Ditto. Although, if someone screamed plagiarism, I wouldn't be surprised.Originally Posted by Starbucks Spunk Bucket
I actually thought that was good enough reasoning. Just sayin'
Ditto. Although, if someone screamed plagiarism, I wouldn't be surprised.I actually thought that was good enough reasoning. Just sayin'
Hey, dummy! Read this passage from a CNN article from the end of last year and be edified:
someone who isnt garrett, please.
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"The reality is that btcoin is possibly not safer, possibly not cheaper, possibly not faster than other means of distributing money from point A to point B," said Mark Williams, risk management professor at Boston University, adding that "bitcoin is seven times riskier than gold, eight times riskier than the S&P and 15 times riskier than the U.S. dollar."
Williams had predicted in December 2013 that the bitcoin bubble could burst and drop in value by more than 90 percent. For 2015, he took a more positive outlook, telling CNBC that the cryptocurrency could experience a boost if it successfully attains regulatory legitimacy.
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http://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/will-...oins-year.html
This risk management prof is basically summarizing the market price effect of risk-reducing regulation of bitcoin markets that I mention above. The timing of the regulatory legitimacy effect may have been off, but that doesn't negate that such a risk reduction-based price effect is a fundamental concept for pricing financial instruments. And he implicitly references it here.
But, hey! He's only a Boston U finance professor who specializes in risk management. What the hell would he know?
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didnt read a word of that garrett.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
The Karpeles story just feels like it has the potential for huge entertainment value. Autism, pre-diabetes, huge money, fraud.
It seems like a feel good story as Karpeles has to have hidden a few bucks and the potential sentence is kind of a slap on the wrist.
This guy hit the lottery and was completely overwhelmed emotionally and technically. He shut down and withdrew. Lol.
I can't wait for someone to write the definitive chronology after the trial. I remember reading crazy shit about Karpeles fixated on his cafe while Gox was imploding. Great stuff.
I remember our debates about wether Dread Pirate may have been Karpeles at one time or another. This guy was far too goofy. Like most of the remaining Bitcoin players.
Lol, the Winkelvoss kids. Still fucking around with the ETF idea. Still holding their Bitcoins. Must be awkward for them at the Harvard reunions.
Has anyone used Coinbase recently? And would they recommend it?
BALLIN'!!
Ecuador’s new virtual currency is a source of pride, worry
QUITO, Ecuador Jaime Rojas keeps his antiquated cellphone on the dashboard of his taxi. He can’t use it to play games or check Facebook, but his “dumb phone” has recently become a powerful tool: He can use it to buy gas, receive fares and send money to family.
Mobile banking has been around for a decade, but this tiny Andean nation recently became the first country in the world to create its own virtual currency. Unlike Bitcoin, Ripple or Peercoin — crypto-currencies with no central bank backing — Ecuador’s dinero electrónico is legal tender, trading alongside the U.S. dollar, which has been the official currency since 2000.
Authorities say the mobile money scheme is a way to offer financial services to those in remote areas where banks are scarce and to help jump-start small businesses. Skeptics, however, fear the system opens up a backdoor for the cash-strapped administration to shed the restrictions of its dollarized economy and, just perhaps, “print” its own digital currency.
Rojas, 55, is among the 47,456 people who have opened mobile accounts since the system went live in December. He says he primarily uses it to buy gas. And while he rarely encounters customers with e-money, he’s grateful when he does.
“This way you don’t have to struggle to find the exact change,” he said, as he plowed his yellow cab down a busy street. “And it’s safer than carrying cash — because of the risk of getting robbed and all that business.”
The government’s control of the virtual currency market (all others are illegal, including Bitcoin) has its advantages. Within a few minutes, anyone with a cellphone on any carrier can open up a mobile account — and money can be added at any bank or other registered outlet.
Growth in the system, however, has been slow. There’s only $645,669 worth of digital cash in circulation and less than 1 percent of the country’s 17 million cellphones are registered to the service, according to Central Bank figures.
Dual Currency?
But it’s the potential for government abuse that worries many.
While mobile money is commonplace throughout Africa and in countries like Haiti and Paraguay, “this is the first time that [electronic money] has been created as a monopoly by a state,” said Abelardo Pachano, who was the head of Ecuador’s Central Bank on two occasions. “In the event that its use becomes widespread, it could generate profound distortions and call into question the viability of our monetary system.”
On the surface, the innovation seems benign: To receive a digital dollar, a customer has to turn in a physical greenback. But Pachano and others worry that the central bank has too much leeway over the use of those physical dollars, including financing the national debt by buying government bonds.
