^THIS!

I can remember being drunk, but how could I tell whether it was the last time I was so, rather than the next-to-last one?

Let me put it this way: have you ever felt the urge to join a monastery or the Foreign Legion, or undergo a change of sex operation, after reading something that you posted the night before?

No question about the facts, but disagree about the predictions.  Ther may be crises, but they will managed, so as no to kill the cow while it can still give some milk.  They may starve it gradually out of greed, and thus end up hurting themselves; but at worst the world wil become a huge Bangladesh rather than a huge Somalia.


Brazil has a huge public debt, that simply cannot be paid off.  If it wasn't past my bedtime I would look for figures, but it passed a trillion dollars many years ago.  Currently some 50-60% of the government's revenue goes into paying interest of that debt; but that is only part of the interest due, so that the principal just keeps growing.  The last time the government actually borrowed money was perhaps in 1999, when the debt may have been 1/10 of today's, or less.  Since then we have been paying all that interest to the banks in exchange of nothing, merely for their kindness in letting us give them only 60% of our taxes, instead of perhaps 90% or 120%. 

Indeed, the just and smart thing to do would be to destroy that debt: tell the banks 'fuck you, we already paid our debt with inerest many times over, we owe you nothing, rather you owe us'.  That is what Argentina partly tried to do onec and is trying to do again, and you may have known the result.

Unfortunately the banks effectively own the stealth bombers and nuclear missiles.  When Lula ran for President in 2000, he had to pledge that he would honor the debt and not try to do what Argentina did.  Lula and Dilma managed to convert some of the debt to less expensive loans, but that only slowed the rate of growth, not make it shrink.  Dilma lowered the prime rate from 18% to 9% per year, but the bankers swore to overthrow her, and she was orced to backtrack and raise the rate again. And so on.

Yeah, but why would it be different with crypto?  If crypto gets widespread use in the economy, banks will create "virtual bitcoins" just like they now create "virtual dollars".  Indeed I see already many budding factories of "virtual bitcoins" sprouting all over the place. MtGOX was an egregious example.

Again, I admit that I was oversimplifying.  But one could view the destruction of that "socail network value" as as consequence of the bad redistribution of wealth caused by the collapse of money system, rather than of the collapse itself.


In the late 1980s, the Brazilian government tried to stop runaway inflation by freezing the funds in all bank accounts above some ridiculous threshold.  (Those frozen funds were relased only a year or two after.) The result, not surprisingly, was a deep economic crisis, perhaps the worst that the country ever had.  The GNP dropped, comerce shrunk, people lost jobs, companies large and small closed (except the banks, of course).  Fortunatey I wasn't in the country at that time, but I have friends who had just sold their home in order to buy another, and had their money trappped in the bank.  Poverty increased, public services worsened, and crime increased -- but the country did not collapse, there was no mass starvation or pervasive gang warfare, not epidemics (at least not much worse than usual).  People and companies found workarounds to the bank freeze, sold on credit or paid with cash, and the government was forced to compromises; so most of those social and economic interconnections did not get to be broken.

Based on that and other examples, I believe that to get a complete collapse of the society one needs something much more powerful than merely messing with people's bank accounts.  Like an invasion by a foreign power, external financing of domestic terrorism and sabotage,  a civil war, or collapse of real economy iitself -- as perhaps happened in the Mayan civiization, the Roman Empire, or the USSR.

I don't see any of those things happening in the US any time soon.  I was in new York last year, for a couple of weeks, and now I wonder whether the doomsday prophets are perhaps posting from another planet....

You know what usually happens when one posts while drunk, don't you?

As many people have pointed out already, those major retailers announced that they are taking dollars -- that will come from the sale of bitcoins, mostly by bitcoin enthusiasts.  So those news may give bitcoin more visibility, but it is questionable whether they will expand the number of bitcoin owners, and they imply more coins moving from hoards into the market.

And, anyway, those news are irrelevant to the Chinese traders -- who seem to be leading the current drop.

Looks like that prof was way off the mark.  The price of bitcoin in the Chinese exchanges dropped 120 yuan, or about 20 US$, in the last 5 hours. At this speed, the price will only reach 10$ by July 7th -- and that will already be the SECOND half of 2014.

 

Huobi's order book is badly messed up on bitcoinwisdom. Meanwhile OKCoin had another small dump (~600 BTC).

EDIT: actually Huobi's chart stalled at 01:04 UTC.
EDIT: Huobi's updating again (and dumping a bit too).

First, I don't think that the winning bid was at 480$.  (How many warning "" should I use when I am really trolling?)  My real guess is that most bids were in the 550$ -- 600$ range, but I would not dare guess what the winning bid was, except that it must have been at least 600$.

