|
I would be very surprised if DPR had 10% of the 600000 BTC left when he was arrested. What many forget is that the 600000 BTC represent the gross income from SilkRoad between January 2011 and September 2013. For most of this time the BTC / USD was in the single digits, or low double digits and for some time even in the double cents. The site had expenses not only servers and hosting but also employees and other expenses typical of this type of business. An example of the latter is, if the allegations made are proven correct, hitmen to deal with employee theft. Then there is also DPR's expenses which given the nature of his business would likely have included "sampling the merchandise".
Now what will the US government do with the seized BTC? First before the US government can do anything with the BTC the wheels of justice have to finish turning. This will not happen for months if not years. The one certain thing is that governments are not known for acting fast at the best of times. Now present the government bureaucracy with an asset for disposition for which they have no policy or precedent and the most likely response of the bureaucracy is inaction. Who knows the private keys for 1F1tAaz5x1HUXrCNLbtMDqcw6o5GNn4xqX might just end up in Fort Knox for the "time being".
|
|
|
|
Finally! We're all Billionaires in AUS$!  WTF? and people thought i wasn't serious when i called for infinite $ for 1 BTC by the 17th Oct 2013, early today when will you guys accept the fact that i am never wrong?  ref: 180 by friday. infinity by the 17th  Adam may have a point as we can see a sharp spike in the BTC/USD rate over the US Debt crisis. Echo of 2011? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_debt-ceiling_crisis_of_2011 |
|
|
|
what will happen to all the bitcoins hold by people on silk road?
the Fed should open up the site so they can get everyone to withdraw their bitcoins, at least the buyer accounts They wont. They have already seized $3.6 million USD worth of BTC according to the BBC. This translates to about 26000 BTC. The questions become how much more BTC does Mr Ulbricht aka Dread Pirate Roberts have that the US Government can seize? Furthermore what will the US Government do with all the Bitcoins they now have? |
|
|
|
|
Swap rates can make a huge difference and also can vary substantially between brokers. By the way VenetFx does not trade Bitcoin CFDs. What they do is accept accounts denominated in Bitcoin and also accept Bitcoin for deposits and withdrawals. AvaTrade and Plus500 do trade BTC/USD CFD's on accounts denominated in USD, EUR etc. The swap rates between the latter two are very different.
The counterparty to the CFDs is the broker who may typically hedge the trade. This does add certain risks.
By the way it is very easy to loose the entire investment with a Forex broker so it is paramount to be extra careful. To illustrate selling Bticoin short with 10x margin can wipe out an account real quick.
|
|
|
|
|
Actually this is a very useful and relevant topic and will become more so. This is particularly true for those of us who have little or no Forex experience but extensive experience with Bitcoin. In my case after two years buying and trading Bitcoin I have opened my first MT4 Forex account yesterday primarily to trade BTC/USD CFDs. This was after two weeks of learning some of the basics of Forex including an introduction to MT4
This raises so many questions such as:
The differences between a BTC/USD CFD and holding the actual Bitcoin including "taking delivery" and the corresponding risks.
How Forex margin accounts work
How to effectively use margin to trade for additional BTC during a rising market.
The opportunity to short BTC.
The fact that Forex brokers are closed during the weekend, while the underlying market is not. This can be critical for dealing with stop losses.
...
and last but not least
The impact of large scale Bitcoin CFD trading on the price.
By the way I am not sure this is the best forum for this topic. Maybe Speculation where many of the active traders hang out.
|
|
|
|
Right. If Mt. Gox 1) had the money, and 2) wanted to pay it out, they could find a way. It really isn't hard to send money if you have it.
In a legal way which scales to 600000 customers? How? Bitcoin  |
|
|
|
Anyone who thinks "shutdown" = "default/bankruptcy" is drinking the kool-aid of the dumbed down mainstream news channels.
The USG is receiving tax receipts for 60% of its budget, and borrowing 40% to tick over. As long as they don't shut down the IRS then tax receipts will come in. It will not default on its bonds, it can pay those obligations. What is at stake is going cold turkey to a balanced budget. Ideally this should happen over a 10 year period. Not overnight. But doing this overnight is better than allowing the existing borrowing trajectory to continue until the point of systemic failure.
What is at risk of being cut is social security (which is unfunded), medicare (hugely wasteful), defense (currently 40% of the world total military spending), food stamps, continued bank and wall street bailouts, ongoing Fannie and Freddie and FHA bailouts, Frankensteins like the DHS and NSA.
