Topic: rpietila public diary - page 3. (Read 86489 times)

If you consider a connection as being something binary (two persons involved) then the network value only grows as n^2, n*(n-1)/2 to be precise, not (n-1)!. This is Metcalfe's law: the value of a network grows quadratically with the number of users of the network. This also explains why there are many^2 presents christmas evening if many guests are attending - the number of presents grows quadratically with the number of people if all guests give all other guests one present each.

And btw, n*(n-1)/2=sum(x,x=1,x=n-1) (the sum of all natural numbers from 1 to n-1, not the product as (n-1)! indicates)

Wonder if SlipperySlope is joking, or do I now have the fifth person who understands Bitcoin 

Look at the adoption rate growth, of the 5 people who I know, who realize what I say is true:

Person A - Sep 2010
Person B - Mid-Apr 2013 (This was me )
Person C - Late-Apr 2013
Person D - Early-May 2013
Person E - Early-May 2013

What I see is a very rapid growth. Today is only 5th of May, after all. I'd say hundreds of people understand it in May, and millions in June. In July it is too late to buy bitcoins for investment probably.


Already have the money, now we're looking for some quality of life.

I assure you, you will feel the shortage of rental offices with 4+ meter ceiling, already this autumn. How could it not be, if the above is true?

This thread is a fascinating read, but is getting crazier by the day! The quote above speaks volumes about relative prioritisation. I've traded billions of USD and managed to do so without being overly concerned with ceiling proximity 

Evidently, bitcoin is easy to sell.

The wonder of it all - is that what Risto says above is absolutely true, depending solely upon the degree to which bitcoin replaces the legacy fiat/PM financial structure. The three year exponential growth of bitcoin suggests that it will take a substantial portion of online payment transactions. And Risto could share rosy statistics about the growth of bitcoin as as store of value - achieving what I imagine to be a growing share of the market formerly served only by precious metals.
  

That's not paranoid, you should only disclose the hash of your public keys, to protect you against a quantum-computer equipped thief.

Deleting a post from this thread is no offence from my part. I have just decided that the thread should be a 30-minute read. So I always keep it as maximum 10 pages long. I have deleted 95% of visitor content so far, and about 30% of my own posts also. Even an old post will be deleted when I no longer consider it relevant to the new readers. If you want to develop the idea in your post further, please do it in your own self-moderated thread. In my thread everything will be deleted eventually.

I don't know every cool guy, sorry. Only the ones that frequent economics, speculation. Esp. technical I don't know.

You can buy yourself a ticket if you want to participate (real/virtual) there is 4 more available as of now.

There is only about 1.5 days left before the admission window to the I Bitcoin Supernode Summit closes.

I have stayed in the Haikko Manor for 3 days now, thinking how to best achieve the results that we want from the summit. I have decided the following:

- We will cease to sell virtual admissions separately for a 5,000mBTC refund. The 3 virtuals so far will be refunded.

- The admission window will be open until midnight Sunday UTC (about 37.5 hours from the timestamp of this post) as stated previously

- Only 4 more admissions will be sold, and they will be sold for 7,000mBTC, 8,000mBTC, 9,000mBTC and 10,000mBTC, respectively. No more tickets will be available for purchase after these ones are purchased. You can just pay to the address and send me PM afterwards, otherwise you risk losing out if somebody pays first. It does not matter whether you come personally or not, virtual admission costs the same now.

- I will set up the summit organization on Tuesday, and you can come if you want even then, I will host you the two extra nights at my expense. So practically the ticket includes full board for 6 days (5 nights) instead of 4 days (3 nights).

- The previous opening day of Thursday will see some increase in the organization such as the Secretariat will open then and we can register the letters of attorney. (If the delegates want to legally represent some persons or corporations, prepare the documents in the notarized way).

- The matters we discuss are quite important, as I don't know how operative the Bitcoin Foundation is in the middle of this lawsuit, MP is for some reason still ridiculing me despite my attempts to establish contact, also it should be obvious that the USD/BTC exchanges in their current form cannot support millibitcoin's price going much past $1, and therefore need to be overridden as soon as possible.

- We will provide real time and delayed audio, video, and transcript material of the meetings according to our discretion.

- The Bitcoin Dealers' Association and the Supernode Network will be established during the summit, or immediately following it. The clearinghouse will probably not be established yet, since to function properly, it needs that bitcoin price first go up, and then slowly down to its long-term stable value. This is not expected to happen in the following 3 months.

