I read your post, tbh I'm not sure what you're trying to warn us about with the boiling frog analogy but there's no reason to believe bitcoin won't continue advancing and no reason to believe Gavin has control over it. There are many people besides Gavin who are working and have worked on bitcoin (see the list here http://bitcoin.org/en/development). I doubt most of the uneducated masses know who Gavin is, but then again most of the uneducated masses aren't mining or running nodes.

It seems there's a bug running bitcoin-qt on mac that the devs are having trouble fixing.

Sounds about right. The biggest red flag I saw was a claim that you could hold the bitshare equivalent of 1 bitcoin that would always be worth 1 bitcoin, and then also get dividends/interest on that bitcoin. If you have a choice of holding a bitcoin or something that's always worth a bitcoin but pays dividends, everyone in the world should buy that thing with their bitcoins (and you'd be crazy to sell). The question is where are they getting the money to pay those dividends in a way that keeps it truly risk-free, it's impossible/unsustainable as far as I see.

Yes I do. I was subscribed to this thread from the beginning, and I had "free" electricity (included in my rent) until the end of 2012. It took poker on SWC to get me to actually buy some.

Furthermore, there are more people than this group that understand the protocol and have implemented alternative nodes. Ones that I know of- BitcoinJ, btcd, BitsofProof, libbitcoin, a C# version, etc... Beyond that, there are plenty of people who are knowledgeable about many of these nodes who aren't actively working on them. I've dug through source code of many implementations to see how certain details worked for advanced features. It's not terribly hard to understand if you know what you are doing. Even more further, you could just clone Bitcoin at any given point and run from that and it would just work without any development.

Where is the best place to buy litecoins? I am looking at BTC-E and cannot figure out how to fund it. On the right side of the page it says "reserves" seems you can depo with a CC but not onto BTCE directly. Any help would be appreciated.

Buy bitcoin from coinbase or stamp, send to btce and trade for litecoin

thanks raw. How long does it usually take to get from coinbase to btce?

i did it the other day, took like 20m

Bump.

I'm reading the "Securing your wallet" page on the BTC wiki but would like a second opinion here. Anyone?

Can you place a percentage chance on any of those things happening?

Flaw that cannot be fixed or is mismanged - 1%
Encryption flaw that cannot be fixed - .1%
Govt crippling - 2% (much lower than before)
Nothing useful being built - 10%

Wild ass guesses.

As long as your wallet is encrypted and backed up up with a strong password its reasonably safe IMO. Others may disagree, but its all about level of risk/convenience you want to have.

Is there any good reading on bitcoins? Specifically interested in different potential 1-2 yr outcomes and what can influence them.

Ya read back through this thread or check out Bitcoin talk forums. They are the 2p2 of Bitcoin.

right, seems serious though, probably too early but some speculation it was a purposeful intrusion by Apple, don't know enough to know what to think, they'll find a fix ofc, just weird that it occurred.

read this entire thread.

i get medieval when i'm takin' payments, cause i don't want the NSA all stuck up in my anus.

$38 atm

It's a bit odd.. there's a guy on btc-e who throws up what you call a sell wall. Recently it's now a $4 million dollar wall he puts up and just keeps pulling it off the market. It seems like he must have a really good trading system or something because if he's throwing it up on the sell side he is trying to scare people from buying and push the price down, but he obv doesn't want the price to fall if he has $4 mil worth.

Somehow he must be making a spread picking up coins when he makes people sell in front of his wall, then dropping the wall and putting up a buy wall and having people buy in front of that then selling the coins he just picked up for more.

digitalmagus: LTC will rise to $250 because: 1) Gox to announce LTC 2) CoinBase to announce LTC (Coblee works there!) 3) BTCChina to announce LTC (owner = Charles Lee Brother) 4) 1 BTC = 4 LTC, thus if BTC=$1000, then LTC =$250. Basic math!

Any opinions on this ?

I have $10,000 and am looking at buying and selling BTC on an exchange. I will be selling/buying very often.

Which exchanges offer:
1. The fastest deposit/withdrawl
2. Safest
3. Narrowest spread/ most liquidity

What exchange do you guys prefer?

Where are you from? I would do the trading on BTC China (0% trading fee and definitely safe). Buy and withdraw on other exchange, send bitcoins to China to trade with.

England.

i'm using avatrade. i don't know about the rest, but they took paypal. doesn't get much quicker than that.

1) Gox has been about to add LTC for the better part of a year, afaik it's not happening anytime soon.

2 & 3) Haven't heard about these but I guess that would be pretty big news if true. Big if though.

4) This one's nonsense. A BTC knockoff that has half as many coins wouldn't be twice as valuable just because it has half the supply for example.

If this is from the btc-e trollbox, I wouldn't put too much stock into any of the claims/rumors that are made there unless you can verify them somewhere else.

You've turned around awfully quickly. I've linked you to it before but bitfinex is pretty good and fast and lets you short bitcoin as you've wanted to do before.

Some pretty cool charts on ZH regarding the largest holders:



http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-1...olders-bitcoin

I wonder how much appeal Litecoin will have if it actually goes up in value more, seems like it is 100% speculation play, say it hits $100 or something, why the hell would you buy it anymore (assuming Bitcoin at 1000)? The only argument is speculation and that seems to be gone.

Are there really people who want to buy LTC but aren't because it takes 1 extra step to get to btc-e instead of coinbase or btchina?