Ahem, unless the browser only replaces the address when the amount is large enough, only when it is being used for the seonc time in N minutes...

(I assumed that the destination address(es) of every transaction to be signed by the Trezor were always displayed on the Trezor window, so that the client could check them independently of the computer and confirm with one of the two buttons.  I understand from the comment above that this is not always done, is that it?)

Not at all.  As I explained above, if you own some of a company's stock, you, quite literally, own a certain slice of the company - its factories, machines, patents, organization, brand, - and of its future profits.  The price of one share (which depends a lot on the company) is a function of the value of the company's assets, which are lised and evaluated every quarter by independent auditors;  and of its expected profits, which can be estimated from concrete market and production data.


Unlike bitcoin, gold does have some utilitarian demand besides currency, investment, or speculation (jewelry, electronics, etc.).  It It also material (everyone can see it and many can test it, without the need of sotware), is permanent (won't disappear if some network stops working), is unalterable (its nature cannot be changed by some community changing some protocol),  and is understood by most everyone.  

But, indeed, gold is currently is overpriced, because its demand is mostly from investment/speculation, and is much higher than the utilitarian one.  Like bitcoin, its price is largely pegged to itself, and could fall drastically if the mood of investors changes.

The changes are slower for gold, because there is a much larger market, and because the trust people have in gold's future demand is not as easily changed by news as their trust in bitcoin's future demand  (which can change radically by a  decree from a government, for example.  Nevertheless, gold has lost about 1/3 of its price between 2012 and 2014 (from 1800$/oz to 1200$/oz).

By the way, this drops is why there are presently so many predictions of imminent global economic catastrophe: they are usually precious metals brokers trying to convince people to invest in gold and silver again.

The SEC's job is supposed to include protecting the casual investor from fraudulent and misrepresented investments, like those that led to the crash of 1929.  If they were really committed to that, their position about COIN or any other bitcoin investment fund should be the one aptly and repeatedly illustrated in this classic video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gpjk_MaCGM

But, as we saw in the last financial crisis, the US government has redefined their mission as helping sleazy entrepreneurs to suck money from common folks.  So I suppose that the chances of COIN being approved are good.  The approval may have a positive effect on price, maybe.

Before going into that, shouldn't we say kilopede instead of millipede, and hectopede instead of centipede?

Indeed, sorry.

I have another couple of questions about my mining equipment manufacturing company (VaporLabs).

If I ship a miner to a client without a PSU, and he gets impatient and installs one of his own, and the chips get fried, or the unit catches fire, will I be required to return or replace the miner, and/or be liable for damages?

If I advertised my miner as consuming 1200 W, but the 1200 W PSU that he tried to install is not enough so he swaps it for a 2400 W unit, can he claim that my miner consuemes more than advertised?  Can I sue him if he writes that on public forum?

Anxiously waiting for your answers.  Well, not really.   

If it were collecting stamps, would it be a stampede?

Indeed it is all a matter of degree.  But, for example, there are many people trying to convince people to invest in bitcoin as a hedge against inflation.  No rational analysis could justify that, even in countries like Argentina.  There are plenty of investments that will compensate for inflation and are fairly likely to survive a finacial/monetary crash.  No one knows what will be the price of bitcoin next month, nor how it would behave in a global economic crisis.


I am rooting for the failure of MANY bitcoin companies, because they are, at the very least, misleading customers.  All bitcoin investment funds are in this list.  I used to think that mining companies and makers of mining equipment were  honest -- just making a product that people wanted to buy -- but now I see that several of them are flat-out scams.  Ditto for certain bitcoin exchanges, perhaps all of them.

You mean, exponential like the red line below?

An if you were not scolding me for things that you say I would do if I had not avoided to do them, you would be killing baby seals with a railroad share to make leg warmers for your pet unicorn.  What a shame. 


You are welcome.


If you were to send me some bitcoin, I may get 75% of what you spent to buy it a week ago, and it may get stolen by a hacker or a trojan in my computer, unless i get a second computer just to handle it; and if it gets stolen or sent to the wrong address, nothing can be done, it is lost.  Can't you see why people are not rushing to use bitcoin now?

PS. However it is true that I have very low opinion of many bitcoin companies, and I am rooting for their failure.  In particular, I view all the bitcoin investment funds as scams: they try to make bitcoin seem an attractive investment, when in fact it is gambling in a lottery with unknown odds and payoffs.   

