Hi

bitcoinchannel.com was my main source of news for everything bitcoin related.

Anything that moved in the crypto world passed through there. But now brotherjohnf appears to have redirected the Google listing for bitcoinchannel.com it to his Silver trading channel (which is also very interesting but leaves a void of BTC news).

This is an adverse development for bitcoin IMO if it proves to be permanent. There was no news clearing site that was less biased or more comprehensive.

Who can forget..."good evening everyone, time for another bitcoin report. This is the 1-hour chart from...".

Classic. Learned such a huge amount about this market from brotherjohnF.

Bullish ?  

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/03/13/central-banks-beat-bitcoin-at-own-game-with-rival-supercurrency/



The fact that the great Ambrose Evans Pritchard has even mentioned the word "Bitcoin" seems so to me. I don't recall him ever having charted these waters.

Bank of England Fiat gets its own blockchain...

There are a select few Twitter feeds that the worlds press are sitting on right now. They are also monitored by people in Greece.

A single new Bitcoin ATM machine has just appeared in Athens.

I suggest that this is a rare strategic opportunity to get Bitcoin a bit of temporary propulsion. Retweet this tweet and try to get it to float. All the appropriate hashtags are contained but feel free to propagate. Bitcointalk has a huge audience and this is a nothing-to-loose opportunity.

Bitcoin can do 2 things for people in Greece:

[1] - facilitate electronic transfers of cash. People are avoiding using credit cards or debit cards right now because they're worried their money's going to dissapear down a hole. Everyone wants cash.

[2] - in the event of a currency reset, it can arrest personal losses during a devaluation

Here's the tweet:

************** TWEET AND RETWEET **************

https://twitter.com/TaoOfSatoshi/status/615663017217392641

************************************************

I've knocked up some notional calculations for Bitcoin if anyone's interested but it's buried in another thread because I got carried away while writing a response to one of the posters.

Feel free to develop the model !!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=970687.msg10610212#msg10610212

It's been speculated that the latest couple of rises in the Bitcoin / USD market are simply "pumps and dumps". This looks unlikely to be the case to me...

The longest range measure of buying / selling momentum, the 1-Week MACD, is now in the process of crossing to the upside. This is now the 3rd completion of a corrective price movement there's been in the last year for the 1-week chart. Each such movement has exhibited successively less selling momentum than the previous one, with this last one being absolutely minimal.

Combined with the huge amount of industrial development that Bitcoin has seen during the last months, it's difficult to conclude anything other than that the market is now in a highly oversold condition and will soon start to re-couple with growth in fundamentals.

Subject says it all folks.

Bitpay now adding ONE THOUSAND new merchants per week - that was back in January, who knows what it is now. (It took them a couple of years to get to 10,000, now they're doing that in a couple of months according to this article).

http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2014/05/08/bitpay-purportedly-raises-30-million-from-investors-including-richard-branson-in-larget-bitcoin-investment-round-ever/

http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/08/bitpay-index/?ncid=twittersocialshare

http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2014/01/11/bitpay-is-now-adding-1000-new-merchants-per-week/

Network effect.

I've been on the fence about how well this project would pan out after the airdrop, but I'm starting to see more evidence of a potentially massive success.

There is an actual Aurora economy already established in only 3 days. People are buying and selling 2nd hand furniture, cars and clothes with it.

Clearly, some people are dumping as soon as they can get there hands on it, but the coin's spreading. All it will take now is a slght increase in value and that will be it: People will stop dumping, hold and at that point things will get very interesting.

Iceland has capital controls. The reason it has them is because everybody hates the Krona (and did back in the eightees when I was living there) and would dump Krona for Dollars, Sweedish Krona, GBP, you name it if they could. The Krona gets devalued on the whim of successive Icelandic governments, resulting in the type of graph you see on the Auroracoin website.

If Aurora even gets a slights foothold, the central bank will have a dilema on its hands. They will increase Aurora's valuation simply by devaluing the Krona (which happens fairly periodically). Also, Iceland is a small place. You can buy second hand goods from someone and be round at their house in 10 minutes to pick it up. Real world goods exchanges are practical there and don't require Paypal and Fedex to complete the transaction.

As far as network effect goes, Aurora is now getting it in bucketloads. Here's a radio show where the DJ is chatting to a band who have just announced they're accepting Aurora for their misuc and merchandise. They have a chat about Auroracoin and how the band members are massively behind it. ("I think in a year's time we'll be able to buy beers down the pub with Aurora just like you can in other countries with Bitcoin").

