I don't think that is what most people here understand by "growing adoption".  They usually mean what I wrote above, or "more bitcoins being used to pay for goods and services".

The total amount of BTC that people have is known with good accuracy (~13 M BTC now), and it does not make much difference for the price whether it is owned by a few people or by many.

Would that be ButterLie Fabs? 

I don't know, really.  I would have though that whales are more likely to be money-smart because (a) they managed to get more money than the small fish, (b) they can afford to buy more information and hire good analysts, and (c) they have better connections to other whales and thus are better informed about their sentiment and gossips.

But there are also many rich people who know nothing of finance, and even financial geniuses make mistakes, I suppose...


Among profs, you mean? I have not heard of any suicide cases.  Some have died in car accidents, most die of natural causes.  Profs here have good salaries, adjusted yearly for inflation, and retire on full pensions, so they don't have many reasons to kill themselves.  Many have side income from consultant work or research grants, or own second homes and get some rent revenue from them.

I know one prof who had sold his house in order to buy another one, and got his money frozen in the bank by the monetarist Collor government in the late 1980s; but he did not kill himself, and eventually got the money out.  No prof that I know has put his savings into bitcoin, so that motive does not apply either.  (In fact, all the profs I have mentioned bitcoin to are even more skeptical than I am, and  do not care to hear about it.)

We do not know that, really.

"Growing adoption" would be more people buying bitcoin for the purpose of paying for goods and services.  As has been pointed out many times, there is no reliable data on that parameter.

Numbers derived from blockchain traffic volume are not reliable, since most of the transactions there seems to be transfers between addresses owned by the same person, or other transfers unrelated to e-commerce. (IIRC, the 50'000 coins auctioned by USMS moved three times in a few days, another 50'000 moved twice, and the remaining 44'000 moved once.  That is almost 300'000 BTC = 105 million USD of blockchain traffic, none of it paying for goods or service.)

The few slightly reliable sources I have suggest that the dollar value of the payments processed by BitPay has been flat or declining in 2014.  I have no data on Coinbase and other processors.  The mere fact that they don't quote any numbers when talking to the media suggests that the numbers are not good.

As has been pointed out many times, almost all of the merchants that "accept bitcoin" do not accept bitcoin really, they accept dollars through BitPay or similar services.  So the number of dollar output channels (affiliated merchants) for BitPay seems to be growing, but we do not know anything about the number of bitcoin input channels (consumers) and the amount of dollars that flows through those channels.

We also have no idea of how many of those consumers bought their coins just to pay for something, and how many spent old coins that they had been holding for months or years.  And we have no idea of how much of that bought-to-pay traffic is new bitcoin adopters, and how much is the same people using bitcoin regularly.

I posted some weeks ago the number of blockchain *addresses* that hold at least 0.1 BTC.  Assuming that a bitcoin user has at least one such address, that number puts the number of users at 650'000 or less (as of the end of September).  That number has increased since January, but that may be only a reflection of the price having dropped by half since then (so that more users can afford to leave 0.1 BTC unspent in their wallets).


Good point, actually... Imagine if someone set up a VinylPay company: "send your old vinyl records to us and we will send their market value in dollars to a merchant of your choice, for a small fee".  Suppose that many merchants signed up for that service (since it would not cost them anything, and could bring in extra dollars).  Would we say that "vinyl record adoption is increasing"?


The 220'000 MtGOX bitcoins will be locked up at least until September 2015, which is the current deadline for the trustee to validate the claims by former customers (that they are supposed to submit until May 2015, in some way that is still unspecified.)  After that, they may be reurned to clients as bitcoins, pobably through Kraken accounts; or they may have to be auctioned in Japan for yen.

The USMS may soon auction a few more coins seized from other sites and individuals that they have arrested after the SilkRoad 1.0 raid: SilkRoad 2.0, a Dutch SR merchant (Joop?), Trendon Shavers, some LocalBitcoins guys, ...  Those auctions, if they happen, would enter the USMS queue, after the remaining SR coins.

The last USMS auction not only had fewer bidders, but the winning bidders (except Draper, who got 2000 coins) were small fish who bid for 1200 BTC each, on average, and could not afford to bid for a whole 2000 BTC lot (or did not want to).  The relative lack of interest by whales, compared to small fish, seems bearish too.

You mean that 4 is not a random number?  It looks quite random to me.

More than 9, for sure...

@jl2012: Sorry about the off-topic posts; I deleted some, feel free to delete more if you think that they don't belong here.

To return to the topic: OTC stands for "over the counter" which means stock traded by a dealer network instead of a regular stock exchange, like NYSE or NASDAQ.

The way SMBIT shares will be traded (so it is claimed) is not "OTC" but on an exchange-like company called (confusingly) OTCMarkets, specifically on a section that they call "OTCQX". 

I doubt that the FTC is reading every post of this thread that has that hashtag.  Yhey must have given up by now.

I suppose that you emailed the FTC investigator a list of those addresses.

There were "relatively" good news, for example, on March 21, when the first rumors about the PBoC tightening were denied by PBoC; on April 15, when the deadline that had been leaked by Caixin passed and bank deposits to the exchanges were not blocked; and on November 12, when a tech guy from OKCoin stated that "a 3 billion euro fund will be trading on out platform".   The first two had the effet of reversing the drop that followed on the previosu bad news.

There is some VC investment in the Chinese exchanges, mining farms, and manufacture of mining equipment.  Mechants however are prohibited to quote prices in bitcoin or sell bitcoin through the internet.  Banks and financial institutions cannot touch bitcoin.  Exchanges have been ordered to keep a low profile and refrain from aggresive marketing.

