I was going to post this argument, but seen you already beat me to it.

I agree completely in that if it is fair to call bitcoin a religion, which there are some good argument for doing so, it is also valid to call fiat, or money in general, a form of religion.

They are all based on systems of belief. Most fiat, is simply paper bills representing something. That something is that the next person or entity you exchange the paper with will honor the value printed on the bill. Same with the numbers on your bank account, simply 1's and 0's in a computer that people agree mean something, namely how much money you have.

Bitcoin is the same way, currently its valuation is based more upon its speculative value, determined mainly by traders. Or in other words, the current belief of what it should be worth amongst different groups of people.

My first Bitcoin also came from mining an alternate coin, putting those on an exchange and trading them for bitcoin.

This part of the hive mind expects that outcome, yes. To be more precise I expect it to rise somewhat before the halving and then to fall.

I am not expecting a huge rise at this point, perhaps to $6, but who knows?

I also would not expect a huge decline once the halving has happened, perhaps it will settle in where it has been now for the past days, in the $3-$4 range. I can't help but think with the reward being cut in half, the quick buck miners will leave and the true believers will stay on, and not want to liquidate their coins so cheap.

Of course, this mindset fits well with how I have invested so far, so maybe it is all just wishful thinking, I guess we will all know in a month or so.

Hi izanagi

I achieved Jr. Member status and have update my signature to reflect this. Can you update my status in the spreadsheet?

I also received my first payment this week from the campaign, thanks!

I will reiterate, I had open buy limit orders canceled. Buy orders that according to BTC-e's explanation should have been filled if the price did indeed drop that low for milliseconds as they are claiming.

I also had open long trades that were closed for no good reason. I am very conservative when investing and the ratio of open trades I had at the time to my equity was maybe 10-15%. Meaning the price could have went to $0.01 and the trades still should not have closed. They closed well above this level, but still enough to incur losses. The whole thing does not add up to an event caused by normal market functions. It appears more likely due to some type of intervention, either insider, hacker, or perhaps a glitch in the software.

Now I will point out that in my case all of this was on their MT4 platform. I had only a couple of small orders on the main site at the time, and those performed as expected.

The other curious thing is that according to MT4's graphical history I do not see any spike downward to even suggest it hit $150 like on the main site. It appears to have bottomed around $194. It may not have recorded a millisecond drop though. In any case, my positions should not have been impacted at $150, or as I said even at $1.

I did screenshot everything and downloaded all my transaction reports, along with every conversation I had with them, in case I would need this information in the future. Seeing as how they are in Bulgaria and I am in the US, I do not think much can be done from my standpoint other than try and get my remaining money off of the MT4 exchange and off their site.

In closing I will just say I am not sure what happened, but I am not satisfied with the explanation they have given me because it does not line up to what I experienced with my account. So whether it was a honest mistake, computer glitch, hacker, or whatever, it does not matter to me until a proper explanation is forth-coming. All I can do is move my funds off that exchange and post about my experience in order to let others make up their own minds with what to do.

Actually an anti-bitcoin entity could perform a 51% attack without buying too much equipment. If I were a government or other such entity and looking to perform a 51% attack I would look into opening up a bitcoin mining pool. They could just payout higher than average and miners would slowly begin moving over to that pool. If you are making y bitcoin per xxx hashrate and I start a pool offering y+20% bitcoin per xxx hashrate, there is no doubt people would start moving over.

With all the cloud-hashing schemes and other scams out there, most people wouldn't even question how is possible for such high payments. Others would suspect something, but most would not care as long as the payments kept flowing in.

So at roughly 144 blocks per day * 25 BTC reward * $300 = $1.08 million per day currently mined. So they offer extra 20% would only cost them ~$200,000 a day. Actually it would be quite a bit less since it would take time to build up a loyal following of miners and they would only need 51%. So only toward the end of the operation would they be paying out in excess of $100,000 a day, They could probably start the operation with just a few thousand a day as people first started to move over.

So the question would become how long until they could convince enough people to move over. If only 30-45 days, I think they could pull it off for around $2-3 million. Heck this is low enough amount where even a large company or high net-worth individual might try it on their own... Thoughts?

I think we can eek out a few more dollars before the halving, maybe to $6 again.

I don't know if the price will plummet afterward as the mining will need to stay somewhat profitable, combined with the fact that miners will have less coin to dump on the market everyday. Maybe the quick buck miners will drop out and the mine and hold types will stay keeping the price a bit higher.

Well I got my response back from them, and it is not very promising as far as my trades go.... Basically telling me too bad, so sad, or in other words Sh*t Happens!



Now to try and get my money transferred out of there. I cannot access the site yet, even though I see movement on the charts and other people claiming they can get in. From the looks of it, it may be a DNS issue as I get messages which suggest this. Does anyone know the IP address so I could try to get to the site directly?

That is so sad for me to hear (happy for you), but I pay $0.14 per kwH here in the central part of the US. Are you limited by how much you can consume in a given month or is it "all you can use" type of pricing plan?

As someone else pointed out earlier, buy some BTC now. You are taking the same risk as your friend did back then. Either it will go up or down, but if you believe in it you will kick yourself harder in a one, two, or even five years down the road.

I am sure when BTC first hit $2 there were people saying the same thing; why didn't I buy when it was $0.02 or $0.20, etc. Then when it first hit $20, why didn't I buy at $2?. At $100, why didn't I buy at $20, etc.

So my point is if BTC ever gets mainstream its value will skyrocket. Think about it, only 21 million coins divided up amongst 8 billion people on the planet. That is roughly a 380 people per 1 BTC ratio, so BTC will be very scarce by then. Heck even if one country, say the US at 350 million people to only 21 million BTC, you get the picture.

