When the price is rising rapidly, there is very little reason to sell. The market gets thinner and thinner, making it rise faster. Eventually this comes to an end and things return to normal (although elevated from the rise).

I don't see a huge increase in sellers at these levels, though. There isn't that feeling of impending bubble where people are holding on thinking it's gonna crash but they are smart enough to beat it. That's certainly possible from this point to get that way, but we are seeing strong rises but nothing like what we've seen in the past. That being said, the market is getting deep enough and big enough that such big runs are MUCH harder to happen, since the amount of money coming in would need to be larger, and the exchanges aren't scaling as fast as the value.

do you mean at 273?

in any case, that probably explains the spike in ask sum yesterday

The code. Bitcoin is not a magic black box. It's a complicated piece of open-source software, written by a community of volunteers and hobbyists with various degrees of ability. IT CONTAINS BUGS. What these bugs are and how serious their symptoms will be remains to be seen, but we have already had a few serious problems (such as the 0.7/0.8 fork) and it's likely there will be more to come.

The value of exploits. With the soaring value of Bitcoins, it is likely that it will increasingly become a target for attack. If someone can find and exploit a flaw, they can make a fortune. Due to the nature of Bitcoin, it would be almost impossible to discover the culprit or recover any losses. This was already happening when there was almost nothing to gain from it!

Government intervention. Currency manipulation is one of the core economic controls of government. Mass adoption of Bitcoin would render this tool ineffective, or even unusable. It's certainly conceivable that the US or EU could implement a blanket ban on Bitcoin trades, which would utterly cripple the currency's expansion. As we're now hitting the point where large-scale funds are buying into Bitcoin, such a move would cause a rapid exodus of significant funds, by a few small high-worth individuals over a very short timescale. This, combined with the effect of legislation, would almost inevitably trigger a large-scale panic sell-off, and there would be no market remaining to allow for the currency's revival.

Corporate sabotage. Moneygram, Western Union, Paypal. Just three examples of multi-billion dollar multinationals with business models which would be rendered obsolete should Bitcoin achieve widespread adoption. Bitcoin, despite its rapid expansion and long-term potential, is tiny compared to many large organisations which have a vested interest in seeing the currency fail. At its current size, the Bitcoin economy could be toppled for a handful of million dollars- enough to buy and sell large volumes specifically to cause huge price swings, to undermine confidence with smear campaigns, or to directly attack flaws in the software or the network that underpins it.

Fundamental flaws. The design of Bitcoin is not perfect. We're already seeing the blockchain becoming bloated by the micro-transactions of SatoshiDice. What if the volume of these were to rise a thousandfold, through deliberate flooding or simply through the natural expansion of the currency? We're already worried about mining guilds which have control of too much computing power. 51% is quoted as the minimum level required in order to subvert the Bitcoin transaction system successfully. This is not strictly true- 51% is simply the point at which an attack becomes more likely to succeed than to fail. It's perfectly possible that an entity with a significant non-majority of mining power could succeed in poisoning the blockchain with dishonest blocks. This can be attempted over and over again by a motivated group or individual, and it only needs to succeed once to cause irreparable damage to Bitcoin's credibility.

Just some of the many problems Bitcoin may face.. sell while its high.

I'll let someone else rebut this, but basically you're wrong about the facts.

ECTAE: Sorry but banks with multi trillion dollar balance sheets just don't care enough about bitcoin disrupting the whole system. They're happy to continue collecting fees for all the processing they do on and off bitcoin exchanges, and from the bitcoin corporate accounts.

Additionally there are no "large-scale funds" that are buying bitcoin. Not even small scale funds are. Investments in this so far are *almost* exclusively from private investors. The exceptions are the Winklevoss twins who may have their holdings listed in their overall investment portfolio, which is likely setup as a fund. And also Chamath Palihapitiya, though I think he specifically stated his investment was private/personal and not part of his venture capital fund.

anyone taking ectae seriously might want to read this thread:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/30...phole-1385274/

Yes, there are bugs. And the system has been shown to be resilient when they occur. The core developers do not rush changes and have been overly cautious making sure they do not disrupt the system before pushing them out. It is no longer maintained by hobbyists and volunteers, and most are very skilled. Many are paid (either by the foundation, or through getting involved in Bitcoin related businesses).

The idea that you can't roll back a serious flaw is flawed. If such a flaw was detected, it's easy to get a vast majority to agree to roll back to a certain point in time. The likelihood of such a flaw is also low due to the amount of researchers and audits occurring.


A real threat. Fortunately, the response from governments has been overall positive. A drastic change of course would have to occur for this to be a real threat.

