Back to $7.  Ok, 30% swings within a few minutes are a joke.  Bitcoin really shouldn't be used for anything serious with markets like this.  Merchants must be craving this kind of price volatility.

Dammit.  $6.02 and dropping.  Missed it.  Bitcoin is so damn slow for transferring money.  Whoever the idiot was that bumped the price up to $7 didn't stick around long enough.

Awesome news.  Someone just put a massive order in and bumped the price up to $7.  Trying to get all my bitcoins into MtGox before it falls below $5 again.

From a merchant's point of view I can certainly understand credit cards and PayPal being a royal pain.  The customer can receive a product and then claim a charge back.  You essentially have no recourse and have to give up both the product and money.

From my point of view (the customer) I like the protection PayPal gives me.  I've only had about 200 transactions through eBay but 2 went sour.  The merchant took the money and never responded.  PayPal returned the money after almost 2 months.  With bitcoins there is no possiblity of getting the money back. Unless an escrow service is used (even more fees) I don't see this issue being resolved.


If I wanted to hide money real quick then bitcoins could be a viable method.  If only they didn't gyrate so wildly in value.


That is a valid point.  Bitcoins makes it easy to transfer money to anyone you like without official oversight.  The bitcoins still have to hit a real bank account to be worth anything however, so there's still the potential for the cash to be blocked before it reaches someone like Wikileaks.  Bitcoins could also be used to fund groups directly opposed to you.

Bitcoin has a lot going for it.  It's a great idea but it's failing at being the great investment that some people envisage it to be.  They look at the deflationary spiral and concluded its value could only go up.  As a currency that's a bad thing as people tend to accumulate rather than spend.  The rapidly decreasing value is also bad news for merchants as it introduces massive price uncertainty and requires merchants to add a huge margin to hedge against currency risk.  That's a hidden 'fee' in disguise.

Visa and Mastercard take about 2% in fees.  For that I can buy products from almost anyone anywhere in the world.  Bitcoin is not free of transfer charges but is cheaper.  The problem lies in getting money out of bitcoin.  I need to use either BitPiggy, with a hefty 10% fee or feed my bitcoins to MtGox and pay $10 per withdrawal plus trading fees.  That's quite a penalty.

Have you ever seen a stock graph from a highly speculative penny stock?  It can go incredibly high and peter out to almost zero, with the consent of tens of thousands of investors.

Here is one example I'm familiar with on the Australian stock exchange:
http://hfgapps.hubb.com/asxtools/Charts.aspx?asxCode=SRA&compare=comp_index&indicies=0&pma1=0&pma2=0&volumeInd=9&vma=0&TimeFrame=M10

ASX:SRA.  The graph doesn't go back far enough.  In mid 1999 the stock peaked at $5.95.  For the last 8 years it has been under 20c a share while the business was still open and trading.  A massive speculative bubble burst that never recovered, all with the cooperation of all the shareholders.  All you need is a lack of buyers willing to pay your price, and people wanting to sell.  That's it.

That's a silly question.  Who do I pay to uninstall a program on my PC, or to delete a file?


Bitcoins have never been worthless.  But you've got to ask yourself the question are they worthwhile after a massive speculative blowoff and a continuous downward trend towards something close to zero.

23k bitcoins (assuming it's real, which I have doubts about).  Must have hurt to have missed the $30/btc bubble.  At $4.75 each it's still a nice amount of money.  Consider cashing out before it will only buy a new laptop.

By publicly announcing your intentions with 'oh no, other people are going to beat me to the bargains' I can't help but feel you've already got quite a large number of bitcoins, or have recently purchased some and are looking to pump the price higher.


So little support for them being this high, or this low?  We can use mining costs to support the price of bitcoins.  If you're in Europe or Australia then $4.75 is already below electricity costs.  American miners may stick in the game for longer.  But with over 7 million bitcoins already out there, there are more than enough for people to speculate with even if not a single extra bitcoin was created from today onwards.  Remember, at least a few million bitcoins were generated when the price was sub $1.  There is price support for bitcoins, but it's nowhere near as high as $5.

I once posted a PCI 16x to 1x adapter for sale on these forums for 1.2btc to cover costs.  Now I'd need to advertise it for 4.8btc.  Receiving bitcoins and then running to MtGox to cash them out ASAP isn't the type of image we'd want for bitcoins.

Won't be long until MtGox is back to its core business: Magic The Gathering cards.

Scaring people, or warning them since several months ago that bitcoin is a highly speculative, high risk investment?

I never expected the price to plummet so rapidly so soon.  Eventually yes, as there's very little to do with bitcoin apart from speculate.  But even this activity leaves me aghast.

I haven't been a doomer but have posted many negative opinions about bitcoin as a warning that it was a highly speculative, high risk investment.  Some people argued with that.  I hope they haven't been too burned by the 50% price slashing within a week.

Proclaiming that "now" is a good time to buy is very dangerous.  I suggest no one follow this advice.  No one knows when it's the right time to buy.  Just imagine all the early adopters out there, seeing their dreams of cashing in bitcoins to buy houses dashed.  Right now they'd be lucky to buy a car.  Do you think they'll stick around when their hoard of bitcoins is barely enough to buy a laptop?  What about all the merchants who traded in bitcoins and have seen just how bad an idea that was.  They won't be sticking around either.

80% off!  All bitcoins 80% off!  It sounds like a rug sale.

I'm just waiting for someone to post a log graph dating back to mid 2010 to show we're still in a bull market today...

Someone found that wall to be bitter.  $5.40, and off we go again.

Lick lick, nibble nibble, that $5.95 wall is being tried and sampled, taste tested and masticated.  Only a matter of time before it retreats to $5.75.  Then we begin again.

How much money is spent?  A lot.  The question is, why should bitcoin duplicate the existing efforts?  Credit cards aren't going to disappear now that bitcoin is here.  Bitcoin would require duplicated efforts in cards, processing machines, there are fees in bitcoin (I often can't transfer bitcoins without tossing in at least 0.01).  There is fraud in bitcoins too (mybitcoin, MtGox, negligence like Bitomat, etc). 

Bitcoin isn't free of taxes either.  As soon as funds from your bitcoin activities reach the real world there's a paper trail of capital gains that can be traced.  It's the individual's choice whether they choose to declare this income, or face possible consequences.

Many users on these forums with cheap power reside in the USA, and pay 10c/kWh or less.  They can't imagine anyone paying any more.

In Australia I'm paying around 24c to 27c, depending on usage and season.  That's 25 to 28 US cents per kWh.  I had a dual 6950 1Gb card system with 1 stick of RAM, 80Plus PSU, AMD 145LE CPU and an SSD.  It chewed through 420w of power (measured, with power factor correction).  That's 10kWh per day, or around US$2.80.  US$84 to run one dual card system putting out about 670Mhash/s (no OC).  Yeah, I stopped mining quite a while ago.

100 Euros is a bit much, but 60 is realistic.

Come one traders, take a lick of that $5.95 bid wall.  You know you want to.  Tastes delicious.