Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 464. (Read 2032286 times)

Sold all the silver and most of the gold. Still retain 2 sleeves of gold coins but that's it. Bitcoin is the future.

I keep offering to sell those 2 sleeves to all the gold bugs who stop by every once in a while claiming they're worth $30000/oz for a mere $15000/oz but not a one of them take me up on the deal.

Ah, now you're thinking.

It may actually be in the US's overall strategic advantage to adopt Bitcoin as backing for the USD in the long run.

Wouldn't that be a hoot.

Well, will you look at that. Nice timing. Do you still hold a single ounce of gold or are you 100% BTC in the BTC/GLD pair?

Just a thought.. since there is a currency war happening and everyone knows China/Russia is going all in on Gold.  It would behoove all the rest to push gold down as much as possible.

Well, given I made this post on 8/9/11, Gold: I Smell a Trap, I think I've earned the right to say "yeah, I'm sure".

I really hope this is the last gasp of the appcoin model:

http://blog.factom.org/post/113341070224/coinapult-factom-announce-collaboration


Because both the marks investors and the regulators are now so skeptical of appcoin IPOs, they now have to pretend it's a "software sale" to have any credibility at all.

Are you sure? Because losing 5% in one month is not what I call collapsing.

Gold really collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

If/when we see a new ATH I doubt it will stop a couple dollars or hundreds of over the previous one. When we're past 1163 then the sky is the limit.

the sentiment is extremely positive we may see a new ATH until some time in 2015 Then we can start to imagining $5k bitcoins next year.

Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

Yawn.

the immutable ledger property that wall st. has finally grokked (took long enough) is in fact provided by the chained-blocks subset, the UTXO ... and therein lies the fulcrum of the not bitcoin vs "blockchain technology" misinformation meme.

UTXO=ledger
blockchain=journal

Good to know.


Yes. The power of Bitcoin is enhanced by in-built flexibility. Many nodes will always have and always want the full blockchain, many will be happier with the UTXO set secured by hashes in the main-chain, and many users will be OK with SPV only.

Just because alternative models are available, and can work concurrently with earlier implementations, does not mean everyone jumps ship to one model.

No one will deny you that access on an open network should you wish it ... destruction of tx history has a myriad of benefits, and risks (that can be mitigated).

wow

this and the 21.inc news has me so bullish.

we are going to see an absolute deluge of innovation and capital setting up to move into Bitcoin this year.

I'm afraid the transition will be swift and perhaps quicker than most everyone expects. It's gonna take balls of steel to ride this market.

bring it on

Masters and cypherdoc are like two peas in a pod in this respect.

Druggies and Libertarians get all the glory in Bitcoinland, but since before I got involved the market manipulators of Masters's class have had a giant footprint.  Probably bigger than any other would be my guess.  This little tid-bit was apparent from one of the many hacks which resulted in the loss of privacy and the note that various of the participant were logging in from work at their Wall Street firms.  And from simple observations of the market, the regulatory bodies, the media, etc.  It really makes perfect sense in a system where there is some money to be made, a dearth of pesky regulation, and a barrier to privacy subversion which walls out most entities abilities to penetrate.  This made Bitcoin, to me, a likely place to make some money as long as I had the patience to match those who have the resources to play for keeps.  I've always been prepared to laugh off little year or two machinations since I would expect them in a market such as Bitcoin.

Yes, THE Blythe Masters. That chick is notorious for JPM manipulation.

This Blythe Masters?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-04-10/blythe-masters-under-investigation-federal-prosecutors

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-02-07/blythe-masters-withdraws-cftc-furious-twitter-backlash-blamed

Well, this a big deal. Remember when it was just her husband?:

**Blythe Masters joins bitcoin start-up**

> Blythe Masters, the former JPMorgan executive who helped pioneer credit derivatives in the 1990s, has re-emerged as chief executive of a cryptocurrency start-up.

> Digital Asset Holdings aims to be a venue for buyers and sellers of financial assets to meet and transact, switching currencies into bitcoin in order to cut the cost and time of settlement and make use of the decentralised “block chain” as a secure record of transactions.

> Bitcoin was created in the wake of the financial crisis by an anonymous computer scientist keen to displace central banks, government currencies and the traditional banking system.

