Feels like a Norman Rockwell painting but instead of it being admirable and calming, you're on edge and panicky, sensing that something is amiss?

Welcome to the illusion: behind the painting is a noxious black mold eating away at the canvas. Whether Europe, Japan, or the US erupts in May, something is going to give way very soon - and it won't be physical gold.

How to preserve wealth. It's worked for ages, only now Bitcoin fits into the mix alongside gold.

Psh. I've used hard money loans in real estate at 5% for 3 days!

JP Bitcoinica!

The result would happen as a process over a long period anyway, maybe a decade. With lots of ups & downs.

At that point, I'd be thinking more about a percentage of total derivatives, not just the equities markets - $700 trillion ($1.4+ quadrillion prior to BIS revisions). Gold established as a global reserve would need to back all outstanding debt on top of existing money supplies in order to stabilise the system - likely at a minimum of 10%. Bitcoin system denomination at 100th of that would be $700 to $1400 billion in 2011 dollars, or ~$30,000/BTC.

And then there's System D...

I just threw up a little in my mouth.

We're really talking about the same thing, but forget just financial obligations. This is forced liquidation at a national level, beyond the financial factor. You can't eat gold, nor dollars, nor oil - but they can all be used to obtain or produce food. Once everything is sold, the gold owners will look like saints when they "benevolently" allow resources for the destroyed nations' survival.

Greece is already undergoing theft of its gold. Italy, Spain, Portugal and all the rest are in the process of being or will be looted as well. It's a concentration of the power base via gold by forcing weaker players to liquidate in order to survive. Any that don't submit will endure riots, starvation, and possibly self-destruction through civil war - at which point they will be too weak to prevent stronger ones from coming in and instituting globalist regimes.

Now for some rhetoric:

Imagine I am the financially weakened US (as in suffering from a terminal disease), and you're Italy. Wearing an IMF mask, I hold a gun to your head and tell you to give me your shoes. You refuse. I shoot you in the leg. I demand your shoes again. You refuse again. I shoot your other leg. I demand your shoes again. You still refuse. I shoot you in the shoulder. Now you're too injured to fight back in any way, so I take your shoes and get France to make sure you behave yourself while I move on to Spain.

By knocking everyone else down to my level, they can't ignore me. Instead of dying alone of my advanced socialist disease, we're all in the same boat now and have to work together to survive. If any of them don't help, we all risk going down together. The western world has been reduced to mutually-assured destruction in an extremely frail state because of the aggressively destructive behaviours presented while America was still strong, rather than respectful cooperation and support with a vested interest in each others' well-being. This is the offer that cannot be refused instead of the desire to repay out of admiration and respect.

It's just like CIA methods of establishing friendly governments and leadership in South America, only on a much grander and more brazen scale. There's literally nothing anyone can do about it. The only things standing in the way are:

• Energy resource availability
• Distributed gold ownership
• China/BRIC resistance
• Decentralized technologies

I've said it before: they already lost the battle. What they're fighting now is disintegration of everything that's been built upon a brittle foundation. That's being done by maintaining an illusion of an illusion (illusion: fractional reserve; illusion of illusion: stability of unlimited exponential growth via fractal reserve).


Good example. I'd like to see that in inflation-adjusted terms. Relative gains would be much lower than they appear there. Again, the illusion of absolute values versus relative. It's like trying to measure a kilometer when the length keeps changing.

Forgot to mention that options expiration is in 2 days... cue the shenanigans.

Also, there's always a victim whenever a squeeze occurs. It's no longer just leveraged futures traders being forced to liquidate:
Syria selling gold reserves as sanctions bite

Control of the world's gold supply is tantamount to its domination. Remember - only the producers matter when it comes to deciding what acts as money; if oil wants Euros as payment, the Euro is money. Likewise, gold.

If gold is overly controlled, Bitcoin is the only remaining freedom from banks on the immediate horizon... unless JP Bitcoinica acquires the majority supply of those as well.

And those who don't look at greater scales are afraid to do so because it reveals the patterns of real collapse in other asset classes. Do you only study history back to 1950?

In the western world, people grow up and think to themselves: "If only I knew back then, what I know now!"

They reinvent the wheel because they're arrogant enough to think they can do things better than all whom have come before, when they could be listening to the words of wisdom from history. Instead, these are the people who attain sharp rises in power and the world suffers for their imprudent actions.

