And the latest twist is that some Chinese guy has supposedly admitted to stealing the funds from MtGox and will return most of them if the police are not involved...

Singapore has extradition treaties with the US and UK for criminal matters. .

Dunno. It's time to read up on the Singaporean legal system I guess. I am hoping when they do a trial, we will be able to see transparently every piece of evidence, opinions, etc, or something like that.

What happens with ALIENS? They probably have real fast computers.

Yes of course any community has lurkers. But for that statement to be actually the case there would have to be something that's about bitcoin and larger than this forum. Since Lurkers, in some way belong to the community too. Something like the bitcoin subreddit, just bigger.

So yeah i keep getting lost in thought on this one whats your take on it?

Curious, what fuels this desire to buy them even at this price?

We still can't buy hardly anything with them andthe blockchain bloat problem hasn't been sorted out.

I was thinking the other day that there does not need to be a large active economy to correlate the price to, because Bitcoin can always act as a store of wealth so long as the community is large enough. But will people use it in this manner? The community is still very small.

What?...that we know how hot or cold the market is?

If it's so strong why aren't we going higher?

$8.40 is temporary. In 2.5 weeks we will have touched below $7.50

Well from the looks of it...not much btc is on the buy orderbook at that level.

Price is headed to $7 range as I predicted 3 days ago for the next three weeks (at some point it will touch $7.50 or below)

If buying doesn't pick up I expect the market will go down before the end of the weekend.

The price has been stuck at $8.40 for an hour now, I predict a slight rise now

You're giving the buyer the right to buy that 1 BTC for $10 next week. IF the price next week is $11 then I believe the OPX settlement process would take $1 from your escrow holding and credit the buyers account, and the option expires. From my reading of the site info it doesn't actually exercise the options but calculates what the price difference would be and makes the adjustment.

Of course, you sold the option for some price so your loss would be $1 minus how much you sold the option for.

Pricing options is pretty tricky stuff and from what I recall there are pricing calculators online that can take into account volatility and estimate what an option should cost. They use The Black-Scholes equation which may not always be appropriate. For Bitcoin the volatility must be pretty high so I would expect options to be quite expensive. ie. The person who buys your CALL option should have to pay quite a bit for it as there's a fairly high chance that it will payout.

The higher the price goes next week the more you lose. Either way you keep the premium (what you sold the CALL for).

---- edit added later ---

A Black-Scholes calculator may help with setting an option price but you need an estimate of volatility to be able to use one. According to the wikipedia a quick (not so accurate) way is to make note of the prices changes over recent days and multiply that out to a full year (as the equations take annualized values). So if BTC has been moving about $.50 each day then 0.5/8.5 is about 5.8%. (Since there are 365 trading days for bitcoin (not 252 like CBOE), I guess the multiplier would be 19 not 16). So a rough estimate for recent BTC is 19*5.8% = 110%

When I place that into the "Trading Today" calculator I get a CALL price of $0.11 and a PUT price of $1.54 (strike $10, underlying $8.56, 7 days, 110% vol., 3% int.)

Options trading can get very complex, though I doubt the opportunity for that yet with bitcoins. There are several primers on the net via google but I'll give a few examples here to help out (pulled from my memory as it's been years since I did any option trading on CBOE).

If you're bullish on Bitcoin you might buy a CALL option. This gives you the right to buy at a certain price ("strike price"). So if you think it'll be higher next week/month/year you buy a CALL at a price favorable to you, like todays price. Later when it matures you can lock in the price and buy them at the strike price. Your profit being the difference between market (on that date) and strike prices.

If you're bearish you might create and sell that CALL above and hope to profit when the price is below strike as the option holder will not be able to exercise it and hence your sell premium is profit.

Or, also if bearish you might buy a PUT option. That gives you the right to sell at a certain "strike" price. So if you think BTC next week/month/year will be lower then you'd buy a PUT allowing you to sell your BTC at the todays (or whatever available contract) price (even though the market price has gone lower).

Likewise, if you're bullish you may want to create and sell PUT contracts into the market hoping they'll all expire worthless when the market price rises.

In real life options are often used as only part of more complex trades. For example, someone opening a new trading exchange needs to seed his wallet with 10000 bitcoin but he doesn't want to take on the risk that bitcoin may drop over the next 6 months. So he buys/sells option contracts to protect that position. If the price of bitcoin over the next 6 months varies drastically he can balance his loss with a profit in the option contracts. Options like this are used as insurance.

Many more ways to use them exist but these are some basic ones.

I just heard of this now when this post came back to top.

I had a look thru several "Trade" screens but couldn't find any options to trade.

Maybe, it would be useful to have a "ShowAllOpen" button that doesn't show just one strike date/contract size/type but lists any and all options that are actually out there. This may help with people finding something they can trade.

I was thinking about loading funds to create some options but past Bitcoin trading sites have had such a poor track record of keeping customer funds safe that I really feel it would be yet another risky venture.

After sitting out about 6 months now, watching these $1+daily swings are making me want to get back in the game .  Also, the shelf full of fine scotch funded from my prior "work" has thinned dramatically, and reinforcements will soon be needed.

My totally uneducated opinion is:
* halving of the block reward will increase future price
* miners cashing out at the highest value since September 2011, 60-80% higher than the $5 stable zone, are dropping the price
* the adoption of FPGAs will change the mining demographic, favoring those that plunked down a lot of cash and will want to sell their mined coins ASAP to defray risks, dropping the price
* the ever-present smattering of big-money speculators buying in, and selling at random, make for big market moves at random times

Summed together, I have no idea where the price is going, but my my my, that volatility looks delectable.  I used to be more ideologically motivated about supporting bitcoin, but this time, I think it'll be about making a buck while reducing volatility.

PS: all the triangle charting posts still look completely silly