Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 462. (Read 2032286 times)

I don't see how selling at the tops is immoral.  If anything it is praiseworthy, since selling at the top and buying at the bottom will smoothen out BTC's price, resulting in lower volatility and greater usability for commerce, store-of-value etc. .  

Selling at the top gives you the ammo needed to buy at the bottom.  
By buying at the bottom you are showing your faith in the continued existence of bitcoin, and stop a feedback loop of declining prices leading to less interest and a smaller network.  

gold in the dead cat bounce today, Bitcoin correcting slightly.
Last support in gold is the November low at $1130 and then $1094 at the quarterly chart.

yes, it looks toppish to me, weekly chart with gold overlay attached below:



Do you think further move of dollar at such pace is sustainable? You say half way through, do you really expect to see 120? Do you know what consequences it would have for global economies?

Ps. don't need more lols, let's talk arguments and charts.

I'm starting to wonder if forks are really that big a deal.

Imagine if all the exchanges were set up to handle economic arbitrage of two or more forks. Say you have 20 BTC on Bitstamp when a fork happens. Your account is automatically split into 20 BTC in BitcoinOld and 20BTC in BitcoinNew. If you don't know/care about the fork, you do nothing. If you think one of the two is obviously more viable and/or obviously more likely to get support, you immediately start selling BTC in one for BTC in the other.

Since everyone is doing the same, I bet this all plays out in a matter of minutes because once the trend becomes clear it will snowball since no one wants to be on the losing fork. Luckily, again, you can sit out the arbitrage and leave your stash untouched whichever fork wins. It's just that you can earn yourself some extra coin if you guess the winning fork correctly.

Now to guard against possible glitches in BitcoinNew, even if it wins in initial trading, BitcoinOld will probably still retain some value for a time - for instance 10% of its former value for a few days or weeks - as a representation of an estimated 10% probability of a glitch in BitcoinNew. After that it would likely fade into nothingness. All the while your bitcoins are safe no matter the outcome.

Not only is this far faster than waiting for "consensus," it also ties more solidly into the basic economics of Bitcoin itself. As Daniel Krawisz has pointed out, where investors go, everyone else follows. Investors have the ultimate control, so the forking process should reflect this and exchanges should be setting their systems up for this.

proof of work wont make it to the mainstream.
1billion^TM people will never benefit from it ~directly.
its insane. they just need ~apps.

ETFs, sidechains, offchains, blythechains.. whatever.

Is it always that bitcoin goes up, gold goes down just as usually when USD goes up against currencies gold goes down?

I can think of a big one. You cannot use Proof of Work on a sidechain. Therefore you accept security and/or counterparty risk. It will up to the sidechain user to determine how much risk to accept.

I cannot see any noteworthy economic disadvantages with sidechains.  Fewer small users, but higher transaction fees, so this part is a wash but with the significant advantage that Bitcoin need not bloat and chase out ever more of those who might wish to be infrastructure supporters.  In fact, many sidechain users would probably become infrastructure supporters for their own chosen sidechain(s), and if they can (or must) provide infrastructure support for Bitcoin itself because it is light-weight, that is a very good thing.

The main concern I have about sidechains is that Bitcoin itself has some historic baggage and disadvantages as a backing currency.  A carefully and specially designed crypto-currency could almost certainly do better.  There exists a theoretical possibility that an entire sidechains ecosystem could migrate away from Bitcoin and on to something better, although it probably would not happen without a very good reason.

That said, the 'very good reason' is most likely to be that Bitcoin has fallen victim to the kinds of attacks (mostly against fungibility) that excessive growth makes possible.  At this point one must ask philosophically, 'Is Bitcoin's demise actually that bad of a thing?  Is it not good that we have a healthy and diverse crypto-currency ecosystem which can continue to work with just a swap in functional backing store?'  Should such a swap happen I suspect it would occur by allowing people to buy in with value from the old Bitcoin blockchain, or simply automatically buy them in.  That would be the most concrete way of achieving credibility.  Alternatives include giving a pre-mine to insiders, but that would rightly collapse any possible credibility the effort might have.

$400 seems a reasonable short term target.

It isn't the 20MB block size that scares me, it is the automatic doubling every two years until we reach 20GB blocks. This scares the crap out of me because if a problem turns up we need a fork to pause the scaling. Would much rather see a series of independent increases that we take in steps.

I'm not a huge fan of side chains yet, but Bitcoin's Grandfather (Adam Back) and a couple of other notables participating in this thread have done a lot to convince me they won't be the end of the world and may ameliorate pressure to adopt Gavin's Bloatchain proposal.

Doc's economic attack via free options still worries me, but I have faith antifragility win out in the end.

OTOH, 20MB blocks would destroy TOR, etc. compatibility and poke holes in our beautifully small (defensible/diffuse/resilient) network, which is the vehicle for BTC's antifragility.

Sorry I can't be more specific and impressively techie!   

What's your take on the matter, old bean?

Please enlighten us all why you rather have SCs.

Bitcoin is literally at a fork.  One path leads to super-gold, the other leads to yet another forgettable/replaceable retail token.

In the most likely scenario, competing camps take both forks and mutual hostility/drama/lulz ensure (as usual).

Have you weighed in on the blocksize debate?  I'd rather have sidechains than 20MB++ gigablocks, and am curious where you stand ATM.

Keynes, a homo sex maniac:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/john-maynard-keynes-new-biography-reveals-shocking-details-about-the-economists-sex-life-10101971.html

It is quite amusing.

Looks topish? lol check the monthly.. its prob about half way through

Looks toppish to me. Two important levels 100 (psychological) and 101.50.
Expect a correction from there. Gold doesn't look that bad so far.

And sell out to Oracle for a giant pile of fiat.

The Browns Bottom equivalent?

We may find out that the US government sold bitcoin near the bottom (US Marshals auctions) and bought (or at least held) gold near the top.  Typical