Why are there so many more comments on other ideas?

Anyways, keep gathering people to vote! Media attention is our main field right now, let's get Bitcoin into people's heads!

Witzige Idee. Vielleicht komme ich darauf zurück, wenn ich mal wieder beim Saturn vorbeikomme und Bargeld übrig habe.

Wenn solche Methoden Fuß fassen, werden lauter nichtsahnende Läden zu Bitcoin-Händlern!

Edit: wieviel BTC verkaufst Du denn? Musikdownloadkarten... kann man die irgendwie in €uronen zurücktauschen? Oder ziehst Du echt so viel Musik?

That.

Had people just hoarded BTC when they were still a game currency, it wouldn't have gone anywhere. Yes, I think the prices were just too low, but there was a very good change BTC would just die again until the real activity boom happened.

So I don't think trading in BTC instead of totally hoarding them was stupid. People were just doing something else than speculating.

Looks cool... but I think you'll have trouble to get people to donate for your game unless they played and liked it. And even then, few actually donate in such cases.

I wish you luck though. I also have a game project I struggle to finish.

Neat how you built an actual arcade machine!

Agree with kjj.

So a trader uses a strange pattern. That's his problem. For what reason can you tell him at what price to trade? Also, those are only 1000 BTC and some Linden sandbox money. How in the world should that move the market considerably?

What are you even accusing this person of? Unaesthetic price level difference?

I completely fail to see the point of this thread, other than complaining that people don't trade on some expected price level. If you think you know a more correct price, be happy and get rich with the knowledge.

Most people do not really want more Bitcoin incarnations. That defies the purpose of keeping them rare and stable. Concurring Bitcoin block chains would hold many problems.

I don't see how hoarding would go into some extreme though. Right now, while the market size isn't determined, well, speculation has that gambling charm. But later? There might be better investments than just holding Bitcoins. Also, few people want to sit on their money forever. Hoarding could become a very boring thing.

The deflation criticism is more of the kind that people expect overall economic strength to be away from the optimum because of deflation -- which would be bad indeed. But a total failure scenario? Mmh... I don't think so.

I don't have that, but I also don't believe IRC is representative anymore. As the user base grows, less IRC users should be in it from what I see.

I like the forum statistics very much:

http://forum.bitcoin.org/?action=stats

It's reasonable to choose security over speed in default settings.

Can the 800 BTC pledgers please clear up which have been paid out? And how much there is to gain right now?

As to everyone else, please add to the bounty. I think this android client is really important. The open source mentality is nice and all, but we shouldn't rely on people working for free too much, especially now that time is of the essence. We're missing out on all those android fans who read about Bitcoin now, many would surely join if they had a full client.

That. More than a few people on this forum might be faced with some major purchasing power if that happens. In fact, this might be the one final achievement marking Bitcoin as a success. I think just a single article might suffice for some major event in the history of Bitcoin.

Unless, of course, the mention is heavily correlated with words like "drugs" "police" and "prison". I don't know where things would go with that.

The last two days, we had volumes of the order three times coin generation.

Given that most BTC activity is speculation and many miners being speculators as well -- which I still find strange -- the volume is well within the range to be expected.

Nothing has changed, speculators just adjusted price to the media attention, which increased Bitcoin success chances. The rest was probably chart hyping until people ran out of USD. This is all very nice, but remember that pure trading activity is still nowhere near to sustaining current price.

If you want trade volume, you need something else than speculators. What you actually want is real productivity paid in BTC; trade volume on mtgox is mostly something like gambling on price movements. That marks far less productivity than a similar BTC movement would that comes from trading.

Using the industrial or decorative value of gold as an argument to why it is safer is not reasonable. Gold is not intrinsically valuable. Nobody keeps it because he knows it won't go below 10 USD a kilo; almost the entire value would have vanished if that happened.

Gold is valuable because it is manifested in culture. It is a convention, belief, you name it. If just a small fraction of this happens to Bitcoin, the system has succeeded. The gold analog is thus valid.

I've been looking for flaws in Bitcoin for quite a while, and I found only two points that might pose a problem. The first would be not reaching a market size from where it begins to take a natural monopoly on being the independent international currency. The second would be protocol issues causing a non-healthy network state.

As to the other criticisms, especially those concerning how important the state, housing or whatever is... it's not important. Bitcoin just needs to take over any kind of market as long as it can gain further momentum from there. Not having inflation alone might get this into The Economist -- and then it's just over, the people reading that can sustain a price of USD 100 just because they're curious how buying BTC works. Rolex, Private jet? Nah, today I'm getting some BTC, they're better than CHF for inflation comparison, ain't that much cooler to have than a Rolex?

States attacking Bitcoin, mh, that might become a problem, too.

@knightmb:

Can you please consider helping to secure the future of Bitcoin with a little of that money? You could, say, pledge a little money on an Android Bitcoin Client. See the thread:

http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=1812.0

I think the android client would be massively useful to increase Bitcoin stability. This might be one of the easiest ways to get real, widespread usage of the coins, not just speculation that might end every minute. If I were to own a ridiculous amount of BTC, like you, I would spend a part of it to fix the most important weaknesses that endanger BTC value. Some changes might really make a difference. Usability on mobile phones! Acceptance in shops! You might be able to do the latter by just buying something very expensive and requesting to pay in BTC. With just a fraction of that money, many things could be set in motion; for example encouraging people to fix protocol issues the general public isn't managing to work out. *cough* we have no mining equilibrium after minting *cough*

Okay, the latter part might be asking too much. But supporting the android client in some way might really do something. Any kind of bounty or price should help to get this rolling. Or directly pay one of the programmers on here to finish that android Bitcoin client -- it's likely someone would work at low prices on this kind of project.

