How To Use Bitcoin – The Most Important Creation In The History Of Man

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psionl0 said:
Penny Stock: "also known as cent stocks in some countries, are common shares of small public companies that trade at low prices per share. In the United States, the SEC defines a penny stock as one that trades below $5 per share.[1] In the United Kingdom, stocks priced under £1 are called penny shares." - WIKI

Pump and Dump: "a form of microcap stock fraud that involves artificially inflating the price of an owned stock through false and misleading positive statements, in order to sell the cheaply purchased stock at a higher price. Once the operators of the scheme "dump" their overvalued shares, the price falls and investors lose their money." ... "Often the stock promoter will claim to have "inside" information about impending news." - WIKI

Neither word seems appropriate.
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I mean the behaviour, not the underlying concept. the best trader I know has been hanging around a few bitcoin forums the last few weeks and said the hype and excitement perfectly reminded him of several pumpndumpers from the past.

he was left with an overwhelming urge.. "how do I short this?"
 
anduin said:
But there is one person with enough Bitcoins to wipe out the value if they sell.
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Possibly - but not necessarily. It could also be, for example, just some pooled reserve of a bitcoin exchange, moved to another address for whatever technical reason.

One can't really tell without investigating much more deeply.

anduin said:
I just checked and the BTCs are still in the receiving address. Just sitting there, a large pile big enough to destroy the value of Bitcoin in one go.
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Possibly. But two things come to mind.

First, if this amount is really owned by a single individual, I can't see why they would want to sell it all in one go. They would get more cash if they sold the bitcoins gradually over time, liquidating them at a rate the market can handle.

Second, if someone does intend to sell some BTC quickly, it wouldn't be very smart to keep them stuffed in their personal wallet. It can take hours to transfer BTC to an exchange for sale. With the market as volatile as it is, it would be foolish for speculators not to already have their BTC deposited to their virtual Mt. Gox accounts, ready to be sold on the fly. - And the blockchain doesn't tell us what happens within the walls of Mt. Gox.

stilicho said:
Does anyone on here own any?
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I never owned any bitcoins.
 
anduin said:
Anyone with any sense would have seen this coming. A big problem with Bitcoin as described early in this thread is that there are some people hoarding lots of coins, and they can do as they please in the market. The amount of hoarding is hard to pinpoint, but there might be one person holding as much as 25% of the currency if you read the paper that was quoted earlier in the thread.
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And all they have to do is sell a chunk of it, wait for prices to go back up as things settle down, rince, repeat, until they are dirty rich.
 
psionl0 said:
The only people putting out false information about bitcoin are those who see it as "immoral" or some sort of threat. They desperately try to associate it with bad sounding words like "fraud", "ponzi", "pyramid" etc even though bitcoin has none of their defining features.
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How much expense do you think it would be to start up a mining node for myself? Earlier I read that there's apparently "specialized hardware and software" that people use for the task.

Given that expense, how much time do you think it would take before I could (speculatively to some degree) recover that expense in BTC mined? How much is each hour of that time worth (measured in BTC) compared to the early adopters/miners' time for the corresponding BTC?
 
remirol said:
How much expense do you think it would be to start up a mining node for myself? Earlier I read that there's apparently "specialized hardware and software" that people use for the task.

Given that expense, how much time do you think it would take before I could (speculatively to some degree) recover that expense in BTC mined? How much is each hour of that time worth (measured in BTC) compared to the early adopters/miners' time for the corresponding BTC?
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from what I gather it is extremely processor intensive over longish periods of time, there's a decent amount of investment and energy required to get any return.

just like mining proper money should be, none of this digital finger on the zero key nonsense
 
remirol said:
How much is each hour of that time worth (measured in BTC) compared to the early adopters/miners' time for the corresponding BTC?
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Imitators never do as well as innovators no matter what the business. That is textbook economics. Are you in the "immoral" or "threat" camp?
 
Belz... said:
I take it you've never heard of Microsoft ?
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I would have thought that stitching up the OS business the way Microsoft did was very innovative. ;)

Put it another way: The more people that get into a business, the less profitable it becomes for each individual concerned. Eventually, only the big boys can make a profit. Bitcoin mining is no different in this regard.
 
psionl0 said:
Imitators never do as well as innovators no matter what the business
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Gracious, you don't really believe that do you? The guy who invents it is in great shape if he also knows how to sell it. But if he doesn't, well... tell you what, did Infiniminer or Minecraft make more money?

Also, it appears you have neglected to actually answer my questions. Does this mean you aren't going to, or that you can't?
 
psionl0 said:
That's more to do with the size of the economy than with any clever government regulation. The M2 money supply exceeds $10T and there is relatively little wild speculation on the value of the USD.

In contrast, the "bitcoin economy" is only worth about $1B. At that scale, it only takes a relatively small number of greedy speculators to send the price of bitcoins all over the place.
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This is something I was thinking about recently. It's too small. There are lots of individual billionaires in the world, or even multi-millionaires that could play havoc with the market. Too easily buffeted about by larger economic winds.
 
remirol said:
Gracious, you don't really believe that do you? The guy who invents it is in great shape if he also knows how to sell it. But if he doesn't, well... tell you what, did Infiniminer or Minecraft make more money?
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I presume you know the difference between an innovator and an inventor.

remirol said:
Also, it appears you have neglected to actually answer my questions. Does this mean you aren't going to, or that you can't?
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I don't know how much more computing power it takes to mine for bitcoins compared to 4 years ago but it is a LOT higher. Does that somehow make bitcoin a "pyramid"?
 
Belz... said:
But much of human history saw very different economic complexities, no ? I mean, things were a lot simpler back then.
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No ! USA the had gold/silver backed currency until 1971 which is certainly the modern economic era.

I am NOT arguing in favor of a metal currency, nor a metal backed currency. I am pointing out that metal has some properties a currency needs for stability. Metals cannot be generated by political fiat. The US and Japanese governments can debauch the dollar and yen, but no one can debauch the supply of gold or silver.

All national fiat currencies are flawed in the sense that we allow central-bank humans to decide on the qty of money - and these humans are all subject to influences. So a fiat currency is 'nice' in the sense that the amount *COULD* be controlled to match systemic GDP or similar econometric w/o any human intervention. It could be cooked into an algorithm that creates/deletes the currency and is entirely removed from human control.

Instead the supply of BC is artificially capped at a low figure and does not expand with use; so the BC designers created conditions that permit massive deflation/inflation in terms of BC. ((IMO the entire BC 'mining' model is silly)). The fact that there are only ~11mill BC (<$1Bill USD) makes it a natural target for manipulation; like pink sheet stocks.

If you take humans out of monetary policy, then no - you don't need any regulation beyond criminalizing counterfeiting and such. I mean really - who do you imagine is regulating Bernanke or the BoJ ministers ? The central banks is currently the place where fiat currency mischief is caused. Replace them with an algorithm.


BCs temperary trading halt demonstrates that is is centrally controllable by humans and therefore lacks an important safeguard.
 
As far as I can see the ease of early 'mining' compared to wh
ere it's at now was designed to give those that were in early an advantage over anyone coming in later.
 
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