Can't you see that I am NOT attacking the company, but trying to help it and its clients?


I gave some suggestions (keep it as simple as possible, make the firmware read-only, make the case a bit harder to fake/tamper, ...)

But some risks are probably not fixable, such as the need to trust the manufacturer, hijacking in the mail, social engineering and address substitution ... 

Clients must be warned of those risks, and the warranty must be carefully worded so that the company is not held liable for losses that come from them.

You don't have to be a sophisticated investor to just buy the S&P500. I guarantee that you'll comfortably outperform your silly bank by several percentage points annually at least over any reasonable period of time.
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I do not feel that the chance of extra income is worth the worry and hassle.  It would not be much compared to my salary, anyway.

My younger son has a degree in Management, he invests his savings in stocks, long term.  He was quite worried about my interest in bitcoin, afraid I could be tempted into investing in it.   

That's ridiculous.  I have helped enough already, if you can't see the risks, I don't care any more. You have bitcoins, I don't; so bitcoin theft is  your problem, not mine. 

No doge dogs in the play?

Remember to use the f-word liberally and unnecessarily; you may win an award just for that.  (But you may have to substitute "Belgium" for it, to get published in the US.)

And just exchange questions with no questions asked, wouldn't that be great?

I understand that that is your preferred interpretation, but I bet that the courts would not agree.   In the US bitcoins are not currency but merchandise; I do not know in Czechia but I bet that the court would take that view.    Courts usually do not count as "loss" a profit that you could have made if you did not give something to the merchant  (in this case, the money that you could have made if you had saved those BTC and sold them today). 

On the other hand you may be able to get damages, if you convince the judge that you lost money because of their fault.   I wonder how you could prove that, though.

But, sincerely, I would not feel sorry for Satoshilabs if they are forced to refund you 3 BTC.  It would teach them not to quote prices in BTC (and, more generally, that business and religion do not mix). 

(Sorry for being cynical.  Maybe I need to take a long break  from this forum.)

It is not the same thing at all, that was his point.

The price of a company's stock is based on the value of the company's assets (their factories, stores, patents, etc.) and their expected profit, which depends on demand for their products.  If you own one share of the company, you own a certain slice (say, 1/10'000'000) of those assets and profits.   When the company distributes their profits, you will get that slice of the profit.  If the compant were to close down, their assets would be sold and you would get that slice of the money.

Financial analysts have formulas to compute the "sensible" share price from these so-called "fundamentals".  These fundamentals cannot drop suddenly by 98% (unless some global catastrophe happens, like an asteroid hitting Earth, or there is something very wrong going on with the company's finances that no one knew).  Thus the stock fof companies like Apple or Coca-Cola is very unlikely to drop by 98% all of a sudden.

Bitcoins, on the other hand, have zero assets and zero profits.  Their value is supposed to derive entirely from the demand by people who want to buy them in order to pay for things over the internet.  However, that demand is still very small.  The current price (over 500$) is due to the much larger demand by short-term speculators (day traders) who buy and sell bitcoins on the exchanges for profit; and most of that trade is in China. 

So why is the price at the exchanges 500$, rather than 5000$ or 50$?  There is no logical explanation, that is just the price at the thousands of Chinese day-traders are willing to buy and sell it now.  They think that 1 BTC is worth 500$ because they see that everybody else is paying 500$ for 1 BTC, and buy it expecting the price to be somwhat higher sometime later. At times they get more optimistic about the future price and start paying more, at times they get more pessimistic and will pay less. 

So it is perfectly possible that the price will fall to 10$ or lower, if all the traders just get convinced that the value is 10$.  Last November the price shoot up from ~120$ to ~1200$ for no reason, just because thousands of Chinese traders discovered bitcoin and wanted to day-trade with it.  Just as it shoot up without a concrete reason, it could come down without a concrete reason.  (And it has, so much that  the price now is only 50% of what it was on Nov/29.)

Seems I did, sorry. 

But I stand for the first point (about the refund).  If the 3 BTC that you send them were worth X euros when you send them, you paid X euros, and you are entitled to a refund of X euros.

When the exchange has no trades in some interval, Bitcoinwisdom just omits that interval from the plot, so the horizontal scale is no longer linear.  Then straight lines become stariscases.   

To better see the effect, select some low-volume exchange and 1 minute intervals, then draw some slanted straight lines.