Bitcoin $500
cloudup.com
cloudup.com
What an unspeakably horrible service. I thought I was in for hundreds of dollars over budget, but it turns out that not a single BTC was purchased at all.
I only intended to buy ~$50 worth, so I would only have earnt something like $200, but for the love of everything, stay the hell away from MtGox. It's insane how unprofessional they are.
healthcare.gov may be bad, but this is five circles of hell down from that.
Just look at the latest Blockchain fiasco where the guy who runs the company got butthurt over some Reddit comments and got involved in a flame war. MtGox's lack of professionalism is just the tip of the iceberg.
I love BTC and I wish it would take off in a major way, but in order for that to happen people with shitty attitude need to stop running the community. I guess this is why regulation exists in the real world... oh well...
Just to tell people that as amateurish as they may think these exchanges are, it's actually much worse.
Makes you wonder how a company like CoinBase even got funded by YC, come to think of it.
Bitstamp also runs a highly-professional outfit, with customer service usually responding to my queries within a day, often sooner.
I've started trying to help the Bitcoin ecosystem in that area.
"No database backups ... Everyone had root" https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=81045.msg921159#msg9...
Unsalted MD5 password hashes: http://www.dailytech.com/Inside+the+MegaHack+of+Bitcoin+the+...
Wallet on AWS instance, no local backup: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/08/01/third-largest-bitcoi...
This shit's just inept.
The pain in the ass with buying Bitcoins is due to a simple thing: you never own government currency, you always ask someone else for permission to use it and it's always based on human decision. Gold and Bitcoin you can own. Paper bills you can own to some degree (they print more of them every minute, thus taxing your savings all the time). Digital virtual currency USD or EUR in your virtual bank account - you don't own. Banks can even reverse SWIFT/SEPA transfers if they want.
Here's how you normally do it: send a transaction with fairly recent inputs with a zero mining fee. If you are lucky, it will propagate slowly and will reach the merchant sooner than 50% of the network nodes see it. When the merchant sees your transaction, he ships you the product, then you immediately send out double-spending transaction with standard mining fees (sent to your own address). It will propagate much faster and probably will end up mined before the first one.
Fraud with zero-confirmed transactions is most likely in some fully-automated schemes like lotteries, where repeated attempts to reverse the payment pay off immediately.
Not a single mention of financial guarantees, insurance or regulation on their site.
However - it's much easier to withdraw in Japanese and Chinese currencies. BTCChina is pretty close to GoxUSD.
I'd like to buy a pro copy of google sketch-up, and buy some lumber at this lumberyard that is cash only.
How do I do it if i can't withdraw usd?
Yes, I own an info domain. Because I liked it and it was cheap. That's it.
Once you've done this once, everything will go a lot faster next time.
Don't bother with mtgox, there's a reason why there's such a price discrepancy and we all use Bitstamp as the real exchange rate.
EDIT: I just read elsewhere that mtgox is still highly liquid if you're in Japan or China, which means that there may be a good reason for the price discrepancy (high demand in China). But don't bother with gox if you're in the U.S.
So said people at $3, $30, $100, etc.
A classic pump-and-dump(PnD) is when a large amount of an instrument (security/commodity/shares/etc.) are bought by a few entities (people/institutions/early investors/etc). Thus creating a scarcity of the instrument which when executed well will be followed by enough hype, as the common people usually see the "meteoric growth" as proof of a good investment and "a large number" of people believing in its future, rather than the reality of a handful.
This creates a situation where a lot of these novice/late investors start buying the security, usually using market orders (i.e. accepting the sellers offered price). Now since a handful of entities own a large number of the instrument and they offer few shares incrementally at higher levels, and keep selling more and more as the hype/momentum/# of small investors increases.
Eventually taking it to a point where a large amount(still not the majority) of the instrument is now owned by a large number of small investors hoping to make 10x-1000x like the early investors did. At which point they have a few choices/combination of choices(all : 1) Offer a large amount at a price point where the gen. public will not find it valuable, thus leaving only one direction for prices to go 2) Create a small sell-off by selling large quantities through a market order, thus making smaller investors panic 3) Wait it out to let the news, govts or some other external source to present a good opportunity for people to panic, and do one of the above 4) If they are big enough they can actually create #3
A well executed would further buy back the instrument while it crashes for a round of rinse-and-repeat.
