Thank you for taking the initiative on this.

It seems like the recent news that banks are partnering to experiment with "blockchain technology" took the wind out of Ripple's sails, since being a settlement network for banks was the only interesting thing they had going. Now that banks are going to use their own closed system, Ripple is left searching for a reason to exist. The price is sinking accordingly.

Similarly, the media's attention on blockchain technology (i.e., private or "permissioned" ledgers) is making it clear that there's just very little need for more than 2 or 3 public blockchains, and that they have to have a strong network effect to have any utility and hope for long-term prospects.

Dogecoin is kinda sad in that some people really believed that it had a future, even though it was created specifically as a parody, being purposefully ludicrous and flippant. It was all fun and games until the price charts started steeply rising, and soon a great crowd of speculators assembled, hoping that they were on the launch pad of a new Bitcoin rocket ride. But we're talking about money here, and the rest of the non-internet meme world doesn't have the time or inclination to consider the value of a weird dog-themed cryptocurrency whose proponents communicate primarily in glurge. To outsiders, Bitcoin is weird enough as it is, so Dogecoin never stood a chance.

Bitshares is cool and all, with nifty things like DPOS and pegged assets and whatnot, but in the end it's the network that matters. That's the hard part. Your bells and whistles don't mean anything if nobody uses your coin. Bitshares and NXT and DASH all followed the same trajectory: a fast launch to around a $50M market cap (and higher), and then a slow drift back to earth as no network effect takes hold - no merchants, no media, no trusts, etc.

Litecoin seems to hang in there perhaps because it's just old enough to be entrenched as a secondary cryptocurrency with its own significant network effect. It's interesting to me that a technologically advanced coin such as Monero, with its obvious privacy advantages, can't even come close to eating into Litecoin's value and market share. That is the power of the first-mover advantage and of the network effect.

I can't hate fully on altcoins, though. The do serve as a way for home hobbyists to convert electricity into Bitcoin, people who otherwise might not bother to get into Bitcoin. They're like alternative Bitcoin mining chains.

Bitcoinaverage is on board too:

 https://bitcoinaverage.com/

Many thanks to Bitcoinity for taking the lead on this! Hopefully the other charting sites will follow.

Eventually people will become very comfortable with mBTC, and usage will gradually shift to just calling it BTC again.

+1

Perception is everything, and right now the average newcomer thinks Bitcoin is "too expensive". It's stupid, it doesn't make any sense, but there it is.

Bitcoinity is working on making mBTC the default display unit, but what about other large services like Mt. Gox or Bitstamp? Does anyone know if they have a stance on the issue?

Maybe you could put the BTC price in tiny print beneath the large price display... that might help to prevent confusion.

Venmo isn't money over IP - it's Paypal with a mobile/social interface. Bitcoin is money over IP because it's a protocol for transferring value between users on the internet, and it's a platform for higher-level services.

Venmo isn't a distributed protocol or platform, it's a centralized single entity that removes some of the friction in transferring USD within US borders. It's still subject to all the problems of Paypal - that of arbitrary account suspensions, seizures, and blocking of payments.

You can't use Venmo to transmit money internationally, store value without fear of seizure, hedge against inflation, purchase goods/services with relative privacy, activate an online business instantly, engage freely in voluntary transactions with anyone on the planet, accept payments without risk of chargebacks, and so on.

Bitcoin and Venmo offer different value propositions. Venmo is more of a threat to Paypal than it is to Bitcoin.

It's a surprise. When did you declare this shareholder's loan? I wasn't aware of it. It's not stated in the IPO, and there's no published shareholder's agreement. You really owed it to us to make this arrangement clear at the time of the IPO, not now.

It's too bad that the IPO's purpose wasn't to provide capital for the betting pool, which is what would have made sense.

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Mem, that article written by Mircea Popescu isn't what you think it is - you've completely missed the point.

This non-issue comes up every so often whenever a sensitive soul skims that article on Mircea's blog.

Here's why I think there's been a lack of S.DICE buying pressure:

 A) The general belief that SatoshiDice betting volume in BTC is inversely correlated with the BTC/USD exchange rate. New S.DICE bids became very rare indeed when the BTC/USD price started soaring over $20.

 B) Fear that SatoshiDice will be shut down by some authority and without any warning.
 
 C) A lack of news or updates is allowing fear to be the dominant factor guiding trading decisions.


The outlook is bright, however. There's strong evidence that betting volume has remained constant when whale action is factored out (many thanks to organofcorti and dooglus for this analysis). Evoorhees is presently working on removing any question about SatoshiDice's legal status, and in the meantime is laying low. When the legal issues are put to rest and evoorhees starts promoting the business again, I think we can expect a big swing in sentiment from negative to positive, and thus a higher and more stable share price.

It will be bad… Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

My understanding is that SD no longer creates 1 satoshi transactions. The minimum it now sends is 5000 satoshis, which should help with the unspendable bit dust problem. Does that change your position on SD transactions?

As has been said many times before, trying to block SatoshiDice transactions is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

If it's not SatoshiDice that's generating "transaction spam", it'll be something else, and then something after that, and so on. Are you going to launch a new campaign against each?

Also, it's ignorant to vilify the very individuals (Erik Voorhees, Roger Ver, Jon Matonis) who, by their tireless evangelizing, are probably most responsible for making Bitcoin as popular as it is today. If you hold any bitcoins and are enjoying their current value, you owe the aforementioned a debt of gratitude.

I got into it after reading a story on metafilter.com back in mid-2011 about how bitcoins were being used to trade illegal drugs on a hidden Tor service called the Silk Road.

It just clicked for me then. Bitcoin wasn't just some silly nonsense, people were actually using it to facilitate real trade. I immediately dove in a bought my first 50 bitcoins by using the SecondLife -> Virwox method.

The main MPEx frontend, http://mpex.com is undergoing a DDoS attack, saturating the traffic uplink and causing  the site to be unavailable. The MPEx is unaffected and is still processing trades. You can get to it through a number of web proxies, including this one: http://mpex.coinbr.com.

Mircea Popescu just redirected traffic to whitehouse.gov as a gag (and it might actually give the attackers pause), since it'll be a while before he can solve the DDoS problem.

Wait, so a DDOS attack is a "hack" now?

Please go to http://mpex.coinbr.com, a web proxy to the MPEx backend, and tell me if it's been "hacked".

Erik, thanks for another great month for S.DICE. Do you have any news or info on upcoming plans that you could share with us?

There are 50,000,000 S.DICE shares on MPEx, and 37,000,000 of those are controlled by evoorhees.

When the dividend is paid, it will be in the sum of 6619 BTC, which will be divided into all 50 million shares (0.00013238 BTC per share).

I'm assuming that Erik stated 1721 BTC because he's only considering the 13,000,000 shares not held by him, however MPEx will still require him to actually pay 6619BTC to issue the dividend.

Dividends should be around 0.00013 BTC per share.