Sir, I must applaud you. To state that the great depression was merely a "short term problem for the American economy" is truly a masterwork in understatement.

Bravo, good sir, bravo.

Most of us don't view the world in 100-year time spans, and we are somewhat worried.

Shorting or selling gold today is downright stupid. Hold your gold if you're lucky enough to have any, buy whatever you can afford.

Every reputable analyst says it will top $2500 by the end of this year, then from there who knows Collapse is certainly on the cards if the grand plans the US and EUrozone governments have to stabilise this whole mess don't work. In that scenario all banks start calling in their defaults and we play write-down dominos. Personally I'm selling at 2400, as my heart won't stand the stress of waiting for the price to collapse

I'm really not sure if there will ever be the interest to reverse the steady decline of BTC. It's too early and the market is too small to make any informed calls one way or the other, but anyone can see that 90%+ of Bitcoins are held by people waiting to sell, and only a handful are being traded. This for me is a ticking bomb, as market panic could trigger a huge sell-off at any time, knocking the floor out of coins.

Your comments about how hard it is to buy and sell BTC are spot on. It's only going to get harder as regulations and more charges creep in. It's amazing that they have the value they do, as they're still basically inaccessible to the vast majority. We've got a lot of work to do with security, usability and currency exchange before we can even think about using BTC at Amazon, or even a small independant retailer.

http://Intersango.us has no commission or charges at all

http://btcpokerroom.com/
 
pretty good site, no java.

The main error here, apart from the incorrect kw/h cost quoted, is assuming that 306 transactions per hour is the current network capacity. It isn't. I don't know exactly how many transactions per hour could be processed by the current hash pool, but I'm sure it's many orders of magnitude higher than 306.

The transactions per hour is low at the moment simply because not many people are trading or spending bitcoins right now, mainly because there's not a lot to spend them on... Most people are simply mining and hoarding.

Really, I'm not sure that I have to assume anything to be quite honest.

I see what you're saying. Short-sighted miners who sold as soon as they mined really got a bum deal, and we're doing better today then they were, but that's not really the point.

If I do assume current exchange rates, and look back at people making 200BTC/day on 4 computers just using 65W core 2 duos before the GPU miners were available, then (provided they waited until now to sell their coins) they were making $1800 a day for an insignificant amount of electricity cost.

I know there's some people out there that saw the exchange rate creeping up and just kept the coins and still have them today, so you can see where the jealousy creeps in... It's much like the gold rush in America during the 1800s. Some dumb prospectors were selling at £1 and £2 an ounce, which seemed amazing at the time, but then a few years later prices skyrocketed to 10 times that, so those that hoarded their gold became super rich.

Of course, unlike gold, if anyone did try to sell $1M worth of coins all at once the exchange rate would crash, as there simply isn't the demand there right now, but if they did it slowly they could really rack up some serious $$$ and for what? Simply having the good sense / luck / foresight to start mining in 2009 instead of 2011 like me

I think it's an incredible story and I hope someone takes the time to document all this properly, it will make an amazing movie.

Those that made thousands of bitcoins early and cahsed out already should go on suicide watch imo

I agree, which is why placing a tax on transactions is so unwelcome.

I'd rather pay 1BTC up front for my account and then all transactions are free.

Weird that investment would be turned down.

Did u offer to buy shares at the market rate through GLBSE, and agree to the same terms as any other investor?

Just bought a bunch of shares, this seems like it is going places.

A few questions though....

Do you own the house / apartment / whatever where your rigs are kept?
Are you running out of space for your rigs?
What will you do if you sell all of your shares, any plans to raise more capital and expand further, or will you focus on simply generating BTC with the rigs you already have?
Have you considered spending some of the money raised on Solar panels or a windmill to help with the energy costs?

Normal banks charge no transaction fee, although I accept that they make their money from debt and the concept of debt does not really exist with Bitcoin (yet).

Even still, 0.05% transaction fee seems a little high, when holding my coins in flexcoin offers zero interest or any benefit over being slightly easier to use than Bitcoin. Seems like this is a good way to pay for nothing.

