Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 1233. (Read 2032266 times)

And yet BIT has not identified the coins that back it.  How different is it from the current PM market.

Fixed. 

Our Fed is merely the largest tentacle on an international octopus.

The Fed Chairmanship represents the ultimate in centralization. 

why else create a Fed and stick one whipping boy into that position?  manipulate him to the max.  profit.

poor Ben Bearhonkme. he must be thinking that he did nothing wong in his life! he went to school, got good drades, his parents told him to stay away from drugs so he never touched them, got a nice job, did it very nicely and always followed exact orders from the top. he recommended himself as extremely reliable person and got the top job in the field. he must be clueless as to where he went wrong in his life. - as you can see these sort of people are unable to think for themselves and only follow orders whether its from his parents, teachers or bosses. i bet there is a bunch of old boys above him getting stoned weekly and thinking what other humiliating thing they can make Ben say for everyone to hate him and him only!

i totally agree! i believe that running bitcoin business is unwise at times like these. they can run for the sake of bringing legitimacy only and not for profit - and why would they as they profit everyday by just holding coins they have. we need to wait for volatility to be less aggressive and then you'll see them sprouting out like mushrooms after rainy season.

really.

Want to pay me 1% a year to put and keep your coins in cold storage?

Well put!

IMHO the issue with the current system is across the board our "thought leaders" (i.e. those in positions to advise and create/influence policy) are universally those who bought into the conformity of thinking you described so well. Just look at the path one HAS to go through to become a FED chairman. It requires going to a top economics program, accepting the concensus line of thinking as fact, and becoming highly regarded in that field by publishing papers that most other experts agree with.

By definition, those who go outside the norm are not seen positively and do not advance in the field. Engineering/science fields are at least grounded in a physcial world, it is possible to later prove who is right, but economics & public policy have no such feedback mechanism and as a result can go down false paths for generations. Worse is these fields are coruptable due to their proximity to money/power politics.

I read the paper about a week ago. LOL. Especially as I studied engineering And still no bitcoin software...

Many people whine when the cards don't go their way and engineers are absolutely a huge pack of whiners!  And finger pointers, esp. when their "baby" is being hurt!  This is the human condition.  

Yet many engineers who have spent time in startups have a great appreciation of the role of capital.  Others maybe not so much.  At the same time I think you're saying that a lot of engineers would have no idea how to get Bitcoin from $1 to $400.  To simplify, they'd just figure adoption would occur because everybody would read Satoshi's white paper.  "Nerds have no idea how to apply what they hath created"  does not quite have the same panache... but is more what you are saying I think.

I think around 2011 you were a lone financier in a pack of engineers and so you've got some serious battle scars.

WRT updates... its always the engineer who does the work!  And the manager who wants the goddamn waste of time daily meetings!  (Yes my team is going through release crunch right now)...    Just kidding in fact it may be terrible but 100x vs 105x is a whole lot in dollar terms but just another increment when posted.  Can you imagine a 5x increase in Jun 2012!!!  I should make you a google docs spreadsheet...  I try to do updates either at significant ATH or when I see the thread start to roll off the bottom of the first page...

I see BIT is modeled after GLD.

This sets up the Final Battle of Paper Bitcoins vs Real Bitcoins.

Like silver, gold lost its battle against paper due to the intentional opacity of actual vs claimed holdings (which take advantage of natural sources of friction and information scarcity).

Bitcoin is Gold 2.0 in the sense that it is radically transparent and perceptions of supply cannot be (effectively) manipulated with fractional reserve management of unallocated accounts and naked shorting.

/stuff Peter Schiff needs to understand (after he learns why public/private key encryption can be trusted)

oh gaud.  hoarding.  that's another one of the major criticisms i heard all day everyday back in 2011.

they failed to understand that hoarding is just another form of saving.  and since when is saving supposed to be bad, unless you're Ben Berspankme?

the arguments against hoarding at the time went like this.  "unless Bitcoiners spend their money, there is no way the merchant economy can get off the ground".  this is so wrong on so many levels.  sometimes ppl just need to save money for rainier days.  it depends on their age in life.  savings can be used to lend to promising Bitcoin projects.  it also creates scarcity during this inflationary phase of reward issuance which helps support the price. point being, there will always be hoarders.  AND, there will always be spenders.  so my argument was just "STFU about hoarders. please".

the other argument they made about volatility was that it prevented merchants from running a stable business.  while this could be true for those Bitcoin businesses running on a shoestring or who were susceptible to price swings, it is NOT true for a well run, well capitalized, forward thinking business that seeks to accumulate BTC leveraging future prospects.  what an opportunity to do so back in 2011!  idiots were dumping BTC to buy whatever they could due to fear that their BTC would go to zero.  i always think back to Meze Grill who shut their doors back in 2011.  what a huge mistake that was.

Great post cypherdoc!

Bitcoin is an extremely complex phenomenon. Expecting everybody to understand both its technical workings and its social ramifications would be very optimistic.

The importance of speculators as well as "hoarders" (or savers, as I like to call them) for Bitcoin seems to escape lots of people on this forum even to this day.

