Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[cypherdoc]

Fricking Huge:

https://twitter.com/MichaelDell/status/490162239983599616

[1713582385]

1713582385

[1713582385]

1713582385

[cypherdoc]

gold getting smacked again. 

there's a clue in there.

[Dragonkiller]

gold getting smacked again. 

there's a clue in there.

What is the clue?

[cypherdoc]

gold getting smacked again. 

there's a clue in there.

What is the clue?

what's the clue?:

Gold collapsing.  Bitcoin UP.

[cypherdoc]

Dell 2013 rev: $57B
Expedia: $4.8B
Overstock: $1.7B

[Chalkbot]

there's alot of negativity running around about the NYDFS release yesterday.  and rightly so, there is alot of overbearing, overreaching regs in there that could be abused and which set unrealistic expectations on startups as well as on transmitters. the big question is who is considered a transmitter? i've seen all sorts of extrapolations to Changetip and to blockchain.info.  yes, it would be best if many of these regs weren't even in place to let innovation flourish and let the market figure it out.  unfortunately, that's not what the regulators are going to allow.

the point i really want to make is that while many of you may be selling off from fear of these regulations permanently constricting Bitcoin, the big boys are doing the opposite.  they are embracing the clarity and will be moving forward in the space no matter how the most ultra-Libertarian participants feel.  and with that forward movement comes their money.  to then be followed by waves of USD investors.  actors like the Winklevii, Circle, SecondMarket are going to be unleashing their enterprise products very soon.  the question is, do you want to be around when they hit the market?  or would you rather get out now from fear that Bitcoin is being constricted?  i, for one, will be sticking around to see what happens b/c it will be big.  we're in a bull flag configuration, afaic, and the price is waiting to launch.  the important thing to realize is that even in the most negative scenario where nothing gets modified in the NYDFS regs, Bitcoin will route around NY.  you'd be blind to not see that given the uptake in Bitcoin all around the world in so many places not deemed possible in years past.  yes, NY is important, but otoh who caused this whole mess in the first place?  how fitting if they unintentionally quarantine themselves off from the greatest achievement in monetary science.  i actually think Lawsky sees this but can't completely extricate himself conceptually from his role as Superintendent.  he may in fact make a mistake, but don't you.  hang in there b/c nothing has fundamentally changed and NY can't stop what is happening globally. 

in the meantime, read that document carefully and submit your change proposals to try and make it right.  that's what i'll be doing.

Yes. While at first I felt pretty negative about the whole thing, I came to realize that these regulations are not for us. They are for a group of financial dinosaurs who need them in order to operate in the space. Their existence will have a near zero effect on the way most of us use bitcoin, and will create a standard for the rest of the world to measure against, presumably in a favorable way.

Let these guys use bitcoin the way they want to, and remember why you are into bicoin in the first place; because they can't force you to use it the way they want you to. The net result is more people in bitcoin, and that's a good thing.

[cypherdoc]

Bitcoin creating a daily green candle...

[Dragonkiller]

gold getting smacked again. 

there's a clue in there.

What is the clue?

what's the clue?:

Gold collapsing.  Bitcoin UP.

Lol, I see.

[cypherdoc]

this is great:

https://twitter.com/robustus/status/490183380491702272

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Bitcoin and the history of money:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP0jCjyrew8

This is my new go-to video.

Money as Memory is an absolutely critical concept to understand, for everything. Even for strategies in dealing with regulators. I'm pretty sick of the "bitcoins are digital tokens" line; it invites all kinds of needless objections and sounds immediately suspect to the slightest skeptic, even otherwise on-point people like the Austrian economists. Bitcoin is a ledger. It isn't a replacement for gold, it's a better system for doing exactly what people originally did and what gold was used to as a low-tech way of doing on a large scale: record who brought value to others within a community. A community that is growing at 10x per year.

[cypherdoc]

https://twitter.com/cypherdoc2/status/490190400175353856

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

https://twitter.com/cypherdoc2/status/490190400175353856

Indeed, why not accept Bitcoin? It apparently took Dell 15 days to implement. That's a company of 100,000 people. Why the heck not accept Bitcoin?? All the cool kids are doing it, it costs almost nothing, takes very little time, and is basically free money.

Now I'm rather partial to the "dishoard-spending theory," which says that the bulk of purchases using Bitcoin are made for portfolio rebalancing purposes. That is, if like Risto Pietila says people reduce their bitcoin holdings by an average of 17% for every doubling of the BTC price, the lion's share of the consumer spending will come from that 17%.

For example, if the market cap doubles from $8 billion to $16 billion, people will get rid of roughly $1.4 billion worth of bitcoins (because their portfolio is getting bitcoin-heavy), of which some will be spent on purchases - instead of the more roundabout method of selling on exchange, wiring to bank, then paying the merchant with fiat. That's potentially a fair amount of money (cheapair.com has already done $1.5 million in sales)...and then think what a full bubble move to $50-80 billion would do.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Well done DELL ... dammit I just went with HP, every DELL I have ever had has performed flawlessly to EOL, with whatever hack linux OS I have thrown at it. I'm gonna go and buy a DELL now just because I can.

NY regulation pontifications just show how irrelevant regulations are to bitcoin ... anyone stop transacting?, anything really change? afaik the network didn't miss a beat, it is all just hot air by impotent guys in suits. All the beating of drums about "engage with the regulators" is more hot air and BS, theatre of the absurd.

Money doesn't need regulations, it just IS ... like ideas

[chriswilmer]

Bitcoin and the history of money:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP0jCjyrew8

This is my new go-to video.

