This is one of Bitcoins biggest questions right now, what is a tainted coin? It seems that it already are some tainted coins out there that for example Mt.Gox is not allowing to be traded with at their exchange, how does one know if they have some tainted coins in their wallet? And also who dictates if a coin is tainted or not?

This community should have a very clear answer to this questions, no one serious will invest in this Economy in the long run without a clarification and Bitcoin will just attract small players and hackers.

If someone is giving me fiat money, I know that I can spend that money as easliy as I got it. The same thing should be with Bitcoin, so how are we going to handle with this issue?

This is a big issue, everytime Bitcoin price is going up it is at the same time working against it self with the high inflation that we have right now. This is just the way Bitcoin is constructed today. I know that Bitcoin isn't any ponzi sheme, but it will look as it is. The reason for this is very easy to explain, at $3 the inflation rate gives Bitcoin around $21 000/day of fresh capital (or miners that pay this amount by keeping their Bitcoins - the money has to come from somewhere) that is needed to hold the system intact and stable at the rate it is long term. If the price goes up to $10 or $30 then what is needed of fresh money at the exchanges is $72 000/day or $210 000/day to sustain a stable price at those levels. When the inflow of money doesn't come in at a stable rate, then it will act as if it was a ponzi scheme, because soon after it will fluctuate in a very disturbing way. As soon as the interest is gone for a couple of weeks the price will go down dramatically and vice versa.

So my conclusion is that every time anyone or group wants to start to bring in a bigger interest for Bitcoin they are facing a very very hard competitor. They can keep the price high for a couple of weeks, that is possible. But after that the inflation just hits the price every day, it acts today like a Duracell bunny and just gives those inflation numbers to the exchanges and it will not take a pause because the interest in down for a short period. And that will very fast show it self at the exchange price, and when the price goes down people sell in the trend. Exactly the same way they did when the price went up, a herd mentality.

One of my passions of life has been to really understand why the prices in the financial markets (and pretty much everything that is traded) goes up or down. I have been doing this for more then 11 years so what I am saying is my main conclusion why we have all these people that is right now tired of the way Bitcoin is acting, everyone should understand why this reason is.

And also, many super bulls are very blind and just see the positive signs, they really live in their own world. So for the super bulls, you don't need to comment.

I cancelled my withdrawal earlier, but how is it looking now.

Is Paxum withdrawals still under investigation (at Mt.Gox)?

You are right now investing in Bitcoins. As an idea I think this is a good one, you will probably make some kind of good return on it within 2-5 years, but what you are missing is that you guys are in a hurry, don't forget the high inflation environment. You have put in your buying orders at least 6 months to early, we are still printing 7200 bitcoins/day, so you are buying to high to soon, it is a classic beginners mistake and you will pay it by forced liquidation (if you buy through Bitcoinica with leverage) or you have to wait maybe up to several years to get a good return. Let the market do what it is best at doing, giving what is traded the right value, knowing that we are printing 7200 BTC/day will let everyone that is interested get in to BTC at fair levels, and that level isn't 3 USD, it is much lower.

The market will do this with "force", meaning people will do all what it takes to tackle the high inflation environment (and losing a lot of money doing so), or we can just get to a good fair value as soon as possible and start building up the Bitcoin community and price.

To compare it, it is like the Economy in the real world, the central banks tries in every way keep the bubble intact, what is necessary is to let the bubble burst all the way as soon as possible (like 1929-1932 great depression), and after that start building it up again.

This is my point of view, lets see which one the market will choose.

Just to be sure, has anyone been successful at withdrawing in any of the withdrawal options like Paxum, Dwolla, international wire etc. for the last week?

They told me that my money should have been at my Paxum account yesterday (no money on the account yet), I requested to withdraw 2500 USD more then a week ago.

I made a request for transfer of my money on Saturday, so the withdrawal order probably went through on Monday. Now it is Wednesday and the money isn't still on my account. What is your experience of SEPA transfers, how many days should it take?

I thought that SEPA transfers main points are that it is pretty fast and cheap.

Because Bitcoin in its nature is decentralized, you would think that people investing time, effort and financial means around Bitcoin would try to make for example the exchanges as decentralized as possible. But the world doesn't look like that, it is much easier to for example centralize a exchange and have as we have it today with Mt.Gox one exchanges that everyone finds liquidity at. Because we could suppose that Mt.Gox doesn't want to create a "exchange pool" with other exchanges and by that lose potential fees through their own platform. We as a community needs to put effort on the exchanges that get in the position that Mt.Gox is in right now, being number one.

My suggestions are these, feel free to make comment on them and add suggestions as well.

