Silk Road forums

It's not going to disappear.

Compared to a few months ago, there are...

3 times as many transactions per day: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular
(excluding popular addresses like Satoshi Dice)

3 times as many unique addresses being used: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique-addresses

Insanely higher USD trade volume: https://blockchain.info/charts/trade-volume

20,000 new accounts being created on MtGox every day compared to 2000 per day in March.

Thousands of people still waiting to be verified on MtGox.

Things can seem grim during a crash, but bitcoin is more popular than ever, and it's already bouncing back. It was trading at $130 a little while ago. That's higher than it was ever valued up until 10 days ago.

You can complain about vendors going on hiatus, but buyers were doing the same thing when BTC price was exploding. There's at least one thread in this subforum where vendors were talking about lower sales and buyers explicitly told them that they were waiting for BTC to keep rising so they could get more value for their coins. So it goes both ways.

Ultimately, any large movement in price is going to reduce trade. Stability is the best thing to promote trade.

In any case, I see about 3020 domestic US listings and there were 3100 before, so only about 3% of the listings have been taken down, at best. They just happen to be some of the top vendors, like Nod and Kush in the stimulants category, so it's noticeable.

Is there any evidence to back this up?

It sounds too conspiratorial to me. People have a hard time accepting that "small" people can do "big" things, so they come up with more profound explanations. A lone nut with a gun could not have shot the president, it must be the CIA. 19 guys with box cutters could not have brought down the WTC, it must have been the government. Some random hackers or market manipulators couldn't crash bitcoin, it must be the central banks.

The truth is that we live in a world where insignificant people can sometimes have a significant impact on history.

Then again, if you have evidence for this, I'd love to see it.

Interesting read. One barrier to adoption is that it takes 50 times as much computational power to process zerocoin transactions, although the authors admit their code could be made more efficient. I'm all for it.

And start.

168 hours form now, if BTC is less than $90, OP won.

If i could I would ask him what to do as a vendor should I always sell the coin as I get em or save em? or what ratio to hold and sell?

That's easy to answer.

When bitcoins are going up, you're better off holding onto them as long as possible. If you're a buyer, you should buy a week or two before you want to spend on drugs (if you did that during the recent climb, you'd get twice as much drugs for your money). If you're a seller, you should wait one or two weeks before cashing out (if you did that during the recent climb, you'd get twice as much money for your drugs).

When bitcoins are going down, or they are unstable and unpredictable, you're better off getting rid them as soon as possible, so at least you get close to the value you paid for them.

There may be a "profundity center" in the brain, some region that makes you think things are profound when it is activated. Psychedelics seem to trigger that, but talk to someone who is tripping while you are sober. Their insights seem fairly mundane.

I'm a hardened materialist, though.

The price dropped because of panic caused by the MtGox lag. Ironically, bitcoin crashed because too many people want bitcoins and the infrastructure can't handle them. There are multiple lines of evidence to support this. Account creation at MtGox is up 10 fold over last month. You think those people are going away? Most of them haven't had a chance to buy, because it takes a week to transfer money to MtGox.

We saw the same thing today. As trading began in the United States, the lag went to 3, 5, then 7 minutes and the price dropped from $170 to $120, and then they suspended trading. IF they finally have their shit together when they reopen in a few hours, I think after an initial bout of craziness, perhaps another crash, the price will finally start rising again.

There's 10 times as much interest in bitcoin now as there was when it first climbed from $10 to $100.