- All delegates please send PM to me, or skype "ristopietila" or send SMS +358503235950 in the next 36 hours, we will decide what forum we will use for practical arrangements, the delegates have already set up skype chats, fb forums, threads and all, but it is a little bit of a mess and we need to clear it to start functioning properly

Thank you for your thoughts,

Bitcoin can change in a heartbeat. Superficially it may look that you can easily buy bitcoins sub-0.1, as it has spent several hours under it and the wall observer shows a wall at 0.1.

Don't fall on the trap: Everything can be fake, until you receive the bitcoins.

I have been a full-time silver dealer for 7 years, I know. Until you get the silver, you can imagine what you want and rant endlessly about the fiat price and its supposed crash. All the fiat in the world cannot buy you 10% of the world's silver, and neither it does buy 10% of physical bitcoins.

There was a day in October 2008, I could not buy silver in this world for any price.

There was a day in March 2013, there was no bitcoins for sale in Bitstamp.

I advice you to buy right now, as I have been doing all the way. The only official selling suggestion I have ever issued for bitcoin, was the following [translation from Finnish mine]:

Thursday April 11th, 12:52 UTC:


Translation of my own text:

I would, however, like to know, if you are now in the process of buying bitcoins, since due to the crash they are cheap?

I dare to stick to my argument that the February blog post of mine (in which I urged to buy bitcoins for EUR 15) is, and will remain, a more important piece of advice than anything that you have instructed the people to do.

Especially now, as I officially exhort people to sell 20% of their position, to repatriate double the amount of fiat they invested, and ride the freebies "for the longest time" until you develop a desire to buy a private island or a penthouse.

Link to the blog added (original did not have the link, which was considered public knowledge in Finland). Note the added emphasis on the rare word "officially", since there are not so many things that I officially instruct people to do. I am not official

Originally in Wall Observer, which is a good thread to follow if you want to spend about 25% of your waking hours following it. (Well, some people still watch TV and such, you decide...)

[originally written 18 hours ago, posted now due to unavailability of the forum]

I have been taking it easy the last 2 days.. kind of premeditation for the upcoming Summit. I had a three-hour lunch meeting with the staff of the hotel, the MD (of the hotel) paid a visit, hotel paid the food and I paid the wines. Sun has been shining and it is just fine here:


Really relaxing. I acknowledge that there is blood on the streets of bitcoinworld, but everybody is entitled to create their own reality. Mine is: "I have been wrong with my calls concerning $.14, $.121, $.115, $.1, $.095 and $.091. According to my theory, it should visit sub-.08 before heading back up. Perhaps I am wrong with that also. The fibonacci levels are now so close to each other that it does not practically matter. I will be buying as much as I can sub-.1, but I never hold excess fiat so I cannot likely buy that much. If I get to sell the 10,000oz of silver that I listed is for sale (for bitcoin payment only, PM me!), my bitcoin stash goes up by another 2-3 million mBTC, but that does not really matter as silver is also incredibly undervalued, and some diversification is good."

If somebody else meditates according to following lines: "I invested half my life earnings into bitcoin @.167 last week, so now I have lost half of everything I have ever earned, I better sell it now and buy a rope with the proceeds", he is entitled to it. It is pointless to argue, who is "correct". Since I do not feel I have lost by buying silver over $40 and holding it until now, I must have gained. And it is not only me, most of my senior partners feel the same way, and they are still happily buying more silver and bitcoins. (Although some are selling silver for bitcoins, anyway it is good - I get margin both ways.)

This is the curse of bitcoin: everyone who knows shit about bitcoin is nearly 100% all in nearly all the time, and consequently cannot buy much more, no matter how good opportunities present themselves. The ones who don't know shit, are joining the manipulative selling, cutting their fiat gains significantly short of their potential, or even making a loss. The large fish that only ponder about whether to enter into bitcoin or not, don't send their million$ to a place like Mt.Gox, and there is not yet a dealer network that could sell bitcoins for immediate lock-in, delayed payment. So nobody can easily lift the price up despite the ridiculousness of the undershoot. Next week bulls again make money, the following week bears make money, but the pigs get slaughtered every week.

The curse will be lifted, effective days, weeks and months from now as we have the Summit, and we establish the dealer network. Then anyone who wants bitcoins, I mean any number of them, will just need to call the friendly local dealer, and lock in the price expressed in percentage over fix, and at the following fixing, which will be executed every 8 hours perpetually, the dealer can buy the bitcoins, hedging his position, pocket the fee, and nobody is in risk of losing significant amounts of fiat or bitcoins due to unethical middlemen, or substandard trading practices.

