If you want to make the real money.. buy something and then create the buzz. Alt currencies are full of a bunch of "trading fish". A guy under the name Fontas used to do it on btc-e. He got a big following and would "pump" a coin and it would shoot up like 50% in a matter of seconds and obviously crash but he had to be making a killing on it. I'm guessing in the multiple millions. He would sometimes post large sell orders to show off his stash and I saw one time he had over $4 mil.

He has gone missing though as I think it is illegal to do what he was doing. Dunno how that is considering it's an unregulated market at the moment.

Well actually it looks like he's back on twitter. His page went missing for a while.

There isn't really an edge in trading alt currencies from a technical analysis standpoint. The best advice was already given which was listen to people talk and get ahead of the people who listen. Technical Analysis does NOT work with alt coins (nor bitcoin for the most part but less so than alt) so don't try and play the outsmart game.

I agree with the one comment, seems like a really easy thing to do, just let the coins accumulate then "oops we're hacked sorry".

if the 3 "suspects" end up leading somewhere cool, if not, seems like a perfectly simple way to make $4 million

he got banned in december i think but you make it sound too easy.

100% right

Scalability:

Is this an issue? The public ledger is currently about 12gb. As it gets bigger and bigger will it become too big to be efficient?

You know you want to be a part of the BFI Long Island Bitcoin Bear Club. The BFILIBBC! We got two members so far

You stole the acronym we were going to use for the BFI Long Island Bitcoin Bull Club.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygree...-funds-stolen/

yomofo, seriously stop. this was posted 6 hours ago already. the update on the first link is interesting, that this may have been a scam by the silk road staff, and not a hack.

really yomofo? Still posting links to super old news that literally the entire bitcoin community has known about forever. Setup an rss feed or something ffs.

Just because coins were "hacked" doesn't necessarily mean its going to be sold directly into market, the coins come from an illegitimate source anyway who would bring them to an exchange where you would have to identify yourself? Some of the biggest hacks in early 2012 had the coins followed only to find that the hackers held onto the BTC and made magnitudes more than the original theft

Being a bear in times like these is pretty easy to do.. Following the herd is a good way to lose money, i remember the bears talking about how bitcoins were gonna fail when the price was in the single digits, how stupid do you think they feel now?

HD space is cheaper and cheaper each year. Bandwidth increasing.

SPV clients will be more common in limited bandwidth/storage areas.

Or you'll connect to a trusted node/series of nodes and trust what they say.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhIZd9b2-Qs

Seems like he does his research, and actually took a lot out of the hearings last month.

I've been looking around. Do they have a solution to this problem? It doesn't appear so. If not, who knows how long it could be if it's even possible to fix? I mean seriously, if it could have been fixed, why the **** haven't they done it over the last 3 years?

So what are the odds that MtGox is not insolvent but merely incompetent. Someone is offering me his MtGox balance at a discount. The balance is currently in $US but I would buy bitcoins for it and then hope I can get them out at some point. I think that the price different between MtGox and bitstamp is about 30% right now.

I'm guessing there's a high probability someone exploited them using the bug and stole their ****.

And if that is the case and the thief sells the coins.. look out.

We just broke through an almost two month low. Last time prices averaged below $570 across the exchanges was December 18. Mt. Gox weighing it down I believe.

It actually hit like $530 a few days ago on stamp and flash crashed to 102 on BTC-e and bitfinex.

Yeah but that was brief, this is a weighted average across all exchanges hourly so if that clarifies it.

Also somebody had a good point that if they were solvent they would buy up their own coins and sell them on the other exchanges.

The owners of gox have always been shady and would most certainly do that to make a profit. Their biggest shadiness was obvious litecoin manipulation. They "announced" like 5 times they were going to add ltc to their trading engine. It never happened, but you know they were loading up before each time they announced and making multiple times on their money.

are you talking about transaction malleability?
there's an easy solution. most exchanges implement it. gox doesn't because they're incompetent.

Well apparently stamp and silk road 2 had the same issues. SR 2 could easily be a scam, but stamp seems fairly reliable.

There were DDos attacks due to the Tx malleability. I don't really get it, but it's been made clear to me the issue is not really an issue at all. It does scare the public though and the price has dropped...which is nice. It's kind of sick that I own bitcoins but want the price to drop more.

"This is a denial-of-service attack made possible by some misunderstandings in Bitcoin wallet implementations," Bitstamp noted in a statement. "These misunderstandings have simple solutions that are being implemented as we speak, and we're confident everything will be back to normal shortly."

Another note: If you've ridden the online poker rodeo with insolvent companies, this article SCREAMS gox is ****ed.

http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2...gox-executive/

I'm also no geek and don't understand this ****, but couldn't gox in this time of crisis do manual btc transfers?

I'm a dinosaur just like Warren Buffet (who continues to beat the market despite everyone who thinks they can use simple TA to beat the market or that hedge funds are somehow better which they are not). I hope you sold when I told you to when your fake coins were worth $1200, and if not, I hope you sold when I told you to when your fake coins were worth $800, and if not, I hope you sell now while you can still get close to $600 for them.

Dinosaurs like me have seen cycles like this a million times already. Cash out while you can, bitcoin is absolutely doomed to failure. History does repeat, the current generation is not suddenly infinitely smarter than all their predecessors combined.

Yes, that does mean the average economist out there is more intelligent than the average poster in this thread. That's not even up for debate.