http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-10/bitcoin-default-swaps-blythe-masters-joins-bitcoin-startup

So this Blythe Master sounds like a piece of work, but it is very interesting to me that they are trying to set up a kind of swift for Bitcoin.  Someone with so much market influence is probably backed by lots of money will surely help the bitcoin environment to grow.
It really does seem like the old wall street types are seeing opportunities in Bitcoin at the moment, I hope it doesn't take over too much, but it should definitely make things more mainstream.

What does everyone make of the price of oil at the moment? 

There has been a lot of chatter that we could see $10 oil, then in the next breath people say oil could return to $100 in short order.  I personally beleive that it is being used as a political tool against Iran and Russia, whilst the Saudis will also be happy to get rid of some of the more expensive to reach fracking oil from the system.

The thing is, at the moment global supply is high and stores are full, which would indicate that Oil is over-priced.  BUT this rate of oil cannot be profitable got out of the ground at $50-60 per barrel, so in the future prices will have to rise or we will have a short fall, so the price should start to normalize in short order.

Where do you see the price going?  I invested some when Brent went under $50, but I feel slightly less confident at $60.  I do think $100 will be reached in the next 5 years again, but I am after a shorter investment..

I just got an email from New Scientist magazine saying they are giving away a Bitcoin.
That's an odd bit of press, but getting word out to a wider and new audience, what do you make of it?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26905-win-your-very-own-bitcoin.html?cmpid=EMP|NSNS|2015-0206-GLOBAL-bitcoincomp&utm_medium=EMP&utm_source=NSNS&utm_campaign=bitcoincomp&

Ok I in no way mean to give advice, but here are my bets for the weekend.
I am betting on Nitrogensports.

Manchester United -1 @ 2.133, I think LvG will have them ready after last weeks loss to give QPR a good beating
Southampton match odds @ 2.4. Newcastle are very hit and miss, but recently more miss.  We never do well against the Saints, I fancy Suthampton to keep up their good form.
I will bet them both as singles and a parlay.

I will post tomorrow's football bets later today, then the NFL ones tomorrow.

If anyone agrees, feel free to bet along with me and good luck to you!
If you disagree, then feel free to bet against me, but I hope you lose!

[like this photo:]

Hi all

So this is very off topic, but I am a bitcoin and football (soccer) fan.  I had a season ticket for Mainz05, a German team where I live, but my girlfriend didn't have a season ticket, so I stopped going.  This season they have a competition where you take a photo with a cardboard cutout Shinji Okazaki (one of our best players) and then collect likes for the photo.  My girlfriend is in the competition and it currently in 5th place (there are 5 season tickets to win) but it is very close.

If you could help me out and like this photo:
https://www.facebook.com/1fsvmainz05/photos/a.790556007632782.1073741992.149265181761871/790556030966113/?type=3&theater

It would mean she will win a season ticket, so I can buy a season ticket and start going to the football again!

Just so that it isn't 100% off topic, I have asked Mainz05 to accept Bitcoins.  They have this awesome pre-paid electric card system at the moment, which would easily be topped up with bitcoin, or completely replaced by bitcoin.

Thanks!

PM me bids for 55k bull coins
BTC, FZ, QRK or SPT accepted

$8.5 billion is the market cap at the moment.  It sucks that China are messing around stopping banks from investing in them and 3rd party exchanges etc, but does Bitcoin really need China to maintain the market cap.?

$8.5 billion is peanuts, and the price rise and increased press has only increased the number of places where people can buy and use Bitcoins.  Finland has it's first bitcoin ATM, in the UK people will be able to buy Bitcoins at almost every corner shop, Switzerland want to classify it as a foreign currency, Germany already have.  Cyprus have the first Bitcoin bank opening in a months time...
As a guide, the 100th biggest company in the world has a market cap of $70 billion, LinkedIn has a $25.5 billion market cap! Bitcoin has so much room to grow that it is unreal. 

I think if China wants out of the Bitcoin market, then fine.  Bitcoin has a bright future with or without them. I see $2000 next year no problems.

So the major indexes are all really high now, they look set to fall especially when tapering is announce (I think it will start but have to be cancelled)
When the markets crash, do you expect that some of the money will land in Bitcoin?  I would expect that to happen, but then we are at near ATH levels whilst the markets are flying, so it could be that if they fall, we fall, due to a risk off atmosphere.

I wanted to sell some bitcoins for pound sterling and was contacted by ricardotemporal who wanted to buy.
He posted a link to his localbitcoins account: https://localbitcoins.com/accounts/profile/ricardotemporal/ a heavily used and trusted account.

On his localbitcoin account he has a facebook link, so I asked him to message me from this facebook account, which he couldn't.  So I posted on the wall of the account to confirm that he was who he said he was, but I got a reply back saying that he had not offered me any deals.

Watch out for this guy.  Fortunately he is a junior member, but his trust is 0, so someone could easily fall for it.