One also has to consider the impact of QE ("printing" of USD) by the FED. I mean will the FED keep buying the defaulted US Government obligations? |
|
|
|
Why is camp BX so low, its uber ez to fill with USD...
exactly. and when gox finally resumes speedy withdrawals, you can expect a turbo crash. Only reason ppl buy btc these days is to get fiat off gox. THE ONLY REASON. The sharp rise in the BTC/ JPY volume on MTGox over the last 4 months would indicate otherwise. Fiat is leaving MTGox both as JPY and EUR. http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxJPY#rg120ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv |
|
|
|
...
What makes this even more interesting is that ASICs have 0 value (apart from materials perhaps) besides generating Bitcoins, whereas GPUs used to be modern GPUs that could be reused and resold for gaming machines.
This is not entirely correct. An ASIC can continue to have value as a space heater in winter partially subsidized by the BTC generated even after the marginal cost of electricity is well above the value of the BTC generated. This is because they are far more compact and portable than the typical GPU based mining rig. |
|
|
|
why do these story tellers even have bank accounts in the first place to complain about.
Because their bosses won't pay their wages cash in hand. +1 Even worse in some cases their employers insist on a prepaid debit card that then extorts the employee with usurious fees. The latter is becoming a very serious problem in parts of the United States. My take on this is that the war on cash in many 1st world countries is having a particularly detrimental effect on the poor and lower middle class. A very simple example is payroll. 50 years ago many employers would pay their employees in cash. The cost of handling the cash was the responsibility of the employer. Today many of the same employers will pay by cheque or even worse a prepaid debit card. The cost of handling cash is now passed on to the employee either in the form of a fee to cash the cheque at a cheque cashing store or fees on the debit card. I do not begrudge the banks at all, they have their place and actually do a very good job in many cases of meeting the needs of the upper middle class and the wealthy. Where they fail is at the bottom of the income scale, where it is very difficult for them to break even let alone make a profit from these customers without charging exorbitant fees. Let us not forget that the cost of AML / KYC compliance to the bank is the same regardless of whether the customer has a net worth of 1,000,000 USD or 10 USD. The profit opportunity for the bank on the other hand is very different. The reality is that cash and now Bitcoin are by far the most cost effective solutions at the bottom of the income scale. |
|
|
|
One very significant issue with Mintchip is that the technology is dependent upon propriety drivers with no support for GNU / Linux and OSX. http://mintchipchallenge.challengepost.com/forum_topics/827. This does beg the question does this technology depend upon security by obscurity and DRM buried in propriety code? This Canadian simply prefers Bitcoin stored on GNU / Linux. |
|
|
|
Selling Bitcoin short as a short term speculation or hedge has made money and can make sense in some situations. I am talking about borrowing Bitcoin for six weeks to a year or more https://www.bitbond.net/faq. There have been other examples before. The most famous of course was Trendon Shavers aka pirateat40. What broke pirateat40 in the end was not the 7% a week interest rate (this actually made sense for a period of time in the fall of 2011 when the BTC / USD exchange rate was falling by more than 7% a week) but rather the long term increase in purchasing power of Bitcoin. |
|
|
|
This article while technically correct from an academic point of view misses a crucial point. In order for a bank to create money by fractional reserve banking there has to be a person who is both creditworthy and willing to borrow. Furthermore the borrower must be willing hold the loan for a significant period of time in order to have an impact in the M1 money supply. The trouble is that no borrower in their right mind will borrow Bitcoin, a currency that has increased in purchasing power by a factor of 25 in under 6 months only to then "correct" in the "bear" market to "only" 14 times the purchasing power! By the way the real issue here is not volatility but rather the massive unrelenting bull market in Bitcoin driven by the adoption of the currency. Bitcoin borrowing and lending will only make sense once adoption of Bitcoin has reached close to its saturation level, at that point it will behave a lot like gold does today. In the meantime Bitcoin only makes sense as an equity based form of money and the Bitcoin monetary base will be for all practical purposes effectively equivalent to the entire Bitcoin money supply including M1, M2, M3 etc. The author's site https://www.bitbond.net/ and concept is in fact so far ahead of its time that it actually at this point in Bitcoin's development highly dangerous to both borrowers and lenders alike.. |
|
|
|
|
My experience with this is that not having a life and constantly watching the BTC price and / or the speculation forum is a very strong indication that one has either way to little or way much of ones net worth invested in BTC for one's comfort level.
