that makes no difference. when it isn't profitable, people leave, difficulty adjusts. when it is profitable, people join, difficulty adjusts. sunk costs, changes in price of electricity, CPU vs GPU vs ASIC vs botnet, etc etc etc all may effect which miners are mining, but difficulty is simply an indicator of price+technology, it does not drive price.

In a worst case scenario, the formula used to adjust difficulty can also be adjusted. It is not written in stone the way other parts ofd the bitcoin protocol are.

Wasn't responding to you, was responding to the poster above me who seems to think that "naked shorting" and "regular shorting" are the same thing.


Naked short selling, no one is borrowing the securities before they sell them. They are just selling them and assuming they will be able to deliver them at a future date.

Shorting is in the works. But otherwise, if you want to bet on the price of bitcoin going down, best done on derivatives/prediction markets where you are simply opening positions against other people, no bitcoins needed.

Going well so far. It took a while, but we seem to have a good starting number of intelligent askers and answerers. Will be interesting to view the growth over the next few months of the public beta period.

No. The difficulty adjustment will ensure that some miners can make a profit at nearly any price. Lower prices drive miners out, difficulty ramps down, mining becomes profitable for miners remaining, more miners jump in, difficulty rises, mining becomes unprofitable, miners leave. It's a balancing feedback loop that is always in play, it makes no difference what the price is. I have no frigging clue why after a year of this we still have people insisting that the "cost of mining" somehow affects the price of bitcoins.

You need to look up the difference between short selling (which will certainly come to the exchanges) and naked shorting (which should not be done on the exchanges but on prediction markets instead)

*whew* almost hit that in one swing. may have to revise that a bit lower for the day. geez.

I think that's true, I don't see it hanging around in the $2-$3 range for very long.

*whew* good thing bitcoins are designed as a means of exchange and not an investment

$4.38

no

For the past few months bitcoin has only moved up on low volume, and has moved down sharply on high volume. Bubble deflation, that's all. The price was far far beyond what could fundamentally be supported in terms of the state of the available clients, the current acceptance/usefulness of bitcoins, and the extremely high inflationary period we are in right now

$5.50ish is the bottom I called a few months ago, and I still think it is likely we will settle at $4-$6 for awhile, but we may see some drops back into the $2s and $3s at some point

Good (if not entirely positive) article by James Surowiecki  of the New Yorker in MIT's Technology Review

https://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38392/?p1=featured

Points out the current problem of the BTC economy being dominated by speculators/savers rather than spenders/users

uhhh, no. If you all had brains you would be profusely thanking the SA folks for doing the due diligence this forum never did. Exposing scammers and removing their influence from the community is a good thing, not a bad thing. (Even if the SA folks think it's hilarious to call bitcoin itself a scam).

As far as my other point, you are right, there is no desire on their part to understand the difference between a pyramid scam - that involves deception, and a pyramid /game/ which involves transparency where everyone involved knows where they are on the list and the fact that the vast majority of players never get paid. Personnaly, I generally go to the casino if I want to gamble, but they are two very different things. But whatever, haters gonna hate - still grateful for their work around exposing Bruce and I hope they can help get to the bottom of the mybitcoin fiasco.

I see the Dumb has gotten turned up even louder here lately.

Did someone post a bitcoin advert on on Alex Jones site or something?

coming from 2+2 are we?

Hey now, nothing wrong with pyramid schemes if everyone involved knows that's the way it works and is transparent about it. Just like any other sort of gambling. Pyramid schemes only troubling when they are sold as legitimate investment opportunities and no one realizes they are getting paid with other suckers money.

Yes Bruce Wagner has responded multiple times. Here and in IRC. He has responded with dodges, lies, and half-apologies. The mortgage fraud was just mismanagement and he's really sorry for it, he never said he called the fbi just that he talked to them, etc,etc etc.

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Really, I honestly wish the Thailand/child prostitute stuff never got brought into the whole mess, because while it is certainly alarming, it is mostly completely circumstantial and somewhat ambiguous evidence and makes the whole thing look like a bad talk show episode. (Yes, I realize it is alarming and Bruce somewhat brought in on himself by his freakishly vociferous defending of Pattaya as the next location for a bitcoin conference. Why? I have no idea.)

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Mostly it is clear that he is a dodgy guy with a dodgy past that quite possibly screwed a lot of people out of money. This plus the fact that he was not only the biggest promoter of mybitcoin but supposedly lost 25k coins to them AND was supposedly paid back but refuses to provide any confirmation of that transaction makes me a lot more worried that he is currently scamming lots of people out of their money.

I have no idea why anyone in the bitcoin community would continue to defend him at this point. This project went from interesting open source project to some sort of shrill tribalism and cultishness in just a few months. Quite breathtaking actually. One minute bitcoin was a prototype, the next minute it was being sold as the One True Currency. One minute the forums were a useful place to talk about bitcoin, the next minute they were Our Home and Under Attack.

There are other places where interesting talk is happening around complementary currencies and both the advantages and limitations of the current blockchain technologies. But that place isn'[t here.

I applaud the developers for remaining largely clear of the fray and still focusing on the big picture of what is important about bitcoin.

Yes, absolutely (not hacked, but the owner of the server could have just put up a redirect). It's like a David Mamet movie in here. Scammers scamming scammers with another plot twist every 10 minutes.

sorry, but fleeing a state to not pay a judgement against you and still having enough money to invest in 25k bitcoins and rent property in one of the most expensive cities in the world is pretty scummy. I agree that mybitcoin was a "school of hard knocks moment" but if there is a chance that one of its largest proponents is also involved in it, that's pretty big for the community to get to the bottom of imho. Bruce's story would be a little more believable if there was a bunch of people who his company had actually helped and/or he tried to make restitution. But crying crocodile tears and skipping the state. not so much.

Bitcoin is obv at a stage where it attracts a lot of scammers, not only because of the nature of the currency but because there are so many people around with equal parts naivety and greed, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to expose them if possible.

A huge number of scams include two or more people where some of them get "scammed" along with the marks to provoke a feeling of solidarity and sympathy (as well as trust)