This is going to be interesting I think. (If we can get past block 5400. only 10 to go)

"The Band 1860 Accepts Auroracoin"
http://www.ruv.is/mannlif/hljomsveitin-1860-tekur-vid-auroracoin

"Auroracoin 2nd Hand Goods Market Springs Up"
http://www.visir.is/bilar,-snjallsimar-og-haegindastolar-fyrir-auroracoin/article/2014140329024

Hi

coinmarketcap.com is going crazy with misleading stats due to spiking trades on Cryptsy and Cryptorush.

For example, Pandacoin was reported as having a 3000% market cap increase, MAZA 300%. Redcoin 1000% today.

All these currencies have in fact been flat. What gives ?

They are bankrupt and can't pay their debts no matter how much JPY-no-upper-limit, ink-mineable instamine scam coin is generated by the Central Bank of Japan.

They now want to tax cryptocurrency trades (Good luck on that one).

The only way I see this being enforceable is by regulating the exchanges and making them report the gains to the authorities. Exchanges would probably also need to hold the identities of their customer accounts the way they do at the moment for facilitating fiat transfers.

Of course, they're not going to be able to regulate any exchange outside of Japan so it seems kind of hopeless.

http://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Policy-Politics/Japan-to-regulate-Bitcoin-trades-impose-taxes

All right people.

Get stuck in...

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-collapse-of-bitcoin

Here we go.

$20 million being invested no less.

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/25/secondmarket-bitcoin-exchange/?hpt=hp_bn1

EDIT: (Oops, I forgot to add the obligatory "to da moon !")

Hi

It seems intuitive that there are 2 big Bitcoin price breakouts at hand.

************* [1] - the last big manual breakout done by individuals ***************

I predict that there is some mileage left in the price driven by the current "geek sector" - i.e. individuals investing in Bitcoin with their own cash and who can be bothered with all the crap to do with wallets, private keys, negotiating exchanges on their own etc.

This will be driven by 3 things:

a) - shaking off the 'China Syndrome' PBOC bank and exchange restrictions and whotnot

b) - various favourable press including large retailers accepting bitcoin, New York hearings which was basically a beauty parade of bitcoin entrepreneurs, prospect of institutional investment in cryptocurrencies and a general consolidation of value

c) - stock market jitters or outright collapse. Up until now, the worldwide low interest rate policy combined with huge money printing has pumped the stock market up to kingdom come. It's peak days are now moving into the rear view mirror and there's nowhere for the money to go. Cryptocurrencies provide a perfectly poised crash landing pad for cash jumping from the burning aeroplane that is the worldwide fiat currency crisis being lead by Turkey, Argentina, Japan and followed soon by the US and Europe


************* [2] - the first big auto-breakout breakout done by institutions ***************

For this one, we just need to sit back and watch. It will not involve wallets or unplugging your network cable while typing your encrypted drive password or heart attacks while checking block explorer for your withdrawals or scouring rubbish dumps for old hard drives that got accidentally binned or alarm clocks in the middle of the night to check if the 1 hour MACD has crossed over or chAngIng-YoUr-ex$hAnge-p%ssw0rD_to.A=verY_c0mpL|kaTed_oNe.

Bitcoin will be just another stock code - an institutional investment offering manifesting itself as a range of vehicles such as ETF's or private investment trusts.

To me it looks like these are actually on the boil for this year. Breakout [1] looks like taking the valuation to between $1500 and $5000, at which point the big boys will do the "right, we'll take it from here" and push the price to the $10,000 upwards range. (Or if you want to dream Max keiser style, straight to 6 figures).

That's my forecast and I'm sticking it up here so I can come back and check it in 12 months and see if I should change career or stick with the day job

Good luck to all whether you prefer all in btc, pump-&-dump-alts, pump-&-hold-alts, btc with a smattering of instamine-scam (my personal favourite), all in instamine-scam or simply all in dogue-&-cat !!

The real adventure will be watching the world economy change in front of our eyes I think. I remember around 1992 when I was clueless as to what an email address was. I remember when airlines started taking web bookings and people thinking it was "quaint".

For me, watching history unfold will be worth more than any bank balance.

Hi

I'd like to set up 2 factor authentication on BTC-e, but I just can't get my head around it.

