There's about 8k btc ($1M USD worth) on bitstamp priced below the current MtGox ask price of $122.89.  Will people bother signing up with bitstamp and sending their fiat there, or will they keep using Gox because they're comfortable with it?  An additional $1M at Gox would drive the price up to $126, a significant change in a slow week.

I think that if the Bitstamp wall gets eaten and bid orders placed with the resulting cash, whomever(s) put those underpriced BTC on Bitstamp will have hastened the end of the Gox era. Bitstamp is already at 25% of Gox volume the past day, and with just a few million USD in liquidity, they could become the dominant exchange.  No one seems to like Gox, but bigger players have had no choice up until now.

Received a message from Dwolla just now:

"As of 12:13 PM on 5/14/2013:

You’re receiving this notice because our systems have indicated that you’ve processed and completed a real-time Dwolla-to-Dwolla payment to Mutum Sigillum LLC (“Mt. Gox”) within the last 24 hours.

Due to recent court orders received from the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Dwolla is no longer legally able to service Mutum Sigillum LLC’s account.

This is a courtesy email encouraging you to follow up on any uncompleted orders with Mutum Sigillum LLC as Dwolla is now unable to move money to and from Mutum Sigillum LLC’s Dwolla account.

Dwolla is not party to this matter nor does it have any information or further insight into the situation. We strongly encourages those with questions to contact Mutum Sigillum LLC

Note: Dwolla requires a court order before honoring requests such as seizing funds or revoking access to an account.

On behalf of Dwolla, we apologize for this inconvenience."

This is rather inconvenient for me as I've been using Dwolla-->MtGox for some time now.  It's slow, but it's been working without much effort and with only a $0.25 fee.  How many people actually use this method of getting money into MtGox?

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have been many things in a short time: Olympic rowers. Nemeses of Mark Zuckerberg. Characters on “The Simpsons.” Now they can add a new label: bitcoin moguls.

The Winklevii — as they are popularly known — say they own nearly 1 percent of that, or some $11 million.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/as-big-investors-emerge-bitcoin-gets-ready-for-its-close-up/?hp

While it isn't confirmed that they're the ones yanking the MtGox exchange, they're prime suspects.  Not many players can put up 40k btc bidwalls and still sell into the resulting rally they sparked, and still be sane enough to have a diverse portfolio.  $11 million is  less than 5% of their net worth.

The timing is awfully convenient, too.  Did they sell out, pop the bubble, refill on the way down, and are now trying to inflate it again?

After sitting out about 6 months now, watching these $1+daily swings are making me want to get back in the game .  Also, the shelf full of fine scotch funded from my prior "work" has thinned dramatically, and reinforcements will soon be needed.

My totally uneducated opinion is:
* halving of the block reward will increase future price
* miners cashing out at the highest value since September 2011, 60-80% higher than the $5 stable zone, are dropping the price
* the adoption of FPGAs will change the mining demographic, favoring those that plunked down a lot of cash and will want to sell their mined coins ASAP to defray risks, dropping the price
* the ever-present smattering of big-money speculators buying in, and selling at random, make for big market moves at random times

Summed together, I have no idea where the price is going, but my my my, that volatility looks delectable.  I used to be more ideologically motivated about supporting bitcoin, but this time, I think it'll be about making a buck while reducing volatility.

PS: all the triangle charting posts still look completely silly

I wasn't following the action especially closely, so please correct me if I missed something, but it seemed like an attempted manipulation failed miserably today.

The attempted manipulator:
1) sold ~20k btc from $6.13 down to $5.72
2) placed buy order for 20k btc at $5.70, likely to try to catch liquidations and restock their bitcoin holdings
3) placed sell order for 10k at $5.96, likely to try to drive price down

But instead of getting to rebuy their bitcoins for cheaper, there were no (or insignificant) liquidations, and the selloff was met with a collective yawn: no panic selling, the price didn't go down, and not even a speculation thread about the selloff.

And then, 3 hrs after the 10k sell wall was placed, someone just bought the wall.  So the attempted manipulator now has an additional ~$175k in cash now, and 30k fewer bitcoins.  If they wanted to buy back into the market, they'd have to drive the price up to $6.50, and would have 5% fewer bitcoins than they had earlier in the day.

This is what market stability and maturity looks like.  Nice.

The "Bitcoin for Dummies" episode airs tomorrow, and the youtube preview has 20k views!  Will there be an obvious bump in bitcoin searches after it airs?

In the past, I think all bitcoin publicity hype has been just that - hype, with no effect on bitcoin usage.  Even if people stopped by the bitpay CES booth every minute, that would come to about 2k people over the whole CES.

A secondary measure might be the "what is bitcoin?" video, which has 884,257 views right now.

I'm guessing it will be late January or early February, and if I had to pick a day... January 29th.  Anyone else want to guess?  I'll send the winner 5 btc, tiebreaker goes to the first predictor of the winning day.

