It would be useful to know what percentage of requests for ETFs are denied by the SEC.  Their approval is not a mere formality, and COIN surely is not the only wannabe ETF with heavyweight attorneys.  I gather that it is not a good sign that COIN has been sitting on SEC's desks for ~2 years, and already went through 5 amended re-filings.


I doubt that loading up in bitcoin would improve the image of any investment fund.  Wall Street is not very fond of instruments that lose value every quarter for five consecutive quarters, and whose Captains of Industry cannot even explain why the price is now 220, much less why it should rise again in the future.  "Because Wall Street will buy lots of it" is not a convincing argument to Wall Street, I suspect.

Sigh.  Is it so hard to believe that someone may be just telling the plain boring truth, for a change?  Perhaps, when everybody is hiding behind a pseudonym, people grow to expect lies by default; but is harder to tell lies when you are using your own name, and you have a job where lying is not as forgivable as it is in finance or politics.

If you have seen enough of my posts, you should know that I *do* try to do serious data analysis, and to understand bitcoin deeper than Antonopoulos-level.  I think I have learned a few things about bitcoin that bitcoiners do not seem to be aware of, or try hard to ignore, or deny because they desperately need them to be false.  I think that this sort of thing is quite appropriate for a computer scientist to "waste" his time on.  (More so than the Fukushima disaster, although even then I did contribute some bits that others found useful.)  For example, this plot



that is strong evidence that the Chinese exchanges were leading the Nov/2013 bubble, and quite probably also the Apr/2013 one. (Which, of course, has many unpleasant implications for the future price and the solidity of bitcoin funds.)  Or this plot



that shows that the number of deposits per day into BitPay's receiving wallet was quite flat through most of 2014, and increased by a factor of ~3 since mid-2013; whereas this plot



shows that the bitcoin volume of those deposits has been constant at ~1000 BTC/day since Jan/2013.  (Explaining these numbers is not trivial, but they definitely contradict the claims of "booming adoption", and are consistent with may other indications that usage for e-payments is stagnant at best.)

And so on.  I don't know whether those pokings will yield something that many people will care to know, but, as some famous scientist said, "research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing"...

The important thing is not to have a class, but to have class.  

EDIT: @BJA stole my punchline, rats!

Folks, I wish I had time to count the number of posts about ✫ME✫ in the last few pages.  But (a) I have a class to prepare and (b) if my ego gets any bigger, it won't fit through the door...

The system here is different from the American one, but yes, I have tenure and I already got all the promotions that I could have in my career as teacher/scientist.  I could try running for university president, but there are too many profs here who know me already, so my chances of being elected by accident would be pretty slim.   

As much as I am "wasting" time with bitcoin, it is still much less than I "wasted" with the Voynich Manuscript, and comparable to what I "wasted" on the Fukushima disaster, Wikimapia, Wikipedia, cold fusion, space exploration...  I learned *a lot* with each of those "wastes of time", including with bitcoin. 

I am supposed tobe grading this:

and another one like it from another course. Do you need any other explanation?

What are you talking about?

For those folks in gelid Scandinavia and anywhere else the news may not have arrived yet: @fonsie created his account specifically to troll @fonzie, one of the smartest contributors to this forum (so much so that he easily won the bitcoin price prediction contest for 2014).  But @fonzie has been rather absent of late, so @fonsie changed his life mission to troll the undersigned.  Then he, or someone who thinks very much like him, created another account "@trolfi" with the same life mission -- making me the only member of this forum with not one, but *two* Exclusive Personal Trolls, a distinction that I will forever remember with pride.  But then he may have found it hard to manage the two accounts at the same time, or his employer refused to pay twice for two very similar sockpuppets, or something; anyway, @trolfi seems to have left us for good.

I hope that this background information will help newbies understand some things that otherwise may seem to make no sense, such as @fonsie's bizarre signature and avatar.

In their official report to the SEC it says clearly that in Q3 2014 they were no longer taking bitcoins; all their "bitcoin" sales were converted into cash by the payment processor.  What more proof would you want?

That's ironic (or pathetic), coming from an account that was created specifically to troll another user... 

SEC FORM 10-Q -REPORT For the quarterly period ended September 30, 2014

In the yearly report for 2014 they declare to hold bitcoins as an investment worth about 300'000$.  For comparison, they hold about 10 M$ worth of precious metals and 180 M$ in "cash".

In the transcript of the spoken presentation to shareholders, Patrick also gave some disappointing numbers about bitcoin sales.  Basically they dropped fast after the first few months, and were all domestic (US).

виллй робот?

The idea is that IRAs can be put into BIT shares (with some indirection) but not into raw BTCs, so there is a potentially large market for the former that is not available for the latter.  Also the supply of BIT shares is rather small and fixed because of the 12 months "maturation" period.

It occurred to me that there is a simple way to predict the price of bitcoin.  

Start with the equation V = U + R*P, where

V is the amount of money (or money equivalent of goods and services) disbursed by new investors (in $/day);  
U is the amount of money (or money equivalent of goods and services) collected by holders who are divesting ($/day;
R is the block reward volume, now 3600 (BTC/day); and
P is the current price ($/BTC).  

From that we get P = (V - U)/R.

Now you only need to predict V and U.  

Thanks, fixed. But Mississippi, Massachusetts -- it's all the same thing, humpf.

Apart from the Chinese government's ban on using bitcoin as currency, the utilities (like all major merchants that "accept bitcoin", everywhere) will want to be paid in the national currency, promptly.  They certainly do not want to invest in bitcoins; not  even Overstock is doing that anymore.  ASIC manufacturers and workers will want yuan, too.  So the bitcoins corresponding to those expenses will have to be sold at the exchanges anyway.

The Chinese government presumably would be happier if the miners sold their bitcoins in the "Western" exchanges, thus adding to the effective Chinese foreign trade balance.  

EDIT: Since we are on the topic, albeit off-topic: it was on news sites recently that some New England Mississippi electricity company is suing John Garza's GAWminers for a ~300'000 $ unpaid electricity bill.

EDIT2: fixed Mississippi not New England.

They already support the major bitcoin "news" sites and conferences, pay for advertorials on WSJ and Forbes, buy time on Bloomberg and CNN,  hire lobbyists, and contribute to politicians.  Why should they waste time with forums, where there are already plenty of "anti-NLC types" doing the job for free, out of self-interest?

A month or two ago there was an announcement in some bitcoin news site of several bitcoin companies pooling their resources and hiring a major marketing company to "improve the public image of bitcoin".

A curious resemblance:

Last 18 months, 3d intervals	Last 18 hours, 5m intervals

[ click on each image for the full-size version ]

Did anyone watch the actual trades?

I would guess that it started with a buy of ~970 BTC at 21:06.  Then there were buys of ~200 BTC each at 21:09 and 21:19, another buy of ~1000 BTC at 21:36, and perhaps one of ~1000 BTC at 21:38 (all times UTC).  The rest of the volume may have been just reactions to those buys.  So, my guess is that the maybe 2400--3500 BTC total.

But it is not over yet, it seems...

The shareholdres themselves don't know, but this one estimates 5 more days:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=337486.msg11213021#msg11213021