallet file.


Pros and Cons:

When compared to other digital time stamp services, this can be much cheaper.  It is decentralized.  But it is not RFC 3161 compliant.  And it wastes/destroys small amounts of Bitcoins.



Any comments?  Any ideas for improvement?

[Edit of my edit: I think this is an entertaining thread. It starts with a discussion of how a Bitcoin Lottery could be run. After several messages, in message #4, a user who runs a lottery claims that it is cheat-proof, and bets his entire BTC fortune that I can't think of a way that he can pay himself without everybody noticing.I proceed to give a method of how he can do that. Some people agree and others disagree. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not accusing him of any wrong-doing; I'm wondering what consensus opinion is.But it does bring up an interesting dilemma.If someone runs a betting site, and he loses a very public bet in a forum and fails to pay up, can you trust his betting site?]

Edit of my edit:  I think this is an entertaining thread.  It starts with a discussion of how a Bitcoin Lottery could be run. After several messages, in message #4, a user who runs a lottery claims that it is cheat-proof, and bets his entire BTC fortune that I can't think of a way that he can pay himself without everybody noticing.

I proceed to give a method of how he can do that.  Some people agree and others disagree. 
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not accusing him of any wrong-doing; I'm wondering what consensus opinion is.

But it does bring up an interesting dilemma.

If someone runs a betting site, and he loses a very public bet in a forum and fails to pay up, can you trust his betting site?

Lotteries need to be provably honest.

A provably honest lottery site could be one that bet on the hash of an upcoming Block.  The Hex value of the Block Hash (or the last few digits) could be bet upon.  If you can name the last hex digit of block 131300 (or some future block, 2 blocks into the future), you get a 15 to 1 payback on your bet.  Name the last 2 hex digits, and get a 250 to 1 payback.  Bet correctly that a certain 3-digit sequence will appear somewhere in the Block Hash, leading zeros excluded, and you get $250 (or whatever makes it a near fair bet).

People can see payments into the lottery in the BlockExplorer, and can see payments out (which should be predictable, odds-wise).

You could even make it provably honest as a para-mutual, growing bet (like Power Ball or MegaMillions).  You buy a "lottery ticket", and your lowest numerical payment address recorded in the transaction is your entry.  If your payment address, written in hex, has its last N hex digits matching the Block hash, you win.  Otherwise the jackpot grows.  Users can watch BlockExplorer to verify that previous payouts were made.  (Of course, you can never prove that the Lottery Company won't run off on this next bet....)


The only real issues that I see with this are if there's a chain split.  So maybe payouts are delayed by a day to help fight that case.



Somebody get to work on this!

If you've been messing with your wallet.dat file, and "lose" a bitcoin in the process, this tip might help you out.  (This is probably old news for the long timers, but I think this might benefit someone!)

If you start bitcoin with the -rescan option, the block chain is rescanned looking for any bitcoin transactions that pertain to your current wallet.  So make sure you try that!


Here's what I did to lose, and subsequently find, a bitcoin.

 1. I've been running my client program, where I have say 50 Bitcoins.
 2. I ended my client program
 3. I backed up my wallet.dat file, and then renamed it to wallet_50btc.dat
 4. Start the client program, and generate a fresh new wallet with a new wallet ID, new private keys, etc. 
 5. Copy my new Bitcoin Address to notepad
 6. Terminate the client program
 7. Rename wallet.dat to wallet_0btc.dat
 8. Rename wallet_50.dat to wallet.dat
 9. Start the client program.  All looks good, I have 50 Bitcoins.
 10. Pay 1 BTC to my new Bitcoin Address that I had copied to notepad.
 11. Wait for at least 1 confirmation.  (I wanted to make sure that I got my change!). Now my balance is 1 less, i.e. 49 BTC.
 12. Terminate the client program.
 13. Rename wallet.dat to wallet_49btc.dat
 14. Rename wallet_0btc.dat to wallet.dat
 15. Start the client.  The wallet is empty.  Where'd the 1 BTC go?

 (The answer is that it's in a block that was already received and processed (in step 11), and so Bitcoin isn't going to process it again, unless instructed to.  They aren't really lost, they're hidden in the Block Chain, and your client program isn't going to go look for them, unless you tell it to.  The client program thinks it has already processed all those old blocks.)

 To re-find the lost coin:
 16. terminate the client.
 17. run the client with -rescan option.  After processing all the blocks, the 1 BTC shows up in the client.

Hopefully this helps someone find some lost Bitcoins.  If so, I'll gladly accept a cut!
Reference: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin

Evaluating the smallest possible block in the block chain, I looked at Block #1, which is 215 bytes, and is 50 BTC.

Using calculations from 2007 Discover Magazine, we can compute that the weight of the 215 bytes is about 1E-21 ounces.

At current exchange rates, this 50 BTC is worth approximately 1E+3 dollars (a little less than a thousand bucks).  This means that Bitcoins are worth roughly 1E+24 dollars per ounce.

Gold is under $2000 per ounce (2E+3), so Bitcoins are 5E+20 times more valuable than gold.  
That's 500 * 1E+6 * 1E+12, or
500 million trillion times more valuable than gold.



Meaningless calculations, I know.  But kind of funny.  Maybe?

It seems to be that the cost of mining will always approach the expected revenues from mining, such that it's hard to do much better than break-even on mining from now on, especially when you factor in electricity costs.  So it occurred to me that the only people who can really benefit from mining in the future are those with no electric bill.

Around here, the price of utilities at college is included in the dorm fee.  I wonder if, come September, college campuses will see a spike in their electric bills for dormitories.

