TC,

I think the trick here is to figure out when the annual bitcoin inflation drops below the user growth rate. It may have already. Then buy in assuming that vendors are really using it. Here is the annual inflation.
2010: 100%
2011: 50%
2012: 33%
2013: 13% (Why so low? Because generation drops from 50 BTC to 25 BTC.)

Bitcoin is falling now. I think part of that is because it shot up to $1 too quickly based on a huge surge in interest. If the demand for using the currency is growing less than 50% right now, the value should be falling. However the inflation in supply is always dropping. Buying in at the right time, and then seeing usage growth increase could net a lot of cash.

All transactions in bitcoin are broadcast. There should be a way to monitor the velocity or turnover in the bitcoin economy. I think you could remove the fiat to bitcoin transactions and get a pretty accurate picture of how much the coins are actually being used.

There's some interesting data here:
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgo...gSzm1g10zm2g25

You can also use the block explorer to look for transactions. Keep in mind however many of the transactions can be simply people moving their own money around consolidating addresses they control and so forth.

If you can trade sucessfully you could setup your own bitcoin bank. Give interest to bit coin users who deposit into your account for you to trade with. If you had enough bitcoins as your disposal I wonder how easy it would be to control the market.

Well a lot of the traders of coins go off of the mtGox market. I imagine someone could buy a lot of coins outside of mtGox and then sell on MtGox to depress the price.

So far I've been disappointed. It seems very hard to get started, and even then there isn't that much to do.

I got .05 free from the faucet. To test it out, went to the double or nothing game, sent .01. It was refreshing for a long time, I never got anything back. So I guess I lost. Today I sent another .01 to it, and 2 hours later, the network has 0 confirmations of the payment. I tried again with my last .03, using .01 as a transaction fee to see if it sped up the process. 0 confirmations after hours.

I was looking to fund a small amount for screwing around with trading and making a trading bot, but the best I could find was 7% fees through PayPal. No thanks. The forums seem to be overrun by people trying to sell stuff for bitcoins, and no one buying them. It looks like a ton of people are hoarding the coins hoping they'll be worth more later, so it's tough for people who are interested to get any. I was hoping to just start small and test it out, but so far it's been a bust.

People hoarding it might be good for the currency up to a point. At least it'll make it less likely it's going to 0.

Yeah, I am having a similar experience. Transferring money into Bitcoin is not going to be cheap for a long time. Paypal charges 3%, so a company that gives Bitcoin for this amount has to at least charge that much. It would be nice if someone worked on a decentralized funding scheme to match buyers and sellers. For one it removes the single point of failure that the bitcoin exchangers represent. Second it would be much cheaper if the buyer and seller could just split the 3% paypal fee.

Turns out I had to click something on that double or nothing game once they got my money confirmed. I lost the first link, but played with the last two, won once. I also used the URL to play on my lost penny, and won that, so back to 6 cents! Still, until I get a few BTCs it's going to be hard to do much of anything.

Probably best thread I've read on BYI ever...
P2P + Cryptology = Decentralization is the future...
Once BTC or other digital currency takes off...
P2P rake-free gambling/poker is an obvious application.

All the code for poker servers is out there for years...
Poker is relatively simple ...
Just need one genius to tie it all together...
And release complete package like BitCoin = BitPoker.

I can imagine 90% of online low stakes poker...
Migrating to rake-free P2P network over several years.

http://www.liquidpoker.net/poker-for...m_session.html

AFAIK there are some small scale bitcoin poker sites out there.

Not sure it's going to be a huge thing. Marketing and advertising are absolutely huge parts of getting people to play. Marketing and advertising isn't free.

I'm more interested...
In the general concept of this mathematically...
The mind expanding powers of studying the IDEA BitCoin...
And how these concepts might transfer to trading.

Poker SHOULD be a logical first adopter of this model...
But look at the Poker World...
Has a single meaningful thing changed since 2005??
Could you even tell it's not 2005 by logging into PP?
Or looking at WSOP? Anything?

That's what happens when you have an effective monopoly...
Catering, primarily, to low-end degenerate gamblers...
Just Bugsy invents Vegas for the Losers all over again.

Meanwhile, the trading world advances at lightspeed...
> 90% of all prop shops and click traders are out of business...
It's hard to view online poker as a serious business niche.

The dude below wrote the Open Poker server...
Which could support 10,000 players on one Mac...
If he merged his code with BitCoin = BitPoker...
And included various Shill Bots (labeled as such)...
To start and keep games full...
One could imagine exponential growth at LOW STAKES...
The entire financial infrastructure exists = BitCoin...
I would switch on principle... Casinos creep me out.

http://wagerlabs.com/

The lottery nature of the payoff, IMO, is a mistake...
It's aimed at getting Botnets to run BitCoin mining farms...
Mine BitCoins instead of sending spam...
But these people are always thinking ONLY CRIME...
Only crime is fun for some people.

There are a lot of places people live on $50-100/month...
If you could make $0.25-0.50/day STEADY...
(Which buys a LOT of bread/potatos in Eurasia)...
I can see 100s of millions adopting this...
Then it goes viral bottom up... not top down.

This is a good post and discourages me from mining. If I could get a consistent small pay vs. hit or miss large payments, I'd be more likely to do it.

You can join a mining pool that will give you your 'EV' of mining, minus a small fee of course.