Well, at least one of us does not understand how funds work. 

As investors come buy COIN fund shares, the COIN fund will have to buy the corresponding BTC somewhere.  The Winkles at some point will sell their 110'000 BTC to the fund.  (That is what "provide liquidity for" means).  They will own the fund, and the fund will own those BTC and maybe some more; but the fund will also owe to its investors the dollar equivalent of those bitcoins (minus a few % in fees).  So the net assets of the fund will be just those fees.

Simplifying the equations: the Winkes will sell their BTC to the fund investors, for the current market price plus a few % in fees.  After that, they will only get a few % of whatever investors invest in the fund.


Why would they want to do that?  Bitcoin will still be a risky investment, with no backing assets and paying no dividends, whose value is entirely dependent on the expectation of future expectations of investors.

Right now, no one with money wants to buy those bitcoins that are for sale at 360$.  If the Winkles and Silberts and Drapers really believed that bitcoin had a 10% chance of being 10'000$ next year, they would buy every coin they could, until the price reached 1000$.  They are not optimistic; they just want others to be optimistic -- and buy their bitcoins.

If the COIN fund buys a million bitcoins from current holders at 10'000 $/BTC, that would mean 10 billion dollars will go from the pockets of fund investors to the pocekts of current holders.   But when are the investors getting back their 10 billion dollars, and from where?

That is the difference between investing 10 billion in bitcoin (whether bare, or wrapped in the glittering tinfoil of a fund) and investing 10 billion in stocks.  In the latter case the investors become owners of 10 billion worth in factories and such, which will create many more billions of new wealth.  In the case of bitcoins, the 10 billion will just pay for caviar and palaces and lamborghinis for the old holders; no wealth will be created, only wasted in luxury consumption.  Isn't something wrong with that picture?

It had crossed my mind too...  If they are not the same person, would perchance @PsychoBoy know who @SLok is, or vice-versa?

Wow. There goes my moonlight job as FUD-troll. 

(My ears are still buzzing, his gold-peddling masters must pay him 10$ for each word...)

If your last salary had been paid on Nov 11, the bitcoins you received then would be worth 4% less today.  But you could have paid your bills and filled your fridge on Nov 12, and that would have been as good as a 24% raise.

On the other hand, if your last salary had been paid on Nov 12, you would have lost money, no matter when you spent it -- as much as 22%, if you held it all until today. 

The problem is that the demand for e-payment use is short-lived.  If people buy 1000 BTC every day to buy things through BitPay/Coinbase, the effect on the market is equivalent to a single buy of ~1000 BTC by a longterm holder (assuming that Bitpay/Coinbase sell the coins 1 day after they were bought).   And, if this is indeed Bitpay's wallet, they have been processing less than 1000 BTC/day, on average.   Perhaps Coinbase is doing more, I don't know.

This thread is becoming too complicated to follow.  I gather that a false newbie is claiming that a sockpuppet of an alias of an anonymous bitcointalk moderator has been threatening to kill the guy who pretended to be an unidentified employee that ostensibly owned the newbie's former pseudonymous account.  Is that true, or is someone trying to make it seem that a sockpuppet of a BFL forum moderator pretends to believe that it is true?

Technically that is not a selfie, someone else took the photo (on chemical film, still -- was ~20 years ago).

Seems I have touched a nerve.  Sorry...

For whatever it is worth, in case anyone cares; I have no opinion:
"One Of The Biggest Mistakes Investors Make"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JmLzEo0Bts

Because the threaders do not have a leg to stand on?

The liquidation of MtGOX is still going on, and you should eventually get something back, perhaps by the end of 2015.  Maybe 20% of what you had.

The trustee appointed by the bankruptcy judge is still trying to collect the assets of the failed company, trying to decipher its accounting, and pondering how it will gather the claims of former clients.  The latter should happen in May 2015. Then thee trustee will have until September 2015 to validate the claims, and then it should distribute the assets proportionally to the claims.
 
It is not clear what amount each former client will be able to claim as his loss.  The account balances at the time of the collapse may be unusable, for several reasons, including the fact that the database that the trustee got has been found to be inconsistent.  Also, it is not clear whether it is leaglly possible for the trustee to distribute the remaining 220'000 bitcoins as bitcoins; he may have to auction them, and distribute the yen instead.

It seems that the usual procedure in bankruptcies of this kind (e.g., in the Madoff ponzi) is to ignore the account balances provided by the company, and instead consider how much money each client deposited, minus how much he has withdrawn.

If the MtGOX trustee chooses (or is required by law) to use this method, then bitcoin deposits and withdrawals would be converted to yen according to the BTC price at the time of the deposit or withdrawal. 

Obviously, the figure obtained by this method can be totally different from the client's final account balance.   Unfortunately the victims do not seem to realize that this is the most important question they shoudl ask the trustee.  Whether the refunds will be in BTC or JPY is irrelevant in comparison.

Clients would have to identify themselves in order to get refunds.  It is not known how many former clients will give up and fail to file a claim.  It is not known whether any of the accounts in the database are fake, with virtual balances, created only to get a slice of the bankruptcy refunds; or whether they belong to former management (which, by law, should not receive any proceeds from the liquidation).  So it is impossibe to say how much each client will receive in the end.

I haven't seen any claim that he emailed his password.

I don't know whether the wallet was encrypted and/or if the FBI hacked into the computer where he kept the wallet; but, if both are true, then the FBI would have easily captured his encryprion password too, as soon as he used it.