Where have you been? Circle threw in the towel a few months back. Now they point their orphans to Coinbase.

I'm not too sure where the hype can go from here. The basket buying will be done. What's up for sale via ETFs doesn't impact the market. It may be a while before they're up and running anyway. Either it sparks some irrational bonkersdom or things settle down again.

The appropriate official will spurt a 'Y' or 'N' with their semen across a stripper's breasts. Those guys know how to deliver a message that hits hard.

Death is when your life ends and your earthly vehicle slowly turns into a rancid puddle of bubbling black slime. Passing animals and insects feast on your slime and then it emerges from their little arseholes and it's truly over.  

You no longer exist in any way whatsoever for all eternity. I'm fine with that. Never for one second of my life have I believed in any outcome other than that.

When I get bored on trains I find a newspaper and insert the word 'pants' somewhere into every headline which brightens every page. I kind of get the same feeling with that word.

'Bitcoin outlawed', antifragile.

'Bitcoin forks into 934 different chains', antifragile.

'Bitcoin causes impotence and herpes in users', antigfragile.

Blaaaaaaaah.

Factory reset isn't good enough. They could still fish out your data if they knew what they were doing. What I did when I sold a tablet with Mycelium on it was factory reset first, then video something until the internal memory was full and then deleted three times in a row. That should hopefully overwrite any old data well enough.

There is of course massive potential, but this is money first and technology second. Don't underestimate how emotive a subject money is and how uneducated most people are about it.

Applying technological parallels discounts that factor which is vastly more powerful.

Yes, it's centralised. And anyone who believes that hashrate distribution chart isn't the same person running multiple pools needs a big hug.

Even if you managed to roll it back to CPU mining, deep pockets would simply buy more CPUs than anyone else. We'll have to see whether the incentive to play nice to preserve their investment is enough.

There are many users who'd love to stick it to miners trying to throw their weight around.

Predictions like this tend to forget one rather important thing, rises happen because real people put real money in. The bigger the rise, the more real people are required. You can't magic them up from nowhere.

Real people are not predictable and they're extremely conservative as to where they throw their money. The latecomers will be more conservative than the nutters who arrived early.

If there are enough of them then that isn't a problem but nothing happens in a vacuum.

And I don't think the technological S curve can apply to something so complex that requires people to really think. Very few know anything about money. Adopting mobile phones or the internet was a no brainer.

Utter bilge.

People are using alts to make more BTC apart from a few weirdos. That's never going to end. And you're telling me there are millions of potential users checking GitHub hourly waiting to pile in?

Merchant acceptance is a dead end at present no matter what the blockchain's functionality looks like. Most people don't want to spend it.

Just goes to show how fatally warped mining has become. I've not been impressed with how Core has addressed the grievances of others, but I really won't be impressed if one Chinese penis pretending to be multiple mining pools manages to blow up Bitcoin. That doesn't really feel much like a free market to me, more like economic thuggery.

Nope. But as far as I can tell they use Poloniex on your behalf. You may as well go straight to the source instead.

Indeed, but I'll assume the serious miners never go anywhere near exchanges. They'll have very juicy OTC deals as they're the go to source for large amounts of coin. Big league buyers won't have many other options.

Doesn't everyone here have one? Satoshi PM'd me from the dead when I first signed up and told me to provide a picture of my facial furniture or sod off. He approved of my Fu Manchu and gave me 100,000 BTC to look after it.

I'd hardly call it blood in the streets yet. At present it's just a few scabs floating past in the wind and getting caught in your moustache.

If my grandmother, not that any of them are alive, came to me and asked me whether she should invest a large sum in Bitcoin, I'd tell her to forget about it. I'm not going to endorse something with so many uncertainties where much far out stuff could still happen. This is still the experimental phase.

That's what the SEC does writ large. Sure, there are a million vested interests distorting everything they do, but they also know their shit and they have a huge burden of responsibility. What they say yes to carries an awful lot of weight. They rightly don't give a fuck about Bitcoin holders. It's everyone else out there. We'll be fine no matter what happens.

I think we're due further falls no matter what happens in the short term.

The ETF is just another excuse for a rapid pump by the same old people a la Cyprus and all those millions, or dozens, of Greeks who bought all the coins.

If it does pass then it might be weeks or months before it's operational. When it is operational it's selling shares in coins that have been parked for years that have nothing to do with the active market. Eventually they will have to buy more but it could take years before that stage.

Like so much good news it goes in the long term bank but nothing happens right now.

http://www.businessinsider.com/four-volatile-etfs-for-active-traders-2011-8?IR=T

There are ETFs that are custom designed to be as volatile as possible.

Any pension fund putting more than a fraction of 1 per cent of their money in Bitcoin needs immediate retiring. With no pension either.

They have no more idea about this than anyone else. If I had my coins in there I wouldn't be too impressed with their pure guesswork. Where does the 25% figure come from?

Like every other actively traded fund, if you'd just sat there and did fuck all you'd eventually beat them. And you're paying them to throw your money away. My best performing fund goes months without making a buy or sell.

I don't think volatility is any type of concern.

It's the governance, or lack thereof, or the excess thereof, or chaos thereof, that would be the biggest problem for them. That is completely out of their control, as it would be for the ETF applicants and an overwhelming majority of the users.

There is no way of protecting people from the protocol splitting, failing or ending up in a form that it didn't take when the ETF started. Gold will always be a lump of metal that doesn't do anything. Bitcoin could end up with very little resemblance to the form it has today.