There are rumors about the MMM ponzi scheme being somewhat responsible for the current rallye. After the recent price rise we may experience an unexpected dynamic that works like this: Many newcomers to the ponzi scheme learn about Bitcoin and how to buy them in order to enter MMM - and they do this while the bitcoin price is rising very quickly.

Now put yourself into the position of such a person: You have bought Bitcoin that gain 10% in value each day. Would you still "invest" into MMM or would you rather hold the coins, as you already see crazy profits that are even higher than what the ponzi has promised? We might currently see MMM inadvertently recruit bitcoin users instead of ponzi victims, which would be a very nice thing on many levels.

What do you think?

Wow, OP has just found a simple yet elegant way to double your holdings:

1. Sell your Bitcoins
2. Then withdraw them

After executing this sophisticated strategy you are left with both your original Bitcoin holdings in a wallet and their current fiat value on the exchange. Amazing. Hey, OP, you should've sold your cash-cow-strategy to a few selected individuals under NDA and not publish it for free. Now everyone will do it and crash the price to zero.

New poll please:

- Capitulation done, bear market over
- One more crash
- Continuing downtrend
- Sideways with some volatility for a few months
- No idea


A trader who has been consistently wrong may be a very useful indicator. It doesn't matter if an indicator is "wrong" or "right" most of the time, consistency is what matters.

Here's one from november 2014:

http://media.coindesk.com/2014/11/bitcoin-distribution-by-age.png

No. And you are misrepresenting the facts:

Bitcoin: About 13.6M BTC out of 21M BTC or 65% are in circulation, the remaining 35% will be distributed in the future by a transparent and clearly defined scheme.

Ripple: About 31G XRP out of 100G XRP or 31% are in circulation, the remaining 69% are held by a single for-profit business and may be distributed at any time for any reason in any way to anyone.

Holding XRP isn't favorable to holding BTC because "no inflation", actually the opposite is true. There will certainly be less inflation with BTC than is possible with XRP. BTC has a clear path, XRP is a corporate black box.

I wouldn't trust BTC-E with large sums of money myself, but you can start with just a little to prove your trading gains. Margin is available and your balance should grow very quickly if you can live up to your claims. They seem to have put a lot of work into the PAMM platform, which makes a sudden disappearance a bit more unlikely.

There are currently about 70 master traders on PAMM. Out of these about 87% have a negative total gain, many complete losses. The most profitable trader has a total gain of ~450% over 4 months. You claim to profit at least 200% per week, so you would quickly become the number one star-trader on PAMM with a very large pool of liquidity.

If you're honest and serious, then this is the way to go for liquidity. Not receiving 30 USD via Paypal.


Well, how do you transfer your Paypal balance to Bitfinex and back within a single day? Care to explain?

Sending money by Paypal to some pseudonymous person on an internet forum is usually a bad idea.

fewcoins: If you're actually a good trader who needs liquidity, you may want to consider opening a master account on the BTC-E PAMM platform. By doing this you can prove your trading results transparently and without giving away too much information. Slave accounts can provide liquidity to you in a safe way and you can define the amount of commission you want to earn.

With services like these at hand it's beyond me why anyone would accept the conditions you offer in your OP, which seem quite shady. Caveat emptor. You have been warned.

Correlation does not mean causation. Here, have an entertaining read: http://www.tylervigen.com

This line of argument has been repeated over and over but it doesn't hold.

When a new company adopts Bitpay and customers pay in Bitcoins (that are converted to fiat instantly) then these coins need to have been bought at an earlier time. You cannot spend Bitcoin that you have not bought before. There is no credit with Bitcoin.

Then, why would it affect the price negatively, when people first buy a certain amount of Bitcoin and then sell it back into circulation, using a Bitpay transaction instead of a market order? It doesn't make sense. Actually the price will be increased, as Bitcoins are withdrawn from circulation for the amount of time they are held, i.e. the period between the buy and the payment.

There is one exception to the above model, however. You may consider it a self-evident part of your argumentation (I'm trying to be polite here), but it is not, so let's discuss it explicitly:

There are long-term holders of Bitcoin that may feel encouraged to sell Bitcoins by Bitpay transaction when new goods or services can be paid this way. As these coins are not taken out of circulation right before they are sold back into the market, they will have a negative effect on price.

So, what's the ratio between these two types of buyers? What are the effects on price? We do not know because there is no data available to make any worthwhile conclusions. If Bitcointalk hadn't gone to 100%-troll-mode yet, I'd ask you to refrain from presenting your wild assumptions as facts. But it's a lost cause anyways. Why am I even reading this?

Virtually all exchanges handle it this way: For each deposit a fresh address is or can be generated by the user. There has to be at least one user-specific bitcoin address, otherwise the deposit couldn't be assigned to the user's account.

You can identify the cold and hot wallets of an exchange and monitor the transactions going there. But these are not the addresses users deposit their bitcoins to directly. So you'd need to discover if your target exchange forwards the deposited bitcoins to its own wallets instantly (or at least very quickly).

Provided that you are able to identify the forwarding transaction to the exchange wallet before the deposit is credited to the user's account, you could possibly utilize that knowledge. But you would be making a lot of assumptions there: The deposit is made to dump the coins (not a swap), the exchange's deposit forwarding works in a predictable way, it's an actual deposit (not an internal transfer between wallets), etc.

As already pointed out, it is not a perfect science. Not at all.

Finally, we might break the 3 month downtrend today and stop the boredom.

Bitcoin can be used as currency but also as just a payment protocol. Many shops interface with Bitpay or Coinbase in order to accept Bitcoin-as-a-protocol: The payments are instantly converted to fiat and the shop neither holds Bitcoin at any moment nor is it exposed to exchange rate fluctuations.

