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195K Bitcoin Transaction
First time accepted submitter saidi writes "The Washington Post reports that yesterday a truly massive Bitcoin transaction occurred, from the article: 'In this particular transaction, bitcoins from 15 different Bitcoin addresses were consolidated and sent to address 12sENwECeRSmTeDwyLNqwh47JistZqFmW8. The size of the transaction? 194,993 bitcoins. Given that one bitcoin is worth around $800 right now, the transaction is valued at more than $150 million.'"
A researcher did a bit of digging, and it appears that this was the Bitstamp exchange moving their balance around (business appears brisk).
This is an excellent example of traffic analysis and how you can leak your identity based just on the nature of the transaction. It makes me wonder why bitcoin users do not routinely engage in 1:1 transactions simply to frustrate traffic analysis.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
To be honest, Slashdot and http://phys.org/ are by far, my favorite websites for interesting stories news.
However, I am getting tired of fucking bitcoin stories. Enough is enough.
This is simply good stewardship. One of the largest exchanges (actually not, Bitstamp, rather another ahem Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange site) had a rush of buy orders, so they decided to redeem an address they kept in cold, offline storage to meet demand.
This is a good thing(tm), as it means that there isn't any fractional deposit factoring going on.
So, the FBI busts the Silk Road and confiscates a few million USD bit coins. But a most of them are missing. Or are they? Chances are, the NSA got to them before the FBI did. They have the computing power, the skill, and the viruses. And there's on controlling legal authority, either. How many bit coins have they stolen? But why stop there? Chances are they've hacked into the federal reserve computers, too. Sequestration? Government shutdown? Not when the Ben Bernanke's printing press leads straight into your wallet.
O noes
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When you aint gonna need anymore advice
Sort of annoyed I never jumped in on that recent nosedive it took there.
I was hoping it'd crash harder down to maybe $200-300-ish.
Oh well, LTC->BTC->sweet moolah it is.
What if I had bought $100 worth of Bitcoins in early 2010 (when the price was something like 5,000 BTC for $25 USD) and held onto them until it peaked at $800/BTC? I know what would happen to my bank account, but would that have thrown the entire system into chaos if I cashed in that many at once?
Basically, should I be kicking myself for NOT doing just that, or would it have flooded the market and crashed the price before I could have gotten the full value out of the transaction?
You know what's really cool? One billion bitcoin transactions
You have your own wallet in bitcoin right? It can be as secure as you make it. Why are people trusting their coins to a bank?
I've poo-pooed Bitcoin before. If it's now at the point where there are $150 million transactions, that's significant. I sure hope the operators of that exchange don't disappear with the money, get hacked, or any of the other nastiness that seems to happen every couple of weeks. A $150 million heist would be a big deal, and damn few internet-connected systems are secure enough to thwart even moderately skilled crackers. For example, a certain national agency I'm familiar with that does cyber-security training is wide open to SQL injection and other attacks. I sure hope these bitcoin exchanges have better security than the agencies that set security standards have. If not, somebody's going to steal $150 million in bitcoins any day now, and that'll be a big deal.
Anyone with a clear head can see that BTC is in a massive speculative bubble, just like the housing market in '06, and .COM companies in '00.
The market will correct itself, and all this nonsense volatility will leave a handful of people wealthy, but 99% of every other speculator losing their hides.
Plenty of time and reason to poo-pooh
Especially now that it has become ineffective as a currency and it isn't being backed by cost of production (vast amounts are produced by botnets, effectively for free to the producers).
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
31531.5315315... is the number of Bitcoins that must only be held in the wallet of the beast. Why, simple, because there are only 21 million to go around. Naturally if it is decided that a greater number of Bitcoins is necessary then this wallet will increase proportionally. Call this a sin tax but because of this. Here is what happens to those who send money to the beast's public key.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
I've poo-pooed Bitcoin before.
I'll keep poo-pooing it.
