Real numbers, unlike 'real money', are inflationary and infinitely divisible.  Their Central Bank can issue an infinite amount of them in an arbitrarily short time.  In fact, more than you can count.

Yes, very investors bought in Sep-Oct 2013 when BTC was cheaper than today. (The first ~18'000 BTC apparently were "seed" investment by the fund creators themselves.)  Most investment occured between Nov/2013 and May/2014.



[ click on plot for full version ]

BTW,, there are no "GBTC coins".  Those are BIT shares; GBTC is just their ticker symbol on OTCQX, just as AAPL is the symbol for Apple shares on NYSE.

Should have used log scale (seriously!) i.e. use the geometric mean instead of arithmetic mean,
and compute the SD by exp(sqrt(sum((log(P(i)) - log(Pmean))^2))).

Sorry, I didn't notice that this news was posted and discussed earlier today. 

These guys should have hired Prof. Bitcorn, he is a lot more optimistic about bitcoin;
“I’ll be surprised if Bitcoin is here in five years,” says new BitReserve COO

Did I understand right -- they will hold your bitcoins as dollars, euros, etc, to protect them from volatility?  That would make BitReserve the neo-Neo...

I liked this bit: "He’s to join founder/CEO Halsey Minor who carries a checkered resume of insolvency. The founder of CNET in 1993, Minor went on to found Carter’s Grove LLC which filed for bankruptcy with more than $72 million in debts. In 2012, he was listed as California’s #1 delinquent taxpayer, owing over $10 million."

Bitcoin inches a bit closer to full regulation in Massacchhuussettss:
Tewksbury police pay bitcoin ransom to hackers

Well, someone apparently managed to avoid "legal recourses" in Pakistan by closing shop and moving out of the country before the Pakistani SEC could bite them.  That experience may come handy again in the future.

Aren't you all envious of me for having TWO personal exclusive trolls devoted to my person?  (Unless they are sock puppets of the same nothing-better-to-do user, that would be really disappointing.)

So that no one can say that I never posted a train picture:



That is actually the first electric passenger tram built by Werner von Siemens in Berlin, in 1879 (or perhaps a rebuilt replica), now at the German Technology Museum in Berlin.  There is a photo of it in use. 

It has some interesting similarities and contrasts with bitcoin.  Like bitcoin, it was a prototype and proof of concept; it did not see much commercial use, being used mostly for fun at trade shows.  (The first commercial version, opened by Siemens two years later,  looked like this.)  Like bitcoin, it was powered by electricity but, unlike bitcoin, it did not waste more electricity than necessary.  And it reached a speed of 13 km/h; that is, one (city) block every 4.6 minutes.

There are many BIT shares out there (worth about 97'000 BTC)  that have been held for more than 12 months. Many of them (worth about 35'000 BTC) were bought before ~2013-11-06 when the price was less than today's.

As others have noted, their owners must receive some sort of certificates or access codes before they can sell them.  I have read somewhere that the codes are being sent by USPS, but that may have been a guess or joke. 

The shares can be sold only to registered brokers, and the trades may be eventually recorded in the OTCQX list, under the symbol GBTC.  I don't know the details of that process -- whether all trades will be shown, or only those that go through the "level 2" brokers listed on that page, or what.

I would be surprised if none of those old investors will want to sell.  In the GBTC filing they say that some investors did redeem their shares when it was possible, before last October when they suspended redemptions.  (Their current holdings, 138'000 BTC, is the net amount, investments minus redemptions.)  The big question is how many people will want to buy them.

Following a time-honored worldwide tradition, the Authorities only step in to close a Ponzi after it has collapsed.  Until then, it always gets full support from them, including endorsements reassuring statements to the press, presence in conferences and roundtables, Congress hearings, special regulations and exemptions, etc..

LEOcon LEOcoin is obviously, how should we say, an investment that, as implied by the previous achievements of the principals, may see rather radical price volatility in some not-to-distant future, followed by an unbounded period of absolute stability.

For humor value, sorry for the off-topic:
LEOcoin mining page:

My reading of that analysis is that Markus/Wally had several "slave" accounts, used one after the other, that bought bitcoins continuously in small amounts from other users; with apparently valid trades, paying with non-existent USD, at 10% above market.  Then periodically those slave accounts transferred the bitcoins to that master account; not by open trading, but by fake trades (not visible to the outside world), that had the same  meaningless USD amount "15.13$" irrespective of the BTC amount or market price.  The coins presumably were then withdrawn from the master account to some destination outside the MtGOX wallets.

Wow.  So that explains those lavish advertisements...

But they still need the video with the guy on a yacht surrounded by six models in bikinis.  I am sure that it is an ISO standard or something.

No, I do not know whether the top miners will try it, or any other "little abuse".  I believe that they could -- not just in theory, but even taking into account the possible reactions of the community.


Who says that it will be a quarter of the price? 

The past halvings did not have a visible effect on the price.  So why would a delay in the halving have any effect -- unless the ideologues go out screaming "BITCOIN IS WORTHLESS" to the world?  Now they wouldn't do that, right -- because "destroying the value of the thing you sell is just bad business."

The ideologues would react the same way they have reacted to previous bad news, like the MtGOX collapse, the confiscation and sale of the SilkRoad coins, the China bans, etc.: they will say that bitcoin is "antifragile" and will survive this third fork like it survived the previous two, or even that the change is "good for bitcoin".

In fact, that fork would probably be less traumatic than the previous two, because it would be deliberate rather than an unexpected bug.

There is nothing magical about the current halving schedule.  Satoshi could have just as well picked a schedule that skipped 2016 and antecipated the following halvings, and it would have been just as good (or just as bad) as the current one.  If he had done that, and we were discussing the opposite change, I am sure the objections would be the same...


Wait, are you accusing me of slander?  Of whom exactly? 

Or is that a threat, "stop warning people about the problems of bitcoin, or else"?

That is why the "proof" that "a majoritary mining cartel can't change the protocol" is subjective.

I don't know whether the miners will try to delay the halving (or do some other "sacrilege").  But, if they were to try, my estimate is that less than 10% of the bitcoiners would be furiously opposed to the halving delay, the other 90% will not care, and only the 4-5 miners with 60% of the hashpower will be in favor.  Then these miners will do it anyway; and 99.9% of the bitcoiners will accept the change, including most of those who swore that they would abandon bitcoin if that happened. Because their greed will speak louder than their ideology.

Bitcoiners are incredibly easy to fool if they are told what they want to hear.  They believe that adoption is booming, that the exponential price trend is built-in, that Satoshi was an anarcho-libertarian, that governments cannot stop bitcoin, that Greece may adopt it, that the banks are secretly investing in it, that sidechains will solve all problems of the protocol, that Wall Street whales are holding the price down, that China is irrelevant, that Willy created the last bubble...  

If Antonopoulos tells everybody that postponing the halving will not delay the Apotheosis, and Roger Ver posts a video where he promises that it will be the first and last change to the protocol, and Gavin tweets that he supports the change, and Coindesk and Bloomberg and Forbes and the WSJ assert that it will be a positive development for bitcoin, then 90% of the bitcoiners will believe that it is a good thing, and the rest will pretend to believe it in order to preserve the value of their coins.  

Unless you can write really fast, it may be 1 BTC = 0.997 BTC or 1 BTC = 1.07 BTC.