Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 29516. (Read 26608419 times)

the butthurt of late adopters is sweet, sweet nectar

+1 Wow... you are really an early adopter.  Congrats!

Me likey Bitcoin. Bitcoin show promise. Jorge think Bitcoin is ponzi. He newbie. He see tree and not the Satoshi Forest.

I don't mind Jorge, since the beginning I find him as more educated version of my dad. My dad would never ever invest in Bitcoin because that's not that, it's nothing, bla-bla-bla...

Jorge is more educated and able to articulate those points, and that's it. He is used to make money teaching, writing books and there's nothing outside of that world for him and people like him from other branches (like my dad).

That's fine and nothing new.

FTFY


FTFY



Whether Bitcoin is truly fixed is arguable. The point is that the issuance of the currency is fixed, however the total amount at any given time may not be known because some will be lost over time. What you call "moving around money and bitcoins" would be equal to me saying "moving around money and stocks" yet you don't have any problem seeing that investing in a stock can produce more wealth by growing services.

Investing in Bitcoin is growing services. There's no 2 ways about it. Interesting that you don't see this even as the economy around Bitcoin grows. Every day on reddit 5-10 businesses announce they now accept Bitcoin, plus some new companies announce they are opening solely around the Bitcoin technology.

+1

Fuck me. Flatline ftw.



Quiet before the storm kicks in. As some said already, HODL ffs.

@KeyserSoze : IMO you nailed the whole thing pretty well.

Satoshi invested NOTHING? He only invested his/their lifetime to learning to code, learning about currency and cryptography. He invested his intelligence, reputation, time and money into creating software for the entire world to use freely. If he invested nothing into Bitcoin then you invested nothing in becoming a University Professor.

Once he created the software he mined <4000 coins (80 blocks @ 50BTC reward, basically testing the software) before releasing it to the world. Note this was several years before 10,000 coins would even buy a pizza. Satoshi risked the cost of his electricity to mine worthless "ledger coins."

"When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test. I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them." - Hal Finney, on block number
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-and-me-hal-finney-155054

I'm generously using 80 since Hal's "70-something" could be 79. Other sources claim blocks as early as 12 may have been mined by others: http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/satoshi-s-fortune-a-more-accurate-figure/

Original block reward was 50 coins:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Bitcoin

And of course Satoshi continued mining after that. It was his project afterall. In the beginning if he didn't use it, who would? The rewards came fast back then and he accumulated many before apparent stopping. It is believed his stash is unspent but who knows for sure, and why would it matter? He deserves every penny for his innovation.

Nice teaching post. I really enjoyed it. In a way I think most people here would be more relaxed if they weren't invested more than they could afford.

If you invest more than you afford to lose in bitcoin and for some reason it fails, I think you will have to blame yourself for that mistake.

+1

Is why I mentioned Eternal September earlier. The forum will continually replenish the newish folks who are going through the process of learning about Bitcoin. Many of these folks don't bother looking at past threads or using Google to help them learn. Bringing up ponzi is a first step on their road to learning, however some get stuck there...

the calm b4 the storm...

shit may or may not hit the fan in ~12hours.

in any case HODL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

All I hope for is honesty. Thanks for that.



I believe your tone has been different. I haven't seen you here call anyone a scammer, fool or sucker yet but maybe I missed it. I haven't seen you gloat over an investor's loss here yet but maybe I missed it. I do however see consistency in your pointing out the negative aspects.



Saw it but others have posted before. It is clever until one quickly realizes that USD, Rubles, Yuan, etc. will all also be worth zero one day.

The UK used to use sticks as money. Native American Indians used shells. Just as oddly "pre-Information Age" currencies use paper and bits of near-worthless metals. The Information Age uses encrypted bytes and they'll, just as strangely, be worth as much as sticks, shells, and paper were. Today those bytes are worth @624 times USD.



They're extremely valuable *now* so you've lost that bit of your argument already. I sometimes wonder if Bitcoin has staying power myself but I believe that code changes can be made to it as necessitated to keep it healthy, as have already been done. I watch as more tech gets added on top of it. Though the heart of it solves and old problem with virtual currencies, it does seem a bit creaky to base a worldwide currency on. I wonder if something more solid (seemingly, to me) will come along but in any case I am aware the project is in Beta and as Gavin has claimed many times, it's an experiment.

From my point of view a part of it has already succeeded. I bought some. Not only did I make some money (investment paid off) but I was lucky enough to purchase many gifts last year for the holidays with it (using as a currency). With new developments I wonder if I will write my Final Will with it (using it as legal documentation) or vote for a President of my country with it (using as voting mechanism).

Can you see you need to separate your views about Bitcoin's "fiat worth" from its "technology worth" -- the potential to drastically change things worlwide?



