How can you say there is 0% chance of below 200? That is ridiculous. There is no such thing as 0% chance. What if tomorrow,
1. U.S. bans bitcoin
2. A flaw is found in the code
3. EC or SHA256 is broken
4. The existing exchanges shut down due to fraud or seizure.
5. Someone randomly decides to dump 30KBTC at market on bitstamp.
6. The economy melts down
sub 1% total. 6 is not a case. in a meltdown btc will only correlate weakly.
"sub 1%" chance for Bitstamp going belly up because Unicredit suddenly pulls the plug, and prices plunging as a result (even if just for a flash crash from which we immediately recover)?
That's an awfully optimistic stance (and I say that as an active trader on stamp).
EDIT: in case this isn't clear from the above, and lest I be accused of "bear FUD"... there's nothing wrong with Unicredit and Bitstamp right now, to my knowledge. Don't panic. I just consider the entire banking/exchange situation to be somewhat fragile, so in my mind, there's a > 1% chance that things can go sour without much warning.
The local unicredit Branch employees are Bitcoin bulls, I know few of them personally, but this doesn't represent the big picture of what Unicredit Bank as a corporate thinks about Bitcoin which is unknown for me...
I'm sure they are, I suspect the Bitstamp account brings in quite a nice bit of revenue and fees.
But that's not the point, right? We were assigning probabilities to events, pulled out of our asses, but motivated by our experience and expectations. And my experience and expectation is that the banking interface is a fragile one, that could break. Not likely, so I personally don't see more than a, say, 5% chance that it happens, but "sub 1%" is another way of saying it's nigh impossible, and that I disagree with.
I agree, I was just pointing out that Banks are aware of Bitcoin, and when we say Banks we are not talking about computers and buildings but about people and employees running/working in these banks.
yet, I share the fear with many of you, if something somehow happen to an exchange's Banking account, basically only people who have funds there are fucked, but if anything happens to the bank (just look to the new EU Bank bailing road-map) than not only Exchanges are fucked but pretty much everyone living in EU and the ones who didn't even hear about Bitcoin will be the most effected.
if I summarize the situation, what is happening in the world right now doesn't look so promising, and having fiat sitting in your bank account is not safer than having Bitcoin sitting in your wallet, even when considering a scenario when an exchange like Bitstamp gets fucked up by its bank, the consequences will be temporary comparing with what could go wrong if something similar happens with the EU banking system.
The fact is that an exchange commingling all their customers funds in one single bank account is simply non-compliant, and even illegal in most of the EU.
Just check how brokers work: you need to open a bank account UNDER YOUR NAME on a certain bank, and give the broker an authorization to operate with your account for this or that purpose - but customers funds are never commingled, each customer has his own separate bank account.
Bitcoin exchanges (apart from B-C afaik) do not operate that way (not even Kraken), exposing customers to a huge risk. It just takes one rotten seed (eg, a drug dealer) operating in exchange X and the only option LE has is to freeze the full account - that's why you cannot take customers deposits* in the EU if you are not a bank.
*deposit = holding funds on behalf of a third party - those funds are NOT legally yours, you are just holding them on behalf of your customer - that's what banks and only banks do.
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