Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin falls from $266

data.mtgox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 505 posts

Re: Bitcoin falls from $266

#371

Post by beedogs »

kybernetikos wrote: post #218
ghshephard wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is HUGE news on Bitcoin - nothing like this has ever happened in it's history. Market went from $250 to $110 in 5 hours. MtGox was down for 30 minutes today. Trading lag was 600 seconds for orders placed at market prices. April 10th, 2013 may be the day that will be remember for the next 20 years as the day that Bitcoin crashed and either (A) never recovered or (B) kept progressing after an incredible Blip. Defi…

> Definitely HN fodder today. Maybe, but my own unscientific, vague sense is that I've been seeing multiple bitcoin related submissions to HN every day for quite some time now. At this stage all of the arguments have been hashed and rehashed (ho ho) in the comment threads to the extent that they're getting pretty repetitive and tedious (especially since so many of them are so political). So, sure, it was marginally i…

We could go back to talking about Aaron Swartz if you'd prefer.

Re: Bitcoin falls from $266

#372

Post by rayiner »

mrb wrote: post #355
rayiner wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're fighting an uphill battle. On a deeply, delusionally paranoid hill.

What a pessimist you are. I would not want to live in your world. In mine, in the hypothetical case we will need to fight for Bitcoin, we will, like we did against the SOPA bill. The government is made for the people. Don't you forget that.

You misunderstand me. I meant it was an uphill battle to argue to all the paranoid people that the U.S. government has yet to outlaw trading in Yen, Euro, etc, even though it doesn't control those currencies either.

Re: Bitcoin falls from $266

#373

Post by betterunix »

jessriedel wrote: post #217
crapshoot101 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

correct in a sense- the US dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government, nothing more. Would I still have that faith in the US $ if the government did not collect taxes / did not seem like a stable entity? Probably not, but your point is still valid

> the US dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government Huh? What does this mean? This phrase can be applied to government bond ("The US gov't promises to pay you back") or to FDIC insurance ("The US gov't promises to refund your money if your bank closes"). But it doesn't have any meaning for dollars, unless it were to mean that the gov't would exchange it for gold, which of course is false.

"it doesn't have any meaning for dollars, unless it were to mean that the gov't would exchange it for gold, which of course is false."

It means, "The government will accept it for tax payment," and for the payment of various other debts and fees.

Re: Bitcoin falls from $266

#375

Post by coldtea »

mrb wrote: post #325
coldtea wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's until one-two major governments decides to make it illegal to deal in bit-coins that it's price will drop to zero. It doesn't matter if they can't enforce it 100% (or even 1%). What matters is that it will kill almost all opportunities to use it as regular money for legitimate purchases by major companies etc in the future. And that it could also land your ass in jail (with ISP monitoring and such being what it…

"It's until one-two major governments decides to make it illegal to deal in bit-coins..." I don't know about other governments, but I doubt the US will ever declare Bitcoin illegal (though I am told to never say never). Supporting my viewpoint, the US Treasury Department, through FinCEN, has recently tacitly approved Bitcoin: http://www.businessinsider.com/is-bitcoin-legal-2013-4 I think the US government would prefe…

>This is a broken argument. The US does not control the Euro, or Yen, etc, yet they do not make it illegal to trade in Euros/Yens within the borders.

They don't, but that's because Euros/Yens are backed by foreign governments that would mind this on a diplomatic level. Bitcoin is a much easier target. And most governments would agree to work together on banning it.

Also: the US might not "make it illegal to trade in Euros/Yens" but it does whatever it can to keep the Euro/Yen down. Especially before Euro got itself in trouble anyway. If any small country attempts to do mass business in Euros for example (e.g selling petrol in the currency), the US puts all of their diplomatic (and sometimes military) pressure on them to revert back to using the dollar.

>I think the US government would prefer to take the benefits of Bitcoin (startups springing up everywhere, taxable Bitcoin economic activity, etc)

Not very appealing advantages.

