I'd assume you'd still have an easier time currently finding people or places to convert the euro or gold coins, but that may change.

I do think the WU type appeal of sending a store of value around the world pretty easily is a pretty significant utility gain. I've heard of people using diamonds and expensive artwork to transfer big sums outside of conventional means, bitcoins is much superior as long as you have a market to cash them out that functions reasonably well.

be weary of using words like "definitely" when talking about something that's in uncharted waters.

outside of pulling numbers out of thin air (which I suspect you did here), what makes you think a market cap of 440 - 550m is "sane"? If you are going to be a bitcoin bear thats fine, just try & stay away from lolzy predictions.

are people in this thread trading BTC for PokerStars/other_poker_site transfer? or is there a better place to go for that?

How big a sale would it take to lower the price on Mtgox noticeably these days? Anyone watching what the biggest sales going through tend to be, perhaps the top 5 per day on average?

Has anyone tried mining for bitcoins? You can buy devices that have the software built in so all you really have to do is let it run 24/7 and you generate bitcoin.

You're pretty late to the party. There is a high likelihood that you'd never pay off the devices, let alone make a profit off of them.

how do you figure? if the speed of the device is high enough you can certainly make enough to at least break even over time

The more people that mine, the fewer coins you make. We are at the beginning of another exponential rise in difficulty, and you don't have one of these devices on preorder

so go do it?

why would you tell other people about it? that only creates competition and makes your job harder

the fact is you arent gonna do squat

Oh the facts...tell me more about the facts

you cant get ASICs right now:
- Avalon Batch #3 is sold out and Batch #4 doesnt exist yet
- Butterfly Labs has been taking millions in preorders for 10 months and has not delivered 1 ASIC

GPU mining is becoming obsolete: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

When the number drops, it means there is less new money coming in. Without new money, the price is simply not supported.

The old "this time is different" mentality. Another sign of bubble.

No, it's not out of thin air. It's based on current value and future value predictions and likelihood. Which are of course educated guesses, but far less than out of thin air that Bitcoin dreamers come up with.

What makes me think that? Supply and demand, once the dumb speculation leaves the picture.

I sold 2 today, but mainly as a hedge to buy more on a collapse. But, this time it can be different. If you read Kyle Bass, he expects Japan to collapse, then Europe, then the United States financially. I think the United States will be 2nd. Early in the days of bitcoin Gavin gave a speech that bitcoin might become the worlds reserve currency. I don't doubt that anymore. The world is full of Keynesians and they will continue the recency or sunny day bias til the end.

My point is that the number is just a ballpark guess at new demand. The important part is the number of new accounts coming in, not the size of the queue. We can't measure the number of new accounts, so all we have is the queue size, but there are big problems with using that as the measurement.

The queue is a symptom of Mtgoxs inability to keep up with demand, much like their frequent trading lag. Both of these going away would potentially be better for bitcoin overall, depending on the reason why...

we have some information. Gox said there were 57k new accounts created in march

Now *that* is a good number to track every month

where can i find queue of numbers?

just attempt to make a new acc and upload some bull**** ids, queue is ~5k

queue last reported at 12800

So it looks like digital currency is having a similar problem as normal currency.. "banks"

Does anyone have an idea of how many BTCs instawallet held? A "50" BTCS "depositor insurance" sounds woefully inadequate.


http://arstechnica.com/business/2013...et-shuts-down/

I'm tired of waiting $150 for 1 bitcoin

It won't be, it has to many weaknesses. Bitcoin could simply be overun if someone/organization started to make as many asic chips as they wanted and used them. There are only how many asics out there right now.. a couple thousand at most? Luckily the company making them right now had the greater good of BTC in mind. Had it been someone with a more greedy mindset, bitcoin would essentially be done.

Surely it's profitable to just keep printing asics. The fact that they can make them cheap and aren't getting charged 7k for a unit like avalon charges, makes it that much easier. Nobody else would buy asics because it's wouldn't be profitable because this other company has invested and taken over.

If something is this simple to mess up, it will need to be modified in the next virtual coin.

bitcoin is just a protocol and it can be updated, the hash function is designed to be changed at some point. if some rogue entity made a bunch of asics and kept 51%-ing the network a simple change could be made to make all the chips worthless. currently bitcoin uses:
sha256(sha256(header))

but something like:
sha256(rearrange_bits(sha256(header)))
where rearrange_bits is just a fixed permutation of bits would probably make every asic produced so far worthless for mining and every gpu miner would be patched in a day without any sacrifice of security.