Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 1406. (Read 2032274 times)

never said i bought at avg price of $1.  you may be confused with me saying i started buying @ $1.60.   yes, i knifecaught some on the way down from $32.   no shame in admitting that it dropped way more than i thought would so yes i bought some in the teens.   what matters now is i'm way in the black.  never sold a coin.

Request thread name changed to "Health of Global Society UP, Human Reliance on False Authority DOWN".

I thought that you bought bitcoin at avg price of $1. once you tried to buy 10k bitcoin around the price of $1. maybe you buy too much when it's 20 or 30?

While I think a lot of us were waiting for a $1 second chance, in hindsight I'm just happy to be in the black. Especially considering I bought my first coins for $19 and $27 (you know which week that was).

I always wondered what your cost basis was just on an academic level, so thanks for that.  In my case I only started buying on the way down.  I got a few bad-ish purchases in maybe near $20 on that PayPal site before I figured things out and started sending wires to Tradehill which made me really start at $16.  At that point I was just shooting for 100 BTC.  As the prices dropped it was amazing to me how many BTC one could get given where I started.  As I had extra fiat to burn I choose BTC vs. phyzzz for a fair percentage of it until the price started up from $2-ish which lends support to the contention that I saw it as having the potential to outperform PM's by a wide margin.  I always did feel that those $2-$3/BTC times were a very welcome second chance to 'get in early'.

I believe I can honestly say that all of my blathering in all of my posts have been done with a certain level of honesty and I never tried to convince anyone else of something I didn't believe myself.  I toyed with a thought of trying to invest in efforts to suck in Joe Sixpack since it would enrich me personally, but never got around to actually doing much along these lines and never really was comfortable that it was really the right thing to do...yet, with so many people getting burnt.

I honestly believe that there is a real chance that we may be approaching a time when for 99.99% of people, investment decisions will not just be for shits-n-giggles but will be extremely important and possibly life-n-death issues for some.  I continue to believe that actual physical PM's are something that everyone should have under their mattress and Bitcoin is something for knowlegable and careful people to dip their feet in since it is so neat and so potentially world changing.  And since it could make them extremely wealthy.  Bitcoin does not need to maximize the user-base to succeed at this point...and in fact doing so at this point could be a factor in causing it to fail in my opinion.

i was actually quite involved in those accusations against allinvain.  iirc, he claimed he'd been hacked like 8h before for around 3.xx BTC while on slush's pool and yet he didn't do anything after that to secure his wallet or move the rest of his coins?  he sounded more like an attention getter than anything to me.

That's a question you should ask hackers  But there is for sure a number for which it's true.
I agree that it's not really a problem right now (and iirc some where not convinced that the allinvain case was legit). It has for sure been tried already (there was a trojan a few months ago which purpose was to steal wallet.dat files, before encryption was coded in the satoshi client), but I'm not convinced the people who tried were trying really hard, or were the most competent.

I do think that the method you're using right now is the best one available, and that is what matters. Being among the most protected minority is the best solution, even if it's not perfect (nothing is).
And I'm sure there will be even better methods in the future, like specialized hardware.

ok, if you want to quibble about the definition of infiltration; someone infiltrated the usb stick.  but i appreciate all your comments and paranoia.  never hurts to be suspicious and on guard.

the good thing about having been a so called early adopter (if last Feb 2011 can even be considered that) is that there were more security discussions going on back then.  i've always been very paranoid with my wallets ever since and have never trusted or gotten involved with any online wallet or bank/exchange scheme. from the beginning i created a live session cd offline wallet and refused to touch it since.  there were some great discussions about usb stick vulnerabilities as well with regards to autorun malware.  any usb stick i might use to access that wallet will never have been exposed to an infiltrator.  i also have other means of connecting to the internet via VM's, etc.  one of the later benefits of using Armory is focusing on how these offline wallets work and what the objectives are to minimize exposure to a hacker.  i think it would be pretty hard to get malware onto my usb stick.

you still didn't give me any examples of private wallet hacking that have been verified as legit.  i haven't heard of any except for the server based ones and allinvain.  and i'm sure its been tried ad nauseum.  how high does the value of Bitcoin have to go for this increased hacking activity that you're calling for to kick into high gear?  seems like it would have been worth it at many points here along the way.

b/c of the problems with a starting point in all these discussions, silverbox and i informally agreed to the beginning of this thread as a starting point.  thus:  Gold down, Bitcoin UP.

no. you had it right the first time with regards to my specific situation. i consider it a huge win.

i sold gold at avg price of $1600, sold silver at avg price of $44, and bought Bitcoin at avg price of $6.50.  i find it interesting how my avg price is near tvbcof and despite our differences here in the past on gold and silver appear to have invested into Bitcoin at similar points in time (on the way up and on the way down and most importantly at the bottom).  this has been a spectacular trade for me personally according to the timing of my switch.

i also think, in general, w/o any specific time points that its fair to say that Bitcoin has outperformed gold/silver by a long shot since its inception.

Cypher at what point will you change the topic to: Gold UP. Bitcoin UP.
?
1900?
2000?
 

About Stuxnet, I don't think it required an infiltrator, it required a human mistake (in this case an infected usb stick plugged in a computer). If it was indeed an infiltrator, why infect so many computers around the world ?

About btc, I agree, the risk is quite low presently, but so is bitcoin valuation. The higher valuation goes, the higher the risk.

How sure are you that any interaction with your btc-only, never connected to the Internet laptop is secure ? For the case of usb stick, you cannot trust entirely the results of an av scan. When av companies discovered stuxnet, it was already in the wild for at least a year as far as i know.

I agree this all sounds paranoid, but that's an important quality to have in computer security.

Anyway I'm just saying that it's part of the risk inherent with btc, and that it shouldn't be underestimated.

true, gold didn't collapse. I should've said: "bitcoin still wins by a long shot". sorry 'bout that, miscreanity.

I knew I should've changed my name

the dynamics of every crisis situation will vary.  with what we face today, which is a debt deflation, i see gold failing to exceed the previous high just like the stock market.  could be wrong of course.

how many Bitcoin wallets have you heard of being hacked?  private ones, not those on servers like Bitcoinica.  allinvains wallet doesn't count either as it was an open mining wallet hooked up to a pool server.

Stuxnet, as i understand, was incredibly sophisticated developed by the US gov't and required an infiltrator that installed the virus on the Iranian computer probably with a usb stick.  that won't happen to me anytime soon.

same 'ol arguments, same 'ol delusions.

Thx for the recognition.  It is true that I felt Bitcoin had much room to grow at that time as evidenced by my plowing much fiat into it back then.  And by my regular gum-flapping about my actions and rationals at the time.

A solution such as Bitcoin is hugely valuable, and even partial exchange-centric utilization would, by my estimates, make each BTC worth thousands current USD per.

Today we are approaching a year from those dark $2/BTC days and there has been:

 - no core system exploits.
 - no change in the high quality of the core development team.
 - exciting run-ups (and downs) and a touch near halve the $32/BTC peak.

These things together make me much more confident in Bitcoin's potential than I was back in.  It is important to note (or I feel it so, at least) that I still consider Bitcoin more likely to fail than to succeed in the end.  ~labestiol mentions the sleep factor, and I think that's quite important.  I'm not ready to get even close to 20% of my savings in BTC at this point.  As I've mentioned before, success of Bitcoin means (to me) such astronomical numbers that one really does not need a huge footprint in Bitcoin to realize the potential upside in a big way.

(Of course it won't hurt my speculative investment in BTC if everyone goes all in, so, patient reader, go for it if you want...but I don't think it is a wise or necessary move.)