“That initial liquidity that backs the whole system could be turned into non-liquid assets that could cause economic problems under certain circumstances,” he said. In short, if e-money became widespread, and there was ever a mass rush to redeem the currency, it could collapse the system.
Others imagine a future where the indebted administration begins paying public salaries or servicing domestic debt in virtual currency — essentially pumping new, unsupported money into the market and fueling inflation.
Ecuador’s Central Bank insists that safeguards are in place and that no such moves are in the works.
Sucre death
Even so, there are historical reasons to worry about Ecuador’s money. After seeing soaring inflation and the collapse of the sucre currency in the 1990s, then-President Jamil Mahuad took the drastic decision of dollarizing the economy on Jan. 9, 2000. The currency switch was brutal as people saw their life savings evaporate overnight and Mahuad was toppled just weeks later. But it also helped turn the economy around. In 2000, inflation topped 90 percent, but by the following year it had dropped to 22 percent and has been in the single digits ever since.
The stability helped spur investment and led to solid growth. But using a foreign currency means that monetary policy is set in Washington, not in Quito.
President Rafael Correa, a U.S.-trained economist who has embraced Venezuelan-style 21st century socialism, has bristled under the dollar. In his 2009 book, Ecuador: From Banana Republic to No Republic, he wrote a chapter called “Ecuador’s Monetary Suicide,” in which he equated dollarization with “going backward” and adopting the restrictive gold standard, which the United States abandoned in 1933.
“It seems like dollarization is a type of Latin-American machismo applied to monetary policy,” he wrote. “You eliminate the national currency and you’re forced to compete or die.”
Correa blames the recent dollar appreciation and falling oil prices for sapping $2 billion worth of exports during the first quarter. But he’s also admitted that the costs associated with abandoning the buck would be “catastrophic.”
Not everyone believes that the president is unwilling to make the leap. Simon Pachano, a political analyst with the Latin American Faculty for Social Sciences in Quito, worries that the virtual money may be Correa’s stealth route back to a national currency.
“Correa has always wanted to abandon the dollar,” he said. “For him it’s an aberration. It bothers him to be the president of a dollarized country.”
Political backlash?
In a sense, one of the biggest drawbacks of Ecuador’s system is the government backing, said Lindsay Lehr, a mobile money expert and the senior director of Americas Market Intelligence.
In countries where mobile money is offered by the private sector, it’s often seen as a much-needed solution. In Paraguay, 17 percent of all cellphone users also have mobile money accounts, and in Haiti 15 percent are in the system, according to Americas Market Intelligence data.
In Ecuador “since it is the government behind it, it’s receiving a lot of opposition, criticism and cynicism,” she said from her offices in San Francisco. There’s the perception that “the government has ulterior motives or that it’s a political play — which very well may be true.”
Almost nine years into his administration, Correa has been facing demonstrations over his economic policies and his belligerent attitude toward the opposition. In this environment, almost all of his proposals, including e-money, are facing a backlash. On Thursday, labor groups, indigenous organizations and the opposition are planning to begin a national strike asking for reforms.
So even as Ecuador continues to expand the system (users will be able to pay utility bills and bus fares soon) it’s unclear whether people are ready to embrace the initiative.
Rojas, the cab driver, says he’s proud to be an e-money pioneer, but he also recognizes its limits.
“I know old taxi drivers who don’t even have a mobile phone so they’re never going to use this system,” he said. “But I hope it does catch on.”
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nati...e30968391.html
Rich superfag dumps his assets into bitcoin, destroys his atm/credit card, travels the world using nothing but his btc, constantly gets stranded, nearly starves, advises other people never even consider trying what hes been through, but STILL TOTALLY tHINKS BITCOIN IS THE FUTURE
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debat...-only-bitcoin/
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
He says he would like to get paid in bitcoin and plans to keep his savings in the digital currency as well.
BTC has lost 11% of value today, currently sitting at $228.
Seems micon is under attack: SwC Poker @SwCPoker 2h2 hours ago
SwC Poker retweeted Shoe
We are experiencing a very large DDoS attack courtesy of an underhanded competitor. We're in process of mitigating.
-Allergic to the struggle
Ecuador’s new virtual currency is a source of pride, worry
Interesting article that 4 Dragons posted. I wonder if it would work here? Is it redundant with the options that underbanked people have right now? Some of the issues that concern me are security from hackers, stolen and lost cell phones, and would it become the bank and currency of choice for drug dealers and, more importantly, terrorists? Also, if the banks would oppose this idea, they could probably croak the bill in Congress.
