They have to me used sooner of later.

Everything sounds really good. Can't wait to hear more.

I was also thinking about writing some calls right before the options expired. But in the end I decided that would be pretty low and potentially hurt the credibility of the system. I think until auto-exercise is up and running, the bids and asks should be pulled and hour or two before strike. I wouldn't do it if I knew I had the other person would have a full hour to exercise it.

PS I'm pretty handy with python and would be willing to help some.

Indeed, this doesn't work. The "host" needs to know which door to open that doesn't have the right thing. The extra odds comes from the information the host gives you. If miners just discard blocks at random, it does nothing to help your odd.

To show you the truth of this, imagine that the host doesn't know anything about where the car is. You pick a door, he opens one, then you switch. 33% of the time you'll have picked the right door to start, 33% of the time, the host will open the right door (ending the game early) and 33% of the time you will switch and find the right door. As you can see, your odds didn't go up by switching doors.

For god's sake man. I told you in eight different ways in your last thread that the prices weren't going to go up because of difficulty. I had no idea you meant _immediately_, that's just crazy. You do realize that the prices are set my people buying and selling. There is no governing body setting prices. All the buyers and sellers knew that the difficulty was going up. If they felt like it had any effect on the price, they had _already_ taken into account and adjusted their prices accordingly.

Furthermore, there are 6,500,000 coins in circulation. Before the increase, we were mining about 10,000 coins a day. After the increase we are mining about 7,000 coins a day. That is only a 3,000 coin change. That's only 0.04% change when compared to the entire number of bitcoins. So the price should really only change about that much. This is all very hand-wavy, but I told you, repeatedly, in your last thread, that the any price change is already baked in.

UPDATE:

A more recent 30 day chart, you can see that the trend line I drew earlier was broken, and there hasn't been much upward movement, it still matches price very well. If movement continues downward, there is a case for a lower price:





I think that popularity is the only factor driving bitcoin prices. To drive the point home I put together a couple of charts juxtaposing google trends and Mt Gox USD prices.




The blue line represents the google trends graph, scaled to match. I find it interesting that a dip in popularity in mid may seems to have lead directly to a dip in prices. Looking at the year graph, you can see that the google trends line (which isn't fully updated to the present), is about to cut into the price line deeply. Looking at the last month, you can see that for the first time in these graphs the price exceed popularity quite a bit. This seems to have led to a quick over correction and then a bounce back.

In the month graph the google line is once again not up to date, but the pink line gives a generous trend. If the pink line were accurate, this would mean we are priced correctly at the moment, since at the scale I am using, google trends has historically been slightly above the USD price.

As always, if you found these graphs useful, please send a tiny tip to the address below. Using the newest version of the client you can get transaction fees down to a super tiny sliver.

I did indeed find a place selling groceries for bitcoins. And my city is pretty small. This is awesome. I can see the Big Shift coming. In another year bitcoin will be a household word.

I think you missed a few pros.

I grabbed them at a store. They'll still pay themselves off, make a little profit, even if the prices never rise. I might have been able to make more by buying bitcoins when they bottomed out around $10, but it depends on the size of future difficulty increases.

Then we have a bunch of stupid traders on our hands that can't look a few days into the future at a pre-scheduled event.

The price for the next difficulty increase is already baked into the current price, because everyone knows it's coming. This isn't to say that the price might not increase anyway, but it will be for different reasons. Honestly, the amount of bitcoins sold on Mt Gox that are freshly minted is only a tiny fraction. That tiny fraction getting a little smaller shouldn't have a big effect on prices. Price increases are mainly due to popularity increases, not difficulty increases. Demand is the driving factor. There are already 6,500,000 bitcoins out there. The 7,000 mined each day aren't that big a deal.

This has been hashed many times. The relationship between difficulty and price is clearly very complex and and goes both ways. When the price hit $30, I went out and bought two new graphics card. So in that small case, the price helped push the difficulty up, not the other way around.

I think most people buying and selling right now are informed enough to have already taken the difficulty increase into account.

The newbies are escaping their pen.

Ah, thank you. That is a good point. The price is a lot higher in some other currencies too, when converted. I didn't take that into account.

I would say that the cost for this service (the three month plan at least), at this exact moment, seems to be about $45 a bitcoin. It depends heavily on future difficulty rises and only applies right now. I'm estimating at about 35% rises in difficulty, which might be low. If difficulties goes up slower, the price goes down. More difficulty? The price goes up.

Again, cool service.

Cool service, but I don't see how I could make a profit with this unless I'm banking on bitcoin prices rising dramatically. If I'm counting on the raise in price, I feel like I would make the choice to invest directly in bitcoins.

$1900 could buy me about 95 bitcoins today. 1 Gh/s would give me about 1 bitcoin a day at the new difficulty taking effect in about 3 hours (about 868,000). So if the difficulty stays _completely_flat_ for the next three months, I'll only make 90 bitcoins. But we know that the difficulty is rising, so the most we could count on is about 50, and even that is pushing it.

I don't mean to disparage your services on your own thread, I'm sorry. But the numbers just don't add up for me. Does this make sense for anyone else? Unlike investing in mining equipment, you don't even get resell money. Am I missing anything? Can anyone give insight on why you would choose to do this?

Seconded. I would love a countdown so I know for sure I don't have my times wrong.

EDIT -- Nice job that was fast. It was good you got in on there, I'm an hour off for some reason. Perhaps daylight savings.

I starting bitcoing after seeing a few articles on slashdot. They are the right target crowd. Slahdotters have everything, many people read the hate with a grain of salt.

Because bitcoins will make you immortal, mwahahaha.

Which part, auto-exercising or selling the contract I already have? If I can't sell the contracts I have it make dealing in long time frame options really unpleasant. That means to exit a position I have to escrow all the resources to bid and ask, when really my resources should be completely free. This can't be right... It also increases the commission I  have to pay if this contract does end in the money... I would have to pay twice, once when the buyer exercised and once when I do... That's a whole extra dollar, and a bitcoin locked in escrow for a month, bad deal.

Quick bug:

If you put in a decimal in the # of contracts section (which I did on accident), the error message tell you that you are logged out, instead of informing you about the decimal.

"There was a server error, your bid / ask didn't go through. Sorry!

Probably you got logged out of your session.

Try logging in again first."

Woot, I just manage to sell my first option at a higher price than I picked it up for. Liquidity here we come.

By the way, they did not 'cancel out' in my 'active contracts'. This is what I see:

BOUGHT    2011-07-28    call    50.0000    1    -30.7    Exercise
WROTE    2011-06-23    call    28.5000    2    -9.2    
WROTE    2011-07-28    call    50.0000    1    -30.7  

Since the first and third are the same contract, one bought, and one wrote, shouldn't they just go away? Or do american options not work like that since I may choose to exercise it at a different time? I was trying to sell the option I had, not create a new contract, I figured it was the same thing. Now I have an extra bitcoin tied up. What did I do wrong?

Which leads me to another question. Are the options auto-exercised at strike if they are in the money? I guess not... hmmm... It seems like you should really implement liquidating immediately to pay to exercise the position. Then you could auto-exercise contracts in the money for people when they strike. I don't see the risk if you just verify that the mt gox trade went through. Although the user takes risk counting on that possibility if mt gox is down.