Satoshi is certainly here and observing how his baby is developing.
When the world has accepted bitcoin, he might reveal his true identity.

If someone claimed he is Satoshi, would you believe him?

To prove his identity he needs to at least:
-send one bitcoin from his original wallet to a new wallet.
-discuss cryptography with experts so his competency can be proven
-show personal projects, documents and mail conversations that has not been publicized yet

Today they made 12M US$ volume. At 0.20% fee that's an annualized rate of 8.6M$ of profit. That should buy enough servers to handle legit or illegit clients, depending on how powerful the other side might be.

Cavirtex has done his legal homework, Havelock look well made and secure,

But anyway, I wouldn't take a GLBSE-Nefario fuckup as reference for an exchange getting shut down.

https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=163



This is why whoever Satoshi really is can never out himself.

isn't ripple a hobo wine too?

Per Cnet article: "Attackers wait until the price of Bitcoins reaches a certain value, sell, destabilize the exchange, wait for everybody to panic-sell their Bitcoins, wait for the price to drop to a certain amount, then stop the attack and start buying as much as they can," the Japan-based exchange said in a statement at the time. "Repeat this two or three times like we saw over the past few days and they profit."

Any truth to this, or something deeper behind the scenes?

If you could somehow design an exchange that works like Bitcoin itself - completely decentralized, peer-to-peer and with no owner, one could hardly require that exchange to follow any regulations, just like bitcoin. The responsibility to follow rules and regulations born by the user. However, I have no Idea how an exchange could work like that, since there needs to be a way to interface with the traditional banking system. Such a completely decentralized, owner-less exchange would be possible for cryptocurrencies though (e.g. trading BTC for LTC).

Also, I think you should welcome professional traders and bots, as that is probably the fastest and best way to achieve high volume and liquidity on the exchange. Sure, that will require you to provision extra network/computing capacity and a good API, but I'm pretty sure that cost is easily outweighed by the "services" they provide to regular users.

Prices on professional exchanges are "ticked". Do the same thing with amounts and "1.00000001" won't be placed in orders.

If you're worried about the IRS, don't let me stop you.  Report all your earnings on BTC and roll with it from there.

A bubble suggests that this was caused simply by speculative trading gone wild.

Hoarding is not a problem. The word merely means saving. Saving is virtuous, not a problem to be "solved". I'm not interested in what "mainstream" economists take, give or do. If you want what they are selling, then please just stick with dollars or the local currency of your choosing, and leave us bitcoiners alone.

Haha +1

I was thinking the same thing. How much are they spending on all this tech & spying?

It won't kill the currency itself (since it's P2P software), but will all of this rampant speculation (both on my part and others) kill Bitcoin's credibility as a stable and safe store of value in the long run?

Anarcho-capitalism is not compatible with a government. They are mutually exclusive.

First, there is a problem with your unqualified assertion that there is a "dearth of meaningful commerce". Since there is no systematic reporting on Bitcion commerce such as there is in a managed economy this statement has no basis. I can only speak from an understanding of a mining operation as a business model... So, I can not buy electricity, rent, equipment directly in Bitcoins right now, the fact of using an exchange as an intermediate step in this process does no de-legitimize it as "meaningful commerce". To this extent your statement is ludicrous. To say that miners are speculators is like saying wheat farmers are speculators... They actually have a position in what underlies the market, and that informs their business decisions, unlike pure 'naked position' speculators which have an entirely derivative interest.

Given the current network hashing power there is an approximate equivalent of 1780 GPU cores, from that I can estimate a total equipment investment of about $71,000, or around 1% of BTC market value, which seems reasonable to me. But that capacity will be effectively rendered obsolete in a couple of years due to Moore's Law, just to stay current miners can be expected to replace equipment at a rate of $1,365 every two weeks. On top of that, to keep up with network growth another $56,100 investment is required every two weeks. The overhead in electric costs alone are on the order of $12,800 every two weeks. This gives us a baseline for investment + operating costs of around $70,300 every two weeks just to keep mining operations current to market conditions. But there are only 2016 BTC available every two weeks... At current market prices, about $2,300 to be generous. That is a volume multiplier of over 30 just for the economic activity of mining, but it is not fair to characterize it as 'speculation'.

If you are counting the measly $2,300 generated by mining activity against price then it is fair to say it could not affect price that much, but when you account for all the economic activity from mining operations it starts to look more meaningful. I think mining operations respond to market conditions, but this also feeds back into the market... The two are tightly coupled. This does not mean that all of the volume activity over and above what can be accounted for by mining is just speculating from naked positions. There is actually no accounting for the real-world economic activity connected to those trades aside from currency speculation. Just because you don't know what that is doesn't mean you can characterize it as a bubble. As long as there are no systematic reporting requirements for Bitcoin economic activity this will be the case. There will always be people calling market fluctuations 'bubbles', and people calling bullshit on that.