QUITO, Ecuador Jaime Rojas keeps his antiquated cellphone on the dashboard of his taxi. He can’t use it to play games or check Facebook, but his “dumb phone” has recently become a powerful tool: He can use it to buy gas, receive fares and send money to family.
Mobile banking has been around for a decade, but this tiny Andean nation recently became the first country in the world to create its own virtual currency. Unlike Bitcoin, Ripple or Peercoin — crypto-currencies with no central bank backing — Ecuador’s dinero electrónico is legal tender, trading alongside the U.S. dollar, which has been the official currency since 2000.
Authorities say the mobile money scheme is a way to offer financial services to those in remote areas where banks are scarce and to help jump-start small businesses. Skeptics, however, fear the system opens up a backdoor for the cash-strapped administration to shed the restrictions of its dollarized economy and, just perhaps, “print” its own digital currency.
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nati...e30968391.html
SWC rolled out their new 'six toe pete' 6 man mix games and you know who is less than pleased.
The overall recent price drop might have been partially due to New York State's BitLicense regulation.
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-in-t...d-bitlicenses/
If so, this negative affect of regulation on transaction anonymity is a risk that you had been mentioning for quite some time.New York Business Journal's Michael del Castillo, for example, wrote a piece about the BitLicense's impact on the New York bitcoin scene.
The piece, titled "The 'Bitcoin Exodus' has totally changed New York's bitcoin ecosystem," emphasized the negative effects of the law, including the number of firms that have so far announced they will cease to do business in the state.
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Or perhaps the the volatily and recent downward trend is due to the release of Bitcoin XT (an alternate to the current standard, Bitcoin Core).*This new bitcoin client is what was alluded to in the article Sonatine shared last month on this thread.
But because the new client has actually been released, it's no longer just shouting through social media. Meaning, the "forking debate" has potential devolved into bitcoin "civil war".
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-in-t...load-of-drama/
The Economist covered the news about the bitcoin fork in a piece titled "Forking Hell", which began:
"Federal Reserve deeply split. Renegade group of board members to create separate American dollar," continuing "such a headline seems highly unlikely, but in this essence is what is happening in the land of bitcoin, a digital currency. "
The article then noted how last week, two of bitcoin's developers had released an alternative version of the cryptocurrency's software. "With no easy way to resolve feuds, some are warning that this 'fork' could result in a full-blown schism," read the piece...
"The dispute is predictably arcane. The bone of contention is the size of a 'block', the name given to the batches into which bitcoin transactions are assembled before they are processed. Satoshi Nakamoto, the crypto-buff who created the currency before disappearing from view in 2011, limited the block size to one megabyte."
"That is enough to handle about 300,000 transactions per day suitable for a currency used mainly by geeks, as bitcoin once was, but nowhere near enough to satisfy the growth aspirations of its boosters. Conventional payment systems like Visa and MasterCard can process tens of thousands of payments per second if needed," it noted.
The piece then went on to note quite rightly that the debate about increasing the block size has long been a matter of contention among the crypto community. "Overlapping cabals of 'core maintainers' and 'main developers' serve as de facto keepers of the currency, especially in Mr Nakamoto's continued absence," it said.
'Civil War'
Writing for The Guardian, Alex Hern began by alluding to the fact that bitcoin was facing a civil war.
Exposing both sides of the debate, Hern noted that the "fork" was being supported by Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen, "two of the most senior developers involved in the bitcoin project".
"Both are involved in the Bitcoin Foundation, the non-profit group that oversees the currency's development: Hearn is the former chair of the foundation's law and policy committee, whilst Andresen is the chief scientist of the foundation," continued the author.
Hern who's written about bitcoin in the past then went on to cite Hearn's post on the bitcoin developer mailing list in which he reasoned that a fork was the only way of solving the deadlock within the bitcoin community.
Hearn was cited in the piece as saying: "I feel sad that it's come to this, but there's no other way. The Bitcoin Core project has drifted so far from the principles myself and many others feel are important, that a fork is the only way to fix things."
In the meantime, the journalist noted the differences between Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin Core the digital currency's previous version. "The key difference ... is size of the blocks into which transactions get grouped every 10 minutes. Core supports a maximum block size of 1mb, which XT increases to 8mb. Hearn, and the other supporters of XT, argue that that increase is necessary if the currency is to continue growing."j
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The forking debate is the cause of the fall in BTC price?