How can anyone set prices in bitcoins? You might offer to sell some good or service for 1 bitcoin. Then, a week later, your potential customers are laughing at you saying "one bitcoin for THAT? WOW talk about over priced, thats ridiculous!" and then they will buy from someone else.
Bitcoins simply cannot be used as a medium of exchange for goods and services.
If you look at how much a good or service costs in bitcoins you are probably and reasonably going to make a mental conversion into 'real' currency. Each week those goods and services effectively cost more and more.
The seller has a choice; post a stable price in bitcoins or post a (constantly adjusted) realistic price in bitcoins.
Ie in order to sell things in bitcoins and maintain a realistic price you have to keep charging less and less of a bitcoin. If you post a price in bitcoins and don't continually adjust it downward anyone who wants to buy and doesn't already have 'old' bitcoins is going to look at how much they now have to spend on bitcoins just to pay for your goods/services and, probably, think twice about it and probably go somewhere else.
How big a proportion of people who use bitcoins mined them themselves? How big a proportion got those bitcoins through selling goods/services for them? How big a proportion bought the bitcoins with 'real' currency? My guess is that most bitcoin users pay for them with another currency and these people are not going to use them to buy and sell; they are going to hoard them.
Therefore, bitcoins are useless for anything other than speculation which was not the original intention of the system; it was intended to be used to buy and sell services. Therefore bitcoins are now useless for their intended purpose.
WTF happened here? Has the bitcoin been deliberately sabotaged? Or is this just an unintended consequence? Do we need a new virtual currency that won't devolve into this and stay useful?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Perhaps we should start exchanging goods and services with the exchange of WELL FUCK I DONNO goods and services?
Hoarding means lack of liquidity. Lack of liquidity is a risk. Therefore, hoarding will be self-limiting and bitcoin could theoretically reach a stable equilibrium.
That doesn't mean there won't be deflation, but it doesn't preclude bitcoin being used as a medium of exchange in the long-term. It's not an ideal medium of exchange, but because there exists no ideal currency, and because people find value in using bitcoin to get around government-imposed barriers--both legal and practical--it doesn't have to be perfect. It's imperfections (e.g. risk) merely need to be less than the relative benefit in any particular transaction.
You also seem to assume that once the bitcoin bubble pops that *poof* it'll disappear. But I can't think of any bubble market that simply disappeared after devaluation. Certainly people didn't stop buying and selling mortgages after the housing bubble popped.
And while bitcoin itself would over the long-term continue to experience deflation, which _diminishes_ (but doesn't eliminate) incentive to use it as a medium of exchange, there's no reason to think that other similar currencies won't become popular. I could imagine a "meta"-currency system where people exchanged an aggregate sum composed of multiple electronic currencies. That partially solves the inflation problem.
This is a good thing(tm), as it means that there isn't any fractional deposit factoring going on.
you cannot have fractional deposits with bit coin because you cannot get more bitcoins. So there is no interest. So there is no inflation. The "currency" of ultimate deflationary spiral - that's bitcoin.
Hell, I'd rather use gold as currency and I view gold as useless.
are you asking this for real? Bitcoins have no intrinsic value, their prices are always pure speculation, nothing else. You can only redeem anything for BTCs as long as somebody else is willing to take them, while speculating that somebody else will also take them off their hands. You can't make anything out of BTCs of any material use, you can't make a bracelet that anybody would want, you can't redeem them into anything unless there is a 'greater fool' out there. Now, I am NOT saying that BTCs will not go up higher, again, they may as well be 1,000,000,000 USD per BTC in some not so distant future. However eventually, without a doubt, the value of BTC will be 0, that's because there is no value except perception, and you are correct in one thing: there WILL be other electronic currencies.
Once there is one that is similar to BTC but where you can actually steadily redeem it for something (for example, 1Electronic Coin for 1 gram of gold), then that Electronic Coin in fact becomes a real currency.
As is, BTC is not a currency, it's MONEY, there is nothing standing behind it, but there is no store of value attribute present in it. Without store of value it's pure speculation, and now with the higher and higher relative prices, it's not even good as a unit of account, just as you mentioned yourself.
