This isn't new.

When they originally started the service, they'd have a site-wide daily buying limit and as soon as it was hit nobody could enter new buy orders.

It got particularly bad during the spring of last year, so much so that people would create bots that you could run that would retry your order very 10 seconds until it finally went through.

I think it was last summer sometime they changed the system so that if they ran out of coins they could guarantee a price on (presumably, this would have been when they ran out of USD on Bitstamp to buy coins with) that you'd get the opportunity to buy but without a guaranteed exchange rate.

On résiste à l'invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l'invasion des idées.

This is a good read:

http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/the-problem-with-altcoins/

Take a look; you might learn something.

The problem with that image is that there are only two possible fractions of the global currency market which Bitcoin can occupy in a stable equilibrium:

0% or 100%.

When the time comes, there will be no such thing as "liquidating Bitcoins."

They're going to try very hard to persuade people to keep their coins in web wallets.

You can buy lots of UX and advertising with fiat currency right now.

It's easy for people who are paying attention.

Yet, in spite of this, how many people who should have known better left life-changing amounts of Bitcoins sitting in the care and custody of Mark Karpeles because they were to lazy to set up a secure wallet on their own computers?

How many people will be tricked into the promise of interest-bearing Bitcoin bank accounts, pegged-to-gold or "easy" web wallets where they "don't have to worry" about their own security or backups.

How many Bitcoins are credited to the the accounts of Coinbase users vs the number that they actually hold?


In the long term, the manipulators lose. It's a question of how much damage they cause and how many innocent people get robbed between now and the inevitable.

You're probably right this time, but I want to make sure this possibility is on everyone's radar because the odds of it happening go up every day.

That the Federal Reserve Bank of NY stole 300+ tons of gold from Germany is not an imaginary conspiracy theory.

They promised to hold those bars. Not an equivalent value - the specific serial numbered one which Germany originally deposited.

When keeping that promise became inconvenient they defaulted.

This is the MO of Wall Street, and they will not change their ways when they get involved with Bitcoin.

What I expect to happen is that Bitlicenses are going to eventually force all Bitcoin startups to get acquired by banks, because Bitlicenses are impossible to comply with and banks are immune from their provisions. One day after Coinbase has been bought out, their users are going to log in and have to check a box indicating they've read the new Terms of Service. Buried deeply in the legalese where nobody will actually read it will be the provision that says they "might" rehypothecate your deposits.

tl;dr: Hold your own coins and don't store them with third parties, because if you don't you'll eventually discover you don't actually own any.

You are putting way too much faith in the integrity of the exchanges and third part wallet services.

There is nothing that stops Bitstamp (deliberately or via subversion) from giving sellers infinite paper btc to trade with. They can get away with it as long as most people don't try to withdraw their coins. If they suddenly started making it hard for people to get their bitcoins back, that would be a possible indicator of this.

There is also nothing that stops Coinbase from loaning out customer btc deposits to short sellers. We'd never know if they had done so.

Security is not the goal of proof of work, and anyone who talks about it is missing the point.

Proof of work is a method for a network of independent nodes can arrive at a consensus without any privileged decision maker, a.k.a "distributed consensus."

Distributed consensus is impossible in proof of stake systems.

If I recall correctly, Atlas was banned for faking suicidality on the forum. So I think there should at least be a standard of not allowing threats like this in threads:


There isn't much in the way of a standard for decorum here, but I'd like to suggest that comments like the above, at a minimum, are off topic.

Note I've been reporting such posts and I'm creating this thread to get some feedback so that I know if there's any consensus or if I'm wasting my time.

Live stream/recording for people who can't attend in person:

https://plus.google.com/b/117429404983378101169/events/cpmusrnthjp444dqf1162m15bno

It does though.

Developed economies are so bound up in cronyism that any innovation can only take place outside the regulations and laws, a.k.a the black market.

Exhibit A: Lyft
Exhibit B: Uber

And working around those controls and restrictions is, by definition, the informal economy a.k.a black market.

I don't mean a copy of the original Silk Road.

I mean a marketplace that improves on existing marketplaces to the same extent to which Silk Road was an improvement over buying drugs on the street.

It could be anything, but it should be something that will get people using Bitcoin because otherwise something they want to do would be impossible.

Easily done.

Create a bunch of sock puppet accounts. Have each one make 10 random predictions.

Throw away the ones whose random predictions are wrong, and keep the ones whose random predictions are right.

At the end you'll have a group of suckers hanging on the every word of the sockpuppet that accidentally got lucky several times in a row.

Guru status achieved.

http://www.meetup.com/BitcoinAustin/events/200977752/

When: 2014-08-27, 7:00 pm
Where: Brave New Books, Austin, Texas, USA
What: Dave Collins and Marco Peereboom will join us to explain Btcd, an open source implementation of the Bitcoin protocol written in Go.

Developing cryptocurrencies is an exciting endeavor that touches a wide variety of areas such as wire protocols, peer-to-peer networking, databases, cryptography, language interpretation (transaction scripts), RPC, websockets, and QA.

Dave and Marco will describe how they approached these areas from a Go perspective and their future plans and roadmap for the project.

This is a joint event between the Austin Bitcoin meetup and Austin Go Language User Group.

Refreshments will be provided courtesy of Umbel.

Where are the coins being sold coming from? Do they even exist?

Are your bitcoins in your Coinbase or Circle really sitting idle in cold storage, or are they being used to short the market?

With the current design of exchanges and web wallets, it's impossible to know.

Bitcoin needs a new Silk Road.

As long as price discovery takes place on the exchanges, instead of via supply and demand for commerce, the banksters can play their tricks very easily.

The only killer app for Bitcoin is to enable commerce that would otherwise impossible, and that means the black market.

Note that the black market doesn't imply violent or destructive - it can be as ordinary and benign as operating a lemonade stand without a permit from the city, or participating in a ride sharing service without a taxi license.

Bitcoin needs to give people access to things they can't have without it. A safe and pleasant drug buying experience was a great start, but it's time to think bigger now.

That or just delete it entirely.