Money as Memory is an absolutely critical concept to understand, for everything. Even for strategies in dealing with regulators. I'm pretty sick of the "bitcoins are digital tokens" line; it invites all kinds of needless objections and sounds immediately suspect to the slightest skeptic, even otherwise on-point people like the Austrian economists. Bitcoin is a ledger. It isn't a replacement for gold, it's a better system for doing exactly what people originally did and what gold was used to as a low-tech way of doing on a large scale: record who brought value to others within a community. A community that is growing at 10x per year.

What an awesome video. Just posted it on Facebook.

At this point, most of my friends are neutral or positive about Bitcoin... EXCEPT the academic economists. I think the fact that Bitcoin was not invented within the sphere of academic economics really bothers them (not that they would ever put it that way...)

[cypherdoc]

Bitcoin and the history of money:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP0jCjyrew8

This is my new go-to video.

Money as Memory is an absolutely critical concept to understand, for everything. Even for strategies in dealing with regulators. I'm pretty sick of the "bitcoins are digital tokens" line; it invites all kinds of needless objections and sounds immediately suspect to the slightest skeptic, even otherwise on-point people like the Austrian economists. Bitcoin is a ledger. It isn't a replacement for gold, it's a better system for doing exactly what people originally did and what gold was used to as a low-tech way of doing on a large scale: record who brought value to others within a community. A community that is growing at 10x per year.

you're dealing in advanced Bitcoin Theory, ZB.  even the most ardent of Bitcoin supporters can't understand this concept; look at all the dissers of this video in the Reddit thread.

[Peter R]

Bitcoin and the history of money:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP0jCjyrew8

This is my new go-to video.

Money as Memory is an absolutely critical concept to understand, for everything. Even for strategies in dealing with regulators. I'm pretty sick of the "bitcoins are digital tokens" line; it invites all kinds of needless objections and sounds immediately suspect to the slightest skeptic, even otherwise on-point people like the Austrian economists. Bitcoin is a ledger. It isn't a replacement for gold, it's a better system for doing exactly what people originally did and what gold was used to as a low-tech way of doing on a large scale: record who brought value to others within a community. A community that is growing at 10x per year.

What an awesome video. Just posted it on Facebook.

At this point, most of my friends are neutral or positive about Bitcoin... EXCEPT the academic economists. I think the fact that Bitcoin was not invented within the sphere of academic economics really bothers them (not that they would ever put it that way...)

Chris, we need to launch J Bitcoin soon!

[chriswilmer]

Bitcoin and the history of money:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP0jCjyrew8

This is my new go-to video.

Money as Memory is an absolutely critical concept to understand, for everything. Even for strategies in dealing with regulators. I'm pretty sick of the "bitcoins are digital tokens" line; it invites all kinds of needless objections and sounds immediately suspect to the slightest skeptic, even otherwise on-point people like the Austrian economists. Bitcoin is a ledger. It isn't a replacement for gold, it's a better system for doing exactly what people originally did and what gold was used to as a low-tech way of doing on a large scale: record who brought value to others within a community. A community that is growing at 10x per year.

What an awesome video. Just posted it on Facebook.

At this point, most of my friends are neutral or positive about Bitcoin... EXCEPT the academic economists. I think the fact that Bitcoin was not invented within the sphere of academic economics really bothers them (not that they would ever put it that way...)

Chris, we need to launch J Bitcoin soon!

I just finished a postdoc at Harvard... and a Bitcoin book project... so maybe now is a good moment to again bite off more than I can chew...

(sending you a PM)

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

At this point, most of my friends are neutral or positive about Bitcoin... EXCEPT the academic economists. I think the fact that Bitcoin was not invented within the sphere of academic economics really bothers them (not that they would ever put it that way...)

Mark Twain nailed this one: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

Hayek phrased the problem more more succinctly as "the pretense of knowledge."

It's also the same reason people often lose their car keys: they know for sure they already looked somewhere that they actually haven't yet.

Money experts will be the last to come on board, because they think they already know what money is.

[chriswilmer]

At this point, most of my friends are neutral or positive about Bitcoin... EXCEPT the academic economists. I think the fact that Bitcoin was not invented within the sphere of academic economics really bothers them (not that they would ever put it that way...)

Mark Twain nailed this one: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

Hayek phrased the problem more more succinctly as "the pretense of knowledge."

It's also the same reason people often lose their car keys: they know for sure they already looked somewhere that they actually haven't yet.

Money experts will be the last to come on board, because they think they already know what money is.

+1

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

you're dealing in advanced Bitcoin Theory, ZB.  even the most ardent of Bitcoin supporters can't understand this concept; look at all the dissers of this video in the Reddit thread.

Unfortunately. But I don't think it's actually advanced theory, just conceptual clarity.

It looks advanced only because of the fallout from the early marketing of bitcoins as "digital coins you can send thru the Internet." I'm confident that with enough debate people will come to see how important it is to start with a solid understanding, rather than start with "digital coins" and have to patch it up with a bunch of addenda about how it can't be forged, why "intrinsic value" is an incoherent concept, why it doesn't need "backing," etc. That path, ironically, takes way more advanced explanations to convince people.

The ledger concept is really pretty easy and intuitive: who hasn't had the experience of keeping track of who did the dishes (or swept the floor or bought dinner or drove someone to the airport) in a sort of subjective ledger, as Wences Casares calls it. It's a very natural and completely familiar concept - albeit a nameless one. It's just that things like gold, which is just this weird physical hack for dealing with the technical difficulties in maintaining the ledger in the age before Bitcoin, get in the way.

I think that each extra minute of time invested upfront, taking it back to basics on what money is in terms of that familiar ledger concept, saves a thousand minutes of answering objections and endless misunderstandings later on.