I accept that bitcoin's long term future is less about the price and more about the application of the beautiful underlying technology, but price still matters. It gets people interested, gets people talking, gets serious capital interested and all of those things.

Also, if you are a long term believer with a limited budget then playing the markets gives you the potential to hold more bitcoins that you might be able to otherwise, which helps the future potential by concentrating bitcoins in the right hands.

Understood, but they are binary in nature rather than true (European or American) calls and puts, right?

I agree with some of your points, but I think others are less valid. In particular 2 - owning the machine is of virtually zero benefit in my view. The rate of improvement in technology means that your machine is so quickly redundant that it has no salvage value by the time you have been using it for a short period. This is supported by your point 3 too.

Also, this is definitely not a zero sum game. Cloud mining service providers AND investors can win if the bitcoin price is high enough relative to input costs. A zero sum game is one where the net effect is that no none wins, certainty not true here.

The truth with mining at current prices and with the massive investment from so many is that the little guy will struggle from here. You need massive scale to make this work so that your costs relative to mining power are as small as humanly possible. The investors who put $20m into BitFury know this.

Trend is your friend in the world of trading. If the price is trending down, have a go with a SENSIBLE investment amount (i.e. don't bet the house) and if it starts trending against you then get out quick smart!!!

There have been lots of opportunities to make big money both ways of late if you have the stomach for risk.

Congrats on the launch guys.

Are you planning on offering put and call options or strictly binary options for now?

Putting all your eggs in one basket violates every basic investment principle, but it is also the way to get really, really rich if your bet pays off. Key is to remember when you do this you really ARE making a bet.

The real problem here is the injustice that the modern legal system dishes out - the result for a poor man without a QC on his side would have been very, very different.

This is not something unique to South Africa either. The rich everywhere get away with far more than the rest of us.

Fair call I reckon.

Add a layer of ugly regulation on top of this and we could be in trouble.

There are plenty of arbs around, but the real problem is moving cash - it takes DAYS sometimes. The only realistic way to profit from arbing is to have your cash and bitcoins evenly spread across multiple platforms (which you then have to rebalance as your relative balances change), but even then you need big balances because bank fees eat your cash FAST if you have to move it.

In short, there are opportunities but they are not so easy to take advantage of.

Possibly, although this does attack one of the core principles of bitcoin by requiring an intermediary. The danger with such a big and juicy intermediary like a BTC ETF is that it becomes a massive target for hackers, potentially compromising the whole system.

I think that we'll still see exchanges, but the introduction of ETFs will see massive consolidation among their ranks. This should result in better quality, more liquid and deeper exchanges, which is good news for everyone.

Of course that is your objective, but your trading rules should mean you bail quickly if things go the wrong way.

As for who is selling, if you are a miner who has over capitalised at the same time as everyone else jumped on the mining band wagon then you have got to take the cash to pay your bills.

This seems to be a fairly common point from miners. What I don't understand is this: if you need the price to rally for your mining to be profitable, aren't you just better off buying bitcoin? Much less hassle plus you can liquidate whenever you want, unlike your mining equipment which probably has very little resale value given how rapidly the technology is improving.

Why not have the best of both worlds and short on the way down / buy on the way up?

We are launching a product soon which will let you play things in a new and different way which might be of interest too. Watch this space...

And what do you want to see from a security viewpoint to get you comfortable?

You are confusing value with price. Price is what people are willing to pay, value is what the investment makes you over the journey. The beauty of markets is no one knows what the real value is and views differ, hence price and value almost always differing.

For what it is worth, a million bucks seems a lot for this domain, even though it has to be the best domain in the world of bitcoin.

1 @ 2.5

Key place to start is to work out what you are willing to lose and then to understand your risk/reward appetite. The cardinal sin in trading is risking more than you can afford, a problem which is more likely to occur if you have a few wins early and get over confident.

Next, have a clear plan of when to take your wins and when to cut your losses. It is often tempting to just let losses run but it rarely works out well.

Finally, work out how and where you are going to play. There are a few ways to do it, specifically with or without leverage (a few different platforms offer leverage, including ours, but even these work in different ways (we have no margin calls and capped losses for example)) and using only longs or going both long and short.

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The USSR had virtually no private enterprise and made decisions according to the state's five year plans, so I would say it had virtually no capitalist elements. You can accurately describe the current Chinese system as state capitalism, but the Soviets were playing a very, very different game.

I think this debate was settled in the 80s when the Soviet Union fell over (and please no one tell me China, one of the most capitalist countries in the world, is Communist). Socialism is great in theory but has not ever delivered for the people. The amazing world we have today was built on two key things: science and capitalism.

Possibly, but you could argue that Reddit is the right place to talk to a bitcoin audience (you could also argue that Reddit is the best place to spread a made up story, so hard to know).

I really want to believe this, but it is hard not to be skeptical. The broader support you can claim for the story is that: the Fed governor and her predecessor have both made good noises about bitcoin which proves they are looking at it; and it is believable that the Fed would commission a serious study of bitcoin's potential given it is the Fed's job to stay on top of the financial system (whether they do that well or not I will leave to others to decide).