Good stocks pay dividends and have backing assets, which define their base price as long-term investments; so they leave relatively little room for speculation.  On the other hand, gold, silver, and bitcoin are purely speculative.  Their prices depend only on people's guesses about their future prices, so they are inherently volatile.

The white paper does not mention that, does it?  The declared purpose of bitcoin was to be a currency for e-payments, not a get-rich-by-sittng-on-it instrument.  Given that goal, making the supply fixed probably was a mistake, as economists keep saying (after all, "Satoshi" was a computer scientist, not an economist.)

Besides perhaps the mistaken notion that the inflation of national currencies is a bad thing, the fixed money supply is something that a computer scientist would have chosen for ease of implementation.  An unbounded money supply would have been a pain to program; he could not have used a fixed block and transition layout with 64-bit long ints, he would have needed a variable-length multiword integer, in the layout and in the implementation.

That is only one of many details in the protocol that suggest that it was never meant to be more than a computer experiment.  Take, for example, the abrupt halving of the reward every 4 years: it is a source of instability and uncertainty, the 2016 halving is already having people worried now.  Why didn't he specify a more gradual decrease, that would give the same 0.5 factor in 4 years but in small monthly steps? The only reason I can think of is that it would have required another page or two of source code, and a table of 48 steps, properly rounded, and another paragraph in the white paper...

Amagi Metals used to do so, and claimed that in 2016 they would abandon "fiat" altogether.  But now they have removed the "pay with BTC" options from their site.  Although they say it is not because of the price, just some internal reason.

In a sense it is.  Everything indicates that the Nov/2013 bubble was the opening of the Mainland Chinese market, specifically the Chinese amateur and semi-professional commodity day-traders, through Huobi, OKCoin and other little-known Chinese exchanges.

I believe that what we have seen through 2014 and now is those Chinese traders are gradually getting disappointed with bitcoin and dumping the coins that they bought during that rally, which then come back to the "West" through arbitragers.  My guess is that those coins included the ~700 kBTC that went missing from MtGOX, and an unknown amount from other sources.  Perhaps 1 or 2 million BTC in total.

Normally I would expect an exponential decay than slows down with time, as in the Feb/2013 and Apr/2011 bubbles.  However, in the last couple of months the decay seems to be linear, or even faster than linear.  Perhaps the Chinese speculators are moving their money to the Chinese stock market, which has been booming in recent months.

My guesses for support levels / bottom are

~200$ (the estimated plateau of the Oct/2013 bubble, nearly obliterated by the Nov/2013 one), then
~120$ (the plateau of the Jun/2013 bubble)
~ 50$ (the price where the Feb/2013 deflating bubble appeared to be tending to)
~ 15$ (the plateau of the Jun/2012 bubble)

It seems that, since he renounced his US citizenship in order to avoid paying income taxes, (a) the US government is obliged to deny his entry to the US, which already prevented him from attending a bitcoin event in Miami; and (b) the US IRS wants him to pay at once all the previously deferred taxes of his Memory Dealers business, some 10 million USD.

On reddit they suggested that Mark Karpelès should now make a video attesting that Roger Ver is still solvent.

I don't know how much space there is for bitcoin in that field. In large trades the two parties know each other and are backed by their respective countries, so they can rely on mutual trust (if one party defaults, that country's trade suffers) or trust in a third party (UN, WTC, International Court, US Navy, etc.).  Also, much of that trade seems to be done on credit anyway.  And volatility is going to be a big problem: one can forgive a 5% loss in a 20$ purchase, not so much in a 2 billion $ purchase.

We would have to wait for some examples of such use, before we can guess its potential growth. China importing 10 million frozen pizzas from Italy perhaps?

I think I posted that math already: if there was no speculation (short or long term), just use as a currency, with todays usage volume, the price would quite probably be less than 25$, possibly as low as 3$.

Which do you find easier, asking questions or answering them?

I understood "there has never been [a loss due to reused K value] in a proper implementation".

Was the yo-yo invented by Yo-Yo Ma?

This past week also:

CoinTerra to Users: “We Cannot Issue Any Payments”
http://newsbtc.com/2015/01/09/cointerra-users-cannot-issue-payments/

On /r/buttcoin someone posted an email message:

However, I haven't found any public news or announcements anywhere else.  It may be a hoax.

PS. I suppose you view those funds as good things.  Well, I have a very negative opinion of them: they are trying to sell bitcoins as 'safe fabulous investments' to people who do not understand what bitcoin is, and therefore do not understand the risk.

In fact, I believe that the funds are even riskier than bitcoin itself.  See SMBIT suspension of redemptions (withdrawals).  Have you read the "risks" section of the Winkles' filing?

That is not exactly how the thing will work.

Whenever someone will buy 1 share of the ETF, the ETF will buy 0.2 BTC, by definition.  Thereafter that share will be a proxy for that 0.2 BTC stored in the fund's virtual vaults.  The value of the share will go up and down together with the market price of that 0.2 BTC.  There may be some difference because holding it may be viewed as safer/riskier and more/less convenient than holding the 0.2 BTC directly.

So, if the BTC price is not expected to rise, it will be the public who will not want to buy the ETF shares.

Of course. What can we do except speculate?  


Perhaps because they expect the price to go up once the ETF is approved, for all the reasons that have been repeated so many times; where if they tried to sell 200'000 BTC on the open market the price would crash.


Well, the latter is almost the same thing as saying that they expect to sell their coins for a better price than if there was no ETF.

For the price and for the Winkles' profit, the effect of (Winkles seeling to the open market) and (COIN buying from the open market) should be almost the same as of (Winkles selling to COIN).

The Winkles do not have experience in fund management, why else would they go into that line business?  The management fees are not stellar, and are hard to predict.  How much did SMBIT collect in fees -- perhaps 5 million US$ in 15 months?

The real profit for fund creators comes from speculation -- from the sale of the underlying assets to the fund (i.e., indirectly, to those who buy fund shares) at better-than-market prices.  See for example those funds that the banks created from packages of worthless mortgages, before the 2008 crisis.

Yeah, Mircea Popescu seems to be determined to be the least likable person on the internet.  But he is a precious resource, because although he is a "bitcoin magnate" (worth 200'000 BTC, IIRC) he seems to enjoy kicking the sacred cows of bitcoin.

MAT 21:12: "Jesus hacked into the exchange and wiped out all who were buying and selling there. He deleted the tables of the fiat changers and the order books of those selling bitcoin futures."

MRK 10:25: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for an early adopter to enter the kingdom of God."

EDIT: Rats, @NotHatinJustTrollin bet me to it (by some 5 pages at that).

If music was like science (or internet detectives), the audience would just ignore the player while he plays totally out of tune and rythm, but applaud wildly and give him a prize when he gets just one note right.

That "old format wallet" could be it, yes: 200 kBTC that had not been moved since the end of mid 2011 (about 1000 days before).

Sorry, what is the point?  I did not say anything about that number increasing or decreasing.  I just used its current value.

However, eyeballing that chart, some 200 M BTC-day were destroyed in Mar/2014, and some 150 M in Feb/2014.  I wonder what those events were. 

By the way, note that the 0 level in that chart is the second line from bottom, not the first one.