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I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

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Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#301

Post by danenania »

napierzaza wrote: post #269

TL;DR Bitcoins are possibly even more flawed than any other kind of currency. There is one person who controls the flow of Bitcoins and can unmake transactions it doesn't like.

You are confusing the currency with the exchange. It is definitely a weakness for bitcoin that a shady exchange has captured 90% of the market, but this problem isn't inherent to bitcoin. It seems likely that in the wake of news like this, new exchanges will be created to try to capitalize on MtGox's misfortune, and the exchange landscape will broaden.

As long there is someone, somewhere willing to put up products or state currency in exchange for bitcoins, bitcoins will have their value. The best case scenario for bitcoin could be for MtGox to go down in flames because if it bitcoin held its value, it would prove that its fundamentals are sound, and its price is based on legitimate demand for an anonymous medium of exchange, not pure speculation.

If a MtGox collapse did cause a bitcoin collapse, it would show that bitcoin is not the real deal, just the result of a speculative frenzy. This may be hard to stomach, but it's better than continuing to ignorantly pile money into a bubble so fragile it can be popped by the guessing of a single password.

In my opinion this guy, if he really wants the best for bitcoin, should sue MtGox hard if he honestly thinks what they did is wrong/illegal/breaks contractual agreements. Let bitcoin sink or swim on its own merits.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#302

Post by blhack »

wnight wrote: post #292
blhack wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Jesus, since when has uncouth thoughts been grounds for conviction? If it was, I'd be guilty of a trillion crimes. Are you seriously putting these words in my mouth? I didn't say anything like that. The gist of my post was that from a casual reader's perspective, bitcoin was a hobby for cryptographic nerds, and that this demonstrated that it's "lost its innocence", so to speak. Am I "upset" by this? Sure. In the sam…

> It sounded like he [...] contemplated hitting that $1000 limit a bunch of times. That's the thought, and you treat it like a crime. Hence, thought-crime.

How am I treating this like a crime? I'm saying that all of the players in bitcoin aren't altruistic.

In case you missed the context here, my original argument was that my naivety caused me to assume that people playing with bitcoin were mostly just cryto geeks.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#303

Post by ashconnor »

icebraining wrote: post #228
haberman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the message board: "Folks, in the grown-up world, trades are unwound when the market malfunctions. --Jeff Garzik, bitcoin core dev team" In the grown-up world, currency is controlled by governments, the financial industry is regulated, and money cannot be transferred large distances anonymously. The whole sales pitch of BitCoin is that it is free of all this control. Invoking "the grown-up world" to describe Bit…

Where exactly do you live? Many offshore banks offer privacy even against police authorities, and tax evasion reaches billions per year. The crackdown on that is fairly recent (5-10 years) and still very ineffective. The main reason why Bitcoin can't be considered grown-up is because there aren't guys like Soisson showing up dead.

>Many offshore banks offer privacy even against police authorities

No they don't. I think the FATF would have words with countries that allowed this to happen.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#304

Post by vl »

joe_the_user wrote: post #278
vl wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>fault of the Mt Gox admins Mt Gox is run in such amateurish way, it's appalling. In real life, with many brokers you trade doesn't close in 3 days and as such you can't withdraw proceeds from the trade for 3 days (but you can use the proceeds to continue trading). In this situation Mt Gox is effectively both exchange and the broker. Not to have rule in place to block funds from recent transactions is like people who…

Well, The problem is that the entire Bitcoin model has the same weakness. There's no rule for rolling back a bitcoin transaction because there couldn't be such a single authority because bitcoin is merely a "decentralized" algorithm. This illustrate one of the inherent problems of Bitcoin. Any currency system today must be based not on simple transfers but on valid transactions. Valid transactions require that there…

There is no rule for rolling back transaction in real world too: once other party is gone with whatever was traded you have almost no way of "rolling back" this transaction.

Real world brokers though have settlement period for releasing funds for exactly this reason - so the transaction could be rolled back if necessary.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#305

Post by Produce »

anigbrowl wrote: post #123
blhack wrote: post #16

This reminds me of a conversation I was having with a friend a couple of days ago about network affects. Once a system gets too big, the nice people that started it start getting screwed by the people who don't understand (or care about) the founding ideals. The problem with a trading house like Mt. Gox is that some people assume that all of the players are altruistic (these "some people" being "me", somebody with a…

Before seeing this crash for the last couple of days, it felt like the advantage was that bitcoin users were mostly geeks, and mostly trustworthy. Yeah whatever. 90% of the people using Bitcoin don't believe in the Federal Reserve system or fiat money and just want anonymous online cash transactions. There is nothing wrong with such beliefs or desires, but the idea that such people are on a higher moral plane is the…

On the other hand, holding the belief that everyone is morally identical is even more naive.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#306

Post by thilo »

romland wrote: post #42
wiredfool wrote: post #3

So, There's something like 21 million bitcoin possible, and 6 million 'in circulation' now. A sell order comes in for 1/12 of total amount of outstanding bitcoin. And the system processes it, flashcrashes, and. 3) Profit, I guess. or 4) rollback. That's something like what would happen if someone dumped 1 trillion USD onto a bond exchange. There are only a couple entities who could do this. So how did 1/12 of the val…

Or it could, again, be stupidity by MtGox: This was a "test account" that had no real user attached to it. After all, if the trade is internal on MtGox, it's just a double in a database. If that is the case, then hell yes, I can see why MtGox would want this rollback.

> After all, if the trade is internal on MtGox, it's just a double in a database.

Floating point representation for financial data. That does sound like something MtGox would do...

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#308

Post by jimktrains2 »

napierzaza wrote: post #269

TL;DR Bitcoins are possibly even more flawed than any other kind of currency. There is one person who controls the flow of Bitcoins and can unmake transactions it doesn't like.

Looks like someone is commenting on something they don't understand!

Mt Gox doesn't do bitcoin trades (as in make tx in the main chain), they do trades inside of their own system and it's converted to btc when the user withdraws money. You cannot undo a btc tx (one in the block chain). Once confirmed, it's there.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#309

Post by joe_the_user »

vl wrote: post #304
joe_the_user wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, The problem is that the entire Bitcoin model has the same weakness. There's no rule for rolling back a bitcoin transaction because there couldn't be such a single authority because bitcoin is merely a "decentralized" algorithm. This illustrate one of the inherent problems of Bitcoin. Any currency system today must be based not on simple transfers but on valid transactions. Valid transactions require that there…

There is no rule for rolling back transaction in real world too: once other party is gone with whatever was traded you have almost no way of "rolling back" this transaction. Real world brokers though have settlement period for releasing funds for exactly this reason - so the transaction could be rolled back if necessary.

There is no rule for rolling back transaction in real world too

If you're real world is drug sales in a shady corner somewhere, that might be true.

Elsewhere, we have this thing called the "legal system" which actually exists primarily to enforce something called a "contract", which is essentially a transaction.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#310

Post by vessenes »

barkingcat wrote: post #255
vessenes wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely not that. The Mt. Gox system does not allow orders like that.

yah this comment is not realistic - Mt Gox wouldn't allow itself to be hacked if their "system" was strong enough to disallow "orders like that". It's not what Mt Gox allows that matters - it's been hacked and compromised specifically to allow people to do things that are not allowed

No, I meant what I said. I reviewed the source code before making my post.
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