I put it in quotes, didn t I? 

Thanks for the kind words, I bear no ill feelings.

I would rather not enter into lengthy discussions again.  You have read many of my arguments, I have read yours, but obviously neither side has convinced the other, and that does not seem likely to change.  Logic and mathematics are only part of what defines one's opinions and probabilities.  Experience, with things and with people, is even more important; and it cannot be easily shared.

Let me just clarify my position a bit more:

* It is true that I do not know the technical aspects in detail.  But I know enough to believe that there is nothing wrong technically with the concept.  (I was surprised by the "malleability bug", and surprised that it did so much damage; but I trust that it is not serious, and that all buggy software out there will soon be fixed.)

  My skepticism has to do only with the economical, political, and practical aspects of bitcoin.  We all agree that bitcoin is an original concept, that does not fit well into any conventional economic model.  Therefore, my ignorance about those aspects of bitcoin does not seem to be much greater than anyone else's, even that of the bitcoin pioneers.


* Also, one does not have to harpoon a whale before being allowed to form and express one's opinion about whaling.


* Once again: I distinguish the "bitcoin project" (creating an internet payment method that is cheaper and/or faster and/or safer than other alternatives) from "investing in bitcoin" (buying bitcoins with the goal of making a profit, whether in crypto or in "fiat").

  I very much wish that the bitcoin project succeeds, meaning that crypto-coins (any or all of them) eventually will be used by common people for their advantages (rather than to show support for the project).  Even though I still see some big obstacles on the road to that goal.

  As for investing in bitcoin, that would be a sensible proposal only if the expected future price were to keep rising more than inflation plus 5% per year above the present price.  That expectation, today, does not seem to be supported by any valid argument, over any time scale. On the contrary, I see good arguments to expect the opposite: that the price will mostly stagnate or decrease, perhaps even to zero.  That is why I believe that bitcoins today are, objectively, a terrible investment option, and should not be recommended to anyone as such.

  If it is indeed true (as some have claimed), that the bitcoin project will succed only if many more people invest in bitcoins now, then methinks that the project has a big problem right there.


* Being a "newbie" (who has been poking around for only three months, instead of all of three years) has its advantages, methinks.  It seems that some people got convinced early on of certain "truths" by arguments that seemed strong at the time, but have lost their weight in the last six months.

  So, a newbie may actually get a clearer picture of the bitcoin phenomenon by questioning and rejecting some of those "truths", that, for the "old-timers", were categorically proved long ago.

  For example, the "demand/supply formula", by which one used to "prove" that bitcoins will one day be extremely valuable, has been considerably weakened in the last six months by the existence and persistence of other crypto-coins.  If one replaces "bitcoin" by "crypto-coin" in the argument, the denominator becomes infinity, and the resulting price is zero.

  Ditto for the "network effect" and "first-player advantage" that were supposed to prevent the appearance of alternative coins.   Or the myths about crypto-payments being untraceable and impossible for governments to restrict, tax, or regulate.  Methinks that Silk Road and China disproved those claims in the clearest possible way --- yet there are still people who not only repeat them, but see them as the most important advantages of crypto-coins.

  Another random example of this "newbie's advantage", I think, is being open minded about the role of the Chinese exchanges (and Chinese bank holidays, and, yes, even Chinese sleep hours) in determining the market price of bitcoin -- a possibility that some old-timers apparently won't even discuss, perhaps for sentimental or political reasons.

  And, of course, a newbie who does not own any bitcoins will probably have a more dispassionate view of probabilities and possibilities than an old-timer who invested several years of work in the project, and owns a few thousand coins.


* I am not a libertarian.

  I hate the banks we have, all of them; but I believe that banks of some type are necessary, even if the bitcoin project succeeds.  I do not trust governments, even those that I voted for; but I believe that they are essential, and should be democratized, opened, and held on a short leash, rather than abolished.

  Therefore, I am absolutely not at all excited by the idea that bitcoin will be a libertarian Golem, the magic weapon that will destroy banks and governments and bring forth the libertarian utopia --- whether the non-libertarian majority likes that or not.

  But, fortunately, I have no fear that bitcoin will do that.  One thing that I have learned in life is that social and political problems cannot be solved by technological gimmicks alone. The car did not abolish national frontiers, electronic voting did not eliminate election fraud, the internet did not free us from copyright, Google did not abolish censorship, and so on.

