But it's fun!

I do agree that the categorization could have been a little better, but the results are still interesting. More interesting than I first expected, because I think it will prove my point that day trading usd/bitcoin is a suckers game. I'd love to get quantitative rather than qualitative data on this somehow.

More losses than profit though it would seem. Since the vote is admittedly quite small so far, it is a bit early to draw any conclusions, but I think you are totally right - it's the EXACT same as any other day-trading market.

Also, I am one of the 50%+ voters, so it's a little skewed. I did not earn it by speculation and in reality my fiat profit is actually infinity% usd because luckily, I didn't invest a single penny buying bitcoin. The bitcoin I own were earned, not purchased.

I'll leave others to make up their own minds.

Also, don't know if you have noticed the poll results coming in... hmmm  

Typical response from someone who believes they have won a debate.
I stopped out of boredom and frustration.
It is not worth my time trying to convince someone of their own delusions.

yadda, yadda, yadda  *yawn*

I've heard all the delusions before.
Just keep telling yourself that you are smarter than the rest of them, and you'll be fine.

Ok, I'll admit the contradiction there. Let me rephrase.

SOME iditots can make profit in an asset bubble, OTHER idiots lose.
Some of the smarter idiots, who don't care about the others, will profit more.

If you are at all intelligent, you wouldn't be doing it in the first place, so logic would tell you that only idiots play this game. A spectrum of idiots ranging from complete morons to those who are quite good at concealing their lack of rational thought.

Also, we should stop calling it profit, and refer to it as what it actually is - gambling winnings.

I guess I will try again too.

ANYONE can make profit in ANY market in which there is a speculative bubble. It's not worth patting yourself on the back about. It's a zero sum game in which your winning involves others losing. You are not doing anything more clever than gambling on a poker game. No value is being created, nothing worth while is being done for the profit. You CANNOT make consistent profits trading currencies when a price range has been established however, when people are wary about creating further bubbles. If you try, you will surely lose, unless you are incredibly lucky or have excessive purchasing power that allows you to dominate the market.

Now how about you address my point? How do you reconcile the investment of fiat currency for fiat profit in a system, that if successful, will render your fiat profits worthless? This contradiction seems much more stark to me.

Hmm, strange. Sorry about that. PM me the link to the torrent you are referring to and I will check it out.

@molecular: Yeah, you are right. That is the exact demographic we are targeting. I saw that thread when it came out, it certainly piqued my interest. But it is considerably more expensive than this service could afford right now. I wonder if a smaller deal could be worked out? I might PM the guy. It's certainly worth keeping in mind for the future at least.

Thats exactly what I'm saying.

It will be quite a while before another asset bubble occurs I think.
The first was inevitable, but lets just see how easy it is for speculators to profit without the aid of naive investors.

Most people have realized what is going on, and will not be so eager to hand their money over to people in this subforum in the future.

... because of an asset bubble, yes. Congratulations!

Even the most dull-brained person can profit in a speculative asset bubble.
With the proviso that you are a moral vacuum of course.

I'm just me, and what I say reflects the things that I see and read.


No idea. Care to enlighten me?


Thats a good ethic. Very moral of you.


Because as I explained, the idea of bitcoin is in direct juxtaposition to the idea of fiat currency. So what is the point of investing in something for fiat profit when the thing you are investing in will eventually destroy fiat currency altogether, along with all your profits, if your predictions are successful? It is a stark contradiction.


No need to apologize. My logic is simple. Because of the reasons already outlined, fiat speculators are either stupid, or are suffering from conflicting ideology - i.e. cognitive dissonance. Stupid is more likely though.

Yep, completely right. But the only TRUE value is in it's purchasing power in the bitcoin economy, not the fiat exchange rate. Trading currencies for other currencies won't gain you more value, just more currency - but you usually just wind up with the exact same purchasing power as you started with. It's a good hedge of fiat value, but not a good investment for fiat profit.

Nope. This is the speculation forum, not the mining forum. And the OP specifically said to exclude mining income from this discussion. The profits being referred to here are those derived from the buying and selling of bitcoin for speculative reasons.

I know, but it seems such a pointless reference though?

If you invest in bitcoin, you obviously realize the failures of fiat and its doomed future. So why keep pegging the value of a coin to how much it can be traded for in fiat? The only motive I can see for doing it is that you much prefer fiat and don't give a crap about bitcoin other than how much profit it can put in your bank account. But if this is the case, you are a stupid investor because there are many better fiat investment opportunities.