Believe it or not I am a software developer and I really find 2fa so ambigious to follow. Although I agree it massively increases security, I think it's one of the crappest implimentations ever invented and incredibly poorly documented. I'm not surprised few people use it.

I'm more worried about locking myself out of my account than getting it hacked.

I don't have a smart phone so I'd be using the SMS option.

For a start, I can't even work out if BTC-e 2fa is somehow linked to Google account 2fa. There are so many references to Google with regard to 2fa that I can't decide if I should get the one time password from my google account or if I just generate it with a phone app (or in my case some kind of desktop app). If the latter is the case, how does BTC-e know which phone number to send the codes to ? If the former is the case, there are about 2 or 3 places you can generate "application specific codes" in your Google account.

Another problem is, there's no way to test it. If you do something wrong your locked out of your account. You absolutely have to know what you're doing. Also, I travel a lot and change sim cards all the time. If I loose a sim card I'm screwed and need to be sure of getting the same number from the phone company.

I must say I really hate 2fa because it makes you so dependent on phones and stuff. I prefer just to have a strong password and only keep a small trading balance on the exchange for any length of time.

If anyone cares to clear some of the confusion up for me I'd appreciate it.

Hi

I've just spend all day looking at the viability of various mining options. At the moment I've just played around with an old graphics card to "get the feel of everything". What's confusing me is this:

[1] - As a rough reference, I am mining Worldcoin with an olf NVIDIA GT-220 and getting about 1.2 K/Hash per second using cgminer (cudaminer reports 10 KH/s)

[2] - If I check my card on this and other sites,

[2] - This comparison chart shows the cards performance as 10 MHash/s (Mega instead of Kilo)

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#Nvidia

[3] - To confuse me even further, the pool's website reports my worker's performance at 21 KHash/s

I'm confused by all this because I don't know how to estimate another graphic's card's performance against my current one. For example, a USB Block Erupter Sapphire is spec'd at 333 MHash/s.

Can it really be true that the erupter is 333 x 1000 (333,000) times as fast as my current card ? (i.e. It is 333 MHash and mine is 1.2 KHash ?

If anyone can help me out here I'd be most gratefull !

Pete

Hi Folks

I am a professional eCommerce systems developer and this is something that has been bothering me for a while regarding coins which are promoted as being "fast".

The only advantage I can see of a coin having fast transaction times is for use at POS (Point of Sale) terminals. However, if cryptocurrencies ever get near supermarket checkouts, I think it's very unlikely that people will be doing actual blockchain transactions right at the checkout.

What's likely to happen is that transaction clearing houses like Visa and Maestro will handle the transaction at the point of sale and then carry out the actual "underlying" money (in this case blockchain) transaction as they do today.

What people need to understand is that there is a whole industrial layer *on top* of the real money system which takes care of buffering the waiting time away from the customer at the point of sale. That "clearing house" layer also has time to resolve problems like the occasional delay etc.

You can see this today - when you pay for your supermarket goods and leave the place, the transaction won't show up in your bank account for a while. That's because the supermarket POS systems are not actually doing the money transfer - only sending a number to a server which instructs the clearing house to debit an account. This process is extremely fast. It also allows for problem resolution without bothering the customer. cryptocurrencies are never going to get near this level of "smoothness" and performance because crypto's are doing everything at once - they are both handling the point of sale support AND doing the underlying money transfer.

So my thinking is that there's very little advantage in pushing transaction times for "cryptos" below the level of a few minutes because they're not going to be manifesting themselves at the point of sale anyway. That "clearing house" layer is always going to be needed.

What I think is that there are 2 optimal transaction times for "cryptos"

[1] - sub 5 minutes is very good because it competes well with banks doing "real" money transfers. It's also a reasonable waiting time for email confirmations for internet transactions.

[2] - sub 1 minute MAY be good for certain limited things like buying a train ticket at a station platform

[3] - pushing it further than that is a waste of time. POS is never going ot be doing direct blockchain interaction. Even 30 seconds is far to long for a supermarket queue and the vendor is exposing themselves to far too much risk in having to support the full underlying money transfer

So I think coins, having got the transaction times down to sub 5-minute, should just forget about performance and concentrate on socio-economic issues (like distribution) and reliability.

Pete

Hi

Please, please please could we have this feature. A button (albeit password protected) that says PRINT PAPER WALLET !!