I found the first snapshot of Mt.Gox's website to be pretty interesting.  Thought you might enjoy:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070525044536/http://mtgox.com/gwt/mtgox.php

[myB.TC - A bit.ly type service for your wallet ID]

I've built myB.TC, and am looking for some gentle testers and some feedback.



              myB.TC  -  A bit.ly type service for your wallet ID

Concept:

Each user can set up their own web page, accessible from a tiny URL of your choice (a short name), that lets you store your wallet ID on the net.  That way, when your drinking buddy says "I'll pay you for that last round in Bitcoin", you don't have to rattle off a 34-character Bitcoin address.  Instead, you can direct him to your personal webpage that holds your wallet ID.  "OK, my Bitcoin shortname is jerfelix."

The User pages look like this:   myB.TC/jerfelix

You, the user, can maintain your public page.  You can put a unique phrase on that page, like "I'm John Smith, the car enthusiast from St. Louis".  That way, when people look you up, they can have some reassurance that they got the CORRECT John Smith.

Later, if you want to update your public wallet ID, you simply log in, and make a change. 

In fact, you can use multiple short names.  If you want myB.TC/GiftForTheBoss, you can reserve that one, and direct your co-workers to pay you through that, as you collect money for the Boss's birthday gift.

New Convention Proposal:

In addition, I'm proposing a new convention.  Instead of including your wallet ID in your signature, I propose we begin using the convention ฿shortname or B/shortname.   What do you think of, when you see "@name"?   Twitter, right?  Well, with ฿shortname or B/shortname, let's get people to think Bitcoin.  And more specifically, that you can be found in the Bitcoin directory myB.TC, under that shortname.

I'm proposing that you use this convention across the net, in forums and on web pages.  What do you think?


So, I'm ฿jerfelix (alternately B/jerfelix, for the unicode-impaired) and you can see my page at  myB.TC/jerfelix


Reserved Names:

I took the liberty of reserving people's forum names, so that you can claim your name.  This was a little tricky.  I thought it would be nice for people to be able to grab the name that they use in the Bitcoin Forum, and the only way I could think of to confirm that you are who you say you are, was to have you post some specific text in any forum message, and then tell the software the URL where it can be found.  So try to claim your forum name as a shortname.  You can post your claim text in ANY message - preferably a witty message that you were going to type anyway.  I am a little hesitant about "spamming the forum", so hopefully people will keep their claiming messages all in one thread.  If this gets to be obnoxious, I'll turn it off.

I doubt that I got the claiming part of the software working exactly right, so gentle testing is encouraged!  (This was very hard for me to test without spamming the forums!)

Note, I made some names unavailable.  If your forum name doesn't meet my shortname criteria (because it contains illegal characters based on what's permitted in URLs, or because it's under 4 characters, or if it's a collision with some famous name (like walmart)), then this feature may not work for you.  I did extend some shorter names with underscore.  So if your forum name is ab, it would be ab__ (that is, 4 character minimum for now).  If your forum name is walmart, tough luck - pick a different one.


Bounty Hunter:

myB.TC was developed in response to the 200 BTC bounty posed at http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=1429.msg145713#msg145713  .  Unfortunately, just prior to me publishing the site, the bounty was lowered by 95% to 5 BTC.  Needless to say I was bummed.  But I reworked the site to allow people to buy shortnames for a nominal fee, and to claim their own forum name. 

So, if you like the site, I won't complain if you help to make up that 195 BTC discrepancy!!   remember, I'm at ฿jerfelix and you can see my page at  myB.TC/jerfelix - (the old fashioned way is for me to post 1BZbpx7wHAUcBgzAtH4KeogTmtgUrq5Nkk ). 
~Ain't to proud to beg, sweet darling ~

Please check it out, and let me know what you think.  Be gentle.  Ideas, comments, enhancement requests, and bug reports are ALL very welcome!  Is there anything else out there like this?

myB.TC

I saw that an eBook went up on Amazon a couple of days ago.
http://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Peer---Peer-Illustrated-ebook/dp/B00538IVFK/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1306752261&sr=8-2


Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System [Illustrated] [Kindle Edition]
Satoshi Nakamoto (Author)

Do you think that Satoshi put this out there?  Or did someone take his original paper, and toss it on Amazon to try to profit from it?  (I didn't look at a copy of the $0.99 eBook.  Has anybody seen it?)

I'm looking at Bitcoin Charts, and see a huge spike of buy orders at 6.50 BTC
See http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html for realtime, or http://www.flickr.com/photos/63348656@N08/5755403189/ for a screen shot.

Seems unusual that someone would put in a public buy order for 7000 units at a price of 6.50.  That's $45,500.

To me, that looks fishy.
I recently read an article about stock market manipulators who buy a small amount of shares, and then put in a HUGE public Buy order below the market price, so that other potential buyers will see it, and think that there's major support at a certain price (and therefore, the price is less likely to go down below that, so it's a safer bet).  And then the public (i.e. the suckers) bid up the price, while the scammer sells out at a higher price (and then cancels the low buy order).

The theory that I am posing is that perhaps someone wants the price to go up, so they have put in a huge public buy order at 6.50 (which they never intend to execute) and maybe a dark sell order at 7.50 or so.

Do you think I am being too paranoid?  I know there are manipulators out there.

At the same time, I am very impressed with the generosity of the Bitcoin community, as a newbie.  Guess it's life.  There are the takers, and there are the givers.  
In another thread, I posted my bitcoin address, because the faucet was broke and I am bitcoin-broke, and someone was kind enough to shoot me some coins!