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Messages - astor

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1681
Security / Re: BTC speculation hyper bubble
« on: April 09, 2013, 07:30 pm »
Yeah but I don't want to "invest" at $225 when I bought it at $10 a coin more recently than I had to buy a new stick of deodorant...

I don't want to buy 1 coin and see it double, I want to buy a thousand coins and see them increase a hundredfold >:D

Yes, but the past is history and lost opportunities are a sunk cost. Only future outcomes should inform your decisions, so you are faced with the choice of 100% profit at $225 or nothing...

Well, that's based on your expectation. I'm not making any predictions on what BTC will do. :)

1682
Oh, and SR isn't losing even if sales are down, since they are making money off the shit tons of BTC that they hold. If they had $5 million in BTC two months ago, then they have $50 million in BTC today, which is probably more than they've made from commission since they started.

1683
i literally lost money buy buying 10g of molly off SR and selling it over the course of 3 weeks.  I would have more money now if I had just done nothing at all

That's what I've been saying for weeks, vendors can make more money holding onto their bitcoins than cashing them out to buy drugs to sell. It's a wonder anyone is trading for goods at all.

BTC will stabilize eventually and become a useful tool of exchange, but who knows if that will happen in a week, a month, or a year.

1684
Security / Re: Why is BTC's value increasing so drastically?
« on: April 09, 2013, 05:42 pm »
If you believe what they say, they are exchanging $1 mil per month.

I believe that number was from February, too. It was announced some time in March. They could be doing 5 times that now.

1685
Security / Re: Why is BTC's value increasing so drastically?
« on: April 09, 2013, 05:27 pm »
Damn, as I wrote that, an order came in for 351 BTC @ $239. That's $115,000...

1686
Security / Re: Why is BTC's value increasing so drastically?
« on: April 09, 2013, 05:25 pm »
That leaves the question unanswered, who is dropping $50,000 on bitcoins in a single order? They are either incredibly rich and can afford to lose it, incredibly stupid, or this dog and pony show will climb to the top of Thousand Mountain, and they are geniuses.

1687
Security / Re: Why is BTC's value increasing so drastically?
« on: April 09, 2013, 05:17 pm »
Yeah, I agree, it's hearsay anyway. :)

Y Combinator invested in Coinbase, although that's a company that trades in BTC. I have no evidence that VCs are simply buying up BTC.

1688
Security / Re: Why is BTC's value increasing so drastically?
« on: April 09, 2013, 04:55 pm »
Yeah, I don't know who they are. Watching the trades scroll by, I occasionally see some that are over 100 BTC. I just saw one for 228 BTC @ $225. Somebody dropped $53,500 on bitcoins. I don't know who has that kind of money, but Voorhees suggested that venture capitalists (and perhaps investment firms) are climbing on board. I read somewhere that a MtGox employee revealed that their ticker API gets hits from known IP addresses at investment firms, banks, and governments. So, there's clearly interest in those groups.

1689
Security / Re: BTC speculation hyper bubble
« on: April 09, 2013, 04:43 pm »
Why? If you believe it will continue going up, then now is the best time to buy. :)

Think of it this way. You can buy at $225 right now. Your theory of a crash might come true, but it might happen when BTC is at $600 and it will drop to $300. That's a worse deal than if you bought now and there was no crash.

1690
Hording is the rational response to runaway deflation. If I spend $100 on drugs now and the price of BTC doubles in a week, then I've effectively spent $200 on those drugs by next week.

What keeps SR's business afloat in this deflationary period is the large percentage of irrational actors in the drug community. I think they fall into two categories:

1. Ignorant/uninformed people. These are people who just want drugs and don't follow bitcoin. They buy when they need coins and spend immediately
2. Addicts. People who need their drugs and will pay for them, despite knowing that they could buy twice as much for the same money in a week

The second category contradicts the notion that SR is an agora of voluntary trade, since drug addiction is more like mental slavery.

1691
Security / Re: Looking for a TORmail alternative
« on: April 09, 2013, 03:01 pm »
I answered this in one of the other Tormail threads. Gmail is a pain in the ass to use over Tor. You would most likely have to buy a burner phone to verify. I don't know about Hotmail/Outlook.com. However, Yahoo Mail is easy to register and use over Tor. They don't have good spam catching mechanisms, which is why spammers love to use them, but that's a feature for people who want an anon email account, too. Only problem with Yahoo Mail is it doesn't provide SSL support for viewing your email (only for registering/logging in), so the exit node can snoop on what you're reading.

My suggestion is safe-mail.net, which provides SSL for everything on the site, and doesn't block Tor. You need to disable IP checking in the preferences, or it will log you out when you switch exit nodes after 10 minutes.