Over hundreds of years, gold and silver have plummeted in price for various reasons. At the same time, global exploration and industrial expansion were unbridled. Irresistible force meets immovable object - growth hits its limit; it's all part of one system.





To think about this another way, what happens when Bitcoin's base supply stops expanding? Any further growth will seek the path of least resistance, which is decimal expansion - the opposite direction of what is normally expected.

The same is happening with gold - if its physical supply cannot be expanded at the rate it has been over thousands of years, its price relative to other measures will have to expand.

Looking at it again, I even confused myself a bit

I probably should've said there are pros & cons to CPU mining botnets. There was a lot of discussion on that issue in those threads.

Weak leveraged positions have been mostly wrung out. External sources of demand for Bitcoins have remained steady, and there remains a consistent inflow - it takes about USD$250,000 per week to maintain the $5/BTC level.

I think the situation is similar to that in the gold futures market - forced liquidation of leveraged positions allows for suppression, but only to the point where there are no more weak margin trades left to squeeze. We're now at that point - there aren't enough distressed sellers, so it's time for whatever pump & dump shenanigans to be executed by those with enough resources to do it (bankers).

If malicious whales can get away with it in markets that are supposed to be regulated, you bet they'll do it in a market that has no regulation at all.

Yes, there's something going on there - it might be the beginning of a push up to retest $1680-1700. That's the target I'm expecting after Bitcoin's jump.

MintChip fits in the paper money category. With a central issuing authority, it's functionally the same as existing fiat. It just gets transferred in a modernised manner.

If it legitimises the concept and method of cryptography securing currencies by official acceptance, which seems possible, great. If it's discredited or fails without there being a public comparison to Bitcoin, people may shy away for a while yet.

A 3% spike in Bitcoin - now gold futures should make a similar move before the week is out.

There is enough pressure in both to result in potentially explosive upward moves.

I actually had some success last year booting some Gigabyte boards from USB with Plop. Most of the time, I was able to chainload by booting from a FAT16 Plop USB stick to another that held the OS.

The primary issue with Gigabyte (if I recall properly) is that a USB boot drive cannot have more than one partition and must be formatted with FAT16 - no FAT32. Quite aggravating.

I picked up the cheapest SATA drive I could get and it's been a much nicer experience since. It now acts as a multi-purpose server in addition to mining.

Regarding CPU mining, there are valid pros and cons (no pun intended):
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67634.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=68396.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=69423.0

Yyyyyyyup.

"We" didn't stabilise anything - bigger markets are in a general malaise right now, which means their influence is not adversely affecting smaller markets as much... for the time being.

Enjoy this calm while it lasts - I don't think we'll have it for more than a month or two.

And holy crap, how did this thread go from stupid to pedo in 0.4 nanoseconds?

Sure, if you want to kill the golden goose. There is movement of capital flow into the Bitcoin system; without that, wealth is confined to an isolated environment and what you describe would be the most likely scenario. The USD is an isolated environment of sorts and therefore instead of wealth transfer from external pools into the USD, the proportion of ownership changes.

In a system as small as Bitcoin's any Ponzi scheme would quickly reach its zenith - in isolation. Even if Pirate is running such a scam, external flows from USD and other sources can keep the game going for a very long time. I would only be concerned if capital inflows into the Bitcoin system remain unchanged or decrease and the rates of return fail to decline somewhat over the next 12-18 months.

Right now, a relatively small amount each week (~$250,000) is necessary to maintain the exchange value of Bitcoin at the current base inflation rate of ~25-30%. There's plenty of room to grow with a global pool in the hundreds of trillions of dollars in search of proportion increase potential.

I completely forgot about this thread, but a calendar entry reminded me to come back to this thread and laugh. I suppose the $26 low in 2011 was sort of close to $10, right?

Always keep the paper/physical (derivative/underlying) difference in perspective. If you're saying $10, you mean paper - not real silver.

Careful - if management decides to sprinkle some of Jobs' ashes on the next run of iPads & iPhones, the stock will go to $1,000,000

Hipster


It was mentioned earlier that a decline in equities would put pressure on gold, precious metals in general. However, it's apparent that the metals are stable - physical demand appears to be breaking the paper charade. Games can still be played with the mining shares, so that's where the effort is being focused.