I still sport with 12-14% over spot fees even today, but that will be a distant memory as my dealer network will relentlessly crush the fees to sub-1% range during the remainder of the year. The recent event are only solidifying my conviction that this is the most important thing bitcoinworld needs here and now, and it is just logical that I will concentrate my efforts into it. Thank you for your time

This is what I think you should really do.  You have demonstrated a great deal of motivation and drive to organize such a conference, something that is clearly an essential element.  Every conference needs somebody like you.  On the other hand, you've also demonstrated some highly questionable judgment with respect to some of the elements that it would take to completely put such a thing together.  There is nothing wrong with this, as long as you recognize your limitations and plan around them.  I probably would not attend any conference if you were the only organizer, just based on what I've seen of you, your main fault being that I counted you, and there is only 1 of you, and the conference you want to organize and the one I want to attend will require the help of many more than 1 talented people to put togheter! =)  Please resist the urge to be offended and put my advice in context, I am really trying to influence you toward helping channel your abilities and drive toward the planning of an event that others, along with me, will really want to attend.

What you really need to do is find somebody else who can worry about the things where you don't excel, and team up with them.  Get on the same page with somebody else who can do a better job of putting together the plans of what ought to be in a conference that will attract attendees, who perhaps doesn't quite have the same drive and motivation to organize the conference as you do, and start splitting up the responsibilities so that everyone is doing what they're good at, and avoiding things they are not.  Find someone who is adept at communicating those in the "30 second elevator pitch" so you are attracting the right audience.  Listen to those who are criticizing your plans, they are not trying to attack you, they are giving you opportunities to identify what help you need to look for.  And if the business case makes sense, absolutely make it a nice event and pick people up in style and ensure they enjoy it.  Just remember they are paying for the totality of the experience, and not any one single aspect of it, and not very many people can produce that experience all by themselves, you need them and they need you.

I'm flattered that I wasn't invited.  I like your thread too.

I'd suggest that you build both of them up in tandem (so they can form a base for further discussion before/during the meeting, including the community's input). They both present diametrically different (albeit intertwined) concerns of the ecology/economy, and noteworthy efforts have been/are being made on both topics.

Thank you. Now I want to ask you (esp. delegates), which workshop should I expand first, the Supernode or Real Bills?

I thought it was a given that I will be attending the one in Greece; yes, all 3 most probably.

You mean, all three of them? (Finland, CA, Greece)

August is too warm, therefore the week of 3.-7. July or the one before, would be my preference.

As this Finland gig is organized now, there is naturally no need to have another one in 3 weeks; 7-8 weeks between meetups is just fine.

Accepted.

This conference was originally thought to be organized in early-mid June in Greece. We had already some planning going on. But things develop quickly, and these things (Dealer Network, Supernode, Real Bills) are very important for bitcoin to reach 6 digits by Christmas. They just need to be done, otherwise the infrastructure won't be there. (Can you imagine $100 billion dollars deposited in MtGox, I can't ) Therefore,

I am the sole culprit for the following:
- Inordinately short lead time (of 2 weeks(!)) from invitation to meetup
- Undercutting the San Jose conference by a week - yes, that was intentional, since the same week was off-limits, and one week after nobody would have attended, etc.
- Because of the above reasons, I retained it here in Finland to make sure it will succeed despite of the risks associated with shooting from the hip.

The part about mobile phones kind of proves it. There are some techs, such as Twitter, which did not reach more than 2% of the population, yet continue to be current for that subset. Yet, Bitcoin is now used by about 0.01%-0.1% of world's population. Even if it never makes big, it is hard to comprehend that someone who actually used Bitcoin, would cease to use it.

Everything I see, is now pointing to a rapid mass adoption in 2013, which means that the price will overshoot to $millions range in a speculative bubble, coupled with hoarding, and no easy means yet available to augment the supply with instruments with limited monetary privileges (i.e. "real bills" and the like).

Even if I am wrong, $5000 by Christmas is hardly improbable. $100, never. That would mean that Bitcoin's usage would stall in 0.01% of the world's population, and nothing is pointing to that direction. It is growing right now, I estimate anything between 10-30% per week, and we leave the math to the reader.

So yes, I believe all "legit" bears have sold their coins for a fiat profit, and are now minding their own business somewhere else. This forum is frequented by professionals and their sockpuppets, where the professionals speak mildly bullish statements, and the bears that they employ, speak FUD. All this is just to mask the fact that the pros want to accumulate as many coins as possible. Mathematically and psychologically, bitcoin can never stall in any value short of $100k at least.

I am not a very big potato in the grand scheme of things, but even I can see this much. Seeing it is just the beginning, the next level is realizing that we are all going to be so very rich; now what do we want to do with the money? This is why I am posting. There was this thing called "integrity" in the 1800s, and not much of it could be found in bitcoinworld in 2012. It is coming back, thank you for your time.