Bitcoin thread anyone?

A town near me made it's own coinage a few years ago. Some scoffed openly but the ordinary little town of perhaps 100,000 people has gone from strenth to strength. They explicitly rejected the mega companies like coffee shops from setting up. There are about 20 local cafe/coffee shops in and around the main street. Always full of people especially on market day.

Other towns around look run down in comparison. So it can be done !!
 
This is Sunday and has been 2 weeks since SR went down, so let's analyze what happened, what we learnt and how it effected Bitcoin:

1. Price recovered rather quickly. It took only 3-4 days. So far the rule has been: buy the dips. Currently it is higher than before the SR crash.

2. The price drop was very different at different exchanges. Mt.Gox's price went down to $115 only, but at other exchanges the dip (and opportunity to buy) was $85.

3. We can look at the whole SR debacle as positive PR for Bitcoin. Although we can expect similar sites going up and taking over the illegal business, one huge part of the criticism against Bitcoin was taken down.

4. A very decent chunk of all coins are most likely out of circulation for a long time. We are talking about 5% of currently existing coins. Less coins available usually means higher price. This could explain the current exchange rate.

The Feds gave DPR's profit in dollars, 80 million for 2 years that is. It is hard to calculate just how many coins we are talking about in his hidden wallet, (because the exchange rate fluctuated wildly and the growth of SR wasn't linear), but we are talking about half million coins most likely. If someone is interested in guesstimates, here is a good rundown:

http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/1obvm2/estimating_dprs_income_after_expenses_exchange/

Others have found a wallet that DPR posted the address to, and it has only deposits, currently having 14-16 million bucks worth of coins. This also shows the downside of Bitcoin, people can monitor a known wallet's purchases and spending habits....
 
This just in, a top 1% SR vendor got arrested in Holland, and suddenly the seized SR Bitcoin wallet grew by 3000 coins:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...xpress-caught-red-handed-layer-MDMA-hair.html

"Dutch Police arrested two men accused of selling ecstasy on Wednesday in the city of Zetten. The men were accused of selling the drug on the popular and controversial website Silk Road.

The 24-year-old and 29-year-old were caught, 'red-handed during the manufacturing of ecstasy in a container behind their home in Zetten. The suspects were arrested with a thick layer of MDMA powder in their hair,'

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This brings up an interesting issue for would be vendors: Just how much can you trust an online in-between website with your data/identity? If the website goes down, do I go down too?
 
Quote from Pekelo:


2. The price drop was very different at different exchanges. Mt.Gox's price went down to $115 only, but at other exchanges the dip (and opportunity to buy) was $85.
More...

this is wrong, price drop was the same %. mtgox btc/usd always traded at a 10-15% premium over the other exchanges due to the difficulties to withdraw money from mtgox resulting in the market giving sellers the premium to sell on mtgox.
 
Quote from newguy05:

this is wrong, price drop was the same %. mtgox btc/usd always traded at a 10-15% premium over the other exchanges
More...

Sure you have a point, but even in %, the crash was bigger on less liquid exchanges...

Here is a chart for you, BTC tanking from 128 to 85, exchange was BitStamp:

http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/bitstampUSD.html

Here is MtGox tanking from 145 to 110:

http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html

So MtGox tanked 25%, and BitStamp tanked 34%, a good 10% more. Now argue that they were the same....

For extra credit, Btce tanked from 126 to 75, a 40% drop:

http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/btceUSD.html

And this actually makes sense, because every crash on a less liquid market should cause bigger panic. Simple trading psychology, if not math for you...
 
heh touché... you know what I mean. it wasn't that mtgox crashed to 115 while another exchange went down to 85.... comparing apple to apple factor in the discrepancy that always existed the other exchange went to 105

you're right the less liquid went down more just nowhere close to the numbers in your post I quoted which is misleading
 
It seems that there is a good reason why MtGox's price is way higher than all other exchanges. Here is a good explanation and analogy from Reddit:

"Stop quoting the MtGox price. It's artificially inflated since you can't actually (practically, anyway) withdraw US dollars from Gox.

If I owned a store which traded your used clothing for food stamps (in either direction) except that if you wanted food stamps for clothing, you'd have to wait 6 months to get the food stamps, then people would be more likely to use my store to trade food stamps for used clothing instead of the other way around, thereby inflating the price of the used clothing in food stamps, due to supply and demand (more used clothing gets bought than gets sold which raises the price).

Food stamps are US Dollars and used clothing is Bitcoins."

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By the way price at MtGox went over $150 today, but now as we know, it is inflated. :)

For quick reference:

https://bitcoinaverage.com/
 
The USDBTC prices used to be nearly the same on all exchanges until it became harder to cash out.

As of now:

MtGox: $152.66
Btc-e: $131.99
Bitmit.net (a bitcoin auction site): $139.46

Bitmit uses bitcoinaverage.com for their fiat reference, which has a button to ignore MtGox in their calculations.

MtGox used to be the "gold" (LOL) standard for USDBTC but now they're the odd man out.
 
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