Hacker News Reader

You're totally right. The world is not ready, just like it wasn't ready for e-commerce in 1996. I mean, who's going to put their credit card online? Who wants to buy stuff without feeling it?

BitCoin may always be more volatile than other currencies. That doesn't actually matter much as long as it's liquid with other commodities and currencies. Its primary purpose is transfer, not store value. It will however stabilize the more broadly it is held and the more real commerce it is involved in.

I think eCommerce was a different situation than what you describe. People were already used to calling up and ordering things over the phone from a catalog using their credit card. Doing the same thing over the internet wasn't that much of a stretch.

That might be what you think, but you are not correct.

As someone who was actually involved in ecommerce in 1995, I can tell this was one of if not the biggest concern for consumers.

In 20 years, perhaps you will tell us BitCoin was not a big leap since we were already used to electronic checks and fiat currency.

Uhhh... if you were around in the 90s everyone said "nobody will buy stuff online". Everyone. News articles, talking heads, books, etc. People scoffed at sites like eBay even years after it's launch.

It was very comparable to bitcoin. Everybody has been complaining about bitcoin while the entire time it's been growing and growing and growing. It's still growing and people are still acting as if it's nothing.

I was in high school and college in the ninties, that wasn't my experience at all. Pretty much everyone accepted e-commerce from the get-go. So my roommate and I are guessing how old you are currently, one of us says forty-five, one says sixty -- who won?

The whole beauty is that the people running the world don't have to be ready.

Of course banks are worried. If bitcoin grows just two more orders of magnitude (how many has it grown so far?) It will become a serious threat.

I see BTC as a proof-of-concept experiment right now more than anything else. And I think it's still too early to tell what it's actually proving.

The billion dollar question- is Bitcoin Myspace or Facebook?

Gee I hope it is neither, as a party who intends to go long on BTC.

Facebook has indeed proved to be much more successful than MySpace but I still think its valuation will settle far below what it is today.

I agree. BTC is a great forerunner to a system that addresses some of its more serious issues, but I don't think it's practical for widespread proliferation.

Need to harden the tech before you run with the big boys!

>As an asset class it's far too volatile

Volatile, sure. Depends if you want to invest long term with it, and you understand the risk.

> As a currency it's too impractical and there are serious hurdles involved with turning central bank currency into Bitcoin and vice versa.

I found it pretty easy. Coinbase was lovely; getting verified on Mt Gox was a bit of a pain.

> We think Wall Street plays a rigged game.

Yeah, because it does. On a personal level I find the finance industry as a whole too difficult to gain any insight in to. I wouldn't know if my bank was collapsing or not, or if the housing market was in a true bubble. I can fully understand bitcoin. Maybe it's a false sense of safety, but I don't think it is.

> worry a Government or a big bank they'll simply manipulate the market.

Possible. We'll see how it plays out.

Most importantly though,

>I just don't understand the purpose it serves.

Very low fee, near-instant, world-wide monetary transfers. It serves a purpose.

I've heard online gambling is a huge industry - 30% daily swings is great for some people.

OK, let's play a game. Say you had $5mm. How would you manipulate the Bitcoin market and earn a guaranteed return?

A government entity looking to destroy the market wouldn't necessarily care about getting a return.

Even if they were, take a look at what happened yesterday when someone dumped 5k bitcoins onto mtgox.

http://i.imgur.com/K8T4F0Y.png

He drew an analogy to wall street and called it a "rigged game". So, I'm curious to hear how he'd rig it.

This is excellent. Any explanation to accompany the graph? How about a link to the source?

Source, on the whole, is http://bitcoincharts.com/ You can break down all the numbers yourself. You can also get a giant history table of all buy/sells with times from either bitcoinity or bitcoin charts, I forget which.

http://bitcoinity.org/markets is the place I watch. The table on the right is aggregated buys/sells, so if you see something like "200 for 90.00" it could be 20 people buying/selling 10 coins, not 1 doing 200.

The mini-crash yesterday was interesting. The 5k dump itself only moved the price down a couple of dollars, but there was a mass movement of smaller transactions that followed it and caused the price to really drop.

