Topic: How many of you have been Zhoutonged? - page 15. (Read 26392 times)

Please do not stereotype.

Only a few people were shorting at that time, less than 10% of Bitcoinica's BTC holdings.

Your posts don't have any evidence to back your claim, and I didn't have time to care about them.

i'll ask again; has anyone heard from Zhou since Friday?  i wonder if he's in trouble with this latest ramp in the price?

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.566153

when a leveraged entity needs to depend on such a small electric device to get your money on quick notice you know you're in trouble.

seriously, thats why i just had to put up this thread, LOL!  i also thought of using "Zhoutongued" but i thought that would be too dirty altho perhaps a more accurate representation of whats going on!  

Allegedly Japanese.  No one has met Satoshi, and it's unknown whether 'he' is a pseudonym for one or several people.  Bitcoin could have been created by a guy in Inner Mongolia for all we know, and given a Japanese name to increase its credibility.

Forgive me if I am jumping to conclusions as I don't know if you were being ironic or not, but if you weren't, how arrogant and conceited is this statement? We are not all from the USA, nor do we all agree with the cut-throat neoliberal greed, self interest, individualism, commercialism and consumerism so dearly loved by the business elites in your country, which are peddled to the rest of your society and devoured voraciously as if it were akin to that pillar of american gastronomy, high fructose corn syrup.

Despite what you might think, the world does not revolve around North America. In fact, the majority of the rest of the world consider the USA to be an irritable little child who knows nothing but instant gratification and throws tantrums when he doesn't get what he wants.

Bitcoin is a project that supersedes national borders. It was created by a japanese guy, so please don't presume that american schools of thought have a monopoly on the bitcoin economy.

Don't trade on the margin.  I'm shorting and covered so long as btc doesn't hit $17.  Interest rates are 1% (at least in the US), so the cost of maintaining an account balance is minimal.

My biggest fear is that he runs away with all the money. But he seems fairly legit.  So maybe hacking is the biggest risk.

And go for long term plays.  In the short-run you're more likely to lose money. Especially with a 2.8% spread (I think it is better counted as 2.8%, not the 1.4% that the website claims - as there is a 2.8% gap between bids and asks.).

It seems very realistic to me. Small investors as a class lose.

Seems that you mistakenly posted on the public forum rather than PM'ing him then.  Not an uncommon mistake for noobs.

how am i a hypocrite?

Then I wasn't talking to you, was I? I guess I just have to spell it out for you guys. I am railing on Cypherdoc because he is  a hypocrite.

I don't see much point in being terribly specific, but those are good guesses

I care about 'how many' coins I have mostly as a percentage of the currency base.  Bitcoin, like gold and unlike fiat, makes that math very simple.

As for my interest in making money, I see the most ideal outcome being one where holders of the currency in the 'Satoshi' block-chain would be lucky to make a dime because the actual benefit of using currency is distributed to the users and that the Satoshi block-chain merely facilitates this.

A second possible outcome could be that Bitcoin is an ideal way to exploit people and I get stupidly wealthy off my speculation.

The most likely outcome is that the Bitcoin is rendered unusable for any combination of reasons (or was indeed born that way) and I lose everything.


I don't.  I don't really see the usefulness of the Satoshi block chain as a replacement for our current fiat systems at this time as they are working fine and have a much more well developed supporting infrastructure (though I could imagine that changing rapidly at some point in the future.)  So, speculation in it's various forms plays a huge role in keeping Bitcoin alive and QA'd and developing.


Yes.

I would be interested in more specific info about these alternatives...  gold? real estate?

Where did you get the quote "If you don't care about "making money" through trading Bitcoin"
I didn't find someone claiming that. I might well of missed it...

I don't get your point though and do not see the dissonance. Can someone with a dissonance realise his own dissonance?

I don't believe I have complained and appreciate the learning I gain on many levels thanks to bitcoins. I might well be in the 1% crowd but seriously doubt that.

There is no way prices are going to be stable when means of getting money into bitcoins changes all the time and fiat money toyed with intensely in many parts of the world.
My swiss franc just got thrown under a bus a few weeks ago, it's not going to be smooth.
It is a store value and a medium of exchange for goods and services, and for now most of that is done in exchange for USD.

You are obviously missing the point. If you don't care about "making money" through trading Bitcoin, why could you possibly care about how "many" coins you have? The exchange rate will always take care of calculating how many you need for your uses. My point is about how 99% of people on this forum will decry speculative behavior in some form, whether it's complaining about price declines, short-sellers, or bot trading, etc., and then exhibit that behavior by discussing how great it is buying low, rallies, etc.

Can you see the cognitive dissonance?

Totally.  I've currently have several fold more BTC than I ever expected to obtain because I did not expect the price to drop this low.

It is also the case that many alternates to Bitcoin are also not ones that I consider a bastion of stability.  I try to keep my holdings of USD low as long for ethical reasons associated with the actions of the US on the world stage, and I don't have infinite trust in the stability of any fiat currency in these times.  I'm not about to have a lot of paper investments 'protected' the the SEC or the justice department generally who I consider to be blatantly colluding with criminals in the financial sector.  And my 'portfolio' is already heavy in some of the alternatives that I feel to be more sound than a lot of 'mainstream' investments.

I've publicly hoped for a drop in the price of BTC for some time now since it will allow anyone who is interested to obtain a noticeable faction of the entire currency base, and am fairly delighted that it came to be.  I will start to become uncomfortable about the viability of the Bitcoin network at some point as utilization, mining effort, etc, continue to fall off.  So I would like to see some sort of a floor be put in.

what happened to Zhoutong anyway?  he's disappeared for the last day or so. 

ah, i see.  he's busy liquidating.

Well, you should probably care about stability if you care about the longevity of Bitcoin, since it's a major hurdle for merchants and other non-speculators. But if you truly, truly only care about Bitcoin's chances at being a currency, a rally or crash (excepting complete failure, of course) should mean nothing to your confidence. You won't find that mentality around here. 99% of those holding Bitcoin are praying for higher prices, because they're as profit-minded as the next speculator while saying the opposite out of the side of their mouth. Don't be that person.

That's because the few people posting about their automatic liquidation knew what to expect with a service they were learning about. They might not be experts in margin trading, but that's why they're trying it out.

The real reason you're seeing what you're seeing, Holliday, is that most bulls around here love to hype price increases while claiming they're just "supporters" of the currency, not speculators. Probably because they've lost a ton in the last few months. And they know short-selling puts downward pressure on prices, which hurts their (slim) chance to recover their losses.

Basically, the existence of Bitcoinica is a problem for recent losers in the crash from $30 to $3, simply because it offers the option to short. In addition, true believers in bitcoin want to see more price stability, and Bitcoinica pulls more speculators into the mix. While that might not correlate exactly with increased volatility, it's attracting the "wrong" kinds of people to their revolutionary currency.

I don't know about you guys, but I made plenty of cash manually liquidating my short position since $6, and I'm brand new to margin trading. Quit with all the complaining and take your losses like adults.


You guys are such idiots. It's like you thought mined coins were free, or something. And working for 2BTC/hour was a good deal.  

The $6 I put into Bitcoinica to play with it, I had converted from mined BTC