Quote from: senseless on September 06, 2011, 11:02:36 PM

Quote from: Synaptic on September 06, 2011, 08:20:26 PM

All my posts are kind of trollish...

but yeah, my point is, the amount of transactions meaning anything about bitcoin's viability is a farcical fallacy. It's obviously not transactions for any goods on the white-market, and probably not the black market either.

I suspect a LOT of bogus moving shit around for the sake of it transactions, as well as overly paranoid moon-bats laundering their coins to get some higher degree of pseudo anonymity.

Also, keep in mind that everything that happens within the exchanges never hits the chain, which is interesting.

So you think people are just shifting coins in their own wallets? Are there really that many people out there who would be shifting around that much money per day/hour? It's kind of crazy unless there was some early adopter who's got a billion coins that he's slowly offloading.

I also agree it seems a little high for even black market activities. From what I saw of that one site (i cant remember the name) people were dealing with small quantities. < few BTC not hundreds or thousands of BTC worth of illegal stuff.

It does smell funny.

Anyone else have any opinions on what this might be?

It's important to understand that the 'transitional volume' figures include the coins that are returned to a wallet after a partial spend. For example, if I spend 1 BTC on something, and my wallet has a single consolidated value of 5000 BTC, then the transaction looks like: 1BTC + 4999BTC, and the total volume is quoted as 5000 BTC. It is more interesting to look at BTC Day Destroyed if you're truly interested in 'velocity' in the traditional sense. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Days_Destroyed