Any offers at all?!

Crazy.

When I recieved my order from BFL, the total hashrate at bitminter was on the order of 5.5 TH. Today? 82 TH. And if i'm reading this right, the difficulty back then was right around 26 million? All I can say is that I am glad I sold the moment it got here!

Yes, he posted on stack exchange, and many other forums that contained links to his real identity. But that doesn't explain how they came across two of his actual servers. Those weren't at his house - at least one was in a foreign county. Yet the FBI was able to locate the ISP and image the servers long before they got him. To me that says there's a flaw in Tor that was taken advantage of, along with his own carelessness about his identity that more or less sealed the deal.

Reading his interviews in forbes, I'd always assumed his to be 40's or 50's, and certainly not living in a major us city. Sone rural us locale ? Sure. Australia? Yes. European?

But no, 29 year old kid in San Fran.

Snowdens also 29. This year is the year of the 29 yr old.

When I first saw the headlines , I thought this was going to be a big deal. Bitcoin dies have lots of issues, but I don't think this is one if them; maybe a year or two ago when sr was alledgedly a much bigger percentage of bitcoins transactions, but it made it over that hurdle. And the amount of BTC seized is minuscule, will make no difference what government chooses to do with it

Bigger concern was an issue with Tor, which has gained a lot of new users post snowden... They did manage to track down a few of his servers, and scraped a LOT of info there...  

So, bitcoin, fine. The tor network? Very interested in what the experts have to say about this.  

Update: just seeing btcs movements today; again, I think it has a LOT of issues , but this isn't one if them. So the markets behaving like stocks do at times; a rush to the door while assessing damages... Yes, SR was a big player, but fortunately for BTC, lots of other avenues for its use have opened up in the last year+

My opinion. Unsolicited.

History is replete with companies promising x and either delivering either y or absolutely nothing; asicminer is one who's reputation from that standpoint is untarnished; instead they suffer for having historically charged extremely high prices per hash, compared to their competitors, with the flip side being that there has never been a question of whether they could provide what was purchased.

Cointerrra, yes, has an impressive resume behind it. But lots of other companies have wowed people right up until they suffered delays or worse.

Not to bash coin terra. They sure do appear legit. That said, I've more faith in AM's hypothetical hardware than Cointerra's. Though I also know that they'll charge an arm and a leg for it.

If selling block eruptors at the current price is a profitable endeavor for friedcat, imagine what his margins must have been back in March April May ?

The point of all that hashing is NOT to generate random coins for the miners. It's too secure and validate transactions. That miners are rewarded is a by product of needing a means to get coins into circulation and to provide an incentive for them to actually do that work, at least until such time as the transaction fees in a block are high enough to provide them with incentive all on their own.

I think a lot of people seem to omit that part, or reverse it in their minds. Especially people who say that they route to riches is in owning bitcoins for their appeciation potential because buying mining hardware is a money losing proposition; if that is (or, more, if it remains) the case, buying BTC will be just as poor as an investment, because if miners pull the plug due to costs being more than revenues, it'll be impossible to transact in bitcoins, if even it cash them out in irder to enjoy that appreciation.

But yeah. Without mining, bitcoin is dead in the water. And it exists for a far more important purpose than to give coins away to random miners

I don't quite get the fear of having the location of the hosting facility be known, except for the fact that it's being done on such a shoestring budget that it'll likely be left unattended for long periods of time, which is far from optimal. I'd be more concerned with sending valuable equipment to someone without knowing who they are or where the equipment will be located; maybe that's for security sake, but if the information that johnk has is available to any customer, you'd have to assume an interested adversary would get it too , by simply inquiring as if they are a customer or placing an actual order to have equipment hosted.

All that said, what is the staffing situation? What if someone needs remote hands? How will 2 people be able to respond 24/7? Are you aboth light sleepers, or located that far apart geographically that we can count on one if you being awake. And lastly,  what spawned this was security; given that the location will become known eventually, what is the security situation? If none, can you at least share how isolated it is from facilities with people present all night? Not like it's their responsibility, but just for the hope they could call the police if say, a moving truck pulled up front at 3 in the morning.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're running your pool on a vps, you had better have an extraordinary amount of trust in your service provider; once they realize what you're doing, it's not at all a challenge for an employee to swipe yiur Wallet or just to change the payout address... I seem to recall hearing of this over and over...

