Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[rpietila]

On China's Bitcoin strategy:

http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinSerious/comments/1sbtke/chinas_recent_guidance_great_for_bitcoin_in_china/

Yup, something I forgot to add: Chinese government hardly ever release a statement without adding all kinds of rhetorics and political indoctrination into it, now this statement is surprisingly free of that-had the government wanted to put a stop on Bitcoin trading, they would have painted it in much more negative ways, instead they merely warn of risks, but to the Chinese mindset, "government says it's risky=I can make big money", and "I can make big money"+"government says I am free to do so"="BUY BUY BUY!"

This so much.

Btc i guess needed a correction and that china news seemed like a good time for the west to sell out. Sadly luckily these btc are now in stronger hands, hands most likely in china....

So far china has got debt in exchange for goods. Now they get money. Trade balances equalized in both continents.

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Yet more smart money understanding that Bitcoin is a store of value more than a currency:

Paypal President David Marcus Owns Bitcoins, Says Bitcoin isn't (Yet) a Currency but a Store of Value

[protokol]

I started shorting gold on Monday morning - It's up nearly $40 since then, I'm about to get wiped out. Whoops. 

[molecular]

I started shorting gold on Monday morning - It's up nearly $40 since then, I'm about to get wiped out. Whoops. 

what 20 to 1 leverage? lol

real men trade on high leverage... until they dont.

[protokol]

I started shorting gold on Monday morning - It's up nearly $40 since then, I'm about to get wiped out. Whoops. 

what 20 to 1 leverage? lol

real men trade on high leverage... until they dont.

Indeed, I'm on 100:1

I'm hoping for another one of those mysterious 2,000,000 oz market sells, it's the only thing that can save me now!

In all seriousness I'm only trading small amounts like 0.05oz, more for fun than anything. Well it started out being fun anyway haha.

[lebing]

Yet more smart money understanding that Bitcoin is a store of value more than a currency:

Paypal President David Marcus Owns Bitcoins, Says Bitcoin isn't (Yet) a Currency but a Store of Value

/itshappening.jpg

[tvbcof]

Yet more smart money understanding that Bitcoin is a store of value more than a currency:

Paypal President David Marcus Owns Bitcoins, Says Bitcoin isn't (Yet) a Currency but a Store of Value

Finally a person who thinks like me.

I hope that Bitcoin just stays this way.  It's value would be huge and the risk would be limited.  Trying to move forward into the 'exchange currency' world is very risky given the scaling, key security, latency, and privacy issues among others.  Focusing on the 'store of value' aspect would be much less risky, and given the 'mindshare' and development state as I write this, it has a decent likelihood of being stressful.

[User705]

I started shorting gold on Monday morning - It's up nearly $40 since then, I'm about to get wiped out. Whoops. 

what 20 to 1 leverage? lol

real men trade on high leverage... until they dont.

+1
How does one get bankrupt?  First slowly then suddenly!

[BTCINVESTOR]

...
seems like just yesterday when we passed silver.
...

Indeed, it does. I remember when we passed silver, thinking something like: "Well, that was fun. Next stop gold, but it'll be a few years.". Heh.

Yup, I wouldn't for the life of me have thought that we would catch up to gold this year already.

i didn't think so either back then.

but i started to get an inkling that we might back in the summer when the HR kept escalating, escalating, and then going parabolic while the price just stagnated in the last 6 mo consolidation.  i mine b/c i like to hang out in the Custom Hardware forum to get a feeling about how miners think and what they are doing.  most of them never venture over here to Speculation and vice versa.  they have their own community and compulsive way of thinking that help educate my speculation/investment mindset.  during the summer, we miners were undergoing our own form of breathtaking action in the HR while all the speculation guys were over here wringing their hands about a plunge back to 2.  i kept saying in my newsletter we were going to get a "snap UP" to catch the price back up to the HR.  guys like Frozenlock kept arguing with me saying that price always leads HR.  i even caught evoorhees making a case that mining was irrelevant to the price over on Reddit.  not in this case.  you could easily see that millions of fiat dollars were being poured into the new gold rush of Bitcoin mining by old and new miners alike somehow thinking they could easily get in on the groundfloor of the new asic mining machines.  there was a mentality going around that somehow mining would be more lucrative than outright BTC buying, especially after the price had gone to the "bubble high" of 266.  the different buckets of the Bitcoin economy were being filled by raining fiat in an asymmetric pattern with the mining bucket first overflowing.  i knew we were going to get that snap UP especially after we double bottomed at 65.  i said it more than once in my letter.  i could see the frustration and disgust creeping into the miners from the rising difficulty and you could start to pick out more and more comments about giving up mining and going to buy BTC directly around Aug/Sept.  and sure enough, we got that snap UP.  but i didn't think we'd come this far this fast.  

that is, until it became clear to me that we are in a logarithmic progression.