Trying to invoke critical thinking in people is a noble goal and I salute you for pursuing it! I enjoy this thread.

no wonder you don't do updates as frequently as i'd like you to    i enjoy prodding and poking ppl around these parts to get them to think and be challenged.  especially geeks.  in a major way, this is what this thread is all about.  challenging conventional thinking.

of course my meme "The Geeks Fail to Understand That Which They Hath Created" is just another one of those provocations.  and i think it's fair.  of course it's a broad brush statement which doesn't apply to all geeks but to appreciate the meme you had to have been around these parts the latter half of 2011 to understand just how bad the "geek" trolls became.  i could name off dozens of you around here who are engineers, moderators, programmers, mathematicians who trolled me heavily for being bullish.  but i won't so as not to embarrass them.  while you are correct to say these ppl have astounding skills at math, complex systems, different programming languages, and layouts, etc., what all of them lacked is imagination, investment experience, and an understanding of the speculative mind.  one of the most common themes behind their whining was "those evil speculators!".  "they are causing way too much volatility!" "guys like cypherdoc who 'just want to make money'".  "he's ruining it for everybody!"  "Evil Mr. Manipulator".  "When is the Whale going to Dump?".  "they are polluting our beautiful logical, math based system of new money!"  

of course, i argued vociferously with these idiots that speculators were key to launching all sorts of Bitcoin projects and bringing them to fruition.  speculators pump money into the economy in many different ways and help drive the price up which acts as a positive feedback signal to those hesitant to get in the game.  they take risk when others won't.  of course it creates volatility.  this is the nature of speculative markets when things aren't so clear.  as an early adopter or investor, you want to see volatility.  it allows buying on the dips.  if the underlying principles and fundamentals of the economy are correct, then you develop and create a virtuous circle which allows growth; which is exactly what has happened to Bitcoin.  most geeks could not wrap their minds around these concepts as they are not taught in school or within their profession.  these concepts are, on the contrary, NOT logical but in fact irrational and based on human emotion.  how many geeks do you know who read human emotion well?  this is where the immense confusion comes in regarding Bitcoin.

i don't care how logical or smart you are in math or CS. many of these "geeks" failed to understand these principles.  this comes with years of experience and trading in other markets like stocks, bonds or real estate.  watching stocks go from a penny to $1000 in a relentless year over year ramp related to nothing but money printing puts a nice frame around things.  experiencing an end of day short squeeze ramp due to a simple rumor that Warren Buffett is buying housing stocks in late 2008 imprints a most indelible picture of a manipulated market.  you have to live through those things.  you have to lose money doing it.  most geeks don't have that experience either due to their age, lack of funds, or fear of the unknown.

i will say that geeks were probably in the majority of those who understood Bitcoin from day 1 but it is a questionable assumption.  i am your perfect example.

Selection bias.  Since the vast majority of early adopters were nerds, it is incredibly likely that those who sold would also be nerds... there will always be a few.  I never said ALL nerds understand what was created..

Yet how many of the nerds who found bitcoin in 2010 or 2011 sold off all their bitcoin holdings when they were up 10%, and completely missed benefiting from the big rises in price?

For two people to understand each other, one of them has to essentially start thinking like the other.  My experience is that certain people -- the sort who you know have a PHD because they tend to work that fact into the conversation every few weeks -- are unwilling to think in other ways.  They force you to cross the divide, start thinking like them and explain the concept using their terminology and framework.  

This is exactly Schiff's problem.  He cannot imagine that Gold's intrinsic value irrelevant to the price of gold and is actually a liability for commerce whereas Bitcoin both HAS an intrinsic value and it is advantageous for commerce.  Analyze a few of his shows from the context of cognitive framework and you'll rapidly lose all respect for his intelligence and predictions.  A person who can only see one cognitive framework will only be right IF the world follows his framework -- but the existence of other frameworks essentially disproves that possibility.

But people who do computer science have natural language, math, CS, and probably a half dozen different CS languages with semantic differences (procedural, functional, rule-based, document layout).  To a greater degree (still pretty small for many) their minds are flexible enough to think in multiple frameworks.

Frankly, this is why cypherdoc's comment "the nerds do not know that which they have created" pisses me off.  We know.  Its the economics professors and media talking heads who were endlessly reporting and blogging negatively about Bitcoin. Before 2013 99%+ dismissed Bitcoin.  But of that 1%, most were engineers.

But the "nerds" also know that, like daylight savings time the real world at times makes changes beyond the control of any system no matter how elegant.  "We" know that bitcoin is awesome but at the same time we know what we don't know and can't control.  So while I've been saying that bitcoin could become first global exchange currency I've been saying it quietly :-)

Given the infamy of Japanese Ms. Watanabe's, it seems no surprise as to the rise of Chinese Dama's.

hahaha this is brilliant! +1

http://www.ecns.cn/cns-wire/2013/11-15/88703.shtml

Are Chinese damas giving up PM for Bitcoins? I am not sure how to make of it.

On another note, I would really like to see the U.S trying to greenlist them, dama doesn't give a damn!