Logic tells you that anyone trading bitcoin for fiat profit is suffering from cognitive dissonance.

I guess I just assumed that anyone who invested in bitcoin with usd did so because they believed that a p2p cryptocurrency is better than fiat currency, or would be so in the future. So why then care about fiat profits?

If the value of the usd is inflated to nothing, then it will seem like you have made an absolute fortune in fiat, when in fact you retain the exact same purchasing power as you started with. You have gained nothing.

If people are investing in bitcoin solely to realize fiat profit, what is the bloody point? Trade forex, stocks and shares, bonds or commodities. They are far more reliable markets with much higher trade volume, so you are much less likely to lose your precious fiat.

The motives driving this behavior still confuses me.

I'd be more interested to hear people's return in bitcoin.

If I was going to trade on the exchanges, I would do it to gain more bitcoin, not more fiat. I mean, why bother trading bitcoin at all if it is fiat profit you want? There are plenty of better, safer and much less risky investment vehicles to let you do that, but none of those can let you earn bitcoin.

People are still missing the whole point of bitcoin and are looking at this in completely the wrong way.

What is going on in this thread? I'm at a loss for words.

Delusion: a false belief held with absolute conviction despite superior evidence.

Not saying you're deluded, just felt that definition might be relevant here.
You should be open to the opinion of others rather than shooting down everything contrary to your own beliefs.

There are only so many ways the rate can fluctuate within a particular range.

I read the paper, but it seems they have only tested it on 11 mammalian cell types. There are about 210 distinct types of cell in the human body alone, and they have only carried out in-vitro human tests that do not replicate the normal cellular environment. It is a promising study, and I know these things take time, but they have a lot more testing to do in order to convince me of the safety and viability of this treatment.

Especially considering that the vast majority of viral illnesses are self-limiting, completely resolving over a number of days with non-antiviral care alone. So weighing the risks and the benefits, unless this treatment is definitively proven 100% safe (unlikely), it could not be recommended over non-treatment no matter how high the efficacy.


Evolution itself can only occur in the face of a resource-struggle. This is a universal principle, and is a pre-requisite for natural selection. So any form of life on the planet competes for resources in some shape or form, or else it would not exist. A virus would find it difficult to infect a host, for example, if the host's immune system is already at 100% due to the presence of a pre-existing infectious disease.


This is not correct. If there is a massive selection pressure put on the virus population, such as DRACO, any mutations that are advantageous can be transmitted very rapidly by horizontal gene transfer. I.e. transmission of genes from an organism without being a direct offspring of the organism itself. This can rarely occur in more complex organisms, but it a typical trait of viruses. Also, because of natural selection, any virus that doesn't have the mutation will (by definition) be killed by the selection pressure, leaving only the mutated successful viruses alive. All of this can result in periods of hyper-evolution following a significant stressor.

However, this is not really what I meant with the analogy. Consider the damn to be an antibiotic, and the water to be a particular microbe. If the antibiotic suddenly becomes ineffective at treating the infection, then the damn has been effectively breeched as there is no effective treatment other than that single antibiotic. I know we have multiple antibiotics available, but this essentially translates to a crack in the damn being patched over, which will eventually fail in the same way until the entire structure can no longer cope. Unless we start to use our antibiotics more carefully, I can guarantee you that we could all be suddenly (i.e over the space of a few years) drowned in microbes that we have no effective treatments for.

The analogy though is admittedly not perfect, but I just wanted to illustrate my point about the anti-microbial arms race, and how microbes are much more effective at evolving than we are at innovating. It may not seem like it, but when you have a patient who has a methicillin-resistent Staphylococcus Aureus infection and you have no working antibiotics to treat them with, the reality of the damn-bursting becomes much more striking.


I do see the potential of a therapy like DRACO, it might even be able to cure HIV! But If we use it over-judiciously I would be extremely worried about the kind of viruses that might emerge after the inevitable occurs and they eventually evolve a defense for DRACO. It could leave them completely impervious to our own host-defences (as they work essentially the same way), leaving our immune systems totally useless without technological assistance and further innovation in the future.

The more we try to kill viruses and bacteria, the more dangerous and virulent they become. This is a fact, and we have no hope of eradicating them completely. And even if we managed to do that, we would be signing the death certificate of every other organism on the planet, because future evolution and horizontal gene transfer would no longer be able to occur.

Instead of coming up with new methods of destroying viruses, we need to accept them as something that is necessary and natural, and only treat infectious diseases which would likely kill the patient if left untreated. Very few viruses fall in this category.