Quote from: bananatinpots on March 08, 2012, 08:47 amBTC is still not stable or predictable, if you can't afford to lose all the value in your BTC you shouldn't be holding them.As BenFrank111 said, your attempted manipulation will be a zero-sum game, some one must lose for you to win out of this. The last hording vendor to sell gets screwed. That's assuming that some other BTC hoarder doesn't screw you all when he sees it double, the BTC was trading for fractions of a cent not so long ago, it is possible that apart from the recent massive theft that some one is sitting on a pile of them.Worse still, if you succeed you would be able to generate a proxy on the size of SR for LE and make BTC associated with SR in their minds even more strongly. Its really a bad idea.Question: Is there any way to make leveraged bets on BTC exchange rates? There was a digital gold currency some years ago that was shut down for being used in dodgy transactions... no ones got a refund yet and it wasn't a scam, the govt. shut it down. Could happen to BTC as well, don't you think? I'd love to be holding hundreds or thousands of BTC when the govt makes it illegal and fucks it up... I am no techie and for sure some one will say that it could never happen but I think the exchanges could be shut down and BTC -> REAL MONEY could easily be stopped, some one needs a bank account at some stage in the process... okay then people will start offering to exchange BTC for physical cash as is already happening but I think that is just going to be more hassle for vendors quite possibly make it too hard for most buyers to get hold of them.....there is no way for governments to actually shut down BTC as it is 100% peer-to-peer. Exchangers would only be liable in anti-BTC jurisdictions (i.e. you could set up a digital currency exchange doing LR-BTC Pecunix-BTC, etc. in a non-extradition, non-reporting jurisdiction and nobody would be able to touch you).What they will do, if it comes down to it, is make owning BTC illegal just like the gold seizures by FDR's leviathin in 1933. This will just drive the BTC markets further underground, but it cannot be shut down. The only thing that can shut BTC down is if most people lose faith in the currency and just stop using it, back-boning the network, etc. It's 100% P2P.