Bitcoin needs more short-term speculators and a new bitcoinica clone

[kangasbros]

Have you tried http://www.bitme.com ?
Seems pretty nice and intuitive to me.

Does it work the same way as bitcoinica? Does it offer leverage? Looks like a just normal exchange to me... I started creating an account, but left it because I felt lazy...

(I should note that I'm not the target market (speculator) myself, because I'm pretty sure that I suck at predicting the price movements in the short term. So I leave that gambling to others. However I think there is a dire need for some kind of service which allows it easily to short sell bitcoins.)

[Stephen Gornick]

Anyone working on this, or are there already tools for these?

There are CALL and PUT options:

 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MPEx

[Fireball]

I disagree, in my opinion bitcoin need's more places to spend your bitcoins and less speculation.

At the moment there are very few commodities that you can buy with your coins, and next to no places to buy common communicates like milk, bread, butter etc.  A huge percentage of the daily/weekly/monthly volume of bitcoin trades are for other currencies, in traditional money markets this usually lead's to volatility.

That's one of the reasons why ICBIT project was born. It's not for gambling. Futures contracts are more serious instruments and could be used for many things, including speculation on the price movements (for which they suit very well due to their nature - marginal trading, low fees, fast execution, etc).
Furthermore, we plan to add commodities futures too, including oil, gold, and index futures. This would interconnect the Bitcoin market to the fiat-money exchanges (thanks to arbitragers) and hopefully establish a new ecosystem previously absent in the Bitcoin world, reducing volatility.

[tiberiandusk]

I disagree, in my opinion bitcoin need's more places to spend your bitcoins and less speculation.

At the moment there are very few commodities that you can buy with your coins, and next to no places to buy common communicates like milk, bread, butter etc.  A huge percentage of the daily/weekly/monthly volume of bitcoin trades are for other currencies, in traditional money markets this usually lead's to volatility.

Just my opinion though.

I started BitBid for just this reason. I've had quite a few people sign up but not many have posted anything for sale. I think lack of prominent escrow services are hurting it since it's so easy to get paid then never send the product. Also it seems most people are either hoarding or speculating with Bitcoin instead of using it to buy things. It will come eventually. Slow and steady wins the race, etc...

[kangasbros]

That's one of the reasons why ICBIT project was born. It's not for gambling. Futures contracts are more serious instruments and could be used for many things, including speculation on the price movements (for which they suit very well due to their nature - marginal trading, low fees, fast execution, etc).
Furthermore, we plan to add commodities futures too, including oil, gold, and index futures. This would interconnect the Bitcoin market to the fiat-money exchanges (thanks to arbitragers) and hopefully establish a new ecosystem previously absent in the Bitcoin world, reducing volatility.

Whatever it is for, make it easy to understand and easy to use. And my recommendation is that solve one problem properly first, (like speculation in USD/BTC market), and after that start thinking about additional features.

[Fireball]

Whatever it is for, make it easy to understand and easy to use. And my recommendation is that solve one problem properly first, (like speculation in USD/BTC market), and after that start thinking about additional features.

Sure, thanks for your feedback!

[drakahn]

That was a nice movement, 3.1BTC into 10BTC so far, as a test 'play' this is going well

[Fluttershy]

What bitcoin really needs is acceptance by a major corporation willing to perform the tasks formerly reserved for sites like bitcoinica and Mt Gox.