Purchases by geeks? Purchases by anyone?That is enough to handle about 300,000 transactions per day – suitable for a currency used mainly by geeks, as bitcoin once was, but nowhere near enough to satisfy the growth aspirations of its boosters. Conventional payment systems like Visa and MasterCard can process tens of thousands of payments per second if needed," it noted.
Most of the activity was trading. Well, speculation. That is fading. Those bubble luvin Chinese have moved on and so should you.
$208.75
San,The forking debate is the cause of the fall in BTC price?
Purchases by geeks? Purchases by anyone?
Most of the activity was trading. Well, speculation. That is fading. Those bubble luvin Chinese have moved on and so should you.
$208.75
Most foreign currency trades are speculation-driven by traders working for banks or hedge funds, but those traders watch the real economy activity for signs of strengths and weaknesses in currencies.
http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1312e.pdf
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I am finding everyone's input recently to be good, so please do not troll in this thread, even if you dislike the poster (or think his posts aren't good elsewhere on the forum).
I found it interesting how bitcoin crashed to $199, had its usual post-round-number bounce (quickly up to 207), and then overnight it shot back into the 220s.
Still, bitcoin is continuing its slow march downward, which has been occurring for about 15 months now.
Since May, 2014, bitcoin has never stabilized higher than where it previously stabilized.
It's quickly appreciated and quickly crashed (or vice-versa), but since May '14, there has been no stabilized value that was higher than the previous stabilized value. Ouch.
The $220 range is also interesting because that's exactly where it was before the insane run-up to $1200, which was mostly fueled by MtGox market manipulation (and part by media hysteria).
So it's been stuck in the $200s for a long time, and that means the second big run-up was fully negated awhile back.
Now the question is, will the first run up -- which sent BTC from about $17 to $220 -- also find itself negated in the near or semi-near future?
Thanks, Druff. And for the record, I recognize that I was quite Garrett/Marty-like when I first start posting. But I've had my fun/learned some of the conventions of forum posting that I wasn't aware of before, and plan to be avoid such theatrics going forward.
That being said, I used to think Bitcoin was a passing fad. But now I think that it has a viable long-term future if the technical issues, such as limits on the blockchain size, and better controls on Bitcoin exchange solvency/financial soundness, can be addressed.
Why? Because the history of how developed countries like the US have economically benefitted from international money laundering suggests that the U.S. government will more than likely tolerate a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin (even while it selectively goes after certain users of such currencies). Because capital flight to the U.S. provides a periodic backdoor boost to the domestic US economy. And that provides a long-term economic advantage over other countries that have greater systemic levels of corruption.
For example, South Florida has benefited greatly due to inflows of laundered money from overseas. And only a fool of a Congressman or Senator would actively support stronger measures to stem money laundering there. Pay lip service for public consumption, sure. But not activity fight to undermine an extremely valuable factor driving the economic vitality of their voting district/state.
http://www.thenation.com/article/mia...s-dirty-money/
P.S. Also for the record, I previously taught finance at the university level for about a decade, including courses in money and banking, investments, risk management, and financial markets and institutions, before I realized that I hated the BS involved in academics, caught the poker bug and dropped out from a professional life. So, I'm not a *complete* uneducated loser who is pulling shit out my ass on this subject. And I really am interested in this topic.
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Honestly druff sooner or later youre going to give me the benefit of the doubt, and its going to be amazing.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
I haven't traded BTC for 6 months now. I ain't the only one who has moved on. Honestly, do you really believe banks & hedge funds are trading this? I don't.San,
Most foreign currency trades are speculation-driven by traders working for banks or hedge funds, but those traders watch the real economy activity for signs of strengths and weaknesses in currencies.
http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1312e.pdf
I still lurk trading chat like Trading View just to see the kids get their faces ripped off.
I miss the days of the Chinese traders. Good times.
There are so many better gambles now. If you are "investing" in BTC in this market you are missing opportunity. This market is a traders paradise. We haven't even hit Sept Oct yet. If you think all this action is a one time thing we can talk about your issues.
The HFT guys must be killing it.
I love the news cycle the past few days. The talking heads telling everyone not to panic. Sit tight. We recovered from 2008. Just ride it down. The traders will explore your threshold of pain.
I digress.... However, the lack of any real interest by speculators in BTC and the absence of any real utility will cause the chart to play out to the predictable end of a bubble.
Amen.
Following the Karpeles story for fun. $48,000 bed. Feels like he might pull off a micon.
Last edited by Sanlmar; 08-25-2015 at 01:17 PM.
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