ASIC miners have very little to do with the price of bitcoin. They clearly started mining a few weeks ago, and the network already had more hash power than the top 500 supercomputers combined.

http://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate

BFL can't even release one picture of these freaking chips? Seems weird.

cool. i guess you have one on preorder then? im debating an order guess im late to the party though now.

In reference to the insane run-up, I'm more or less just a casual observer of Bitcoin, and when I saw the story (on Mashable? or some blog like that) this weekend about the new online store where you can buy electronics with BTC (bitcoinstore dot com I think?), that felt like a huge change to me. A real, big, legitimate site where you can buy stuff feels like a huge deal, I wonder if there are new people whose confidence has hit a tipping point because of that.

I actually checked their prices too and for some items they were drastically cheaper than Amazon (and some pretty similar), and I can easily see myself buying some BTC and ordering from them instead of ordering from Amazon. (kind of moot in my case though cause I'm not in the US and shipping might kill any savings.) (Also, I am not shilling that store, I just do think it's a pretty big deal)

this makes it look like theres only 1 party w/a bunch of ASICs:
http://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=rankings

https://twitter.com/ButterflyLabs

they posted these on twitter--what is it?

fffffffkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk it. i wanted to buy at 31$ but then i needed to submit all sorts of documents to be able to buy in euro so i could not do it instantly as verfication takes two weeks or so. obviously the price can crash quickly with so many speculative buyers probably waiting to sell on a setback.

i got paid in some of these but now i have no clue how to sell them without paying a reasonable fee

using that blockchain everyone seemed to be talking about

Excuse me if it's already been stated, but is there currently a way to short these things through a reputable broker?

No.

Tom you were always arguing that the biggest threat to bitcoin was alternate crypto. It appears we have a good example of this now: Litecoin

I always thought litecoin would be crushed by botnets if it ever got any traction, because the mining algorithm it uses makes it so that GPUs don't make CPUs obsolete. But it is still here after quite a while, and it's value has been going up along with bitcoin as you can see here:
https://vircurex.com/welcome/index?a...=btc&locale=en

The main problem seems to be that you can still make a custom hardware for it (at a cost of millions of dollars), and this would allow whoever did this first to take over the network. Someone I respect had this to say about it in chat when I asked him:

"litecoin is, in the grand scheme of things, better than bitcoin, but less significantly as market adoption happens. In terms of real world factors though, bitcoin has more liquidity, meaning the small techinical benefits of litecoin wouldn't make it cheaper to use until it's near as prevelant as bitcoin. It's a good investment, but probably not as good as bitcoin"

So it seems that the network effect from being first is the important factor for bitcoin. Litecoin will grow, but bitcoin will grow way faster.

There is also some speculation that Ripple is a bitcoin killer, but Ripple's security system appears to suck.

Also, I was wrong to state that BFL hadn't posted pics. I do not have any order with them or any ASIC manufacturer, so I didn't pay too much attention.

This certainly is interesting and worth reading up on. Whenever there are monetary alternatives, that will drive the monetary value down on the existing moneys. Simple supply and demand. I think there is a decent chance we could end up with alternatives where some are better at some things and worse at others. For example, from what I understand with Bitcoin is there are limited block sizes and the speed is ~10mins/block. So you will hit a transaction limit at some point. You change the protocol and bloat it, or you have fees for transferring, and Bitcoin becomes sort of a "big transfer" between major players. Consider Bitcoin gold in this case. Then you might have a "silver", which would be the "people's money", which might be great for microtransactions and is fast, but has other flaws compared to Bitcoin. They can compliment each other, and right now different cryptocurrencies could easily augment each other and be symbiotic. As cryptocurrencies win out vs. traditional currencies, all boats rise together (and possibly Bitcoin more).

Either way, in the event that Bitcoin does get replaced by something superior, it won't happen overnight and will be gradual, unless the flaw just utterly destroys it (say government takeover of the network).