Nobody sabotaged it, it is the inherent property of an electronic file that has no real life backing. It can be used as a medium of exchange even now, as long as you can trade into and out of it very quickly and so the value of that is bypassing the traditional banking transfer systems. However once an electronic currency comes into play with a real redeemable quality behind it, then it can also have the same medium of exchange attribute and then BTC falls through the floor.
You can't handle the truth.
Bitcoin was a good first step, but the fact that it is not completely anonymous makes it less than idea as a "real" alternative monetary system. It's only a matter of time till various governments want to dig their fingers into that cookie jar. We need a financial system which is a true alternative to today highly tracked and taxed systems. Starve the beast of socialism - imagine how much cheaper things would be, and how easier it would be to move your assets around without borders. We have the technology.
Financial markets like MtGox could easily maintain fractional reserves because many account-holders don't withdraw their entire balance of bitcoins every night. There is plenty of opportunity for the exchange to do whatever they want with a portion of the deposits. In essence "mtgox bitcoins" are already a fiat currency that are payable in real bitcoins upon request. They just haven't started paying out at less than 1 bitcoin per mtgox bitcoin yet, like half of the other bitcoin exchanges/banks/whatever have when they got hacked.
The seller has a choice; post a stable price in bitcoins or post a (constantly adjusted) realistic price in bitcoins.
And it's basically a no-brainer; set the prices in dollars or other local currency and do real-time conversion to bitcoin prices using the recent exchange history. It's almost certainly going to be converted to another currency at that exchange fairly quickly anyway. Bitcoin will be a payment method and not a stable currency for, in my guess, quite a long time to come. If not because of the speculation but because of its tiny market cap compared to global markets. As such, bitcoin will never become useless until its market cap is smaller than the smallest purchase one might want to make, or if all the exchanges die. In fact, the lack of exchanges would tend to stabilize the currency value so it could still be used to send a few dollars worth of value across the Internet.
Thats kind of what I mean; you can't set prices in bitcoins. That impacts the bitcoins utility as a practical unit of currency.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
you cannot have fractional deposits with bit coin because you cannot get more bitcoins. So there is no interest.
You can. Essentially; your deposit of Bitcoins to mt.gox your bitcoin balance would be a debt on their books.
Mtgox does not necessarily have as many bitcoins as the sum of users' deposits.
The only way you could prove that would be with audited financials, or if everyone cashed out theit BTC successfully. They would likely greatly increase fees, long before that could happen.
Neither form of evidence is likely to be available any time soon.
It is also quite obviously in the middle of a massive bubble. If you look at the movement of the price, the shape of the curve, it is moving just like any other commodity that is being thinly traded and having massive speculation. That sort of thing might be good if you like to play the market and try to make a quick buck, but it's really really bad for anything trying to be a currency. It also is almost inevitably followed by a crash. Hence why bubbles are called that because they pop.
I suppose it is there radically possible that Bitcoin is some kind of exception and its value will continue to rise forever, but it would be the first time that is been true for anything that moved like this. Massive, volatile price changes are not the sort of thing that signal real growth, but rather a speculation bubble that is doomed to collapse sooner or later.
Hell, I'd rather use gold as currency and I view gold as useless.
Gold is a great material with lots of uses. You're just boring.
Watch this
I thought you could fraction it up to 1 million fractions.
so mister ac are you just full of shit?
(I don't own any bc, but that's as much as I've gathered from slashdot)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Nothing is truly anonymous if you have a big enough wrench.
I don't disagree, it sure looks like a major bubble, so on that point I still think it's very risky to get involved in. Where my perception has changed is that it looked like a toy, something tin-foil-hat people play with. I laughed it off. It seems it's now big enough that one shouldn't laugh it off. As an example, with over $150 million in a single exchange, an unlicensed bank, it probably makes sense to seriously look at appropriate consumer protections.
194,993 * $800 is roughly $150 million, indeed.
But try to throw (to sell) these 194993 BTC at MtGox (or elsewhere) at once.
