I think the novelty/potential of the concept makes it different from the lawn example. And if you are a full professor it's basically no risk. You can try it for a month and if it dosent work it's not a big deal. Profs are some of the few people who have moderate computational set ups, free electricity and can waste a month or so on computing something that doesn't amount to anything.

That said there might not actually be any profs doing this but they do have some advantages if they chose to try it.

Lolz..nice catch. All the checks are from dorm room poker games. They aren't made out to anybody and it was always fine to buy in with a check from one of the other regular players... so unless it looked like somebody was trying to free roll the game checks were rarely cashed. It's been a while now though, so I'd have to notify people I barely am friends with that I'm cashing a random 50 dollar check from years ago so it's not really worth it.

Does anyone sell bitcoins for pokerstars money? Pm me.

The hardest part is getting your buddy to write the check, go get an envelope and a stamp and then mail the thing.

If someone asks me to write them a check, it usually takes me awhile to stop being lazy and do it.

One thing is for sure, they wont be around $2 a year from now.
I am looking for the most +EV play, and I think I get that with put options. That doesnt even mean I have to think bitcoins is likely to go down.

I'll sell for MoneyPaks.

why the hell did they limit the total number of possible coins to 21 millions?
in case bitcoin should ever become something like a "world currency", an amazon-book would cost an incredibly tiny fraction of a bitcoin. calculating in milli-bitcoins or nano-bitcoins is very inconvenient. 0.0000000001 bitcoins for a sandwich just sounds totally weird compared to "5 dollars".

would buy, but i'm located in europe. no moneypaks here.

That's just how they have technically implemented it, when it needs to go down to fractions they will just rename it to something like 0.001 BC = 1uBC

Yes, I get that. I'm just thinking that marketing-wise this was a very poor decision. No non-geek would like this milli-nano-pico stuff.

It would also look bad if it was 1,000,000 bitcoins for a coffee too. If you need 1,000,000 of them for a coffee, it looks valueless.

If it takes off, it's super easy to just shift it and give it a new name.

Hell, Betco.in already does this. They have their games in Bitcents.

People will love Millie and Mike don't worry about it.

So call them something else. I've seen "Satoshis" used for Bitcents. What you're missing is that the worth of the bitcoin economy at any stage is/was pretty much unpredictable. There was no way they were going to guess the number that would end up making a bitcoin worth something around a dollar or a euro in 20 years time.

I love the name Satoshis for the small units, but doubt that catches on.

Eventually the client will support multiple views, so if you prefer to see something as .003BTC or 300 uBC you can set a preference, or just show both - showing both will lead to less confusion/sending errors.

It's a good problem to have, but doubt anything really needs to change until 1BTC=$100 or so.

Satoshi's was the term for the smallest unit possible.

The problem is that the mining was done so fast and quickly. You have the smallest number of users at the beginning and the most number of coins mined. I understand you want to reward early adopters, and also drive buzz by making it go up in value, but it's also kind of annoying.

If coins were distributed proportionally to the number of users, then it wouldn't have been so crazy. You'd see more people looking to build an actual economy. The problem now is you have the super rich and you have the peasants. It's quite difficult to get them. Mining was a super cool idea for distributing coins - distribute them "fairly" in a way that can't be cheated by using CPU power. Some people are better than others at it, but not by a huge amount. But the distribution turned out to be much more narrow with GPU mining. Everyone needs to have a high end graphics card to mine now.

If instead, you just give an expected number of users over time, and have mining somewhat follow that (just decide on something ahead of time, assume it will be successful, if not, it won't matter anyway), and use that. Just look at the number of people who used the internet as time went on and base it off of that, extend it out 50 years, and you are good. Find a simple function that maps to that. Start with some base amount to reward early adopters.

What you have is a coin that stays much closer to constant value, and you don't need to keep shifting decimals all over the place. You also have a more evenly distributed coin. If you get them into peoples hands, they are more likely to keep using it. Right now, people get interested, have to jump through too many hoops, give up.

yeah it's crazy how many coins the early adopters must have.

I'm still kicking myself for not picking up $1k worth of coins "just in case" when I first found BTC 3-4 months ago.

Unfortunately for them, most of the early adopters are drinking too much kool aid to ever take a healthy profit on their coins. Why sell for $10 what I can sell for $10k?

Who do you think is selling the 20-50k btc in volume every day? It sure isn't new miners. There isn't that much supply. Sure there are some kool aid drinkers that won't sell, but there are also a lot of very smart people and it sure seems rational to part with a couple thousand at $9 for something that was a hobby project last year.

If they were all kool-aid drinkers the price would be $25 already. Many early adopters have and are still taking money off the table every day. But probably also still holding large amounts.

That isn't purely the number of bitcoins sold though, right? It's total volume of transactions on MTGOX which includes people day trading what is almost certainly an incredibly inefficient market. That likely represents the same coins being bought and sold multiple times.

That's still a guess. If it remains niche the number of users would be totally different to the number of users if it attains mainstream adoption. It can be successful without being mainstream. It can also be mainstream in some countries but not others.

I haven't seen a good reason given for their chosen distribution curve. I'm pretty sure I would have gone for something like a normal curve instead. The curve they have is way too kind to early adopters.

However, while changing it to a normal curve would have given a better distribution of wealth overall, it would still all end up in the hands of GPU miners. There's really no way around this.

day trading with .65% each way? I wish them luck. Sure there are some bots n things trading roundtrip in 1 day, but that has to be a small part of that volume.

Interesting article relating to bitcoins:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/silkroad/

If it's niche or if it's mainstream, the ratio of users won't be terribly far off in the adoption time line. You'll see something like a bell curve.

The GPU mining "problem" isn't something I think that was anticipated nor do I have a good solution to that. It's too bad you can't somehow register a unique identity that cannot be duplicated, and just give 50 bitcoins to each person that registers. But that's always open for scamming. Even the faucet has problems with that.

A bell curve is a normal curve. We're talking about the same thing. The value would still be all over the place though, imo.

I agree it would have been much better if bitcoin could be assigned on something closer to a per person basis rather than a per MHz (or whatever) basis. There's just no way to do it without being centralized though. Perhaps something DNA based? Obviously non-existent hardware required there. It occurred to me that if mining rigs became unprofitable then the network would be made up of idle CPU/GPU time, which would have a better distribution. That would weaken the network though. The current system gives bitcoin based on how much "work" you do, which is at least fair in some sense and perhaps the only sense that has any meaning in bitcoin. If you can't mine you'll just have to get bitcoin by selling dollars, services or products.

if anyone is interested in selling a large-ish amount of BTC for cash at the WSOP, PM me.

It would be all over the place perhaps, but it would be a LOT more stable. It also would be a lot more evenly distributed.

Per person-hour would be ideal, and obviously the CPU mining is the easiest way to have such a system without being subject to fraud.

Sure, you can buy and sell things, but the power of just getting it all into peoples hands would be so outstanding for adoption. Just wish I could think of a way to actually implement such a system.

Daytrading with .65% each way and very large spread, and huge swings could be potentially profitable. There are definitely a lot of bots out there. You can see them do very bot-like things in reactions to orders being placed.