1. Insider trading from all exchanges should be strictly illegal (including own bots that does the trading on algorithms), specially on their on exchange but maybe even on other exchanges (when it comes to active trading). This could be looked at from a committee  (that we as a community in a democratic way will vote for) that will get the right to act accordingly, if there are suspicion to look in to the matter in different ways.

Reason: Easy to understand, you can see all other peoples orders, amount of BTC/fiat money, trading habits of each account, money flows, BTC flows etc.

2. Some kind of audit on the financial health of the company, like do they have the Bitcoins they should have that their customers have deposited, same thing with fiat currency's, at which accounts are they, how much etc.

Reason: If Mt.Gox loses all their financial assets, then I would say Bitcoin will have it very hard to rise after that (for ever). Also it is a trust issue, it is much easier to get into Bitcoin as a merchant etc. if you know that your money is audited.





Many things has evolved over thousands of years, thinking that markets will take care of that, market will take care of this is a naive standing point. I am the first to acknowledge that Bitcoin is a very interesting and necessitous financial tool (because of the way our world looks like today) that have the potential to, to some part revolutionize the world. But having said that some part of the world today looks as it does because it works.

I hate it when people look at everything in black and white. Like if we have two pools, (Love) Bitcoin and (Hate) the financial industry, the world doesn't look like that, the financial industry of today believe it or not have some part of their business that are working pretty good. Let us adapt the good parts of the present world order we now live in and in-weave it with Bitcoin (for the new world order). It will make Bitcoin much more prosperous and will attract people with different backgrounds and not as it is today a very specific individual (background).

 
 

...at doing so. People are losing big because of this.

There is someone/group that are playing a unfair game at manipulating the Mt.Gox exchange. They/him have at least 30 000 bitcoins worth of fiat/BTC that they move around in by putting up big walls, removing them. Try to make people panic selling and panic buying. Because bitcoin isn't regulated in any way this is the wild west of trading, no one seems to care, because we know that Mt.Gox knows exactly who this person/group is. The evidence is easy to collect, when like 10 000 -15 000 bitcoin walls are removed in a second (many many times over), it is overwhelming evidence that someone is playing a unfair game (if you are not prepared).

In this condition, I recommend people that can't trade to stay out of trading. Just buy and hold, or put buy orders at low levels and let him/the group manipulate without us participating.

Also, we should ask Mt.Gox who this is. Because this has been going on for a very long time, more than a month? There are some people on this board that have tried to follow all the tactics of this person/group. Any information is good.

Is there any exact date or even month when this should happen? If I have understood it correctly, it should happen at the end of next year (Dec 2012?), has anyone calculated on a more accurate date?

If I look at you page for the last 24 hours and also look at clark moodys page with volume for MT.Gox, you/Bitcoinica have right now pretty much the same trading volume. If this is accurate, this is very impressive. Mt.Gox have been around for ever and you like less than one week. This tells me also that you don't hedge your positions in a large way. Or are you hedging some of the positions through Tradehill? But it shouldn't make any difference, because Tradehill have much lower volumes.

What kind of positions have people taken, I mean is this a new gamble site with high leverage (average user)? Or have like miners (a guess) taken low leverage positions to short the market (so they now exactly what they are going to sell their Bitcoins for)?

What is happening?

It looks like Bitcoin is building up one of the biggest sell signals ever. We have been at this levels before and it has always rebounded. This time it looks like it will break through and because it has been a strong support level, when we are through it, it will be a massive sell signal. I think some few desperate people still trying to fight it back and have some solid buy orders (not as before when most of the buy orders disappear as soon as someone is selling in to it) at this levels, but they are fighting all the greedy miners that are selling their coins at the exchanges, right now that maximum amount is 7200 x 6 = 43000 dollars / day . The problem as I have told before is that Bitcoin is in high inflation environment, the boom came to fast and we are stuck in this environment for at least one more year. My prediction of 3-4 dollars seems to get right within a month or two.

We are right now in a high inflation environment when we look at one key fact: Miners create 7200 Bitcoins/day or 2 628 000 Bitcoins/year. With the media hype in May and June of 2011 we saw a great power of "I want to get rich quick" miners that thought this is the holy grail. At the same time all the early adopters that are in Bitcoins for the long run thought this is great, at last we are getting the media attention we need and deserve.

What everyone missed was this, because we are in a high inflation environment the more Bitcoins gain in value the more "I want to get rich quick" miners will flood the mining sector of Bitcoin. And the more they will invest in it (mining equipment, electricity etc.), the more that money has to come from the buyers at the exchanges. It is a unfortunate situation that isn't easy to handle. The only way I can see this getting on the right track again, and that we don't see all this heavy fluctuations in price, is something that sounds to me to be common sense. As many as possible of the miners should be in the Bitcoin for the LONG RUN, no "I want to get rich fast" people.