Such a volume would move the BTC price to hell.
Hence the Bitcoin valuation is't real...
In your mind, are gold or silver money? I mean, they change price all the time, so I guess they're kind of worthless.
You are talking about the dollar right?
Right, which is what I'm getting at; the bitcoin is useless as a 'coin' that you can buy and sell goods and services for. Its only use at the moment is speculation.
You can't set prices of goods and services in terms of 'thinly traded commodities subject to massive speculation'.
You can't put bit coin price tags on things, this would be completely impossible. Yet I see this often online.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
How can anyone set prices in bitcoins?
Like this: https://www.bitcoinshop.us/
Yes, the price is different every time I visit.
And, although I admit I have not bought anything from that site, I can tell you that I *have* used bitcoins to buy Humble Bundles, which are another thing you can buy directly for bitcoins (optionally). There's just less overhead (complexity, time, effort, security, fees) in my perception of a bitcoin transaction over, for example, a paypal or credit card transaction... at least if you have a mobile device containing bitcoins that can scan QR codes easily.
I get your point that it's not really wise to spend bitcoins because 1) it's not wise to keep the majority of your wealth in bitcoins due to volatility and 2) it's not wise to spend bitcoins if you have other currencies because bitcoins are most likely to increase in value if you hold on to them. But for micro-transactions where I don't feel like I'm giving up a significant portion of my bitcoin investment, I do like making use of my bitcoins for convenience. It's also possible that if and when enough people are using bitcoins, their value will become less volatile. It might be an interesting path to get there, but barring some catastrophe, I don't see them going away completely, and I don't imagine that they can stick around for decades more without more people getting involved.
There's not really "vast amounts" of Bitcoin being produced by botnets, so it doesn't have the inflationary effect you might think. The system self-adjusts so that no matter how much mining power there is, there is always an average of 1 succcessful mining event every 10 minutes. Right now that means 25 BTC per 10 min, but eventually the mining reward will drop to zero.
Thus the total amount of Bitcoins is predetermined and virtually constant. Mining is virtually an irrelevance from the point of view of the supply of Bitcoins.
Try pricing in Zimbabwean dollars - you'll see the same problem. Hell, there's a mini-rush on every vendor whenever they mis-price in Euros because the Euro jumped and the dollar didn't, or vice versa.
And every business I've ever run or been a part of has to update its prices every few months anyway. If you work in a fast, competitive market, you are literally changing prices every day (e.g. large grocery chains, electronics suppliers, etc.).
The way you compensate is by "over-pricing" as much as everyone else. Because everyone does it. And you over-price so that, as the value increases, you don't have to re-price everything - you just make more profit at the beginning of that price and less profit at the end. And when you aren't making enough profit, then you ACTUALLY re-price.
Perhaps we should start exchanging goods and services with the exchange of WELL FUCK I DONNO goods and services?
You have a small business with several employees. It's time to make payroll so you whip out the goods and services box and...
That's not what fractional banking means.
We are living the libertarian dream with Bitcoin: a bunch of exchanges, none of them insured.
Libertarians feels that government regulation is unnecessary, but what recourse do those depositors have when one of these exchanges just disappears with their money? None.
I won't be using Bitcoin, no matter how lucrative, until a government agency or large bank insures deposits. It's just not worth the risk.
Frankly, I can't see any sovereign ever backing Bitcoin while they have their own currency, so I don't know how Bitcoin ever becomes a reliable, universal currency.
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What makes socialism such a beast?
Fox News told me so. I have no idea why, or even what socialism is, but Fox News told me socialism was bad, so it must be true!!!!!!!!!
Try pricing in Zimbabwean dollars - you'll see the same problem.
Well, you won't anymore because the Zimbabwe dollars were discontinued and the country now uses US dollars as its currency because price volatility made continued use of Zimbabwe dollars as a currency effectively impossible.