I fail to see why people think that the announcement for the eventual purchase of $2.5 mm of bitcoins over an unspecified period of Time will have any impact on the price of BTC? It's not like they're saying that tomorrow they have to spend that much, they have the freedom to do so over days, weeks or months even. No matter how illiquid bitcoins are, those purchases spread over any period if time wint make an impact in a $1+ billion market cap commodity. And after that, they won't be buying any bitcoins at all. When new shares are created, it will be because an authorized participant contributed bitcoins for shares. And when shares are redeemed, all that will occur is that an authorized participant turned in their shares and redeemed them for bitcoins. Whether that person then sells their coins is not assured.

That's how etf's work (which is how this vehicle is described). If this were an open end Mutual fund, then each days purchases and withdrawals would be accompanied by the fund buying or selling bitcoins on an exchange. But that's specifically not what this investment vehicle is.

What's the appeal?

If anyone tries to spend a paper bitcoin bill, the first the acceptee would need to do is verify that there are in fact coins associated with the bill, followed by moving the coins represented by the bill to a new bitcoin address in case the bearer kept a copy of the private key themselves. Even if you knew for 100% certain that they didn't keep the key, you'd also need assurance that the bearer didn't print two bills rather than one, or even that a Piece of malware wasn't on their computer that surreptitiously transmitted the pdf or just the private key in the print file to someone else.

When I saw this topic and started reading, I thought it was so old that these concerns would have shelved the idea; can you explain how your project would attempt to address that, or if even Addressing those concerns is even possible?

 is your power consumption from renewables even measurable?

Sure thanks to tax credits renewables come in at the same price or cheaper than many other forms of electricity, with the caveat that the cost is heavily front loaded. So, to run a farm on solar panels would require a huge amount of upfront capital, with breakevwn several years out.

At least that's how it's been explained to me by a friend who sells solar for a living.

My question is therefor what percentage of your power is coming from panels, and how were they paid for? Additionally what portion of mining revenue is going to be allocated to exanding your non-fossile fuel footprint?

I guess the dynamics could change if you have sunrun or solar city do the install and panels, but then the savings are even more muted. 

Is your operation situated in an area where you can sell excess capacity back into the grid during the day?

Sorry, lots of downer questions/assnptions, but based on my tiny knowledge, it seems that solar is still the province of people who want to pay more to feel like they're making a difference, not for people seriously attempting to save money?

The "added fee" for investing or divesting is just for people who are creating of redeeming baskets; anyone else will just pay a trade commission; I don't know what Second Market's commission structure is, but once BIT moves to public markets, then you'll just looking at the same commissions as you'd pay for a stock trade;

0.1% ETF fees are fine for multi-billion dollar ETF's; but A) for starters, the market cap of this is miniscule; it needs to earn enough fees for the sponsor so that it's filings can be paid for, etc; maybe the expenses will decline as the size gets larger?

Additionally, with this and the Winklevoss ETF, fees will be one of the few differentiators for them to compete on.

Lastly; 2% isn't an absurd fee in the investment world; yes, for anyone already involved in Bitcoin, a 2% fee for having someone else hold your bitcoins might seem steep, but this ETF isn't catering to you. In addition, lots of people are paying fees like that already (US citizens wiring funds to MtGox are certainly paying $30+ each way for their international wire; supposing $60/round trip, any purchase of less than $3000 worth of coins is paying more than 2% for the purchase, PLUS gox's trading commissions, etc.

So even though i said this isnt' meant to cater to people already involved in Bitcoin, it could turn out to be a cheaper alternative for people who want to have an asset that rises in price when/if BTC goes up, and are willing to live with the risk that a heavily regulated company will be holding their coins for them (SecondMarket is already far more regulated than the majority of places that bitcoiner's have stashed their coins over the last few years).

So, all that said. I dont' see this as being bad or absurd or anything else. Sure the fee looks extreme compared to most other ETF's. But considering the size of this fund, the fees Secondmarket will incur, and the fact that most market participants will not object to their charging that size fee considering what a nonstandard asset Bitcoin is, its not by any means a deal breaker.

Heck, if Secondmarket is holding the liability bag if coins from their ETF get stolen, I would be more confident holding BTC's in the form of their ETF in a brokerage account (once it becomes salable to the general public) than any online wallet service.

Wait, so you gave someone else your paypal credentials when you were trying to buy Bitcoins from them?

No offense, but if you did give away your paypal login and password, you're pretty much asking for trouble. Your paypal account would only have value on Silkroad (or anywhere else) if you had given both your username AND password... And, why in the world would you ever do that? There's zero reason to do so, even if asked. If their concern is whether you have funds, that's solved by you sending first (since you're paying with the reversible form of payment, anyhow).