My personal (amateur) theory is that people were hovering over their "sell" buttons, looking to cash out as we approach the landmark $100 point. Once they thought someone with a lot of coins was bailing, they took that as a sign to head for the exit.

I also think that MtGox's horrible lag factors into the dips. Their trading engine was running as much as 8 minutes behind during this event, which causes people to not be able to modify or place orders. Along with not being able to see actual "current" trading info, this causes a certain segment of the trading population to go into full panic mode.

Placing market sell orders in an engine that's showing you ancient data during a crash seems suicidal, but for some reason people do it.

I'd love to see Gox upgrade its engine. I honestly think it would make a notable difference in price stability.

Even better, I'd like to see the market grow strong enough to support 3 or 4 primary trading sites. There are a number of others now, but the rest have such low volume that you should only use them to pursue specific opportunities (arbitrage).

Invest that money in private ASIC dev. and mine away

My first idea would be to see if it's possible to create massive sell-offs by crashing through many people's "stop on loss" barriers.

For example, let's say that the exchange rate is 100 USD per bitcoin at the moment and that you have tons of people who would absolutely sell their bitcoins if it went below 90. I'm not in the bitcoin game, but I think mtgox offers "stop on loss" features so that people could get out of bitcoins automatically.

If you're sure that you want to be in bitcoins, but you think that there are a lot of scared players who put their "stop on loss" too high, you might be able to provoke some kind of selling avalanche by selling sufficiently many bitcoins at once. The price drops below 90, which triggers a lot of automated selling. This makes the price drop even further, triggering other stop on loss barriers, driving the price to 80 and so on.

With your $5 millions you buy up all those bitcoins at a rate of 50 USD per bitcoin when the avalanche stops. Then people realize what just happened and the price of bitcoins crawls back to 100 because that was more or less the fair market price.

The point is, with $5 million dollars you might have the power to create digital panics, a "flash crash", and use that to your advantage.

I don't know if $5 million is enough for that, and it's not a guaranteed return.

Oh, this literally happened yesterday.

Someone sold off 5k bitcoins (~USD $450k at the time).

That's exactly what happened. Big sell off from 95 to 80ish, and then it sprang back to ~$90 today.

There's low confidence in it right now, but that's because most players are actual players. They aren't using bitcoins for groceries, like a bank reserve (yet). They're playing them like stocks.

And maybe the 5k seller wasn't even trying to game the system. He/she just wanted to get out.

Imagine a hedge fund with an order of magnitude more monetary mass trying to provoke those kind of sell offs and benefit from them.

It totally stands within reason that until it has wide spread adoption and regular people stop caring about what the exact exchange rate is that we will see large runs like that. As I stated, we have several people (myself included) invested to make money and take care of an investment, not to use a daily currency.

...this is exactly why it will fail.

No. There were already massive amounts of people exiting the market in 2011 (price went down from $30 to $2 in 6 months) yet Bitcoin did not fail.

5k bitcoin sell crashed the market?! To the tune of 100MM in market value loss on those transactions.

That just shows most people are hording it / not really selling or trading, and a few people are buying it, probably the majority of which are doing so because they need to spend it on SilkRoad or a gambling site.

The moment that goes away, or a few big holders decides to cash out, watch out.

Run your own bitcoin exchange:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fvSYT7vhQY#t=279s

Personally I would just fabricate a very intelligent-sounding report where I claim to have found a serious, exploitable flaw in Bitcoin's encryption. I don't think it would be too hard to convince people, because many people expect that something like this might happen. And if the fabrication is good enough then it'll take days or weeks for researchers to fully evaluate the claim. In the meantime the uninformed panic causes a price dip and I buy a bunch of cheap coins.

You find out who Satoshi is (private investigator) , and you hack their computer. Since they invented bitcoin there's a good chance that they own a nontrivial percentage of all currently mined bitcoins.

Likewise you could hack the computers of early adopters who own a lot of bitcoins (back when mining was easy). For example, someone paid someone else 10,000 bitcoin for a pizza a few years ago.

You now own a significant portion all all the bitcoins.

Alternatively, hire security professionals and finds bugs in the bitcoin protocol or client software. You may be able to force another fork.