There are a lot of examples of pump-and-dumps, a lot of them are legitimate, most are well established and usually don't intend losses for the later investors. The "dump" can just be profit taking, reducing risk, being satisfied with the earning etc. All companies that have raised financing can technically be classified as PnD
ex 1(legitimate): (i) 2 individuals + 2 computers + 1 idea (100% share) [$10,000 valuation/opportunity cost.] => (ii) YC give 3-8% of share for $20k [25x to 67x profit on equity given] => ... so on ..
ex 2(classic PnD - There are plenty worth mentioning): Crude oil futures rally from mid '08 - to its subsequent crash in early '09. I can write a thesis on this one. It was great fun, good times.
ex 3(currently playing out): Bitcoin : This does not undermine the quality of the idea or its execution. Just the fact that a small number of early miners control a large quantity of the instrument. Prices are being driven up by mostly small order-sizes being executed on the sell side (not to be confused with [0]). There is a higher probability that these bitcoin's are being sold by early adopters.
It may be a few weeks early to say if it is a classic pump-and-dump. If it is I would expect to see <$250 possibly even <$100 prices in the next 3-12 weeks. The rational for this is too lengthy for this reply, might just be cognitive dissonance on my part.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sell_side [1] http://raszl.com/blog/bitcoin-benefits-and-risks
One twist about bitcoin is that most early adopters are strongly invested ideologically and/or emotionally, reducing some of the potential dumping power. The next year or two should be rather interesting. I could see some large corrections, but each month that passes gives bitcoin more staying power/legitimacy. So far, each downtrend has only resulted in a later movement to much higher levels.
[1] http://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed-min-yea...
The current market capitalization of BitCoin is above $5 billion.
There will only be around 21 million BitCoins.
If the market capitlization of BitCoin even gets close to a national currency like the US dollar, each BitCoin will be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
We are about to be at $500. Unless governments crack down on BitCoin(possible) I don't foresee this stopping anytime soon.
To me government intervention to the point of banning BitCoin seems like it would be, at this point, somewhat pointless. The Federal Government has known about BitCoin for some time and has yet to take any major regulatory action against it. I think if they wanted to shut it down they would have long before millions of people started using it, and long before major backers like Peter Thiel and the Winklevi had time to establish BitCoin-based companies and lobbying groups. You want to nip something like this in the bud before it becomes an entrenched interest - and they haven't done that yet.
I'd say it's not too late to invest.
Early adopters are rightfully getting a nice reward now, but how do you get "fresh blood" when the difficulty is off the chart unless you have several thousand dollars in hardware?
What do you even mean? That's what pools are for. You can make bitcoins even with a shitty CPU (but will probably spend more on electricity).
If this is a new concept to you, imagine:
When I first received my BFL Jalapeno (ASIC 5G mining rig) and started mining, to the time I sold it, the difficulty had increased enough that I was seeing a .05 BTC gain in twice the time. So now you can imagine how eventually only people above a certain mining speed will be profitable.
Yes you can. It's called pooled mining.
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/
At the next difficulty estimate, an i7 with free electricity mining all the time at 8 MH/s would make about 9 US cents in a month. Since the difficulty will probably go up again in less than two weeks, make that less than 2 US cents per week. Since very few people actually have free electricity it's not worth it.
Seriously, you can. Just based on your comment alone:
> an i7 with free electricity mining all the time at 8 MH/s would make about 9 US cents in a month
This means at the current rate you will make
0.09/470 = 0.000191489362 BTC = 19148.9362 satoshi
Whether you can actually get a single satoshi from a pool is another story. If the pool uses PPLNS, you might not ever. I think most would object to you for being misleading. If you want bitcoins, buy them, or get an ASIC miner and don't use a sucky-ass CPU or GPU.
I specifically addressed electricity costs in my original comment.
My point was, you can make BTC even with a shitty CPU. Whether it's worth it is a different question.
In fact, before hashrate was that high a lot of investors' money was going into mining, not to exchanges (30% growth every 10 days over the last 6-7 months). As mining becomes more and more competitive, less money will go there and more to BTC holders, thus moving the price drastically.
Edit: typos and more clarity.
A farm from a year ago can be completely outpowered by a couple of these machines.
And they are coming online in force over the next 30 to 60 days.
It's hard to make a profit with litecoin, but a single 7950 can still make you around USD $1/day right now after electricity costs. I have a friend who started mining with 4 of them when summer began, they (and the motherboard, power supply, etc. he used for his setup) ROI'd a while ago. I don't know if it makes sense to buy new GPUs anymore... But at least if it does become unprofitable for all but those who have the best GPUs on the market in the cheapest electricity areas (or even for everyone in the event that litecoin dies completely), you still have very excellent gaming GPUs you can resell at a good price to people on Craigslist/ebay. With the "next gen" of consoles that have just come out being so under-powered, a gamer can expect a 7950 or better to handle any PC ports that come out of this gen...
* Using comedy numbering scheme in reference to [1337].
[32]:https://bittylicious.com/ [33]:https://localbitcoins.com/ [1337]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373
Amazing that it is up 100000% in about 2 1/2 years.