  Without a strong political and social effort to solve a problem, a purely technological solution will be banished or heavily restricted, as China already did with bitcoin; or it will be co-opted, and then it will become part of the problem. (Google, for example, has now become a very effective tool to hide "undesirable" internet contents from the public, rather than to help the public find such contents).

  So I see absolutely zero chance that governments and banks will just sit there, sucking their thumbs and whining, while a small ill-coordinated band of nerds robs them of their powers and profits.  If that is what bitcoin means to you, prepare to be severely disappointed.


Anyway, sorry if this reply does not address all your points, but I fear it is too long already.

Till next time, and all the best, to all of you.

Yes. 

The point of that "stupid joke" was to point out how easily a tiny mistake can turn a strong security scheme into an epic disaster.

The mutlibillion-dollar accident at Three Mile Island began with a faulty safety valve in a redundant part of the cooling system.  The "tiny mistake" was that the corresponding light in the control panel did not show whether the valve was actually closed, but only whether it had been commanded to close.

I am sure there are better examples in computer security but I don't recall one right now.

The proportions of volumes in that table match those I got from Bitcoinwisdom, but the values are somewhat higher.

For yesterday Feb/20, 00:00 -- 23:59 UTC,  Bitcoinwisdom had Bitstamp ~35,000 BTC, Bitfinex ~25,000, and BTC-e ~23,000.  

Perhaps that table uses a different 24-hour period.

Anyway, for the last week, Bitfinex has generally been distant second to Bitstamp, with BTC-e only a little below it.

EDIT: but the rankings and percentages assume that  MtGOX is excluded, of course.

OK then, sorry.  (Made that same mistake, again...  )

I too want to be able to see it, but it should not be the in the header line nor the first entry in the menu, since its price is totally misleading.  It should be down below DOGE/LTC or whatever.

People who worry about falling price and public confidence in bitcoin should be the first to demand that.  Mainstream news of "bitcoin crashing" refer to MgGOX's price --- because that is still "the" price that their reporters find on the charts.

Oops, would you care to elaborate?  Thanks...

I understood that withdrawals in Yen to local banks worked much better and/or for a longer time than international ones. 

Also the Japanese know that "one needs a license to protest".

To me it is puzzling how some old-timers continue to defend Mark and MtGOX.  Being "one of us" trumps refusing to return tens of millions of dollars to their owners?

I am surprised that several people failed to see the "tiny" flaw in my "absolutely secure" cold  storage recipe, and called me retard or something.

That post was meant to be just a stupid joke.  Now I am wondering whether something like that may actually have happened at MtGOX.

They repeatedly stated that their clients' bitcoins were safe and that they had them.  But they never said that they could move them out.  On the contrary, they told the Australian guy that that would not be easy...

       <--- take your pick.

I am 100% certain that you won't. 

But I suppose that you noticed the crucial missing step in that recipe, right? 

OK, again, here is what I would do if I had to safely store several hundred thousand bitcoins that my clients gave me for safekeeping. 

First, I would create a dozen new addresses and distribute the bitcoins evenly among them.  I do not believe in trapdoor functions, and I know what NSA did to that random number generator; so I instead of any "modern" encryption I would use the old and guaranteed one-time-pad method. I would generate a file of truly random bits (say, extracted from the microphone signal), and XOR it with the private keys.  Then I would copy the result to a pen drive, check that the copy succeded, safely remove the pendrive (see, I learned my lesson!) I would repeat with a second pendrive and give it to my partner.  Then each of us would go to a different bank, on separate cars, and store his pendrive in a safe deposit box. Only then I would go back and reformat the hard drive of my computer.


Do I really need to add the "stupid smiley" here?)