The "hashrate leads" theory is extremely interesting.

Equilibrium price comes at the point where the number of bitcoins people want to buy equals the number of bitcoins people want to sell. That means that for meaningful price movement to occur, something needs to happen for people to want to hold their bitcoins tighter, or something needs to happen for people to want to buy more coins.

And you're right; probably tens of millions were spent on mining-related hardware in the past 6 months, because difficulty was low and everyone had it in their head it was a prudent investment (I admit, I was one of them; tried to get a number of Klondike miners with the loose Avalon chips). That's fiat people DON'T want to spend on coins.

But at some point the hashrate grows to a point where it's clearly NOT a prudent investment any longer, and that money diverts to bitcoins themselves, driving the price up to the point where price clearly outstrips hashrate again (in that sense, mining is critical to restraining price growth to sane levels !).

That raises questions about the other "buckets" of the greater Bitcoin economy, too. What's the macro effect of altcoins? During a runup, they seem to outperform bitcoins and put downward pressure on the system... but during bear markets the money flows back out to Bitcoin and helps balance out the price. Seemingly the altcoins are also a ballasting/moderating influence on the system.

Have a look at the graphic below:



I used average price of BTC during each month since February 2013. I used Mt. Gox daily weighted prices.

[oakpacific]

Yet more smart money understanding that Bitcoin is a store of value more than a currency:

Paypal President David Marcus Owns Bitcoins, Says Bitcoin isn't (Yet) a Currency but a Store of Value

Finally a person who thinks like me.

I hope that Bitcoin just stays this way.  It's value would be huge and the risk would be limited.  Trying to move forward into the 'exchange currency' world is very risky given the scaling, key security, latency, and privacy issues among others.  Focusing on the 'store of value' aspect would be much less risky, and given the 'mindshare' and development state as I write this, it has a decent likelihood of being stressful.

but really it can be used as both, so it will.

im happy however with people using it for whatever they want. more demand means price up no matter what.

ATM we will mainly use it that way, a contender of gold's position.

But as I said elsewhere in this thread, it will take 500 years for us to fully appreciate what Bitcoin has given us-if human beings are to colonize multiple planets one day, it would be ridiculous for them to still expect authority from a few individual politicans, election and democracy themselves would also not seems to make much sense without shared local political interest, authorities have to be derived from some means which are human-independent, for which Bitcoin sets a precedence.

[User705]

ATM we will mainly use it that way, a contender of gold's position.

Well "someone" just hours ago bought a brand new Lambo with BTC. So was BTC a currency there or a store of value?

Could be both.  Store of value for buyer, currency for seller if they converted to fiat right away.

[oakpacific]

ATM we will mainly use it that way, a contender of gold's position.

Well "someone" just hours ago bought a brand new Lambo with BTC. So was BTC a currency there or a store of value?

The important thing is actually Bitcoin "can" be used as a currency, it doesn't have to be practical to use it, just the potential is enough. Much like an opposition party which gets votes but never enough to get elected can put the ruling party's power in check.

Then people have to spend bitcoins once in a while to send those in charge a message, however inconvenient such spending may be.

Gold had such power, but after USG managed to wrestle control of the majority of gold reserve within the U.S it is no more, and gold is confiscable.

[oakpacific]

ATM we will mainly use it that way, a contender of gold's position.

Well "someone" just hours ago bought a brand new Lambo with BTC. So was BTC a currency there or a store of value?

The important thing is actually Bitcoin "can" be used as a currency, it doesn't have to be practical to use it, just the potential is enough. Much like an opposition party which gets votes but never enough to get elected can put the ruling party's power in check.

Then people have to spend bitcoins once in a while to send those in charge a message, however inconvenient such spending may be.

Gold had such power, but after USG managed to wrestle control of the majority of gold reserve within the U.S it is no more, and gold is confiscatable.

In this case it was very practical, e-mail plus BTC = new lambo in my drive way in a few days. I never even had to leave the basement.


To me BTC can be a good store of value but it is really a currency.

We are in this interesting scenario mostly due to banks' slowpokish dinosaur reaction to Bitcoin. They throttle the flow of fiats in/out of the market, so nobody can practically "cash out" and get his newly earned fiats into any other payment system to pay for the luxury goods they want to buy. But Bitcoin will find a way to get in and kick their asses, so the merchants are there to help you to move the money

[oakpacific]

ATM we will mainly use it that way, a contender of gold's position.

Well "someone" just hours ago bought a brand new Lambo with BTC. So was BTC a currency there or a store of value?

The important thing is actually Bitcoin "can" be used as a currency, it doesn't have to be practical to use it, just the potential is enough. Much like an opposition party which gets votes but never enough to get elected can put the ruling party's power in check.

