[BUTTCOIN] The bitcoin week in review: Panic! At the Bitcoin!

[BitcoinPorn]

A good review of things going on.  Well written.

In case you haven’t heard, this last week has been a very busy and very eventful week for bitcoin. For some reason a regulation-free market just isn’t working out. Here’s what’s happened.



Dwolla started spitting out money like a broken ATM. Dwolla, one of the largest USD -> Bitcoin payment processors used by Mt. Gox and Tradehill, had done chargebacks on behalf of their users against the markets. This was not supposed to be possible as bitcoin transactions cannot be reversed and therefore the users got the bitcoins AND the cash. Tradehill states they lost about 37k, but Mt. Gox denies any chargebacks, which is highly unlikely considering they are 10x bigger than tradehill. If Mt. Gox did suffer chargebacks, then would be around $1mil in the hole, making them insolvent at this point.

MyBitcoin, the largest online “bank” for bitcoins, simply vanished from the net. They have been around for quite a while but have always seemed a little shady. Like, having a private whois on the domain and using parts of their website through the Tor network. Despite all this, a very large amount of people had their wallets in MyBitcoins, including Bruce Wagner, the owner of OnlyOneTV, producer of “The Bitcoin Show” and hosting the Bitcoin Conference who personally lost 25k bitcoins ($250k USD). Ironically, the 3 restaurants accepting bitcoins as payments also stored their wallets in MyBitcoin. The FBI was notified (lol), but the owner is believed to be living in Barbados currently but there’s no chance in hell anyone will or care to find him.

Bitomat.pl, the largest Polish bitcoin exchange and 3rd largest exchange in existence, is run by an incompetent CIS major. He hosts the entire exchange on an Amazon EC2 server made for quick CPU calculation projects and decides against the $10/ for persistant storage. In the process of upgrading the RAM on the service, he apparently does not understand that it will restart the instance, wiping the storage portion clean and losing everyone’s wallets in an instance. Of course this exchange had no backups (which that $10/mo would have handled with multi-distributed backups). The exchange ended up losing over 17,000 BTC and is currently up for sale to pay back the people who lost their coins. As to who is going to pay $200,000 to buy an exchange with no customers, no traffic and no income is beyond me.

As a result, the price of bitcoins has tanked. BTC started around $12.50 on Tuesday and is currently under $8, with no sight of slowing down. I don’t think it’ll be a quick crash, but I think we’ll be looking at a long, drawn out slide to >$1 rates.

On the plus sides, there should be a glut of cheap video cards hitting eBay very soon.

http://buttcoin.org/the-bitcoin-week-in-review-the-beginning-of-the-end

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[Anonymous]

Where'd this site come from? I disagree that Bitcoins will ever go that low, but at the same time this article is pretty much everything I've been saying.

I think the future of bitcoin is in the 10 to 15 dollar range once the fear dies down a bit.

[teflone]

Where'd this site come from? I disagree that Bitcoins will ever go that low, but at the same time this article is pretty much everything I've been saying.

I think the future of bitcoin is in the 10 to 15 dollar range once the fear dies down a bit.

This.......

[BitcoinPorn]

Buttcoin is OG, has been around since before I was into Bitcoin.

[stick_theman]

I thought Buttcoin was for sale awhile ago.  What happened to it.

[Anonymous]

Whoever runs it seems to have a good grasp on the reality of Bitcoins: that currently it's biggest detriment is it's userbase.

[BitcoinPorn]

Whoever runs it seems to have a good grasp on the reality of Bitcoins: that currently it's biggest detriment is it's userbase.

Well shit, someone better make a community so we can discuss and improve things, because right now Bitcoin.org linking to a Google search result instead of here is going to slow the influx of people having a place to let their interest in Bitcoin grow.

So if the theory is the userbase is currently the detriment, then it is downward spiral time, because it is just the current userbase that is on these forums and all newcomers are being directed to no specific place.

I want to say I wish the people who made that decision thought it through more, but I sadly think they did and just no longer give a crap about progressing Bitcoin so purposely disconnected themselves from it's general users.

The tin foil hat on me ponders if someone behind the scenes is a scammer.  Makes sense to not want to have a central place for people to corroborate information if you desire to keep people ignorant. 

