|
102
|
Economy / Economics / Re: Is credit possible with Bitcoin? Explain.
|
on: June 06, 2013, 09:00:55 AM
|
Anything can be abused.
Fractional reserve doesn't seem possible with BTC, no way you could lend btc you didn't have. But it would be possible to create a system that lent $ (or some other fiat) based on holdings of BTC. I don't see why anyone would, but thats a different question.
Fractional reserve banking doesn't allow lending money that doesn't exist, it just permits lending money that you don't personally have even though someone else does. It is possible to do fractional reserve banking with bitcoin. Fractional reserve banking does allow to you to lend money that doesn't exist-- indeed that is exactly what banking is all about. The banks lending more money than they have on deposit is how money is created! The fact that the bitcoin supply is limited to 21,000,000 doesn't stop the banks for lending out more than that-- if all these bitcoin were deposited in bitcoin banks then using the current reserve of about 10% of traditional fiat banking the banks would lend out 210,000,000. What the banks are really dealing with is not bitcoins but rather promises made about the bitcoins: that's why they can create more-- a promise is a very easy thing to create while a bitcoin is not so easy. To clear things up semantically, Fractional reserve banking is the process of assigning multiple owners to the same coin on deposit, then hoping that a threshold number of depositors do not attempt to withdraw simultaneously. The law of large numbers makes this process very reliable (and profitable). However with bitcoin, it would be difficult initially to get to the safety of that large number (of deposits). You can do FRL with anything, the inability to print bitcoins is tangential and will only affect (raise) the cost of deposit insurance for the bank. |
|
|
|
|
107
|
Bitcoin / Press / Re: 2013-5-29 Sovereign Man: Is this the next shoe to drop for Bitcoin?
|
on: May 29, 2013, 09:19:47 PM
|
lets face it, the only reason BTC is at $130 is because its a shelter for criminal money. If you think otherwise I may have a bridge you maybe interested in buying.
hah, welcome newbie. You're wrong and I hope you learn that quickly. ok, explain to me where the billions of fiat to shelter in a crypto are coming from. Lets see, this importer (cough cough) needs to pay for a shipment, so he buys BTC. He pays the shipment to the guy in Colombia with BTC. The guy in Colombia goes to gox and sells the BTC to another importer that also has to pay for a shipment..... and so on. BTC was also used by hackers and mafia groups to laundry money at LR and I'm pretty sure other outfits are still being used. In fact hackers and mafia groups dominate the crypto mining universe. Lets see ... bot nets, shady pool operators, DDOS attacks..... Where are those billions coming from again? Please take some time to understand what market capitalization represents. There has been nothing like a billion in fiat invested in bitcoin to date. A billion Zimbabwe dollars perhaps, but that's another discussion. The average cost of entry (per dollar) for bitcoin investors is nothing like the current spot price. To assume that you have to believe that all the original holders have cashed out in the last month; the blockchain says it just ain't so. Even that ignores the many miners that got in basically for free. |
|
|
|
|
110
|
Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: I want to redesign the Bitcoin.org website
|
on: May 26, 2013, 10:34:20 PM
|
|
No problem. Github and git itself are very good investments of your time if you are looking to get deeper involved with bitcoin. You didn't say what you graduated, I assumed you were a programmer.
I figured out why I didn't like the colours: it reminded me of every scary photo I've ever seen of Beijing air pollution!
|
|
|
|
|
111
|
Economy / Service Discussion / Re: Mt. Gox - and similars - ledgers
|
on: May 26, 2013, 10:17:00 PM
|
Fortunately false credits are not accepted anywhere so Mt.Gox will have trouble spending them all. Seriously though, Possibility? Sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market). I don't really see the incentive for tampering either while their real business model is running so smoothly. The only way to know for sure, is to organise an everyone-withdraw-your-money day. But even that costs people money, which is partly why bitcoin was invented in the first place! Take heart from the fact that market share is levelling out. Soon any tampering would be made much more apparent by looking at data across exchanges. The biggest risk is still the hack + fake sell scheme that happened back in 2011, it would be worse now because there are so many other places for the attacker to buy bitcoin during the ensuing panic. *related: http://youtu.be/E1xqSZy9_4I?t=1m2s. |
|
|
|
|
112
|
Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: I want to redesign the Bitcoin.org website
|
on: May 26, 2013, 09:36:59 PM
|
Congratulations, it's an improvement! I had forgotten what the homepage looked like, studied yours, then went over to the .org and was pleasantly disappointed. So you've succeeded in my book. But you asked for feedback so here it is: - I like the top header row with the clean/clear buttons
- Colour palette needs work; I get that you are using tones of the bitcoin orange, but it's too hazy looking overall and the green with the background it's on just don't go. I think you've got a few too many colours overall
- The big orange button bar is good
- I think we can lose the duplication of the two summary sentences (left side). Maybe it could just read 'Benefits' or 'Why Bitcoin?' before the 3 listed advantages.I get that you lifted the text directly but it's different now that the order of reading is not fully linear. Then make the 2nd summary bigger.
- If we have a giant developers button I don't think we need the menu option at the top. But I could be wrong on that.
- Stick with an exclamation mark not a key for the important info icon.
As a content matter, rather than layout. I think 'How to get it' should be immediately click-able from the homepage not buried in a wiki-style FAQ section. I hope you don't think I was too harsh. It's good overall. Your best bet for adoption is to get at least the front page done, and issue a pull request to the github repo. Lower the barrier to adoption for everyone. At least specific comments there (directly on the pull request) should be forthcoming. Thanks for the enthusiasm, I hope you won't be dismissed just because changes were recently made. Edit: I'm glad to see that people have been positive, while I was typing. |
|
|
|
|
119
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer - MtGoxUSD wall movement tracker - Hardcore
|
on: May 24, 2013, 12:00:42 PM
|
I am seeing a very interesting technique being used on bitstamp right now:
Instead of placing a huge ask wall, someone is setting down ~40BTC orders spaced 0.01 apart. But only a few at once, and filling them up as they get eaten.
This means that the upward trend does not get broken, it just slows down to a crawl. And the person gets to sell all of his BTC at high prices, because the confidence of the buyers is unshaken.
Pretty slick operator, if you ask me...
You have to ask yourself why someone's so desperate to sell off a large amount of Bitcoin. CoinBase and BitPay are the ETF's of the bitcoin world. Merchants throw them a lot of bitcoin and they need to hedge that risk and pay back out in USD. |
|
|
|
|
120
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer - MtGoxUSD wall movement tracker - Hardcore
|
on: May 24, 2013, 11:29:27 AM
|
I am seeing a very interesting technique being used on bitstamp right now:
Instead of placing a huge ask wall, someone is setting down ~40BTC orders spaced 0.01 apart. But only a few at once, and filling them up as they get eaten.
This means that the upward trend does not get broken, it just slows down to a crawl. And the person gets to sell all of his BTC at high prices, because the confidence of the buyers is unshaken.
Pretty slick operator, if you ask me...
If you could see the pattern with your bare eyes, it's hardly subtle. HFTs would eat this kind of obvious pattern for breakfast in real markets, the price would run constantly just out of reach of all but the highest bid, knowing they had a big fish on the line. Just my 0.02 |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