Daily volumes of BTC trade to/from USD and other national currencies (in kBTC):


             !    Wed !    Thu !    Fri !    Sat !    Sun !    Mon !    Tue !   Wed !    Thu !
  EXCHANGE   !  02/12 !  02/13 !  02/14 !  02/15 !  02/16 !  02/17 !  02/18 ! 02/19 !  02/20 ! Currencies considered

  BTC-e      |   9.97 |  18.53 |  52.18 |   9.16 |  21.75 |  15.07 |   8.08 |  5.84 |  23.37 | USD,EUR,RUR

  Bitstamp   |  15.51 |  28.15 |  63.38 |  20.76 |  26.40 |  19.90 |  14.83 | 20.76 |  34.97 | USD
  BitFinEx   |  12.85 |  17.17 |  53.68 |  10.83 |  16.75 |  15.69 |   8.47 |  4.71 |  25.27 | USD
  Bitcoin.DE |   0.51 |   0.78 |   1.63 |   0.22 |   0.57 |   0.57 |   0.38 |  0.54 |   0.70 | EUR
  Kraken     |   0.58 |   0.93 |   1.79 |   0.41 |   0.91 |   0.89 |   0.51 |  0.38 |   1.60 | EUR
  CaVirtEx   |   0.29 |   0.41 |   1.16 |   0.15 |   0.15 |   0.15 |   0.21 |  0.11 |   0.75 | CAD
  CampBX     |   0.10 |   0.21 |   0.41 |   0.05 |   0.07 |   0.28 |   0.10 |  0.14 |   0.73 | USD

  SUBTOTAL   |  39.81 |  66.18 | 174.23 |  41.58 |  66.60 |  52.55 |  32.58 | 32.48 |  87.39 |

  Huobi      | 131.86 |  82.39 | 236.27 | 122.80 | 110.57 | 130.41 |  74.04 | 34.12 | 131.14 | CNY
  OKCoin     |  60.79 |  62.49 | 147.26 |  51.45 |  63.63 |  63.05 |  51.46 | 26.29 |  53.49 | CNY
  BTC-China  |  11.01 |   8.02 |  24.87 |   7.55 |   9.08 |   7.86 |   3.86 |  2.04 |  10.97 | CNY
  Bter       |   0.69 |   0.65 |   1.54 |   0.74 |   0.56 |   0.48 |   0.35 |  0.37 |   0.77 | CNY

  SUBTOTAL   | 204.35 | 153.55 | 409.94 | 182.54 | 183.84 | 201.80 | 129.71 | 62.82 | 196.37 |

  TOTAL      | 244.16 | 219.73 | 584.17 | 224.12 | 250.44 | 254.35 | 162.29 | 95.30 | 283.76 |


  MtGOX      |  25.21 |  33.85 |  79.56 |  60.15 | 104.46 |  65.69 |  63.50 | 40.75 | 127.48 | USD,EUR,GBP,AUD,JPY



All numbers were collected by hand from the site http://bitcoinwisdom.com. Beware of possible errors.

For each exchange, the numbers include only the trade volume to/from the currencies listed in the rightmost column. Trade between BTC and other cryptocoins, such as LiteCoin, is NOT included.

Dates on the header line are UTC. Specifically, "01/15" means "from 01/15 00:00:00 UTC to 01/15 23:59:59 UTC". (Beware that Bitcoinwisdom uses your local time, so the date may appear to be off by 1 day.  For example, if you are 2 hours west of Greenwich, it may show "01/14 22:00" when the UTC time is "01/15 00:00".)

NOTE: MtGOX has suspended withdrawals of Bitcoins and national currencies.  Therefore it is essentially isolated from other markets, and its price is completely out of the norm.  The exceptional trade volumes above may be meaningless.

Indeed it is very inconvenient.

Once I asked a few colleagues to point in the direction of some important building across campus.  They would often point 90 degrees away from the true direction.

It took me several months to figure out which was the shortest route on foot from my Dept to the main entrance.  One cannot find it without looking at a map.

In the 1960s, after the new capital Brasília was built on empty savnnah, architets and urbanists became stars.  Through the next decade every architect wanted to be a Niemayer and every urbanist a Lucio Costa, so they put originality and visual impact  above functionality or economy -- and their customers went along.  That is how UNICAMP got its very original but very inconvenient master plan.

In this university, everyone is conscious of the difference between straight lines and geodesics:
https://maps.google.com.br/maps/ms?msid=209817040763991649639.00045cc5175c714baaaa7&msa=0

I am just a lowly servant of the Straight Line.  I cannot question the sanity of my Master. 

Genial.

Dear @windjc, you may un-ignore me now.  Apologies for the inconvenience.