[Anonymous]

Reread my post then reread yours.

Then delete the politics forum and start actually moderating.

[BitcoinPorn]

I recall the many many issues with the politics forum, that place just needed to have subsections is all.

The mods on the forums do not have full access to delete posts.   I think it is maybe time to try to trust the staff a little and give them a chance to not turn this into a police state and allow them to actually moderate.

But without this place linking from Bitcoin.org, these things honestly do not matter, this is just a dying user base.  I stick around because I like enough of the established members.

[Anonymous]

This is the worst possible public face of bitcoins. I want bitcoins to prevail as much as anyone, but I still can't understand why so many people thing anarchists screaming smash the state and moronic true believers getting their friends to invest in an obvious bubble is idiotic.

If people here can't admit when something is wrong, then this place has the potential to do massive harm. Just look at the number of threads saying a crash is a good thing.

[BitcoinPorn]

This is the worst possible public face of bitcoins. I want bitcoins to prevail as much as anyone, but I still can't understand why so many people thing anarchists screaming smash the state and moronic true believers getting their friends to invest in an obvious bubble is idiotic.

Generalizing the political users of the forum as whatever it is you feel they are and that is it, well, that sucks that is all you seen.  Worst is if anyone honestly thinks that any normal person gives ANY credit to any internet user that enjoys a politics forum, or to a lesser extent, just a political subforum.   

I wish everyone had stepped back from that tiny view of just subset of users and seen the greater community that was being built in the back end through a great place to network.  That shit is gone   Now it is just old members talking with old members, the forums are still here, the same issues exist, except now without new members I would argue it is going to be a lot more negative talk.

If people here can't admit when something is wrong, then this place has the potential to do massive harm. Just look at the number of threads saying a crash is a good thing.

Agreed.   Fixing a problem by trying to pretend it doesn't exist is making things way worse though, as again, there is no longer a community.  This is a big important thing for Bitcoin, if the official site is embarrassed of it's users and needed to cut them off, why should the users have faith in Bitcoin.

[airdata]

jesus...

you cited buttcoin as a source for something?

[BitcoinPorn]

jesus...

you cited buttcoin as a source for something?

Well, they did write the article, right?

And it wasn't a satirical piece, like this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=35615.0, which I also like.

Other than the opinions in the piece, were there factual errors?  It was a decent recap post.  Don't hate just to hate, isn't there enough of that in the world

[Anonymous]

The official site had every reason to be embarrassed of this forum! This place is full of people who wouldn't know economics if it bit them in the ass and people are Jem orating money because they don't know what a bubble is.

The only kind of people who come here and stay are people making fun of us, libertarians, and the occasional investor. Some of those honest investors are scared away by the other two groups.

[BitcoinPorn]

The official site had every reason to be embarrassed of this forum! This place is full of people who wouldn't know economics if it bit them in the ass and people are Jem orating money because they don't know what a bubble is.

The only kind of people who come here and stay are people making fun of us, libertarians, and the occasional investor. Some of those honest investors are scared away by the other two groups.

Enjoy keeping that blind eye to all the positive things that have come from the forums that ensure the way of thinking "if it isn't the community I like, then I don't want a community" that will allow Bitcoin to die when combined with the already other sets of negative issues plaguing the community lately.    It is just a huge example of lost faith at a time when it is really needed. 

Let the people who don't know shit about economics speak, why shouldn't they?  Their Bitcoin was worth just as much as mine.  I accept there are uneducated in this world, you shouldn't fight it and instead try to educate

But yeah, fuck being positive.. and.. "trying" .. I guess lol.  I like how most of the greatest thinkers solutions are to run off and talk somewhere else.   

[Anonymous]

Positivity doesn't float a currency.

Please, list for me the positives of this forum that wouldn't be made better by better moderation and deleting the politics forum.

[BitcoinPorn]

better moderation and deleting the politics forum.

I am for the first thing.  And the first thing would have solved the second thing.

[airdata]

oh lawwd...

I'm going to make a website called "ButtReserveNotes.com"  Gonna be great.

[buttcoin]

jesus...

you cited buttcoin as a source for something?

I am still the #1 site for P2P crypto butts