I see it, thanks.

'
I have read it but cannot see the answer.

The attack that worries the OP may be:  hacker installs malicious browser/plugin in many computers and waits for one of the owners to start the recovery procedure.  As the victim types the words, the malicious software sends them to the thief, and sends the wrong words to the victim's Trezor, so that his recovery will fail.  Meanwhile the thief starts the legitimate recovery procedure with another Trezor, enters the words (garbled, with nulls and all), and gets access to the victim's wallet.

(A basic problem of all security systems is that, whatever one must do to get access, someone else with the right information could do the same.  Including biometrics.  Thus, security always depends ultimately on preventing the bad guys from getting some critical information that the good guys have somewhere.)

But if the new Trezor can use those words in random order, why couldn't the attacker do it too?

True believers in the future success of bitcoin as global currency should be buying and holding even if the price rose to five figures.  That they are not means that any such true believers have run out of money so they can't influence the price any more.

To me it is quite clear that the traders who are defining the price have been buying bitcoins because they hoped to sell them for a profit in a relatively short term, nothing else.  That must have been the motivation for most buyers during the November rally. That must be the reason why there are now enough bidders at Bitstamp to buy 3700 bitcoins at 555$, but not a single person in the world who is willing to buy one BTC there for 590$.

I can see only one.  Within the realm of real numbers, at least. 

That is one reason why I am skeptical of bitcoin: I have yet to see a "business plan", a consistent and fairly complete description of a future "bitcoin economy", with explicit numbers for volume of commercial use, fees, confirmation delays, deflation rate, wealth distribution, hoarding, banking, legal status, taxes, mining costs, etc.

That "business plan" does not have to be probable, and I don't mind if there is no plan to get there from here; but it would have to be detailed enough to withstand "attacks" by skeptics.  Like, why would people use BTC for payments, if it is not inflationary -- why would they not hoard every BTC they get, and use some Garbagecoin or national currencies for payments?  But if they were to do that, why would bitcoin have any value at all?

The simplistic arguments of trillions divided by 21 million seem to fall apart once one tries to fill in the details...

Hm, ok, so why can't human cognitive process outputs be worth 10$ apiece tomorrow?  

Seriously, you are right in that the current price is not supported by its utility but only by the traders' feelings about what the price will do in the near future.  (Whether it succeeds or fails, bitcoin will be a valuable experiment for financial studies, as an instrument whose market price evolved for years on pure speculation, with no "contamination" by fundamentals.)

Yet, most of the major price moves since last year have clear external causes, such as the seizure of Silk Road, the PBoC decrees and their workarounds, the "bug in bitcoin" announcement, etc..

Granted, most of these events were unpredictable, and acted through changing peoples' outlooks, so that the magnitude of the change would have been impossible to estimate.  But one can imagine dozens of events like those that could happen an d bring the price down.  Just as some predict a rally if the SEC approves COIN.

As for the May/20--Jun/05 rally, in particular: for most of the time since then, the price has either wandered about or drifted down.  The rise (and the support after it) came in a few sudden, concentrated buying spurts. So that rally cannot be explained as a general diffuse change of traders' outlook; it seems more likely that there was a series of discrete external events causing each spurt,

Thus, I would rather believe that is was a few big traders getting some inside information, one at a time. But I can't figure out what the information could be, nor whether it was in China or in the "West".

If I understood correctly, Risto assumes some mathematical distribution model in this thread, and tries to adjust its parameters.  I don't know which model, though.

Yeah, it used to happen with bitcoin exchanges too, but bitcoiners cry too loudly whan that happens... 

You mean an 'it is raining because drops of water are falling from the sky' kind of explanation?

Isn't it time that the State of New York issued regulations on this thread, to prevent non-questions and multiple questions from jeopardizing people's humor and soiling the image of bitcoin as a reliable source of jiggles and laughs?

If anyone would explain why it went up from 450$ to 650$ between May/20 and Jun/06, then we could begin to discuss what could cause it to drop back again.  Or whether it is possible that it will do what it already did on Apr/11.

Did I say it would not?  I wrote

... and surely there is a good supply of those.  How many of them will buy bitcoin funds, I cannot guess.

As for the bet, I said many times that I do not bet unless I am fairly certain that I am right, and I believe I know why the other guy is wrong.  Which is not the case here.  