I'd prefer all bitcoin transactions to be free, and you make your money by buying and selling bitcoins for real world currency.

You serious? Food hasn't always come from supermarkets you know... It already has a price floor of zero. I'm eating a free strawberry from my garden right now!

There isn't even close to saturation with black markets... The decentralized nature of bitcoin means that many interdependent markets can exist without each becoming too large.  I expect that black and grey markets to set the minimum price of bitcoin over the next year or so.
[/quote]

I think you are misunderstanding how currency works. The black markets can't set the price of a Bitcoin any more than Walmart can set the price of the Dollar. They adjust their prices according to the current exchange rate, not the other way around. The accepted exchange rate is set (bizzarely) by an old Magic the Gathering trading cards website and like it or not, nobody is considering giving up the dollar just yet.

I think that sellers just want to cash out what they've been paid ASAP at the best rate they can get, usually selling at a few % under the market rate for a speedy transaction. Buyers just want to buy coins at whatever today's market rate is and spend them with sellers straight away. I think this sort of trade throughput drives Bitcoin prices very slightly down overall, not up, but the dollar / coin throughput it generates is good for investors as it provides the liquidity people need to be able to cash out and buy in.

I think your arguments are broadly right, but about 4 years premature.

Gold:
You'd be crazy to sell bullion today. JPM are predicting $2500/oz by the end of the year, or +50%. Even if they're only half right that's a 25% increase in less than 4 months. No other investment in the world (other than bitcoin) can net you that sort of a profit. You're right that more people than ever are buying, and this is a trend that isn't likely to slow down for the next 3-4 years, as it's going to take at least that long to sort the markets out once and for all.

The Federal Reserve and European Banks both have only one strategy to combat financial collapse, print money and keep interest rates near-zero. They show no sign of wavering from this tactic, and in fact the fed announced this week that they would continue down this track for the next 3 years at least. The tactic works, but has the side-effect of devaluing currency against commodities, primarily gold, which will soar higher and higher the more money they print.

Bitcoins:
The days of enourmous spikes in the Bitcoin price are over. There are too many semi-pro investors involved now with huge holdings and ticker alerts. As soon as the price starts to spike, they're in there driving it down again with huge sell offs. There's still enough daily and weekly variance to make some good single-day gains, but the volume is too low for anyone to make serious money here. The price seems to have stabilised at around $10, and I can't see it rising more than 50 cents for the next year or two, and I would not be at all surprised to see it slowly fall away to the $7-8 mark as hoarders accept that the price isn't skyrocketing to $30 again any time soon, and slowly sell off some of their millions of coins that we know are out there.

Wild speculation about mainstream adoption of the currency sending prices sky high is a nice dream, but unlikely with the current transaction model. Bitcoin is too complex, nerve-wracking and unwieldy for the general public to use at the moment. We have a decent throughput into the black markets, but there's a limit to how much that can grow before those black markets either get shut down or implode under the weight of their own politics and infighting.

Interested to know what you think...

Oh yeah the rake is wayyyy too high btw. U maybe want to calm that down a little...

Wow nice site. Just spent an hour on there playing with one other guy lol.

Will deposit some coins tonight and see if anyone comes on this weekend!

Great idea.

Diversifying is a good idea, and all of those things you mentioned have the capability to be profitable, but only if you focus on a small number of them. If you attempt to do them all at once you are sure to fail. The "so much more" part really worries me, especially since it seems to be pretty much you on your own running the whole show.

Talk to any exec at AMD and they will always tell you they are about to release some amazing hardware which blows everything out of the water, it's very rarely true. I'm not saying you're lying, but you certainly seem to be buying into what people have to tell you a little too easily.

So I have some concerns, but what the hey. I'll invest a few coins in you. If half of what you're saying is true then you might just make a success out of this. I'm interested to see if you can make me any kind of return. 

Hi, I'd like to be let into the real world please

Mostly because the other forums are way more interesting and have cool people posting in them!

They can take it as seriously as they want, I still have no hope of ever getting it back. The police aren't magical wizards who can return stolen property to its owner...

Britcoin all the way.