you first

price manipulation

I've never considered it, but it might be useful. I haven't looked at the details of this, but if you have a weak password, it might be possible to bruteforce the electrum wallet and spend or get the master seed.

It's already encrypted once, and it's going to be unencrypted from Truecrypt whenever you use it, so I'm not sure it buys you much.

yeah that's what I figured. I was just updating some PWs and updating time machine and the thought crossed my mind.

But i think it's just a little too much work/hassle to make sure it works right and doesnt **** up anything else.

where can I trade LTC/BTC except btc-e?

cryptsy?

The market has to absorb 3600 new coins every day if miners are trying to recoup their recent ASIC purchases.

The higher the price goes, the more difficult this is.

I looked into a few mining securities last month, and my rough analysis and calculations were that I'd be shocked if a lot of those people make money in 2014, let alone be around in 2015-- long enough that those investments pay themselves back to be breakeven.

The rampant preorder and massively overpriced (by 30-50% imo) ASIC mining really really hurt the miners. I can really see difficulty rate slowing down again in late 2014 and early 2015. Until then I think it's a bunch of guys who'll be mining -roi. Especially those securities that do 75% payback.

pretty similar pattern so far

I wouldn't think their ROI has much to do with how many coins are available for purchase?

All those miner purchases are sunk costs. I guess if they think they should hold on to wait for a price increase to pay themselves back?

Miners spend $17 million a day for a shot at $4.4 million of bitcoin

I heard that that site is a scam. so basically we have no trusted site (idk is btc-e is all that trusted) for LTC/BTC

okcoin maybe. but I don't know any chinese

The difficulty adjustment decouples the total mining effort from the number of bitcoins produced. This makes the bitcoin's value independent of the total cost of the electricity used to generate them.

The bitcoin price, mining difficulty, block reward, and variable costs such as electric rates determine whether any individual miner should be mining at any given time. The current and future values of these determine whether one should get into mining at all. None of these variables, including the number of miners and their hashing power, affect the bitcoin supply, except for the block reward. I do feel that the halving of the block reward played a part in bitcoin's 2013 performance.

How do you know how many bitcoins are in floatation on exchanges at any one time?

I trust bitfinex and they trade ltc/btc and ltc/usd. They're incorporated in Hong Kong and the owners are known. Their wire withdrawals and deposits haven't had any problems.

They don't have quite the same volume as btc-e but their markets aren't dead either, I use them. Their 24 hour volume at the moment is 4860 btc and 3040 ltc. Also their trading fees are the lowest around I'm pretty sure, lower than btc-e.

I have a referral code I can give you which would lower your trading fees by 10%, but I feel it would be in poor taste to post it here. PM me if you're interested.

fyi we have this in Canada for years for the major banks. It's about instantaneous and costs about $1-2 per transfer for a limit of about $1-10k per transfer depending on institution IIRC. Called Interac Email transfer. Very simple.

Lol, i thought the same.

- my landlords are 65yrs + and ask me if i "talk about bitcoin" after i told them about another currency w/o transaction fees. WTF

- random people at a party from Italy talk about it

- my mom is finally willing to put some small change into it after i told her many months ago

Then i remember the classical story "when your barber is talking about it, its the best time to leave".

They were all only superficially educated and got their opinion from a random news piece out there.

It's a good first step, but educating the masses is impossible. For widespread adoption to take place it has to beat the current system by a thousand fold.

This way people who don't adapt will be punished severely by the market (just like they are today buying random financial products w/o any idea).

Still a believer but ready for a lot of bumps down the road.

It wasn't instantaneous and had a $1k transaction limit when I used it with my BMO account. Perhaps it varies based on how good your relationship is with the bank. Also not all banks seemed to offer this, just like clearxchange. Additionally, America has also had this for years, people may not have known about it though. It also matters a lot less since the people who tend to have need for transfers like these typically have an account at the major banks anyway. i.e. Almost all american poker players have (or had post bf) either a bank of america, chase, or wells fargo account and can send 10k/day instantaneously for free.

Considering that a major step towards adoption is getting people like barbers to accept bitcoin, this doesn't sound so bad.

Why does this lead to adoption? This is like saying umbrellas lead to rain.

That was supposed to be a light hearted comment and not a point for debate. I consider merchants like local barbers using bitcoin a step forward, therefore its not bad if they're talking about it.

It depends a lot on the context of how they are talking about it, to be honest. The get rich quick people will get burned along the way, although if they are interested in it as a viable system, that's more exciting to me.

Bitcoin isn't like a fragile stock where if there are more buyers its overpriced and if there are less buyers its underpriced.

Imagine we are in the past and your barber is talking about a computer [or basically any technology for that matter]. Is it "time to leave?"

A cricitical article is here:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.2048

He thinks bitcoin loans are impractical, which has a number of economic effects his paper investigates.