AFAIK, the only bid that has been revealed with some credibility was one by a certain Mr. Waters of CoinApex, for 403$. (I misremembered and rounded that up to 475$ in the trollpost) Have there been other disclosures after that?

It may have been a glitch that triggered a real panic selling.  We saw that recently with BTC on Huobi. (The glitch has since been edited out of bitcoinwisdom's charts.)

One should never insult strangers on the internet. You never know what they can do to hurt you.

You should spend a few days here to have a glimpse of what the country is like. A bit larger than what you can see through the internet... 

He s free, living in Tokyo, and has recently gven interviews to US newpapers.  These were posted somewhere on this forum.

Indeed, I oversimplified.  Inflation, economic crises, and bad monetary decisions can of course cause much waste, and reduce the production of new wealth.  Although one could argue that their primary effect is to redistribute ownership of wealth in the wrong ways, e.g. from domestic workers and good industries to bankers, foreign workers, and bad industries.  The collapse in production then follows from that ba redistribution.

Could be... But there are many other candidates.  Not necessarily in the bitcoin community.

I would put Brock Pierce near the top of my guess list.  He already has cornered a virtual currency market once...

It means only that one buyer with deep pockets was less greedy than all the others.  They may all have bid at 475$, and he bid 480$  

EDIT: typo, 460 --> 480

One basic marketing tool of people who sell investment funds based in gold, silver, etc. -- or bitcoin -- is to paint an apocalyptic scenario for stocks, bonds, bank savings, real estate, etc.  "Repent, the end is near, our fund is the only salvation."

Surely there wil be more financial crises in the world and in the USA, there may be moreinflation, perhaps even hyperinflation  But you can be sure the USA will survive (to the disappointment of many people outside it  )  and so wll China, Russia, and Europe.

Believe me: I have lived most of my life in a country with high inflation, sometimes hyperinflation, that periodically had to redefine the currency by dropping three zeros.  (I still must have somehere coins whose nominal value today is a few pico- or femtodollars.)  Inflation and hyperinflation are a big inconvenience, waste a lot of time, make things inefficient and stressful; but people can finda ways to adapt and survive, and the country continues to function without becoming a Mad Max world.

The reason is because money (or bitcoin, or gold) is not real wealth, it is only a token that society will accept and exchange for real wealth.  The exchange is so smooth and universal that, for personal or corporate finances, it is justifiable to treat money the same as wealth.  But when considering a whole nation, or the world, one must ignore the money and focus only on the real wealth.

No matter how much  money the government creates of derstroys, confiscates or gives away, the real weath of the country will not change.  Fiddling with the finacial system, the currency, and the money supply can only change the distribution of wealth among the citizens

On the other hand, in economic crises and hyperinflation times, the austerity measures that neocons have convinced nations to use are precisely designed to trasfer wealth from ordinary citizens to the banks and big financial players.  If such a crisis comes, can bitcoin (assuming it succeeds) save our wealth from being taken that way?  I don't think that will work. For one thing among many, in a crisis most people need to take money out of investment funds and savings in order to survive; so the value of bitcoin is likely to drop, due to diminished demand, rather than increase.  

Hard to tell, but it is strange to see Huobi drifting 20 yuan below OKCoin.  A couple of days ago they were tracking each other. over the smallest bumps and wiggles, barely 2-3 yuan apart.

The bid form allowed one person to specify any number (0-9) of 3'000 BTC 'A' lots, all at the same price, and optionally the 2'655 BTC 'B' lot., at some other price.  But a person could submit as many forms as he wanted, with different prices.  Obviously if all his forms added to more than 9 A blocks and 1 B blocks, some of his bids would never win.

Any rational person who believed that bitcoins were worth buying at 700$ each, and had some millions lying around, should be buying all he could the exchanges, independently of him entering the auction or not, until the market price reached 700$.  Also, a rational person would not post a bid of several million dollars without having the full payment amount ready in the bank, because otherwise he would risk losing his 200 k$ deposit for nothing. So we can guess that bids well above market, if there were any, were not posted by rational persons.

What the heck, if everybody is guessing on thin air, I may as well:

(1) There were a few bids by irrational individuals well above market price, say 800 $/BTC or more.  (I say "irrational" not becaue of them valuing coins so much, but because they could buy the coins for less than that at the exchanges, with slippage and all, either directly or through brokers.)

(2) Most of the bids where by rational bidders, individualor corporate, who bid at about the current market price, or somewhat below that, say in the 550-630 range.

(3) Some of the bids were well below market price, by people who thought 'hey, why not try, I may win the lottery'.

(4) One or more of the highest bidders failed to send the full amount in time, and that is why the auction stalled -- the USMS had to notify the next bidder, and give him another day or two to pay.