Isn't this true of all stocks/commodities? You can only lose 100% of your money.
That is, yes for long positions, no for short sales.
Remember friends, keep your identity small ;) -- http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
-0.01 BTC = 1 cBTC = 1 centibitcoin (also referred to as bitcent)
-0.001 BTC = 1 mBTC = 1 millibitcoin (also referred to as mbit (pronounced em-bit) or millibit or even bit mill)
-0.000 001 BTC = 1 μBTC = 1 microbitcoin (also referred to as ubit (pronounced yu-bit) or microbit)
-0.000 000 01 BTC = 1 satoshi (pronounced sa-toh-shee)
The price will dip, but may recover pretty quickly, like when the famous v0.7/v0.8 fork that happened this March.
If the Bitcoin can't be fixed and becomes unusable, its value will instantly become zero and everyone's savings in it will become permanently lost.
A cryptocurrency with zero backing that exists only in digital form is now worth many billions of dollars. Is it a bubble? Will this foment a currency revolution of sorts? If it doesn't crash, how will governments react? If it does crash, what will replace it? Obviously there is a demand for a decentralized currency, and as more people realize that something like this is possible, I can only see demand for it going one way: up. Most people have never even heard of bitcoin; I've only talked to a few people in my own life who are even familiar with the word, and fewer still who know what it actually is. Yet with even such a small awareness, bitcoin's value has grown from zero to billions in a few years. Unless governments step in and find some way to put the kibosh on decentralized currencies in general, it seems unlikely that demand is going to shrink as awareness continues to increase. We're so used to governments essentially owning currencies that it is very difficult to imagine a world where they don't, but obviously, if cryptocurrencies take off in a big way, the implications for the future are profound.
2. Some governments are very supportive (at least, not intrusive): Germany, China, Hong Kong, Canada. In United States Bitcoin is effectively 90% forbidden already. Banks close accounts for Bitcoin businesses with no reason, regulatory approval is very slow and very-very expensive (need to get it from all states), past history of very aggressive raids on financial experiments.
Not really, no. Peter Thiel's explanation of bubbles is great. He says that bubbles arise when there is (1) widespread, intense belief that’s (2) not true. During the dotcom bubble, people were pouring money into companies simply for having a domain name; the intense belief was that the companies were worth a ton of money, and that simply was not true. A similar reasoning led to the housing bubble: the intense belief in that case was that houses are great investment vehicles and they always appreciate in value. Turns out that also was not true.
Currently, the main thing that is driving Bitcoin's price is speculation. There is widespread, intense belief that it will become a major currency. Is that belief true? The simple answer is we don't know.
But that's not true with just any money. The dollar for example is not a bubble: people believe it to be a reliable medium of exchange, and the fact that it is backed by the US government makes that belief true. Therefore it is not a bubble.
1. Either USD goes straight home, raises the prices and destroys remnants of the US economy.
2. Or govt erects an iron curtain of capital controls to keep the influx of USD at bay which destroys remnants of the US economy.
The war is not an option because it only works when you fight with one country while the others are maintaining the value of USD that you print to fund that war. When there's no one to give you stuff voluntarily for USD, the state goes bankrupt way too quick. And the first guys to notice the raising prices are heavy industries and military complex. US would have to transform to something like Hitler's Germany to force people to build and fight. But more likely is the scenario of Weimar's Republic which hopefully transitions to Bitcoin before complex economic connections between all producers are completely broken down.
And then of course, there's currencies of states that have little qualms of open currency manipulation like the Renminbi.
But even the USD, or at the very least it's value, but I'd argue the US state itself as well, has several critical dependencies. Oil would be the most obvious one, but easy and safe access to the seas, not just around the US, but all over the planet. And I'm sure there's dozens of other things.
In short : The US is not invincible, and I'm pretty sure the status of the USD currently does reflect that belief.
Note that this is a falsehood. Speaking on an indefinite timescale, it's an absolute certainty the US will fail. And economic output will falter with a much greater certainty. So it's a matter of when, not if. And the USD may have lasted longer than average for a currency, but it's nowhere near the top (that would be the Holy Roman Empire and it's Guilder (later replaced, and it's complex, depending on regions, ... I guess when a state celebrates a millenium's existence some issues crop up with the currency and they have to play around with it. Some day the US may be lucky enough to have to do the same. The "real" currency can be said to be silver).
It's also humbling to think that this very, very, very long running state did fail eventually (yes, you can make an argument that it didn't really fail, only parts did, most made smooth transitions to their currently existing forms ... I wouldn't agree with that argument but it's not indefensible).
It will become as much a currency then, as rare baseball cards or antique physical coins.
Let it go. Just enjoy the ride.
Because you say so, right?