Or these entities can change their business model and adapt. These companies are not stupid. It would be far cheaper to try to exploit advantages presented by Bitcoin than try to destroy it.



More handwaving or pointing to things that aren't a problem. The block chain is a scarce resource, and spam will simply be priced out. 51% attack is very expensive compared to opportunity cost.

You simply cannot publish "dishonest blocks". They are ignored.

Surprised you didn't roll out the laughable Selfish Miner attack paper into this.

You seem to understand just enough to know enough terms to throw out there without thinking any deeper about the situation, or without thinking how people with more invested or smarter than you have already thought about such situations.

I think it's optimistic to call response from governments positive at this stage imo. I haven't seen anything proactive, only inactivity so far.

dont mean to be a nit here, but he speaks as if his fund is holding the (what appears to be a) ~40k btc position (besides whatever his personal stash is)

Yeah I wasn't absolutely confident on my statement regarding him hence why I included him into the possible fund investment category. It seems possible that any of the super wealthy who own btc would keep it part of their fund but that doesn't mean instiutional or hedge funds are investing in btc contrary to what the post I was referencing stated.

US FINCEN guidelines, Germany was positive if I remember correctly. Only negative one I've seen is Thailand, and everything is illegal in Thailand until becoming legal.

The US criminal complaint against the alleged DPR was also positive in its classification of Bitcoin.

The economic powerhouses of Europe and Asia, Germany and China both support bitcoin:

- bitcoin is "private money" in Germany and if held over 1 year, free of capital gains tax
- Chinese government likes bitcoin--CCTV (China Central Television is a state-run TV broadcaster meaning a half hour segment on bitcoin has been approved by Chinese government) has run multiple positive and long segments on bitcoin

Moreover, BTCChina > Gox. most of the ASICs are produced in China

Also worth mentioning, Canada supports bitcoin: FINTRAC has stated they will not regulate bitcoin

This has probably been discussed in one of these 86 pages, but has anyone started seriously looking at some of the other newer cheaper digital currencies? Waste of time? Theoretically the world has room to support several of these, right?

19 of the 98 posts on the last page of "hsnl xfer thread" have the word "bitcoin" in them, and only one guy is selling. I think poker players like it.

a lot of them are pump n dumps and very similar to bitcoin. most of the new ones these days copy litecoin cuz it uses scrypt hashing algorithm. ripple used to be #2 on the crypto currency market cap list but it was removed... while the idea of ripple is nice, the current implementation is crap/kind of a scam.. see http://ripplescam.org/

some useful links:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0
http://coinmarketcap.com/



alt coin mining profitability:
http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency
http://dustcoin.com/
http://coinchoose.com/

as you can see, a lot of crap coins:

Thanks for that

thanks in advance

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygree...-the-dark-web/

Almost all are junk, unless you are some kind of expert trader and can leave others holding the bag.

http://themisescircle.org/blog/2013/...with-altcoins/


Network effect is huge. The only way I see them taking off is if they have some niche use case that wouldn't make sense for Bitcoin to support. Namecoin comes to mind.


Forget who asked all this stuff, quoting is screwed up since it was in my reply-

>Can you elaborate on what you mean by audit? I didn't understand.
The block chain is public record. There are many free websites that let you check balances of various addresses. You could check if you actually got a payment or if Electrum was screwing you, for example.

>So are my btc stored on my wallet much like transaction history is stored by the btc network?
Your wallet only has keys to allow you to spend coins. Everything else is public record. If you make a copy of the keys, that's all you need to go to another computer and spend them. This is a double-edged sword, since all someone needs is your keys to spend them!

>Are those the addresses in the recieve tab?
Yes

>And when I recreate it, it just creates a copy correct? All changes on one copy are instated on all copies, correct?
Electrum uses a mechanism to generate keys automatically starting from a seed. It will be able to generate all of the keys your previous wallet had.

Why do I even read your posts? Seriously?

i ask myself the same thing about you.

he's right--most alt coins are junk/pump n dumps. do you disagree?

i also agree that Namecoin is an interesting case with some potential, although i havent seen a .bit site yet. also check out MasterCoin, its not an alt coin, but you can buy it like one.

holy ****. I would certainly consider Germany very pro-btc then.

I remember that same tone back when BTC started getting recognized..

if you copy/paste the bitcoin code and only change the name, is that worth anything?
there are some alt coins which are significantly different than bitcoin and they tend to have higher market caps.
but there a lot of premine/pump n dump coins:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0

which of these are you putting money into?