In order to bet one must assign numeric probabilities to future events, and have confidence in those numbers. (This gets dangerously close to assigning probabilities to probabilities, which would get one immediately excommunicated from the Statistical Church; but maybe you see what I mean.)  Sometimes, a future experiment (like tomorrow's raining or not raining) can be viewed as "equivalent" to a series of past experiments, and then one can use their observed outcome frequencies as probabilities for that future experiment.  Sometimes the possible outcomes of the experiment (like, a throw of a die) are physically equivalent, so it is reasonable to assume that they have equal probabilities.  But how could I rationally assign probabilities to future events like "the SEC will approve COIN trading on NASDAQ", or "investors will not notice that the fund's value is defined in the Chinese exchanges"?  

Moreover, I am not  convinced that the opening of a fund will increase the demand for bitcoins on the market.  The COIN fund, for example, will probably buy bitcoins from the Winklevoss twins at first. (That, I presume, is the reason why they want to create the fund.)  If that is their plan, then, while their BTC reserves last, the fund will not generate any new demand for BTC in the exchanges, but on the other hand will swallow some of the money that could have gone into buying BTC there.  In that case, the opening of the fund may depress the price at first. (SMBIT opened in September 2013, was there a price jump because of that?  What about PBP?)

And, if that is their plan, why do the Winklevosses want to sell their coins to the fund, instead of holding them?  Have they lost faith on the moon?  

EDIT: typo "die"

Does that guy really expect an *answer* from a Society devoted to asking questions?

Bitcoin does not seem to be a stellar investment right now.  I would think that any competent investor (or investment advisor) would stop reading when he finds out that the 590$ price is not tied to its predicted utility in e-commerce, but is largely determined by the Chinese day traders, and has already dropped to 350$ on mere rumors that the Chinese government would impose harsher restrictions. Who would want to put their savings into something like that?

A bitcoin-based fund, ET or not, has all the financial risk as bitcoin itself.  Even if it is registered in New York, its price will still be a function of the mood of the Chinese day-traders.  The probability that it will collapse to zero is indeterminate, but certainly higher than that of APPL going to zero.

On the other hand, the probability that it will "go to the moon" is indeterminate too, and now depends on the demand for the ETF fund generating demand for bitcoin, thus driving up the price, thus justifying demand for the fund -- in other words, depends on the fund pulling itself up by its bootstraps.  It is not at all like gold, not even overpumped gold.

And I still wondering how much the insurance companies will charge to insure a bitcoin fund against theft/embezzlement of its bitcoins.

Bitcoin-based funds offer some convenience and security over raw bitcoin, especially for the investor who is not tech-savy.  (But note that a long-term investor could also buy raw bitcoins with similar security over-the-counter, e.g. through a broker.  Exchanges should be used only by experienced speculators and brokers.)  On the other hand, bitcoin fund shares may have more limited liquidity, and the fund will charge non-negligible fees.  And there is the added risk that the fund will crash (by hacker attack, embezzlement, or loss of confidence in management), even if bitcoin itself doesn't.

So, I suspect that bitcoin funds attract (and will continue to attract) only investors who are naive both technically and financially.

If you recall, Fortress (a huge investment group) had invested in raw bitcoins las year; but after BTC gave them the only red line on their quarterly report, they traded their BTC with Pantera for shares of the PBP fund management company.  Note, those were NOT shares of PBP itself, whose value depends on bitcoin price, but shares of the company that manages the fund, and will make money from fees whatever happens to the price.

Ahem, could you please fix your post by deleting the last two sentences that are not questions?

There aren't many activities that will pay you a five- or six-figure amount without you knowing anything about the payor.

That money usually must have come in return of some goods that you delivered or some service that you rendered.  Try to explain to the police that you did not want to intrude on their privacy by giving them a receipt...

As for the tax people, they do not care where you got that money from, only that you did not pay taxes on it.

This Wikipedia article about class actions may be worth reading.

In theory it is the SMBIT clients who decide when to buy and sell.  But those XBT numbers presumably are "nominal" amounts of BTC that are assigned to client shares.  The fund operators may have reserves of cash and BTC that they could use to buffer the client moves and get more favorable prices on the market.

The lack of data about the bitcoin economy is surprising (and annoying, and worrisome), the more so if we think  that it is such a "computer-nerdy" object.  The only meaningful numbers that are known with reasonable confidence are the current market price, the amount of coins that exist, and the amount of coins that the miners get each day.   Every other important variable (such as the flow of cash and BTC into and out of the exchanges, the daily trade volumes, the daily transaction volume, total volume of e-payments, distribution of coins by country, etc.) are either unknown or meaningless.

I wonder if any of you read Stanislaw Lem's Return from the Stars (1961) and recall the payment device described therein? 

Ifit weren't for one quaint detail, it would have been surprisingly prophetic...

Did you mean the question marker "-ka", or the word "ne" that could be translated as "isn't it?"?

Is "no" is a question in your language?