Has anyone noticed that "fund" is "fud" with an extra "n"?   


Ignoring the question of whether a 10% discount will make newegg's prices (plus shipping and customs) competitive with local prices, I still woudl have to open an account with Bitpay or Coinbase i the US and send them  my money, ahem, through international bank transfer or credit card.  Or buy bitcoins at the MercadoBitcoin, site of the  BitcoinRain "ponzhack" scam.

Not this time yet, sorry.

I can only begin to imagine all the ways that a fund operator could make money, besides charging fees.  Indeed, that seems to be one of them.

But a fund will probably start with a stash of very cheap coins that the founders own.  Or moderately cheap coins that they got at an auction.  Creating a fund would be a way of selling them at market price, without imediately depressing that price.

Creating a fund also allows the owner to "sell" his bitcoins without losing control over them.  Then some "anonymous hacker" may break through the "professional" security barriers and steal all the coins.  Such an event may be highly profitable, depending on who the hacker is and who will end up taking the loss.  (Are any of the existing bitcoin funds insured against that?)

I suppose that you wrote three versions of Chapter 11, and left the Conclusions chapter blank for now. 

Price started to rise at ~13:10 UTC on Huobi and OKCoin, ~13:18 on Bitstamp and Bitfinex, and ~13:25 on BTC-e.  So "obviously it was Bitfinex that started it". 

Not many at this hour... I would guess that there won't be much action for the next 5 hours, unless it comes from the West.

... and then she added, "you know, the funny money with that cute puppy face".

Maybe some Chinese pop star said "我爱比特币" on a Chinese talk show...

You know, that is one more reason to hate bitcoin: bitcoiners now want to appropriate the venerable word "bit", a heritage of mankind, for their sorry purposes.  C'm'on, at least show some creativity, invent your own word!  (I would suggest using the last three letters of "Satoshi" instead of the first two of "binary", but that would be incompatible with academic decorum. Unless I were a French professor.)

And why are you picking on poor @ShroomsKit?  Don't tell me that you ALL are just kids who still go to school and live with your parents...

is that message from the widow of a Nigerian minister?

I liked that, but I thought this was the official bitcoin anthem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfuBREMXxts

The price fell 60 dollars over the last 6 days, or 10 dollars per day (and accelerating).  It will reach zero in 56 more days (or less), that is, by mid-September.  So it will be "middle of Q3" instead of "end of Q2".  Terribly wrong. 

Moolberry

For a moment I thought that the chart was showing the price of bitcoin. Until I noticed that it had the bottom 80% of the scale cut off. 

Bitcoin evangelists are really getting desperate. 

Yeah, seems I scrolled past that section, sorry. "TL;DR" 

Ideally there should be a single big market for each item.  Partitioning the market into separate exchanges makes arbitrage possible and profitable; and the profits of the arbitrager (like those of the insider who does front-running) obviously come out of the pockets of other traders.  So, the more partitioned a market is, the less efficient it becomes.

Anyway, IF the cash compartments have to be kept separate, for the reason I pointed out, then the UBA is like two independent ATMs, one that only dispenses cash for nitcoins and another than only sells bitcoins. Then there is no point in changing the price in one of them depending on the state of the other.

Raising the price in the first one as its cash reserve gets lower may be an interesting idea, but why don't cofee machines use it?  Perhaps because the capacity of the cash compartment is an arbitrary choice of the ATM company, so the price rise would be seen as arbitrary and unfair?  Because a competitor could install next to it an ATM that sold at a fixed price?

At Huobi I see 6 in a row (like the current run) only on Feb/05--10, after the Chinese bank holidays, when the MtGox drama was at its climax (Feb/10 was the "Bug in Bitcoin Day").

At OKCoin that red run was 8 days long, Feb/03--10, and the current one is only 5 days long.

Yes, that is what "professional" scammers do for a living.  And there are plenty of them around.  Lucky you if you never met one before.

Why am I the only one here who is not allowed to play the expert? 

(Yay, another 2 posts with no contents other than comments about my person.  Keep them coming folks!  )

I wonder whether one could make money with arbitrage between two such ATMs, say two guys communicating byphone? Or between an ATM and the exchanges?

Prudence would recommend separate cash-in / cash-out reservoirs with manual collection, validation and replenishments.  If someone successfully feeds the ATM a fake 100$ bill, that is a 100$ loss; but if the ATM delivers that fake bill to another client, it may mean bankruptcy or worse.

An ATM with 15'000 - 20'000 USD in cash would be a tempting target for robbers.  ATM heists are endemic here in Brazil. There used to be a bank ATM in the Economy dept building next door, a fridge-sized thing with 1/4" armor plate.  But one night robbers entered the building and used a blowtorch to cut it open.  And two months later they did it again, at the same spot.  More common methods are blowing the ATM open with dynamite, or just prying it loose and trucking it away.

If they are like SMBIT, a steadily rising price will make their fund more attractive to clients; but if they play strictly by the rules, the company's revenue will be only from fees (SM collects a few percent when the client buys SMBIT shares, when he liquidates those shares, and for every year that they keep his money).  So GABI's managing company will make some profit whatever happens to the price.

GABI's managing company will have a bigger profit margin if they don't play by the rules and speculate with clients' money: if they buy coins beforehand when they think that the price will rise and there will be more clients buying fund shares, or sell beforehand when they think it will go down and more clients will liquidate.

Creating such a fund is a great way to sell a large stash of old cheap bitcoins without immediately depressing the price.  SMBIT started last September with some 17'000 BTC of seed reserve, presumably "bought" over the counter from some founding investor. (Note the difference between "clients" who buy shares of the SMBIT fund, and "investors" who own stock of the company that manages the fund, which is either SM or some subsidiary.  Clients may gain or lose depending on what happens to the price of bitcoin, but investors will gain no matter what.)  Those seed coins were effectively sold to SMBIT clients over the next month, but are still locked out of the open market (together with the other 90'000 BTC that SM supposedly bought since then).

Does GABI have any features that make it better than SMBIT and PBP?  IF not, then I don't think it will have much immediate effect.  GABI will divide the future clientele with them, and I would not expect them to buy on exchanges at first.