One should honestly ask the following question: What is more stressful?
1) Being predominately in BTC and the price drops by 75%?
2) Being predominately in fiat and the price rises by 300%?
Another trick is to measure one's blood pressure when one is both short and long. By averaging several measurements one can actually get a very good indication of one's comfort level (lower blood pressure). One thing to keep in mind here especially for early adopters that have accumulated substantial fiat profits is that the comfort level and consequently lowest risk position may actually be very heavily weighted towards BTC.
By the way the closer one is to having a life and keeping that blood pressure low, the more successful one will be as a trader regardless of whether one's comfort level is predominately in BTC or in fiat.
|
|
|
|
Mt. Gox is asking for a laundry list of things, including: a declaration that the partnership contract is void; the return of $62,258.70, C$40 dollars and 1,428.8 Bitcoins (worth roughly $165,000 today); and a constructive trust to return the approximately $5 million in customer accounts to the control of Mt. Gox. Really?? 40 Canadian dollars? Please tell me I'm misinterpreting... Anyway, I hope they can settle this out of court and in a timely fashion. This kind of quibbling between two of the largest BTC services is not exactly great for consumer confidence. Not that MtGox has really ever been good for consumer confidence. It may not be so trivial since it does raise the question of MTGox going after Coinlab over Coinlab not having the required the regulatory greenlight to run Bitcoin exchanges in Canada. |
|
|
|
I suspect in the case the problem may be the operating system, anti virus software and marketing detritus commonly found on store bought Microsoft Windows computers. I found that it took 26 hours to validate the blockchain using Bitcoin qt on the following very old laptop hardware: (This laptop by the way has a built in floppy drive and still has its Windows 2000 logo)
Processor Pentium 4M 1.8 GHz (circa 2002)
Ram 1GB
Hardrive 120 GB, 5400 RPM IDE
OS Ubuntu 10.04
It also has no problem keeping up with the blockchain.
After ur reply I googled "Intel Atom vs Intel Pentium" and found this - http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080925100958AAfv4VS. According to the answers Atom processor is very very slow. Here is another comparison. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-atom-cpu,1947.html. Yes the atom is very very slow. I figure maybe 25% - 33% of the speed of my P4M. Under ideal circumstances I figure just under a week for the atom. By the way during the 26 hour run my P4M was very close to max cpu so cpu performance was the limiting factor. |
|
|
|
if the NSA backdoors make Bitcoin worthless, it's not because of the algorithms, but because they can raid any server, and access most home computers through Windows/OSX backdoors and steal people's wallets.  This could be a valid point in that selling by Windows/OSX users could depress the BTC / USD rate, but it would not make Bitcoin worthless far from it. One thing to keep in mind is that for Bitcoin to reach a market share comparable to that of GNU / Linux on the desktop (about 1.5%) the BTC / USD rate would need to be 10000 USD = 1 BTC or more. By the way the biggest threat a Microsoft Windows user has with Bitcoin is not the NSA or some other government agency, but Windows malware. One can just take a look at the number of threads about stolen Bitcoins and hacked exchange accounts involving Microsoft Windows. |
|
|
|
The heart of the malicious Javascript was a tiny Windows executable hidden in a variable named “Magneto.” A traditional virus would use that executable to download and install a full-featured backdoor, so the hacker could come in later and steal passwords, enlist the computer in a DDoS botnet, and generally do all the other nasty things that happen to a hacked Windows box. Bold my emphasis. The malware requires Microsoft Windows in order to work. Still it would be a good idea for GNU / Linux users to not install Wine as an extra precaution. No, their code was targeted towards the windows platform. It doesn't mean windows is less secure, or their was some conspiracy on the part of microsoft. They targeted windows because it's the largest platform. How do you know that there is no conspiracy on the part of Microsoft? I am not saying there is a conspiracy on the part of Microsoft, I am simply saying that there could be. One thing is clear from the Snowden leaks is that there is very close cooperation between companies like Microsoft and various US Government agencies. |
|
|
|
The heart of the malicious Javascript was a tiny Windows executable hidden in a variable named “Magneto.” A traditional virus would use that executable to download and install a full-featured backdoor, so the hacker could come in later and steal passwords, enlist the computer in a DDoS botnet, and generally do all the other nasty things that happen to a hacked Windows box. Bold my emphasis. The malware requires Microsoft Windows in order to work. Still it would be a good idea for GNU / Linux users to not install Wine as an extra precaution. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