1692
Security / Re: Why is BTC's value increasing so drastically?
« on: April 09, 2013, 11:38 am »
BTC is a limited commodity with an infinite spectrum of value in contrast with the fiat currency.

Now it means that there are extremely large amount of people holding onto BTC without selling off, thus the high price?

The price is increasing because of increased interest in bitcoin and thus demand. The more interesting question is why has interest increased so dramatically, see below.

let say a person who holds a large amount of BTC is deceased, so the BTC would be forever lost, right? Say no one has access to his wallet, what will happen to his BTC?

This has come up in discussions before. Some have suggested storing the password to your wallet in a safe... at a bank of all places, haha.

Why do you think the value is increasing so much? Do you think the Federals are at play in conspiracy?

I'll let entrepreneur, visionary and all around scammer Erik Voorhees answer that:

This morning, a family member of mine asked me to write up my opinion of the Bitcoin price movement recently. For those who don't know me, I've been heavily involved in Bitcoin since May 2011. It is my full time life, my career, and my passion. The price in 2013 has been wild, and here's what I wrote to my family member.

Unfortunately, while I'm certainly an insider, not even I know if the price will rise or fall tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or next year. Guessing short term price movements is a fool's game.

My sentiment is the same today as it was a year or two years ago: either Bitcoin is worth zero, or is worth thousands of dollars each. It will take years for the market to figure out which it is. If you believe in the Bitcoin story, that it may revolutionize the world of finance, then it's a good idea to hold on to some Bitcoins. If you think it's just too risky, or are unconvinced of the narrative, then it's best to sell. As stated many times, Bitcoins are incredibly risky and volatile. The whole thing is one grand experiment. Don't ever hold more money in Bitcoin than you can afford to lose, and in general you should assume the whole thing will go to zero.

Now, if you're curious why this price may be going crazy right now, it's a few factors:

1) A handful of "respectable" online merchants are now accepting Bitcoin, this proves that real businesses see the value in it. It's likely that others will follow.

2) Cyprus scared the hell out of everyone (and rightly so). While a few Cypriots may have bought some Bitcoin, the bigger influence is a world of onlookers who are all thinking, "well that could happen to US!" and "look how Bitcoin solves the problem of trusting banks." It's not so much that Cypriots are buying bitcoins now, but rather that the world realizes that as this euro (and soon dollar...) crisis continues unfolding, a greater number of people will seek some degree of refuge in Bitcoin. Speculators, seeing this possibility, are buying up Bitcoins.

3) Venture capital (and private investor) money is moving into Bitcoin. A handful of VC firms putting in a handful of money would explain the current price rise.

4) An increasingly wide swath of the libertarian/gold & silver "hard money" types are buying into Bitcoin. They were very skeptical at first, but are coming around. There are probably a few hundred thousand people like this in America who are deciding to put a few grand into Bitcoin.

5) The FinCEN ruling clarified the government's stance on Bitcoin about 3 weeks ago. The good news is Bitcoin is very much legal, and will be treated basically like money. People don't need to worry that the government will come down on it any time soon.

6) The press attention gained from all of the above real-world events is fueling a huge amount of hype (justified or not).

7) Ignorant, foolish people are buying bitcoins simply because the price is going up and they think (consciously or unconsciously) that this means it'll go up tomorrow. Maybe 1% of the buying interest is from people like this, or maybe 99%. Such people may get really lucky, or impoverish themselves, but either way they're in it for the wrong reason.

All of the above have combined over the past couple months to cause this price rally. It may well be a bubble, and could fall back down to $20/coin. Or, it could be the "new normal" and a new stable price between $100-$300 will be found. Or, it could be the start of a mega bubble that drives prices over $1000 before they come crashing down somewhere and cause widespread misery and chaos. The price right now could be the highest Bitcoin will ever be from now on, or the lowest. Nobody knows!

My advice... don't obsess over the fluctuating price on any given day. The market will figure out the value of these coins, and there ain't a damn thing anyone can do to prevent this from playing out.

But certainly, Bitcoin is the most important thing happening on the planet right now... and it has nothing to do with the price.

-Erik

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1bxcm4/an_insiders_opinion_on_the_crazy_bitcoin_market/

1693
TheHubble, the Litecoin-QT client is a fork of the Bitcoin-QT client. It looks just like the Bitcoin client, but has a tab where you can turn on mining.

1694
Silk Road discussion / Re: Maintenence
« on: April 09, 2013, 03:40 am »
... nevermind, temporary glitch ...

1695
Silk Road discussion / Re: Maintenence
« on: April 09, 2013, 03:16 am »
Looks like he removed the vendor ratings.

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