Now Zimbabwe had inflation not deflation, but the issue of volatility is the same: it makes things ultimately unworkable if it gets too high (even if it moves in a predictable way). When prices change significantly* by the minute and transactions take several minutes to complete then trouble may set in.
* significantly here means, say, double digit percentage change in price every minute. Bit coin is a long way from that currently, but is headed in that direction.
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Did you see that armored wagon from the Belleville last night? Big horses, nervous drivers and all. There must have been cold in there!
Development develops but the people stay the same.
This article is more at home on a financial site than a tech site. The radio tapping article is much more appropriate. With less comments in this article that's a good sign
A blog I run for the wealth
Are you retarded?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking
No, gold and silver are not money. Money is something that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services. They're far from worthless but having value is not the only criteria for something to be money.
Bit coin value chart
Classic Market 'Bubble' chart/graph
Selling bitcoin might require a greater fool, but the greatest fool is anyone who has bought gold in the past five years.
How can anyone set prices in bitcoins? You might offer to sell some good or service for 1 bitcoin. Then, a week later, your potential customers are laughing at you saying "one bitcoin for THAT? WOW talk about over priced, thats ridiculous!" and then they will buy from someone else.
Bitcoins simply cannot be used as a medium of exchange for goods and services.
You've obviously never bought anything on an American site from Europe (or v.v.). I've seen plenty of double digits fluctuations there in periods of just days over the past decade and a half.
Someone came up with this excellent idea. It works like this: the seller sets the price, in their own currency. The buyer accepts the price, and is offered the option of paying in a different currency, based on the current exchange rate. The deal is made, the buyer pays, the currency gets exchanged to the choice of the seller, the seller gets their money, and Bob's yer uncle.
You may recognize this from an obscure little service called paypal, who have been doing this for years.
> the bitcoin is useless as a 'coin' that you can buy and sell goods and services for.
You're shopping in all the wrong places.
Bitcoins as Money
(and Gold as Not)
keywords: gold, silver, petrodollar, bitcoin, us government, dollar, cryptocurrency
Objecively, gold and silver are commodities. Some cultures have a system of coinage involving these metals. Gold with sufficient proofs to its purity might be exchanged at something equivalent to its spot price on the open exchange, perhaps if you were a pirate? I'm sure it happens, but trading e.g. krugerrands must surely be easier.
Gold and silver are commodities. Money, in the context of this discussion, has a formal definition. I will for expediency quote wikipedia:
The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past, a standard of deferred payment.
Something that changes value all the time can be used as money, but it generally makes transactions difficult, so it's not a good idea. Another terrible idea is basing a national currency on the trade of a commodity that said nation does not control. The US has been doing pretty good on the petrodollar, but gold and silver were a pretty stupid idea, sorry.
Bitcoin is fairly interesting in being an international currency, albeit one that is struggling to escape the influence of the US Dollar. It's not quite safe to say that it fails to qualify as money at this point, but it has some interesting feedback loops built in which may allow it to actually bootstrap itself. I think that in the long run they are more likely to end up promoting the idea of cryptocurrencies than to actually succeed as one; the advantage gained by the first miners is at this point a market flaw. However, barring that or some mathematical attack, it may be in use for some time, as other cryptocurrencies gain mindshare.
Now, at what price in Bitcoins may I purchase a smarter AC?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Plotting wildly changing values on a linear scale is not really informative. The only relevant metric is relative change, so a logarithmic scale is the only thing that makes sense. Bitcoin does seem to be in a bubble that started mid October/start November, but in the long run, sorry, over the last three years, the price chart seems consistent with a steady increase of around a factor of 5 per year, overlayed with a number of bubbles. This slower increase could be another bubble, but then I wouldn't expect the increase to be that steady, particularly not spanning several bubble bursts. It doesn't seem consistent with the mechanisms of bubbles (but I have no training in economics, so I could very well be mistaken).
Bitcoin is decentralized - I dunno. The net itself isn't, is becoming increasingly centralised, and is of course always under the gaze of the "5 eyes". And all this unicorn cash sent to one address. Feebly vulnerable.