For one, the government doesn't care for "startups springing up everywhere", it mostly caters to established big corporate interests that can afford lobbying.

Second, the bitcoin economic activity will not be any more taxable than conventional economic activity. Actually, it would be even less. Plus, if bitcoin is banned, its economic activity will just migrate to conventional money again, it wont be lost.

Third, the US government needs to be able to print (inflated) money at will -- something which bitcoin doesn't allow.

Re: Bitcoin falls from $266

#376

Post by PhilandTim »

I'm not sure what's more upsetting, the fact that so many people are careless enough to create speculative positions in such an unconventional and abstract financial product on short notice, or that despite all the media hype over Bitcoins recently and what should've been foresight that this would happen, that I didn't try to catch the wave up myself.

Re: Bitcoin falls from $266

#377

Post by drivebyacct2 »

eksith wrote: post #146

BTC crashed primarily because the market suddenly got flooded by Bitcoinbillionaire : http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/04/bitcoin-crashes-losi... This bares repeating... The value of BTC is in the nature of the transaction; not the currency itself. People have turned BTC into a commodity instead of actually bloody spending it. Their old fashioned thinking still ties it to traditional fiat like a smoker trying to…

This is so absolutely untrue. Those values move rather often.

Re: Bitcoin falls from $266

#378

Post by wting »

wting wrote: post #17

I'm interested in the price of Bitcoin, but we don't need these daily submissions. If you're interested in following the price, I suggest these links: - https://bitcoinity.org/markets - http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD - http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/ If you're interested in talking about the price, try #bitcoin-pricetalk on Freenode.

My reply was a lot more relevant at the time of posting and when the original title was, "Bitcoin drops from $260 to $230". :/

Re: Bitcoin falls from $266

#379

Post by illuminate »

ashray wrote: post #119
knowaveragejoe wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still does not verify beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a widespread DDoS on "pretty much anything bitcoin related". Can you please explain why such attackers would bother spreading their DDoS volume across such a wide range of sites instead of focusing it on the one site that handles 80% of btc usd conversions?

What exactly causes reasonable doubt here ? If 80% of bitcoin sites unrelated to each other are down at once, there's obviously some sort of attack going on. Several unrelated sites (but sharing a common theme) don't normally go down ... unless there's an Amazon outage :P (which there wasn't..). The question was, whether the DDOS was caused by a large volume of trades. The answer is, no, because there wasn't a larger…

"If 80% of bitcoin sites unrelated to each other are down at once, there's obviously some sort of attack going on"

This doesn't follow in the event of a run.

Re: Bitcoin falls from $266

#380

Post by L0j1k »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #249
L0j1k wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long-time (since 2010) miner, I can tell you first-hand that there are massive DDoS attacks taking place against not only MtGox (who has already described DDoS against their infrastructure) but the pools as well. In fact, Reddit's pool (MtRed.com) is completely DOWN at the moment because of a larger DDoS than we've ever seen. You can keep drinking the "everything's fine" koolaid, or get with the reality that cur…

I thought MtRed was down because they shut it down? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=15929.msg1793833#msg... Also, just because MtGox had a DDoS in the past, doesn't mean they are having one now. I know first hand as someone who runs a service that has been DDoSed in the past that the moment you have server issues, all the users scream "They are being DDoSed!". My experience here is just as irrelevant as is yo…

This news reveals then that they lied. It was stated repeatedly in #mtred on freenode -- which is where I started lurking when my rig was unable to connect to the pool -- that they brought the pool down in reaction to a very strong DDoS, and that they were rewriting the payment algorithm in the interim.

That being said, I'm not sure why you think they wouldn't be subject -- along with every piece of infrastructure in the bitcoin food chain -- to very large DDoS attacks. The currency manipulators are here to stay. To think otherwise is foolish and misguided, or hopeful beyond reason.

Post reply on HN