I want to sell 1.47632249 BTC for 810 pounds per BTC.

I will only accept faster payments in the UK to my HSBC bank account.  As I haven't used localbitcoins before, my account is limited, but if that is a problem you could set up a trade that I will use.

I would rather use an escrow, unless your trust is awesome, I can't afford to take chances with so much money.

PM me to work out a trade (or post here if you would rather it all be in public.)

Not sure if this has been posted (I couldn't find it if it was), but it is nice for the Alt world as almost everyone gets a mention!

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/28/bitcoin-alternatives-future-currency-investments Bitcoin’s recent meteoric rise in value to over $1,000 has shone the spotlight on alternative currencies, but bitcoin is not the only new digital currency vying for relevancy in 2013.

Like bitcoins most of these currencies are mined by computers solving hard mathematical problems. The "coins" do not exist physically, of course, as the currencies are virtual existing only as computer files.

As they are based on peer-to-peer protocols, no one computer controls the currencies, but networks keep track of all transactions made using these digital currencies, but they do not know what the coins were actually used for – just the ID of the computer "wallet" they move from and to.

Here are nine alternatives to think about before putting your time, effort and money into bitcoin.
Litecoin

Like bitcoin, litecoin is another crytography-based digital currency, which has also seen a dramatic rise in value in recent months.

Litecoin, a peer-to-peer opensource digital currency, could be described as an offshoot of bitcoin. In fact, it is based on the bitcoin protocol, but instead of requiring extraordinary computing power to mine effectively, can be mined efficiently using standard computers due to its algorithm originally designed by Dr Colin Percival for the Tarsnap secure online backup service for Linux and other opensource operating systems.
Namecoin

Also based on bitcoin, namecoin is another opensource offshoot. A cryptocurrency, namecoin also acts as a decentralised DNS – the protocol on the internet that turns human-comprehensible website names such as theguardian.com into addresses understandable by machines. By acting as its own DNS, the currency operates outside the regular internet and therefore outside the governance of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

The currency values and domain names are stored within the blockchain record, which limits the total number of namecoins to 21m, with each coin divisible down to eight decimal places.
Peercoin

Another variant of the bitcoin-like peer-to-peer currency principle, peercoin promises increased efficiency of mining, improved security and safeguards to avoid abuse by group mining, which has recently been highlighted as a potential flaw with bitcoin.

Peercoin has the fourth-largest market cap among “altcoins” as these alternative digital currencies are known, according to CoinMarketCap.com, which tracks emerging and traded currencies.
Primecoin

A cryptocurrency like bitcoin, primecoin differs at its core because it uses a totally separate mathematical basis for mining. Instead of relying on bitcoin’s “Hashcash” algorithm, primecoin finds long Cunningham chains – a certain sequence of prime numbers named after the mathematician AJC Cunningham – to build value into the currency.

Unlike bitcoin, primecoin’s mining difficulty increases slightly with each new coin created, scaling more evenly than bitcoin’s bigger shift in mining difficulty every 2016 blocks.
Feathercoin

Based upon litecoin, feathercoin adjusts its mining difficulty more often than litecoin and was announced in April 2013. Unlike some other digital currencies, feathercoin updates regularly to incorporate new features and enhancements, including protections from abuse and forking by group mining.
Novacoin

Yet another peer-to-peer digital cryptocurrency, Novacoin differs from most of the other altcoins by integrating protection schemes within the core of the currency, which deters abuse by mining groups.

Novacoin also has a technical cap of 2bn coins, a much larger number than most of the other digital currencies which top out in the millions, rather than billions of coins. The cap could also be increased if it was ever reached, giving novacoin a theoretical dynamic inflation.
Infinitecoin

Announced in June 2013, as another litecoin spin-off, infinitecoin differs with more frequent difficulty adjustment rate during mining and the total number of coins that can be created, which is 1142.86 times as many as litecoin.
Megacoin

A bitcoin analogue in its infancy, created within the fourth quarter of 2013, megacoin is limited to 42m total coins and is mined like every other crytocurrency. Each coin worth around $0.50, and its main selling point is its overt branding, something quite a few other digital currencies lack.
Quark coin

Another altcoin in its infancy, launched in 2013, Quark coin takes the security elements of the cryptocurrency very seriously employing nine separate rounds of encryption using six different algorithms.

If those nine bitcoin alternatives weren’t enough for you, there are over 60 different altcoin currencies currently being traded at various exchanges like Cryptsy, including AndroidsTokens, AlphaCoin, AmericanCoin, AnonCoin, Argentum, AsicCoin, BBQCoin, BitCar, ByteCoin, BitGem, BottleCaps, CryptoBuck, CryptogenicBullion, CopperLark, Cosmoscoin, CHNCoin, ColossusCoin, CopperBars, CraftCoin, CasinoCoin ...