I imagine other forces are at work on the price aside from the back and forth of current investors. That is the economy growing up around Bitcoin.

Anyway even if Bitcoin exchange speculation is nothing but pure gambling you said you weren't against folks gambling so why do you complain about it? because you think the house is rigged? You know the house always wins, right, even in Vegas? This is why it's called gambling. Sounds like gambling is OK with you as long as it doesn't happen in your backyard. NIMBY?



Honestly, I think many of us go through this phase because in the beginning we do not see how bytes can be worth money. But then if we come back and do some research we learn about money. We learn about the Two Generals. We test the currency and it works. It's cool and fun and easy to use (not necessarily to obtain but that will improve). It's a bit rickety around the edges; it has its flaws but it is new. The internet was rickety in the beginning. We see potential.

Bitcoin isn't a project which concerns itself only with exchange rate. It is being used for currency, store of value, legal contracts, voting mechanisms; the potential is a bit mind boggling.

A ponzi is created from the beginning with intent to fraud investors. Bitcoin is an innovation that solved a very real problem in the crypto community and an exchange price arose from that, along with more innovation on top of the protocol.



What you call "luring new players" I personally think of as excitement to share this awesome new technology, with an added bonus of potential monetary gain. I tried to get a brother of mine interested around $140 because it looked pretty certain to go up and he could use the help. But he was afraid and I didn't badger him. I did give some to my family last Xmas and told them to just hold it, but that if they got interested in Bitcoin to talk to me first because there is quite a bit of shadiness in the culture at the moment.

I do have my concerns that if Bitcoin is infinitely divisible why would it be worth anything? I feel it has to do with the psychology of someone wanting to own a whole coin, or really, "more" of anything. Some people always want more. They can pay and so they do. When the UK used sticks for currency I'm sure there was always some fellow who wanted one more notch on his stick than anyone else. In other words, most volume knobs only go to 10 but some folks will eventually get amplifiers that go to 11... because more is better.



Funny thing is it is pretty good at being anonymous until one begins using 3rd parties, or until law enforcement gets access to someone's records/diary, or decides they have the budget to prosecute and issue search warrants to providers for IPs, etc. Once they correlate a name with a BTC address, and have access to records where one has recorded a payment to another's address (tied to a name), then they can easily unravel all the addresses in that chain of transactions. So it is basically near useless at anonymity for the people who'd need it most.

Now if criminals were to encrypt their data and stay vigilant with PGP communications.... but most people in this world are too lazy or complacent for all that.



You see growing legal barriers, I see growing legal acceptance. There has been fraud, surely, as in any currency. You've likely heard of Wall Street in the U.S. (also known as "business Harlem")? This clip is funny because it's true.  
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-august-13-2013/frisky-business---jessica-williams



You mean proselytizing, like a religion? Or do you mean it's like telling one's friends about the Walking Dead on AMC because it is a frigging awesome TV show? Or perhaps telling friends to go to Disney World if they've never been because it is a wonderful experience? Or "try the Grape Meatballs, they're delicious!" We enjoy something, we share it.



I don't see suckers. I see people continuing to come into the market from all over the world as they go through the learning process and begin to see why Bitcoin is more than the sum of its parts, mostly because the parts are so exciting and we can't see them all even now.

None of us knows if China was the reason for the lift, or which exchanges may use fraudulent transaction/price data. I personally assume most of Gox and Huobi transactions are internal bot price fixing. Plan accordingly.



Haven't heard this but I better understand your sentiment. "Gambling is OK with me except NIMBY. And even as a computer scientist I'm too short-sighted to see the massive digital potential, which grows as we speak, aside from price gambling."

It's a remake of Free Willy, starring Mark in a black and white wet suit.

So another pretty boring week in bitcoin speculation world ? I just hope this Mt.Gox movie will just come to an end. It looks like a terrible comedy.

Meanwhile I see that bitcoin ATM are starting to appear all over the place. If they start to get some adoption I bet they will spread like wildfire at least in major cities.

+1    Newbie purgatory wasn't much fun, but it didn't last long and it didn't stop me from lurking the rest of the forum.  This forum was a better read when there were fewer disposable accounts.

Banking doesn't need a conspiracy. Banking is an open conspiracy, hidden only by complexity. It is ultimately held together only by the threat of force levied at the tax livestock (citizens) of the world governments. It's backed by the point of a gun. Repeal legal tender laws and it would collapse overnight.

100% agreement.

I've argue in this thread to set a 'minimum activity level' per sub-board, so that you e.g. had to "earn" some activity points first in a 'newbie' forum, basically: a slight modification of the previous "newbie hell" system, but allowing different boards to set different levels of what they consider newbies. Didn't get picked up (or even responded to) by theymos, though :/