That means, miners shouldn't be able to have highly profitable ROI that makes them invest even more in to it (for the next year or so). That means if there are manipulations going on at the exchanges right now, it should stop. That means that prices must go down so all the SHORT TERM GREEDY people is out of Bitcoin, after that we can start going up again and build up the infrastructure that is needed.

As you can see on the fifth graph here http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ , for many months Bitcoin was very unknown to the public and because of that difficulty didn't change to the upside. If I have understood it correctly around 1,5 million Bitcoins were created from February 2009 until the end of same year. Also if I have understood it correctly very few people mined under this time period making the conclusion that Satoshi Nakamoto and a few more people have a considerable amount of Bitcoins (worth today around 16 million dollars). You could also suppose that a majority of this coins are in the hand of Satoshi Nakamoto. Today it has gone more than two years from the birth of Bitcoin, I am convinced that Nakamoto has big plans for Bitcoin and he/she/they have put considerable amount of time and effort in this interesting project.

I am talking for my self, but I think that my thoughts concern also others that are thinking alike. I want to invest a considerable amount of money and time into this project/currency/commodity/freedom. But I think that until the person(s) behind Bitcoin doesn't come forward I think that the best I can do is to reconsider if I should invest time and money into this project. Because not getting any answers makes Bitcoin to become something uncertain and vague. If Bitcoin should become worth 100-10000+ times more than it is today, and be a serious threat to the establishment and the status quo of the financial world of today, we should demand for some sincere answers to this questions.



My questions:

How many Bitcoins in total does "Nakamoto" have?

What is "Nakamotos" estimation of how many early adopters there is that have more than 200 000 bitcoins, 100 000 bitcoins and 50 000 bitcoins?

What was the purpose of creating Bitcoin?

What is your plan for the future of Bitcoin as "Nakamoto" sees it today?

What are "Nakamoto" going to do with the wealth that has been created?




Until this questions are not answered, and I am pretty sure the person/group behind this project can read this, we should really reconsider buying in until we get some answers. If this is going to get big, this questions will always hunt us until they are answered.

Look at this link as proof: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

Difficulty is plummeting. This is as I see it the strongest indicator of the price of bitcoin, the cost of creating bitcoins.

If the average Joe leaves then what is left is all the investors with heavy investments in 6990 GPUs etc. , they WILL want to have their money back asap, and they have invested massive amounts of money in May and June off this year. And they WILL sell at the market at nearly any price or a bit above electricity cost.

If the difficulty continues to go down (could be even just a modest drop), I have a new price target of 3-4 dollars. My last price target took 9 days (I said it will reach 5-6 dollars within 1-2 months when it was at 12 dollars), lets see how many days it takes for this one.

Golds foundation is primarily that its scarce and that it has been used as money for thousands and thousands of years.

Fiat currencies primarily foundation has been the power of government to tax it and "force" the people of each and every country to use it. Also that they say in the open that fiat currency has inflation goals that are important etc. (not that this has been the case the last years).


So what can be Bitcoins foundation? Realistically it should be in a way where fiat currency can't compete with it. I'm thinking like online gambling in US should be a strong foundation. It's not a shady business (legit in EU etc), but US has opened the doors to give Bitcoin a strong foundation. Beside really shady business as selling drugs etc. what good and strong foundation do you see that can make Bitcoins get to the mass (without speculation)?

I think this question is REALLY important. When this question in answered, this should be the primarily goal to act on. Because getting more and more merchants that sell through internet isn't enough, because I don't see that as a strong foundation. Or getting more exchanges online or even getting more media attention. In the end this wont make the currency strong, I hope that the bitcoin community understands this.

To the Bitcoin community, I want to short sell 3 000 bitcoins, and I will pay 5 % interest per month on the loan. I have my money in Mt.Gox that covers all the loan (hackers f*ck off nothing to get here, I have a Yubikey). I want to make this a secure deal for both parts. I know that there are people in here that don't want to sell, you can make money know.

5 % interest per month gives a annual rate at over 79 %. That is really good terms. I would like to be able to hold it for at least 2 months, and also have the option to close the position before hand.

If anyone is interested, tell me how we can do this in a secure way. Maybe I can contact Mt.Gox and they can take care of it. We really need the opportunity to short sell Bitcoins, it have many benefits, for example more liquidity, people can make money on their bitcoins if they don't want to sell.

I have been told that hellobitcoin gives the trader the opportunity to short sell. The only thing that is missing is the liquidity.

https://hellobitcoin.com/trade

Once again the market (the direct buyer) are feeding the mining sector of the Bitcoin economy. And once again Bitcoins are overvalued. The market gives you the chance to sell on high levels. Take the chance.

Not many cents left now. Trading right now at 8,81 dollars at Mt.Gox.

http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/order-book/