421–430 of 505 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I don't understand why people consider bitcoin something worth investing in You don't understand the power of frictionless micropayments and monetary privacy?
Frictionless? Isn't the very definition of how bitcoin is secure the opposite of frictionless? It derives it's value from friction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The dollar is backed by the word of the most powerful organization in the history of civilization. If that doesn't have value, what does?
No, it's not backed in the sense that it has a concrete value. No one is guaranteeing that a US dollar will buy you exactly a gallon of gas, an ounce of gold, or a bushel of wheat or anything like that. It is "backed" in the sense that people need it to pay taxes, but exactly how much value that gives it is completely uncertain and only determined by the supply and demand of people spending it/accepting it. If there…
Ergo, a dollar today is guaranteed, on the average, to buy just under a today's dollar worth of things next year.
Ergo, a modern dollar is about the closest thing to a guaranteed exchange value that the world has ever seen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> paranoia MtGox has said they were subject to DDoS attacks: https://twitter.com/MagicalTux/status/317423311174909954 > If you looked at the log plot[2], it still looked exponential! Trying to divine future price movement from looking at a graph has been proven definitively, repeatedly to be foolish.
Right.. Because a DDoS on their site should create a trading lag in their backend engine? Are they running on 1 server?
Of course this is bad design, but you have to remember that this website started out as Magic the Gathering Online eXchange. It was built to trade playing cards, not to serve as a multi-million dollar currency exchange. The trading engine was retrofitted for bitcoin, and was stuck with several bad design decisions as a result. While I agree this should have been fixed long ago, MtGox has had its hands full recently. The massive growth in its userbase, the ever-growing verification queue, and the fact that it is expected to be online 24/7 have made things difficult.
However, I suspect the main cause of today's massive has to do with this: https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130409.html
It will interesting to see what effect this policy change will have.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/MtGox/posts/455962117821534
[2] https://www.facebook.com/MtGox/posts/453409538076792
[3] https://twitter.com/MagicalTux/status/320043013420249088
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If the price starts going down, everyone will rush to their favorite bitcoin related site to see what is going on, even if they are not planning on panic selling. Would you say you have checked bitcoin related sites 5 times more than usual today? 10 times?
If the regular users of a site all decide to use it five to ten times more than usual, it is very likely to cause some slowdown.
On the other hand, if a single bitcoin related site was experiencing problems, that is when I suspect a targeted attack.
Lastly, the only thing that mtgox announcing that they have been DDoSed in the past tells us is that they are willing to announce the fact that they are being DDoSed. This would seem to make it less likely that they are being DDoSed in the absence of such an announcement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the days before computers, believe it or not, price reporting often ran behind. In the 68 'paperwork crisis' the NYSE went to a four-day trading week for a while to give back offices time to catch up. Capitalism survived.
... but was that capitalism "as we know it"? Though, to be fair, I don't have an answer myself. Many things have changed, many haven't; it depends which bits you care about how much...
you never step in the same steaming turd twice, you're not the same person and it's not the same steaming turd - RockyMcNuts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any evidence at all of a coordinated attack against Bitcoin, or is this just an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory?
I think there's a lot of people who bought in during the last week or two that really want it to turn out to be an "attack". I haven't seen any actual stats or indication that that's actually the case, though. Likewise, Mt. Gox made mention of "Being DDOS'd" at certain points, but I'm a little skeptical of the claim given that their own charts show a huge jump in trade volume at around the same time. So no, there's n…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"They don't, but that's because Euros/Yens are backed by foreign governments" . No, that is not the reason. Replace "Euros/Yens" with "gold" in my sentence, and my point stands with gold being backed by nothing . Basically the US government is totally fine with side markets that they cannot control directly and that exist in parallel with the USD (whether it is EUR, gold, Bitcoin, whatever). Your other argument also…
> You say it can be used for money laundering, but gold and cash can already be used for money laundering (and even more discreetly since trading gold or cash does not leave a trail like in the Bitcoin blockchain) Spoken like a person who has never tried to launder millions of dollars in gold. You don't just go down to the pawn shop and redeem millions of dollars in gold.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/nyregion/drug-money-launde...
http://www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/mexico-cartels-steal...
"Mexican authorities say that, since 2008, criminal gangs have robbed so many trucks carrying gold shipments that some mining companies have been forced to switch to aerial transportation"
Evidently, many hoarders/speculators decided to cash out at once -- much like the audience in a movie theater would try to go through the exit door at the same time if someone were to yell "fire!" The naive souls who recently bought bitcoins to make a 'quick buck' are in for a rude surprise. In the short run, no one knows how Bitcoin's price will fluctuate. In the long run, however, if Bitcoin continues to work as in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's a lot of people who bought in during the last week or two that really want it to turn out to be an "attack". I haven't seen any actual stats or indication that that's actually the case, though. Likewise, Mt. Gox made mention of "Being DDOS'd" at certain points, but I'm a little skeptical of the claim given that their own charts show a huge jump in trade volume at around the same time. So no, there's n…
There were many, many transactions with amounts of 0.02 BTC. I think P(attack|0.02 BTC * n) > P(~attack|0.02 BTC * n). The reality is probably six of panic sale, half a dozen of DDOS.
Am I the only one who thinks of Bitcoin as purely a speculative commodity which is leveraged mostly by the fact that it is in a financial grey area?