I'd really like to see a congress of rich Bitcoin early adopters, or something of the sort. Just discuss methods to use your current purchasing power to make Bitcoin a global scale currency. It might be the smart thing to do; it doesn't matter much whether you have 200k or 300k BTC. It matters whether they're worth 0.1 USD or 100 USD. And from what I know, values in between aren't all that likely to remain stable; Bitcoin looks like an all-or-nothing bet. If used in the right place, a few of those coins you have might increase chances in that bet.

I know I look like some beggar here, and I won't blame anyone, no matter how rich, for not doing something. I'm just suggesting these things since I honestly believe they would be in the own best interest of any early adopter.

yrral86 is right. A forecast many people believe in is a self-fulfilling short-term prophecy. Those things are dangerous to use, and yes, they put a lot of trust into the one writing it. If that person speculates on people believing the forecast, those believers can be neatly and invisibly stripped of a part of their money.

As a rule of thumb, a public chart analysis can be useful for all moments starting from the second, the variance. But the one that gives you money, the expectation value, should be included in the price as soon as any notable trader noticed a change. Such information is worth a lot of money, hardly anyone is so generous to give it away for free -- before adjusting the price himself.

If I read the technical analysis, the only useful information I expect to get from it is the skew. Bitcoin has too many external factors on the market to make concise statements on variance, and my mind doesn't work well on higher moments.

I don't get the whole dark pool order thing, much less why it should start at some amount of USD.

All this does is making the market depth useless and put small traders at a disadvantage. This has been discussed before, and I thought MagicalTux wanted to replace them with iceberg orders. But that never happened, for whatever reason.

I don't think there's a reasonable amount of money starting from which one should have an advantage. That's just weird, so it's not too bad if the value is low.

The guys who made the system (or helped set up the network in early days) get a profit margin on the scale of the market size they created.

It's not something new or strange. Yep, they'll be rich if this works out. So what? I think they did a much better job than, say, the facebook founder. Why don't people go complain that this dude doesn't deserve the money? Bitcoin is a new concept, not that easy to do and comes with a lot of legal trouble. Yes, it's fairly hardcore to have 5M BTC generated before the general public found out about the system. But will we stop using it because of that? Nope.

There are so many people I can rage against for getting rich in an unfair way, why would I care about those who actually did something useful in the process?

I doubt they'll talk themselves. But we can see who we've got.

Possibly, the #1 is some Lousiana Purchase dude. In Oct and Nov 2010, people solt BTC for ridiculously low prices on mtgox. The trade volume is enormous. A single person with just 100k USD on his hands might have bought a million BTC back then.

Then, there's the developers and early low-risk adopters, who have been mining back in 2010. Until recently, mining BTC wasn't all that hard. If someone just kept a good rig running over the last year, he probably has a good share of BTC today. Also, there's those who take percentages out of large flows: mtgox and the slush pool.

So... ArtForz, slush, exchanges, developers who were with this early... that's where the extreme amounts of BTC are to be expected.

Investors who came later probably make less than 1M BTC in total, judging from mtgox volume and a guess that some BTC were traded back and forth multiple times. But I can't be sure.

@"zomg early adopters get too much":

Boo-hoo, person X does not deserve his Bitcoins. Bitcoin initial distribution is by far the best approach I've seen so far. Yes, the makers made the rules so that they can get a neat share in the first month. SO WHAT? I was late too. But do I mind? This is much better than inflation. I rather give absurd amounts of money to someone who was an early supporter of a useful technology than to states who just burn it. Especially if I have to give it once, and the states want to keep the money burning all my life.

But that's the thing. States are there, wasting billions and billions of Euros and Dollars with everybody watching. If somebody pointlessly earns 100 million USD in a Bitcoin rise, who cares? Even ten billion; the EU destroys much, much more every year! It's not even important. And the time frame for the really absurd minting is pretty much over with BTC already at sizable price.

So, IMO, if a hundred people get an unjustified earning of USD 100 million each, I think this is an acceptable loss. The target economy size makes such an event negligible.



@Thread:

I don't believe all you $1000 people. If as many believe that as claim to believe it, price should be higher already. It's mostly people who shout, but aren't sure enough to actually invest. Which should be very profitable if $1000 is actually likely.

This is still far from done. You'll see when it actually is done. Things won't look like a little hacker circle playing with money anymore if that happens. If. Maybe we'll see three-digit prices then. But the real thing, that is many people using BTC in their everyday lives, has yet to happen.

I see 185 new members and the day is not over. One joined while I wrote that sentence just now.

If those aren't spammers, things are getting real. I wonder what kind of load the forum can withstand.

The few biggest merchants forced to mine at a loss? What makes you think they won't rather quit Bitcoin? Whether they do one or the other is merely a question of how lossy mining is, and that's dependent on attacker size, which is practically an external factor. You risk that, depending on some external quantity, exiting Bitcoin is an intelligent decision. Very dangerous.

That's what I meant with the convinced communist solution... works only if you can force people to not evade into a different setup. Which we can't, not now and not when Bitcoin is the super world currency; people can always quit.