So if BTC would get to be worth $10,000, $100,000 or even $1,000,000 per BTC, buying at $100 versus $300 becomes almost a moot point. And before thinking such a valuation couldn't happen, consider the GDP of the US in 2013 was approximately 16.77 trillion dollars. I know that is is far from evenly distributed (99% versus the 1%, etc) but for simple math, look at dividing that $16,777,000,000,000 by 21,000,000 coins and they would need to be worth $798,904 each just to sustain one countries economy. BTC is a global currency, so it could be higher. Of course this is the extreme in price prediction and is not very probable, but it does illustrate the potential should BTC get a mainstream foothold.

We already seen one peak at over $1,000 per BTC, and I as many others believe the current price suppression is mainly due to big players buying up the cheap coins (the 0.01%ers). Now is the chance to join them.

Thanks guys!

Yes, wonderful guide! I too was able to figure out how to sign a message and posted it on the reputation thread for future reference if ever needed.

Thanks so much for this valuable information for all of us novices.

Hope I did this right.



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I could see this working, although the one week seems a bit optimistic considering it will take a few days campaigning or clicking faucets to come up with the initial investment. Also, it would be a great way for newbies to learn about trading, only risking the little bit of time/effort they spent at faucets or posting on the forums here, which they were at anyways simply by reading this.

But back to the topic at hand, say that original investment of 500,000 satoshis was spread amongst say 5 different investments, for sake of simplicity lets say each was trading at 50 sat when purchased. We would have investments A, B, C, D, and E each with 2000 of their respective coins as the beginning balance and a starting value of 100,000 sat each. Then after say 3-4 days we have the following results:

Coin A:  30 sat * 2000 = 60,000 sat (loss of 40,000 sat)
Coin B:  10 sat * 2000 = 20,000 sat (loss of 80,000 sat)
Coin C   160 sat * 2000 = 320,000 sat (gain of 220,000 sat)
Coin D   60 sat * 2000 = 120,000 sat (gain of 20,000 sat)
Coin E   20 sat * 2000 = 40,000 sat (loss of 60,000 sat)

So we ended up gaining 240,000 satoshis and losing 180,000 satoshis, which would be a net profit of 60,000 satoshis, or a little better than 10% gain of the original investment. We lost 3 out of 5 trades, but since they probably won't go to 0, they don't necessarily sink the entire investment into the ground. Also, one could try holding the losers for longer, but for this example we would assume everything gets cashed out and the end of the cycle with everything reinvested anew. Of course it is pure speculation, and luck will play some role, but it is not out of the question by repeating this method over a longer period, perhaps a month one could earn 1 BTC.

I think the big drawback to this is it is limited to how big of gains you can make. The next month you simply can't pluck sown 1 BTC into a coin that was averaging only a .1 BTC daily volume and expect others to buy it up. You would need to spread the coin around quite a bit and after a point you will run out of candidate coins to invest in. So going from 1 BTC, to 2, 4, 8, 16, etc and expecting to be a millionaire will be highly improbable, but I could see someone starting out and playing around a bit could earn 1 BTC a month doing this. Of course, as others catch on this will also cut into the profits somewhat.

This is my take on the situation as well. While I do see the need for transaction fees, I also see people complaining why bitcoin does not go more mainstream. While the .0005 fee may currently be 15 cents as someone pointed out, if I am going to use bitcoin for my everyday purchases that 15 cents will add up. If I make 30 small bitcoin transactions a day that would be an extra $4.50 just to use bitcoin. While I can see someone willing to pay $5.00 to move a $1,000+ transaction through a bit quicker, I cannot see a lot of people wanting to paying an extra $5 a day just to use bitcoin for their day-to-day activities.

I have several wallet backups and they range in size from 400 KB, probably the first backup, to 4 MB which is one of the later images. I opened one up with notepad just to peak and as others have indicated you will see a bunch of random gibberish, at least nothing in human readable format.

Personally I am expecting the worst out of them. I had some trades mysteriously close during the so called "crash" that should have stayed open even if the price went to 0, even had buy limits canceled for no reason that should have been filled. I have tried transferring out of my MT4 account to get my remaining funds out of that thieves den, but of course that does not work either. Three days later no support response back on my ticket and now the site is down.

Really? Please explain the scenarios you outlined and how these drastic population collapses will happen. I can see loss of electricity putting people in a hardship, but why would they suddenly just fall over dead?

Even more interesting is your projected 80% population decline in one month just because the Internet goes down. WTF, people can't check their Facebook page are going to just up and die, lol. 

Actually getting some trolls ranting against Vanillacoin is a good sign, it means the coin is starting to threaten others in some way. Either that or they trying to bring price down to buy up cheap, in either case it is a win.

Something else is going on there. I had left LTC long trades go overnight using their MT4 platform and they were all mysteriously closed, and not due to margin call, they were closed at $3.8501, $3.8500 and one 5 minutes later at $3.78. I also had a bunch of buy limit orders closed that were well below those prices, so even if it were a momentary spike down they should have filled. I didn't lose too much except the profit I was carrying on my longs, but it is very curious as the LTC side didn't really show anything abnormal. I had no positions open in BTC at the time to be impacted by the $150 drop.

I have a support ticket in requesting an explanation as I wasn't closed out due to margin or anything else that I can tell. At this point I suspect either someone was able to gain access to their system and execute a lot of sells or someone on the inside is up to something funny. In any event, I will be moving my funds out of there as soon as I hear back from BTC-e support. In the best case scenario they would re-instate my trades, but I am only expecting a boilerplate response so maybe should pull my money out now before anything else mysteriously happens.