In b4 "never" - this is a thread for long-term bulls only!

EDIT: revised poll to add a "never" option for bears, though for obvious reasons, the contest can not be won by "never".

A blast from the past: October 17th, 2011, which seems like longer than 6 weeks ago:



In just 12 hours, there was not one, but two ~20k bitcoin dumps, and wild price swings from 3.5, to 2.4, back to 3.3, and back down to 2.3.

Not surprisingly, trade depth was only 15k btc to move the price $0.50 either way. Nowadays, with bitcoins around the same price, a 15k buy or sell only moves the price about a dime with the additional depth (even if it is "just" a big player).  Also, speculators are doing a great job of dampening out any oscillations.

Just thought I'd post this for a bit of perspective.

I've been buying when under 3, and selling at over 3 for the past two weeks, and have been doing quite well while also helping to stabilize the market.

I suppose it's appropriate for a virtual currency to settle on an arbitrary whole-number barrier, but it looks to me like 3 is a stable price point: the majority of miners haven't abandoned mining, and speculators have the purchasing power to buy all of the coins sold on the exchanges.

My prediction: prices won't drop below $2 or go above $4 this year.  Instead, what I'd like to see is the bid & ask walls get steeper, so that the market is less volatile when there are large buys or sells.  But remember months ago when 10k-30k coins would often be dropped on the market by a single sell order, crashing the market?  It seemed like a weekly occurrence back then, but I can't remember the last time that happened.  But we still have 10k-30k bitcoin buys every week or so.  Now to see if we can get through the holidays without a big crash.

I just donated 50 bitcoins to the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly fund.  Anyone want to help me with a money bomb that might generate press?

Fundraising numbers are announced every day at the General Assembly meetings, and a big haul from bitcoin donations WILL get noticed.  There are many journalists right now looking for a different angle on the protests, and this is probably the easiest way to generate press right now.

The General Assembly fund has pulled in about $75,000 so far over the 27 days of the protest (the other $75k was for the Occupy Wall Street Journal kickstarter campaign).
http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/13/news/economy/occupy_wall_street_money/

That's less than $3000 per day, and credit card donation processing company cut them off at one point.  If we can break 1000 bitcoins, I'll bet a bitcoin that we get a press mention, and perhaps even whole articles.

Donation address is in my sig.  276 bitcoins has been donated as of the time of this writing (my coins haven't cleared yet).

Let's do this!

What I'm looking for is Java code that uses Processing.org to display a set of floor maps to create a 3D building view like this:
https://sheilapontis.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/45-sbm2.gif

There are database tables which store the offsets between each map and the building origin (note that not all floors have the same floorplan in the above example image), as well as offsets between the site origin (0,0) location and each building origin.  There's also an orientation field in the database since not all maps have the same orientation for "north".  No need to integrate with the database, just populate a few objects with data for development and I'll take care of integration with database.

But the challenging part is that I also want to be able to explore the map by being able to pan or rotate the view in all relevant dimensions, zoom in and out, as well as display multiple buildings in a site-wide display.  Finally, I want to be able to draw an arbitrary number of lines between any map's XY coordinate, and any other map XY coordinate, in any desired line color.

Send me a bid and a well-documented code sample (I'm a stickler for comments), and let's talk.  Paid in bitcoins, of course, with the amount be agreed on in advance, or determined by exchange rate at the end of the project, your choice.  Should be a fun project, perfect work for the college student looking for a bit of extra coinage.  I'd do it but I'm swamped with other work, so I thought I'd offer it to my fellow bitcoiners.

more about Processing within Java:
http://www.friendsofed.com/extras/159059617X/Integrating-Processing-Within-Java.pdf

For example, a VC may invest $10 million in a company, in exchange for 10% of the stock in the company.  At the time of investment, is the company worth $100 million?  Not at all!  But the VC hopes they'll be worth $200-$400 million in a few years, and they can double their money or more.

Shares in a new startup are usually vastly overpriced for a good reason: they need the money in order to make a business.  And bitcoin exchanges and developers need money, too.  Someone has to pay the lawyers in Mt. Gox's court case against the French bank later this month, and I'm glad to have contributed towards their expenses.  And some early adopters are paying to develop FPGA miners, web site plug-ins, ATMs, and many other infrastructure tasks that take money and time, and I have, indirectly, contributed to their development costs, too.  It's a zero sum game between the buyers, sellers, exchanges, and miners: no cash is being destroyed, it's just getting redistributed.  And most importantly, none of it is going to Wall Street.

I'm holding, and will even likely buy more coins next month, at whatever the price it is then. And yes, a rant makes me feel better about having a lower face value on my held bitcoins. Having my money in the bitcoin economy instead of in a big bank feels good, even if the face value is currently less than I put in.