> Its most ardent devotees include libertarians and drug dealers, but financial services companies are interested in exploiting the underlying technology, which allows the ownership of a bitcoin to be transferred from one user to another.

> “There is a school of libertarian ‘visionaries’ who want to imagine a world without big banks, big governments,” said Ms Masters, who left JPMorgan last April. “That’s nice, but completely irrelevant to this business model. We don’t imagine a world in which big banks and big governments don’t exist.”

> “They say they want the world to change, but the world will change by adopting new technology to do a better job,” she said. Reducing the frictional costs of financial transactions is “one of the great challenges of our time”.

> Ms Masters said she had held discussions with the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and New York’s Department of Financial Services about the venture, though it would not need regulators’ blessing because it was not an exchange, a custodian or a money transmitter.

> Instead, it will admit creditworthy members — such as big banks and asset managers — to trade between themselves using DAH’s technology.

> Ms Masters would not say how much she had invested, nor when the venture would launch. DAH was founded last year by Sunil Hirani, founder and chief executive of trueEX, an exchange for interest rate swaps, and Don Wilson, founder and CEO of DRW Trading, a proprietary-trading firm. The venture has employees in New York, Chicago and Tel Aviv, a cryptocurrency hub.

> Ms Masters, 45, is best known for a diverse career at JPMorgan, where she was instrumental in the development of the credit default swaps market as a young banker. Latterly she was head of the global commodities business and left when the bank sold it last year for $3.5bn.

> In a research note on Tuesday, Goldman Sachs analysts noted that “bitcoin and cryptocurrencies allow for the decentralised transfer of assets without a central clearing authority”. They predicted that the technology could wipe out 20 per cent of the revenue the money transfer industry makes from consumer-to-consumer currency transfers and allow companies to cut $74bn in overheads from businesses-to-business payments over time.

> A handful of existing companies, including Ripple Labs, are attempting to achieve the same aim, though all have different technology.

> “We feel that some of the basic plumbing is missing in the system,” said Mr Wilson of DRW. “Bridging the gap between bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and traditional currencies is a problem. One settles immediately. One settles over a day or more than a day. Participants in this ecosystem will be able to control who they’re transacting with because it’s within a closed system where we can control who’s in the pool.”

> Banks have an ambivalent attitude towards bitcoin — intrigued by the technology but concerned about its negative associations.

> BBVA, the large Spanish bank, has invested in Coinbase, a bitcoin “wallet”. But other banks have stopped providing services to bitcoin companies, citing their riskiness. Daniel Masters, ex-husband of Blythe, complained last year that his regulated bitcoin investment fund had been cut off by HSBC.

I've been a believer in UTXO commits for a while, it moves bitcoin nodes towards being maintainers of the current ledger instead of maintainers of every transaction in human history. The current ledger is arguably the useful aspect, there might be some value to the total history but we haven't seen it yet.

One way to make this work is to add a dedicated hash of the UTXO set to each block (this does not need to be in the header, it could follow the coinbase as a special transaction). The UTXO set would have to be in a deterministic order obviously.

With each block, the mining node would include a hash of the UTXO set that is valid for that block. Every P2P node would validate this hash against their UTXO set, which should match. Mined blocks with an invalid UTXO hash would be rejected by the network. Mined blocks with an accepted UTXO by the network could be trusted.

Today, to join the P2P network a full node needs to download:
1) The full history of every block

With a hash of the UTXO set, to join the P2P network a full node only needs to download:
1) The headers since genesis (small/easy)
2) The most recent full block
3) The UTXO set as of the most recent block, which is validated against the block's UTXO hash

That node would now have all the information needed to participate and fully validate new transactions and blocks. Any new transaction will either use inputs from the "starting" UTXO set (which has been validated) or inputs in new blocks that were generated.

For attacks, if you took control of the majority of nodes and majority of mining power, it might be possible to introduce an incorrect UTXO set and then have everyone blindly use that going forward. But this would be completely visible to anyone on the network at the time that I don't see how a successful attack would work. In addition the "full chain" would always be available to validate against, you could think of bitcoin having a few archival nodes with the full chain stored for prosperity.