On the other side of the deal, i.e. if I as a customer want to pay by Bitcoin-as-a-protocol without currency exchange risk, there is no service I can use, is there? Of course I can keep fiat at an exchange, then trade the needed amount into Bitcoin and send it to pay for my order. But it seems quite cumbersome.

I imagine a wallet provider where people could deposit fiat into their Fiat Wallet and use a browser-plugin (or something) to easily pay with Bitcoin-as-a-protocol. Like with KryptoKit you could pay a Bitcoin invoice with two clicks and the sent amount of Bitcoin is deducted from your fiat balance by current exchange rate.

This concept has been on my mind for quite some time, but so far I haven't even seen anyone talk about it. Does a service like this exist? Is it a reasonable idea in the first place?

I don't quite understand your argument.

Assuming there is (1) a distinct linear trend between block reward halvings and (2) these linear trends continue to get steeper after each halving, then the long-term trend will be exponential, not linear.

You could chop any exponential bubble chart into small pieces and draw a straight line through each of them. The complete chart will still be exponential. When talking of a long-term trend you should draw your trend lines on a single long-term chart. Then you'll notice that it doesn't look linear at all.

Normalerweise wird der Transaktions-Service von Localbitcoins verwendet. Dabei zahlt der Verkaeufer die BTC bei Localbitcoins ein und kann sie vor Ort nach der Gelduebergabe per SMS freigeben. Beide Parteien erhalten dann eine Bestaetigungs-SMS und die Transaktion ist abgeschlossen.

Es geht auch ohne dass der Kaeufer ein Handy hat: Der Verkaeufer bekommt dann nach Freigabe einen Bestaetigungscode per SMS, der dem Kaeufer schon vorher bekannt ist. Wenn dir der Verkaeufer den richtigen Code sagen kann, sind die Bitcoins in deinen Account gebucht worden.

Da die Transaktion ausserhalb der Blockchain stattfindet, muss man keine Bestaetigungen abwarten: Der Deal ist in 10 Sekunden abgeschlossen, es sei denn du verquatscht dich mit anderen Bitcoin-Enthusiasten.

https://localbitcoins.com/faq#howto_transaction

No, the attacker cannot build a longer chain. Re-read my first post, I don't know how to make it any clearer.

I don't think I misunderstood the OP. The argument is that even if timestamps were not validated, it still wouldn't work, because the fake chain won't be accepted as the longest. So there are at least two reasons why this is not an actual problem.

No, it doesn't deserve attention because you're misunderstanding how Bitcoin works. The length of the blockchain is not measured in number-of-blocks, but in the amount of work done, i.e. blocks multiplied by difficulty. If someone managed to set up the scheme you describe, the manipulated chain would not be accepted as the longest. Its higher block count multiplied with the fake low difficulty makes it shorter than the real one.

The dot-com-comparison is very interesting as it exposes a totally unique property of Bitcoin. It has always been possible to invest into companies that utilize a new technology in some way, but this is the first time ever that you can invest into the technology itself. This doesn't necessarily make Bitcoin a good investment, the decision is still up to anyone, but IF you expect mainstream success of this technology, it's extremely easy and safe to take part in it.

Imagine you were back in the 90s, the WWW is starting to gain traction, you're convinced of its golden future, and you are able to buy shares of the HTTP. You don't even need a brokerage account or anything, you can do it in any amount, by cash, anonymously, on the street. That's pretty amazing.

People are arguing that only crypto-currency as a concept can be considered analog to HTTP, not the concrete Bitcoin implementation, which is more similar to things like Facebook. But what has survived the dot-com-bubble is not a multitude of viewable-content transfer-protocols, but HTTP. Complementary blockchain-based protocols for special applications will probably exist, too, like there are protocols for video streaming, filesharing and so on, but the network effect is too strong for payment-altcoins.

Every time I reflect about the basics I am more convinced that mainstream adoption of Bitcoin is unavoidable. Printed-page-style information has been transferred by third parties in a slow and cumbersome way for ages until the Web took over in an instant (historically seen). The Bitcoin protocol opens a similar evolutionary path for money transfers. We're still at an early stage and I'm sure the next decade or so will become increasingly interesting.

Zusaetzlich zur Verteilungsproblematik liefert die Startseite des Wikis eine Liste von guten Argumenten, weshalb NXT kompletter Mist ist:

Warum sollten Protokoll/Client fuer ein Finanztransaktionssystem, das hoechste Zuverlaessigkeit und Stabilitaet erfordert, auch auf dem soliden Code eines Vorgaengers aufbauen? Nein, hier wird schnell alles neu geschrieben und in Produktion gegangen, noch bevor unabhaengige Reviews moeglich waren. Das schreit nach einer Katastrophe.

Chat, Exchange und DNS? Wirklich? Software sollte genau eine Aufgabe erfuellen und das ordentlich. Eierlegende Wollmichsaeue gibt es ueblicherweise nur von unerfahrenen Entwicklern. Nach dem was ich gehoert habe, erinnert die Code-Qualitaet auch eher an die 90er als an die 10er.

Na klar, das Risiko einer Attacke der wenigen aktuellen NXT-Stakeholder ist natuerlich viel geringer als ein 51% auf BTC, mit seiner massiven Hashrate und zunehmenden Verteilung auf unabhaengige Miner.

Wenn alle Coins schon verteilt sind, existiert auch kein eigennuetziger Grund fuer ein spaetes Release, im Gegenteil. NXT erfuellt alle Bedingungen, damit die ersten 73 so viel wie moeglich daran verdienen.

How do you pay taxes?