It's a statistical certainty that noobs who don't know about the dreaded CHANGE ADDRESSES are going to loose coins. Guaranteed.

****************** Standard Noob coin loss procedure *****************

[1] - acquire some coins (say 5 bitcoins)
[2] - spend a *tiny amount* of their inventory (say 0.2 bitcoins)
[3] - copy their address and do a dumpprivkey, create paper wallet
[4] - feel "safe" cos they've now got their paper wallet which they regard as their *primary* backup
[5] - get their wallet trashed somehow or migrate to a new wallet using their "safe" paper wallet
[6] - import the paper wallet to the new wallet, only to find they've almost nothing left cos Satoshi client sent most of their funds to a change address without telling them and they didn't realise they needed to do:

wallet passphrase xxxx 600
listaddressgroupings
dumpprivkey (for each address in listaddressgroupings)

All this misery could be avoided with the single most important command ever instituted in a wallet:

PRINT PAPER WALLET

... that recursively dumps all the private keys corresponding to the addresses in listaddressgroupings

Cheers

Pete

Folks - I realise this may be a bit of a controversial post since people might think I'm spamming against Quark. I'm not, I am a genuine holder of a good few Quarks. I'm on the fence regarding Quarks and the 'scam vs people's currency' debate, but I think the idea and objectives are good and they deserve to be given a hearing.

Anyway, on to the subject of this post:

I just saw a sell order on Cryptsi for 500,000 (half a million) Quarks at a price of 92 BTC. The order was there for a few minutes and then got cancelled - maybe because they realised they couldn't offload it and would have to bleed it out.

Now this could both good and bad for Quark the way I see it.

THA BAD (OBVIOUS)

 - it's an illustration of what the 'scam' accusations are saying (there are whales around ready to dump and destroy the value)
 - half a million Quarks is a huge portion of the total (around 1/500th of the *entire* quark supply)
 - never mind all in single wallet, but all in a single ORDER

THE GOOD (NOT SO OBVIOUS)

 - the fact that that trader was not able to get even close to offloading their inventory is evidence of Quark's economic strategy working

If you watch Bill Still's video interview with Kolin, he states exactly this, that the idea is that a 'whale' will never find enough buyers because they are well distributed.

If Quark's are to succeed (and it's a genuine attempt at proliferating the coins, not a pump & dump), then there's a heck of a PR job to do. A point that doesn't seem to come across at all in the debate is this 'whale mitigation' property that Quark has.

This just doesn't come across at all - the only place I've seen it is when Kolin mentioned it to Bill in his interview. Even then I didn't quite understand it myself - the sound was so crap and the description not really fleshed out. I'm also thinking that maybe this is something Max Keiser understands and that that's why he's not so worried about the early mining aspect.

If this (Whale Mitigation Property - 'WMP') is a serious mechanism of the coin's market strategy then it needs to BE SPELLED OUT IN LARGE LETTERS TO THE CRYPTOCURRENCY COMMUNITY, the same way as Brother John F and Joe Snip have attempted to spell out the scam aspect of it.

As I say, I'm on the fence myself about the merits of early mining. I can see advantages and I can also see why people want to run a mile from it, but all I would say is:

Let illumination rather than accusation prevail !

cheers

Pete

Hi

The other day I was transferring 1.3 BTC to BTC-e. After a while my wallet became unresponsive and I had to force quit it. In the end I force quite the whole machine (a MacbookPro).

The scenario that this poster described is exactly what I experienced: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=266813.0

.. except mine wasn't anything to do with Bitvanity. What I suspect it might have been is that I downloaded a torrent of bootstrap.dat to get my wallet up and running quicker since I haven't used it for ages. I also had Skype open for a bit (mad in restrospect, I know).

Anyway, I know see this unrecognised transaction on Blockchain.info for 5.12 BTC leaving my wallet the same day I sent the 1.3 BTC. (By the way, I sent the 1.3 BTC while my wallet was unsynchronised - does that make a difference ?).

https://blockchain.info/address/13QiFz64rWk2mHiVFKjn1ahNLnqA9xzMrL

Now I'm cautious about opening my wallet again in case the rest flies out if it's been comprimosed. I feel a bit gutted about this. Any recommendations appreciated.

toknormal

P.S. I'm running Bitcoin QT v0.8.5 and the wallet was password encrypted (fat lot of good that did).