Sorry, seems fishy. I mean, even if they did what you're accusing them of, there was no reason at all for you to even have put yourself in that position in the first place. Likewise, if you sent money via paypal and he didn't transfer anything of value to you, then just pick up the phone and complain to paypal and thank yourself that you used a reversible form of payment.

To the person i was writing to earlier, an ETF is just a nomenclature. But the person who provided information from the PPM explained it perfectly, which is that it's an ETF (meaning, a Trust that holds Bitcoins).

And to BTC for Victory, yes, the trust could hold far more than 17,800 Bitcoins. But it will also have more shares outstanding. Each share should always trade close to in-line with the value of 1/10th of a Bitcoin (less accumulated fees and expenses). In otherwords, if you bought shares next week while the Trust owns 17,800 BTC, hold them, and a year later the Trust owns 200,000 BTC, that second number won't be of any concern to you - 2 million or so additional shares would have also been issued, so you're investment will be worth the same 1/10th of a BTC (less 1 years fees) that it was when you bought it.

That's what it means when it says it's an "Open Ended". This is just a passive investment vehicle, not an actively managed fund conducting all sorts of trading for its own acccount).

What do you mean, "what qualifies as 'trading'?

My reading of it is that the only trading the the trust is doing is buying Bitcoins when it receives money and selling bitcoins when investors redeem. Investors in the trust aren't trading against one another, owners of a mutual fund aren't trading against one another - they share the exact same fate.

It's just a vehicle for adding Bitcoin exposure for investors who are unwilling to buy bitcoins directly.

The OS is just one layer. Switching to Linux is meaningless if you continue to use Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, or really, ANY email or communications product that's not under your control (ie, any webmail product, any POP/IMAP mail account for which you don't directly own and manage the physical server (as opposed to running a virtualized instance elsewhere).

There is so much more at play here, that just blindly adopting Linux. It requires a rethinking of how you use the web to communicate and information.

The SPDR Gold ETF is, in fact, a Trust. In fact, most (if not all) ETF's are Trusts. That just means that the issuer owns the underlying shares on behalf of the trusts unit holders (ie, shareholders).

Are you proposing borrowing Bitcoins or cash? There is a difference, after all...

Scenario 1) You borrow 17.5 BTC at $135 each and intend to replay $2362.5 upon the due date, regardless of what the price of Bitcoin does (ie, if the price of bitcoin fals, you repay many more BTC than your borrowed, andif the price of BTC spikes, you repay the loan by buying fewer Bitcoins than you received in the first place.

Scenario 2) you borrow 17.5 BTC and intend to reoay the loan by transferring 17.5 BTC back to the lender, without regard for the price (ie; if the USD/BTC exchange rate goes to $270, you would be paying back twice as much on a dollar denominated basis, or if BTC falls to $67.50, you'd be repaying half as much on a dollar basis.

Either is fine, but should be disclosed. If you're seeking something akin to Scenario 1, I would make it clear that you're trying to borrow cash and intend to repay cash, with Bitcoin jut there as the means to transmit value. If you're envisioning the second scenario, one might ask what your plan to repay will look like should Bitcoin double in price during the time the loan sis outstanding.

That hardly makes for frictionless commerce. What does escrow cost? 1%? 2%? That the buyer pays? I'd rather get the product, and let the seller pay 2% for the credit card processing. If it's acceptable, I keep it, if there are issues with it, i can return for a refund. And if the seller refuses to refund, I still have recourse. So even if the price is ultimately the same to me (X +1-2% for escrow vs X + 1-2% for seller accounting for credit card fees), going the route of the credit card is optimal. Especially in this global economy where face to face transactions often aren't feasible (I ordered some gear on eBay that was delivered from China; going to China to to the transaction in person would completely destroy the cost savings, for starters...)


Sure, upon making contact with the buyer, you can both change the terms to whatever meets both of your likings. But advertising in your listing you'll charge 10% less to buyers who use Bitcoin, could be seen as having the affect of discouraging people from using anything buy Bitcoin, which is eBays gripe. They'd also call foul if you were using your own credit card processor and stated that Discover users were entitled to a 2% discount, Visa and MC users could get a 1% discount, but Amex buyers had to pay full price...

Besides all that, I'm actually surprised that they let you sell used vegetable oil..... good to know!