It is absolutely not about fairness, unless you define "fairness" as "the joint is right". Fair is doing something without bias, and if there's any biased party in this discussion it is indisputably the joint; goat would likewise not be a fair judge. As the person giving 5 (now 10) BTC away for nothing other than his good will, old_engineer is a far more impartial judge--unless you can prove that he actually knows goat and/or the joint.

Let's not forget such things as this: "The smartest student, I think, is the one who finds the most efficient means of passing any examination or test they come across. Yes, even by cheating."

We could say lying is also allowable by such an attitude, which is precisely the sort of thinking that causes the most harm to society. Lie, cheat, steal -- do whatever it takes to get ahead. For someone who posts regularly on the forums to say that he "never saw the rule change" is unlikely at best. I know I wouldn't trust the joint either after this little diatribe.

Deception:
1. The use of deceit.
2. The fact or state of being deceived.
3. A ruse; a trick.

Whining:
1. To utter a plaintive, high-pitched, protracted sound, as in pain, fear, supplication, or complaint.
2. To complain or protest in a childish fashion.
3. To produce a sustained noise of relatively high pitch.

Which is more likely out of those two? If Old_engineer didn't pay up to anyone, that would be deceit; if he simply chooses to pay someone else because according to his rules that person won, that's nothing of the sort. If you'd like to try and convince the actual winner to part with half of his winnings, that would be a better approach, but they're by no means obligated to do so.

Oh, oh, oh! I have an idea! If he needs to change/clarify rules, he should post a comment in the contest thread. Then he can expect anyone that actually cares to update their post; if they don't care, they don't change and worst case they're off by one day. As it so happens, he did this and in a twist of fate we had one of the few people who would be affected get lucky/unlucky. C'est la vie!

When you make a game, you can decide on the rules. If someone makes a game with unclear rules and then "changes" them with a clarifying comment, it's up to the players to conform to the rule changes.

He wants his cake and he wants to eat it too! I like his new thread and the, "I never checked the thread again until after I discovered I won the contest." Too bad.

Nothing like a poor loser starting a new thread. Old_engineer, started the contest, someone said "what time zone" rather early on, and he said "GMT". GMT is the standard time zone in many things because it is the standard. You know, the way that Central time is referred commonly listed as "UTC - 06:00" just to explicitly show what time zone it is? And of course UTC is the replacement of GMT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time).

Why would anyone use GMT as the standard? Because it is. When you're dealing with a global environment, what else would you use? Anyway, you lost out on 5BTC because you got in early on a free contest, never corrected your vote (basically because you had a lucky guess), and now you're whining about it. Welcome to the Internet. His game, his rules.

Ouch... Zhoutonged. I was short at $2.85 a few weeks back and never thought we'd see $3.50 before $2.30, let alone $4.50. Now the question is: up or down? If I was daring, I'd short again at $4.20, but this sudden spike in activity up to $4+ has me shaken. People talk about fundamentals but I have to admit I'm skeptical at best for Bitcoin. Then again, the Euro and Dollar (and the other world currencies as well) are pretty much a joke right now so perhaps BTC isn't all that bad. Do I go long and hope to see an extended rally into the double digits? Last week I would have called even the thought of such a thing insanity, but this market strikes me as pretty much insane.

Not sure where else to complain, but the information on http://bitcoinity.org/markets?exchange=mtgox right now shows the market depth fine, but the pricing data and "recent trades" on the right are woefully out of sync. The price is currently at 3.7-ish, but the "recent trades" and top chart shows things in the 3.45-3.50 range. Also, there have been quite a few instances where lots of trades in a short time cause the price chart to render incorrectly (e.g. with yellow lines shooting off at angles rather than up/down). I would assume these are known bugs, but digging through the whole thread is a bit time consuming.

I've "only" lost half of my short money at present; I keep wondering if I should kill the short while I still have something left at Bitcoinica, or just let it sit and either get liquidated or hopefully ride out this bump in price. I'm still far from convinced that we'll continue going up, mostly because all the talk of BTC having "sound fundamentals" seems like lunacy to me. I'm here because I have access to a reasonable set of hardware which allows me to mine for BTC. I made some money earlier when pricing was higher during the bubble, but all along I was selling everything I mined because I didn't expect prices to stay up. The $2-$3 range is where I expect BTC to settle for some time, and right now we're above that, but we could experience another bubble and hit $30+ again. My mining equipment hopes that's the case, while my Bitcoinica short is hedging we'll be back down into the low 2s in the next week or two.

Didn't we have a huge bid wall sitting there right before the last "crash" to $2?

Hey Chris, have you tried this with Python 3.2.2 for Windows? Not sure what to do to get it to run, and I'd love to fool around with things and give it a shot. Right now it gives me syntax errors on the mtgox.py and liquidbot.py files for what seem to be acceptable statements (e.g. it gives an error of "invalid syntax" on the line "print timestamp_string(),..." highlighting the timestamp_string part). Thanks!

EDIT: Nevermind; I guess you wrote this for Python 2.x; it's running fine (AFAICT) on that platform.

That seems bass-ackwards. If they have limited pockets, they would be buying up BTC to keep the price higher than it "should" be. A better statement would be that the "benevolent stabilizers" are going to run out of BTC to sell and thus the demand will outpace what they have to sell. Unfortunately, I think that's highly unlikely, given an extra 7200 BTC on average show up each and every day. I'd say right now we've "stabilized" at around $2.75 -- we're high now, but we'll drop below soon to make up for it again, and then we'll go high again, etc.

I vote down -- people are hoping for something BTC related, and when it's nothing, some of those that tried to "get in before the big push" will sell off while they can still take a profit (or only a small loss).

I'd say lock the thread now; the longer you wait, the closer we are to the deadline, and the easier it becomes to be "right". Those who guessed 22 hours before the deadline are going to have to be a lot luckier (or whatever) than those who guess one hour before close.

1AhFbcdwU4TDg3rr1wk4TstRwFZfDXNFvg

3.15935

The rational thing for me is to play some Batman: Arkham City for a bit. Wheee!   

I think some of us [raises hand] are trying to do just that, but it takes patience. You can't really be a day trader and piggy back the manipulator.

I thought the consensus (such as it were) was that the giant bid wall was to try to support the price. There really hasn't been a giant sell wall, which is what would typically drive the price down in my opinion. And if you look at MtGox, there's now >70K BTC willing to be purchased for anything over $2.50, so if it's one person putting up staggered bids (which would make sense considering the history of the past couple months where there's a big sell off between the 7th and 15th of the month), moving your bid wall down is a safe bet. The real question -- the the thing we can't answer -- is whether the person who put up the large bid wall has sold off some of those coins at a profit, or if they're just holding them waiting for the prices to go higher. Either is possible, depending on whether the owner(s) are day trading or playing a longer term game.

What evidence of this is there? I don't think anyone is intentionally trying to drive down cost; I'd say the reverse may be more likely, but most likely is that there are simply people trying to make as much money as they can off of BTC. It's just like the "manipulator got sold into at $2.90" stuff. Sure he did, but then I've seen a pretty steady trickle of coins back out into the market at $3+ in the five days following that. Whoever bought at less than $2.90 could be selling at a profit. It's "only" a 3.5% increase, but many people would be pretty happy about a potential 3.5% per week increase in their savings (which would work out to 483% per year if you're interested).