And bitcoin should be a currency, not some kind of speculation vehicle. So it is good, it shrinks a bit, nobody dared to buy it or wanted to use it as currency.  Now you probably get some regression, so bitcoins should grow to his mean value.  The first growth is probably based on luck.

Relax dude. It still quite high. 100 dollar is a lot, if you think about it. Bitcoin used to be 35 a couple of weeks ago.  That is still an enormous growth.

It is just a correction or something like that. Maybe some big people cashed out. Or people got anxious that it would fall and started selling.

Oh well OP was right. And I think it can go somewhat lower.

Would those ASICS caused this? I mean certain people made a big investment in GPU's, created a lot of coins and now started to cash.

I saw someone just before the move something like 60.000 bitcoins. I think that is the winner of this all.

It is around 10% then, which is moving? I took the total output volume as indicator for moving. But I haven't a clue, if this is a correct metric.

It is somewhat more stable at the moment. Bitcoin is going up and up and up and at a certain moment people become afraid to hold it. That seems to be a dangerous situation to put the money in. Especially if you don't have it lying around. 

But more important than uses, is the fact that there is choice. Bitcoin is developed following an open source strategy. Forking a project means more people working on it. More people working on the code (even if it is a fork) means more safety, less chance the idea disappears and more new ideas are constructed.

PPCoin is a fork, which has some truly novel ideas in it. It doesn't matter it is better or not in the end. It matters that people can experiment with cryptocurrencies, so at the end bitcoin can evolve further. You can not do this kind of experimentation on bitcoins, but you can do it in a fresh fork.

I think the question: What are the underlying reasons bitcoin is expanding?

I think the following reasons are possibly pushing the value:

• Bitcoin is exposed in the media. There are more people buying bitcoins.
• Economies around the world are falling apart. People search a new safe haven.
• People invested in bitcoins through mining rigs. These people are holding their bitcoins, creating scarcity.
• Because of the hype people keep buying bitcoins, pushing the price.

The first two reasons would be good, if bitcoins can be used at more places. The economy of bitcoin is growing and if people can actually use them for payments then there is less reason to sell them. They won't mass sell the bitcoins, because with a bitcoin you can actually buy something. (Besides drugs)

Bitcoins can also be used as local currency. Then people won't start selling them either.

The last two reasons means people do not want to sell the bitcoins yet. That would be bad, because if they sell, they would do it en mass.
It is quite exciting. I kept some and sold some, so I can bet on two horses. That seemed the most sane.

I actually don't believe the normal person would jump in now. So it seems the bad reasons are more probable.

Is it known, how much bitcoins are in play and how much are actually moving? That would be interesting.

This whole conversation is like the fucking twilight zone.


And you have forgotten to log out of your official account or something? Assuming you are god_43.

And not everybody wants to speculate with these things, I find bitcoin interesting, because it is an alternative currency, which the government cannot touch easily. it possibly can rewrite some rules of society.  It is a more political interest I have than speculative.

The first movers profit from an growing economy now. The first ones in the oil rush are still rich.


Plausible deniability is the same as lying, but you can plausibly deny it is lying.

This is actually a good way of handling your wallet:

Download truecrypt on your computer and dump your wallet in the second volume. If the tax institute of your government comes crashing into your house, you can say you don't have a second volume. Just pull the plug and put some really gruesome porn on you first volume. Something you want to hide.

I think moderation cannot handle the amount of people easily in this forum. Don't let them bother you

I don't lie either, not now at least, I estimated it. And it is not even a bad estimate, just one order of magnitude wrong.

Everybody lies here or have you filled the amount of bitcoins on your tax paper?

Lol, it seems it is rather bad posting in this thread for getting "promoted". I should write a program to see the percentage which eventually got out by the normal mechanism, but that's probably not allowed.

I actually understand why you would contain people a while. It is not that stupid to do. Especially if there is such a big influx of people on the forum, who don't know how to use the search engine. Anyway you can exchange it here:

https://btc-e.com/Share

You post an order, where you say:

I want to trade x ltc for y btc and if x and y are good offers someone will pick it up.

Just buy BTC and convert to LTC. You pay some fee.

I actually start to think, that because of the scarce nature of bitcoins the price will eventually go up to 1500 dollars.

Now the total economy is 1 billion dollars. There are more and more services accepting bitcoins. Some people get their salary payed in bitcoins. Whether this is stupid or not, I don't know. But we can assume the economy of bitcoin is growing. Maybe at a certain day the economy will be 30 billion dollars, if the total number of bitcoins is reached this will be 1500 dollar for one bitcoin.

Thirty billion is not that big. It is just the bonuses payed out on wallstreet. The drug traffic industry is something like 300 billion dollars. The total GDP of the world is 200 trillion dollars.

On a worldwide scale 30 billion is small.

That's an entertaining thought.

I have to sleep, but if you find it interesting and want to know, how to take some precautions to make it safer, maybe we can talk later about it.

Good night.

Just WIFI, a somewhat busy cafe and some trust they won't kill you/rob you/give fake money/too little. Almost every cafe has WIFI now. In the Netherlands you don't have to be afraid for cops getting you this way, they are restricted by law.

There is some risk. You will have a problem if you travel around the city with a lot of money.

A strong, technical party, say a HFT trader, could manipulate the market probably very easily. Bitcoin is still rather small. I would wonder, what would happen, if a financial institute starts buying and mining bitcoins and hide them after that. Thus making the amounts of bitcoins smaller and smaller and then at a certain moment, dump them quickly through various (unconnected) channels.

Is there some way to check the amount of circulating bitcoins? That would be interesting.

I would say definitely yes, because we already had noppes, which was a local currency. In the beginning it wasn't worth a lot, but at a certain moment you could buy diamond rings with it and hire an advocate. It broke down, because the tax agency started to restrict the use of free noppes. You can have 3000 noppes now then you have to pay taxes.

There are a lot more of these systems. (E.g. http://www.letsnijmegen.nl/) I think bitcoin (or a fork tailored for local usage) could be used as a strong, safe for taxation, backbone for these local currencies. Maybe somebody should tip them. I am not sure, if they are aware of the possibilities.

Another thing I observed, is that a lot of dutch are using silkroad and atlantis. It is also quite easy to change your bitcoins to normal money in cash.  At least in Amsterdam, it is. For your daily food, you don't have to touch the ATM, if you have some bitcoins lying around.

If you cannot trust anyone, will this not affect bitcoins in a negative way? Or any monetary system? I thought that this sort of systems are always rooted on trust even bitcoins.

For example if I buy something from an online merchant, I will have to trust he will send a good quality product. I even need to trust him, he will send anything at all. I also have some trust in the central bank, if I don't have that, the value of the currency starts to decline very rapidly.

Silkroad is a particularly strong example of trust. You buy some shady goods, you give the other party your home address and then hope you will get it and it will be in good quality. And also that the other party didn't have alerted your authorities. The upside of this is that your packet will be send by courier. The downside is, that you cannot consume the shady goods and cannot file a complaint, so the merchant looses his merchant status at silkroad.

You need to trust, that bitcoin exists tomorrow. That the developers don't make a huge unreparable mistake, that the authorities not go down on it next week. You need to trust, that there are not huge financial corporations pumping the value of bitcoins. There is a lot to trust.


The reason bitcoin is going skyhigh is that people trust third parties like mtgox, silkroad, the dark souled business men on there, the gambling sites and all those options and the lending constructions. 

I think you would wanted to say, be cautious.

But it is good advise, you give, but just don't distrust trust.

It will hurt the currency in the long run. I have converted some of my euros into bitcoins, because I have trust in the system.