wachtwoord

Interesting how nobody in this thread said a word against Mt Gox until 2 weeks ago. Hindsight bias is a powerful thing. I never made a new account after they were hacked and lost their entire database of user data in the summer of 2011 (and they reverted a few hours of trading). If you ever read the Bitcointalk forums you would have known they have been a shitty exchange always, and have been illiquid for many months. Everyone knew this. If you had money in MTGox you speculated and lost.

Isn't the USA the country where they lock you up you release evidence of war crimes to the public? To me they have lost any and all right to speak after that.

Oh absolutely. Mt Gox finally dying has nothing to do with the viability of Bitcoin. If Microsoft discontinues Hotmail do you give up on email? I think MT Gox going down might well be the trigger for another growth spurt in the price. I think it's highly unlikely for the price to be below $1k by the end of the year by any means. Why is everyone calling for regulation "to keep fraudsters in check"? "Yes, let's stop using Dollars because people sometimes pickpocket each other" would be the equivalent.

Do you think other countries should have suspended financial dealings with the US when we invaded Iraq? Our military has killed a lot more people in the past decade than Russia has. Ethically yes, logically no.

Haha, I'm definitely saving this to quote you later ;)

Only if you believe MTGox is still liquid. Looking at the price it seems like most don't. I wouldn't trust MtGox, they've been quite shady.

I don't see this happening. A corporation would want control over it. They would never create something they couldn't control then release it. If there was an AmExCoin, AmEx would be in essence the Federal Reserve of AmExCoin where they could and would inflate it at will. Take a look at Amazon Coins, that is about all you can expect from these players in this area, IMHO. EDIT: The only large company that I can think of where doing something like this would even be a remote possibility would be Google. The value lies in the decentralization. With a (large) corporation being the seed this would be lower indeed. Especially if they pre-mine (allocate coins to themselves or don't properly announce that mining will commence). Of course there's also the first-movers advantage that Bitcoin has. Overall I think it is an order of magnitude more likely that another crypto-currency will take over the lead from Bitcoin because of a true evolution than the scenario you describe and I don't think that's very probable. I consider the largest "threat" to my investment still to be the time horizon. Even though things are progressing much much faster than I expected it to go, it's still possible it will take upwards to 100 years (that order of magnitude at least, making predictions this far out is extremely unreliable) for Bitcoin (or another crypto) to be fully accepted, as gold is today. Of course I only have a limited lifespan ;)

I'm not looking to sell but might diversify a little at some point.

It's common sense. How would you estimate future $ fees earned by miners per transaction, next week or next month or next year? You would look at current $ fees earned by miners per transaction. $100 per transaction is not sustainable. Let's say $10 per transaction is a fair price. Either transaction volume has to increase 10x or BTC has to drop 90%. It's a silly exercise to try to estimate it. Transaction volume will go up by many orders of magnitude when Bitcoin succeeds. Your estimation will be so unprecise it's completely and utterly useless. Any time spend trying to predict this is wasted time.

How do you figure transactions are way cheaper? They're not when you take the indirect cost of mining into account. Transaction cost what is needed for miners to include it into blocks. For non-spammy transaction (small or non-recently moved inputs and/or small transaction size) this is free. Otherwise it will usually cost 0.000 BTC What this author has used in his calculations is the block subsidy. This is the main incentive to mine while Bitcoin becomes mainstream and sufficient transactions are processed to support the mining network. This subsidy was 50BTC for the first 4 years and is halved every 4 years until it reaches zero. In meanwhile the market will discover what transaction fees are required for an efficient mining market (which will become a marginal business). Using the block subsidy to estimate this during the bootstrap of the Bitcoin economy is just silly. For the first 4 years this was

Yes, it's called bootstrapping. The above blogger clearly missed the point. Transactions are way cheaper.

Porn.com and their franchise accepts Bitcoin payments

You don't see Bitcoin go up a 100x from here so you prefer the casino? I'd say investing in Bitcoin is a (very) profitable decision EV-wise while investing in a basket of altcoins is negative EV. I'm not saying it's impossible, but neither is 31 black ;)

The only altcoins I owned some of were LTC and PPC (the only 2 legitimate ones in my opinion) and I sold it all for Bitcoin after the recent run-up. LTC and PPC are overvalued and most others don't have a value north of zero.

Sold AZN to buy SEP and more EXC yesterday. I should have waited a day :P

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/12/31/fortress-is-forming-a-bitcoin-fund/

Yes I wondered about that too.

Everyone: at least 10 positions are required.

1. DDD 2. CZR 3. CSGP 4. JASO 5. MU 6. NFLX 7. SHLD 8. SPWR 9. TWTR 10. UA 11. YGE

It's definitely not just you. I just don't know the answer. Your line of thought does sound plausible and I never thought of it this way. I thought they would be allowed to invest however they choose and their sheer size would allow them to take the hits (and if you don't think it can, don't buy insurance from them). Having read your recourse it does sound very plausible. But if you're right then the guys at FFH are being suboptimal (not impossible of course, people do make mistakes) or we're missing something.

Please continue this argument I really appreciate it (but have no valid contribution, other than thank you).

I wasn't around for the 2008 crisis since I started investing in 2011, but I've never bought a bank stock. Even though everyone here is saying that BAC and C are great investments (and I'm sure they are) I don't truly understand it and can't value it. Further, the moats of banks are provided by the state (basically being allowed to borrow very cheaply and handing out loans expensively) and could (potentially) be taken away if the public finds out what a great scam that really is. Banks without that monopoly would make far less money. I also never owned insurers. I think those businesses are far more stable, but I've yet to investigate how to analyze both the safety and valuation.

Thanks! Bookmarked :)

Hidden question: Please share all your material ;)

You're welcome :)