Borrow them from someone, cash out, then later when you are going to repay the loan+interest buy new ones.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=65.0
https://btcjam.com/

Don't pay attention to the ******s on the forum arguing about the block size limit. They aren't devs, and they don't know what they are talking about. They just need something to get bent out of shape over. If you really want to know more, jgarzik (a dev) wrote a blog about it:
http://garzikrants.blogspot.co.uk/20...-thoughts.html

In other news, I have completely reversed my position that banks will launch a war on bitcoin in the near future. My fear was that bitcoin was competition for them. In reality, banks don't make too much money on the areas that bitcoin will attack, which is stuff like wire fees and currency conversion fees. The bread and butter of banking profits is investing customer deposits. They don't care if that currency is USD or EUR or bitcoin. They will let me deposit bitcoin, make a profit with it, and give me a return.

Not trying to hijack this thread but my site http://gold.net is adding bitcoin data and i'm curious to talk with those who follow them intensively as to what people might be looking for as we implement.

Basically we are site to like up stocks, commodities, economic data and such and currently let you reprice financial assets and data in any currency or precious metal but we're adding bitcoins now to the list. So people can chart and monitor real time ticks of stock prices in bitcions, or economic data in bitcoins, etc. Also can chart network stats, and look at the coins versus different currencies they trade in.

Tons of charting tools will be accessible like technical analytics (moving averages and such) on bitcoin data, drawing, and sharing tools for the charts.

We've integrated a few APIs to grab data and are now working on the front end so would love to pick brains of those who monitor the markets and may have desires to chart them more intensively. Any cool features you can recommend?

i have read the silver vs gold comparison before. i didn't really think there was room for more than one crypto-currency in the long run, so i kind of dismissed litecoin. then again, a month ago, i had never heard of either. bitcoin is crushing it so far, and i dont know of any poker sites taking litecoin. however, it does make sense now that there could be room for more than 1. also, if there is something about litecoin that turns out to be much better, maybe it surpasses or supplants bitcoin? interesting. i might have to trade one of my bitcoins for some litecoin.

They won't be able to make loans out of thin air like they can with USD or EUR. They will have to remove the money from someone's account and put it into someone else's. That is a huge disadvantage for banks.

Wat? Of course they can. Bitcoin is not incompatible with fractional reserve banking.

People already trade MTgox codes on bitcoin-otc as if they are actual bitcoins.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Fractiona...ng_and_Bitcoin

thats bad for the price long term. the money-multiplier of bitcoins could be a lot higher than that of the dollar as you don t really need to hold "cash". however, when the price of bitcoins is projected to rise lending bitcoins might not be that attractive.

I traded 10 of my bitcoins for litecoins as a lottery ticket. I figured at the bare minimum if bitcoin got attacked or something, litecoin may serve as a good back-up. I mean they are still going to have to sell drugs over silk road. Also it may rise in price just for the fact that if bitcoin takes off more, litecoin may get hyped as the "next thing" and the money that missed BTC may pile in. Who knows. I haven't researched it a ton, but the couple things that stood out to me was it is more memory intensive to mine, so asics won't be able to take over like they are in BTC, and they have 2.5 minute blocks as opposed to 10 minute blocks so transactions can be made faster.

set up something like mtgoxlive.com
do better versions of the charts on blockchain.info
make a post on the bitcoin forums asking what they want to see
start taking bitcoins to sign up for your site before doing that

Ipoker skin now taking bitcoins.
I cant figure out how euro sites are taking bitcoin before US sites.

do bitcoin gambling sites need any licensing or regulation ? i assume not right

Have: Stars/FTP + small vig
Want: Bitcoins

Up to 7k USD, please PM me

Pop pop? back under $40

this is huge. payment processing is a huge financial strain on the poker industry.

hopefully this can boost some competition among some of the smaller skins, grow networks, and offer a trickle down effect of better competition between sites for players. a wider adoption/acceptance of bitcoins among poker sites will be awesome, hope this spreads like wildfire

imploding right now!