Then people have to spend bitcoins once in a while to send those in charge a message, however inconvenient such spending may be.

Gold had such power, but after USG managed to wrestle control of the majority of gold reserve within the U.S it is no more, and gold is confiscatable.

In this case it was very practical, e-mail plus BTC = new lambo in my drive way in a few days. I never even had to leave the basement.


To me BTC can be a good store of value but it is really a currency.

We are in this interesting scenario mostly due to banks' slowpokish dinosaur reaction to Bitcoin. They throttle the flow of fiats in/out of the market, so nobody can practically "cash out" and get his newly earned fiats into any other payment system to pay for the luxury goods they want to buy. But Bitcoin will find a way to get in and kick their asses, so the merchants are there to help you to move the money

on silk road btc was a currency eh?

sure to speculators btc is a store or wealth, but not to them druggies who only cared about getting that smack or whatever its called.

That's indeed it. But I mostly talked with respect to the problem/non-problem that is Bitcoin's infrastructural suitability as a currency(stuff like 1MB block and confirmation time, etc)

[oakpacific]

That's indeed it. But I mostly talked with respect to the problem/non-problem that is Bitcoin's infrastructural suitability as a currency(stuff like 1MB block and confirmation time, etc)

ahh got ya, but there is other crypto for that like LTC.

LTC made trade-offs for its faster confirmations, you should read fanquake(a LTC developer) 's take on this: http://archive.is/XXBn , I am hopeful of LTC's future mostly because the developers are honest and want to push things forward, rather than pretending everything is fine, typical trait among creators of scamcoins

[tvbcof]

Yet more smart money understanding that Bitcoin is a store of value more than a currency:

Paypal President David Marcus Owns Bitcoins, Says Bitcoin isn't (Yet) a Currency but a Store of Value

Finally a person who thinks like me.

I hope that Bitcoin just stays this way.  It's value would be huge and the risk would be limited.  Trying to move forward into the 'exchange currency' world is very risky given the scaling, key security, latency, and privacy issues among others.  Focusing on the 'store of value' aspect would be much less risky, and given the 'mindshare' and development state as I write this, it has a decent likelihood of being stressful.

but really it can be used as both, so it will.

im happy however with people using it for whatever they want. more demand means price up no matter what.

Spell-check misshap: s/stressful/successful/

Anyway, I'm not happy at all if people push to use native globally distributed ledger Bitcoin for every piss-ant cup of coffee.

Nor am I happy when the principle architect says we have to 'innovate' at top speed to...um...meet the standard expectations of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley I guess.  Gavin said that in his 2013 'state of the union' thing in San Jose but didn't really bother to explain why.  Sounded like the standard sound-bite that I've heard numerous times in that environment.  I only hope he does not completely buy into it himself as some sort of an ordained principle, but I'm afraid he might.

I'm much more confident that Bitcoin will collapse into ruin (or worse) as these things are attempted than I ever was that we'd see $1000.  OTOH, with change comes opportunity for those who have a little bit of vision and analytics ability...and most of the people reading this thread, or at least the old timers who are still in the game.

[oakpacific]

That's indeed it. But I mostly talked with respect to the problem/non-problem that is Bitcoin's infrastructural suitability as a currency(stuff like 1MB block and confirmation time, etc)

ahh got ya, but there is other crypto for that like LTC.

LTC made trade-offs for its faster confirmations, you should read fanquake(a LTC developer) 's take on this: http://archive.is/XXBn , I am hopeful of LTC's future mostly because the developers are honest and want to push things forward, rather than pretending everything is fine, typical trait among creators of scamcoins

that is dated and the new direction was changed with the new team that came about in the spring of 2013.

Haven't followed it up, where can I find more?(checked the LTC forum and saw nothing)

[oakpacific]

Haven't followed it up, where can I find more?(checked the LTC forum and saw nothing)

find warren on this forum or the ltc forum. he has some google blog thing.

anyway the development collected a shit load of money, like $500,000 or so and the path has been split from just following btc.

LTC is its own beast now.

Thanks, thought it was that Warren guy.

Btw you should really check out the LTC daily volume on this particular Chinese exchange https://www.okcoin.com/ , LOL

[calian]

I don't know if this is appropriate but if you want some entertainment, long-time bitcoin hater raw dog is back at it. I suppose he fancies himself the anti-cypherdoc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFgApShXy7Q

And Goat, we want to see pics of the new ride before you take any chances at crashing it. Actually I'd recommend getting some specific driving lessons based on the number of stories out there of  nouveau riche hot rodders totaling their new rides within days of taking possession.

[Grix]

Hey Goat, why a lambo? A Model S would have been much cooler