Bitcoins

dryhat

Archi_Bald wrote: »

Where's the guy with the nick that sounds like his head hurts? Dryhead or something, the Bitcoin day trader? Haven't seen anything of him on this thread in days. Why hasn't he jumped to the defence of Bitcoin recently? Wonder where he is trying to talk the Bitcoin price up these days.

Hi. Still around.

There's nothing really to say. One Bitcoin exchange has - either through incompetance or malice - closed down and lost/stolen thousands of bitcoins and millions of dollars.

Bitcoin lives on.

(and by the way, I'm not a day trader and never have been)

WatsonNimrod

As if the establishment was really going to let this get out of control.

atush

dryhat wrote: »

Hi. Still around.

There's nothing really to say. One Bitcoin exchange has - either through incompetance or malice - closed down and lost/stolen thousands of bitcoins and millions of dollars.

Bitcoin lives on.

(and by the way, I'm not a day trader and never have been)

So how much you lose today (over the price crash or the exchange closing or both?)

SailorSam

When i first read about Bitcoins they were on the up and seemed a good investment, but i never understood how a virtual currency could work so i held back. Sigh of relief when i watched the news tonight that i wasn't tempted.

dryhat

atush wrote: »

So how much you lose today (over the price crash or the exchange closing or both?)

I haven't lost anything.
All the bitcoins I currently hold effectively cost me nothing.

The recent drops in the exchange rate just means my bitcoins are worth less in GBP.

WatsonNimrod

dryhat wrote: »

I haven't lost anything.
All the bitcoins I currently hold effectively cost me nothing.

The recent drops in the exchange rate just means my bitcoins are worth less in GBP.

Out of interest how easy are they to sell now? I have a few but like you I bought them ages ago, actually for my sons school project for next to nothing.


Seems there is a mother of all sell offs going down.

dryhat

WatsonNimrod wrote: »

Out of interest how easy are they to sell now? I have a few but like you I bought them ages ago, actually for my sons school project for next to nothing.


Seems there is a mother of all sell offs going down.

For a start, I wouldn't call it the "mother of all sell offs" .
This weekly chart shows the price has been more or less corellated with the events of Mt.gox and shows the price holding up well ...

https://bitcoinaverage.com/charts.htm#GBP-averages-1w


As for selling, all the usual channels - Bitstamp, localbitcoins etc - are still operating normally.

The new groundbreaking technology which underpins Bitcoin is still new and groundbreaking and as a Bitcoin enthusiast, this is what I'm interested in and am therefore keeping hold of all my bitcoins.

And I am confident that the price of bitcoins will be higher in 12 months time than it is now.

DiggerUK

I have lifted this post in it's entirety from The Bubbly Bitcoin thread on House Price Crash. It was posted by bambam, and I thank them.

"MtGox appears to be gone for good, along with 750,000 buttcoins, stolen because they were totally incompetent and didn't notice that hackers were stealing coins basically.

It was always in Japan.

Their prices were higher than rival buttcoin sites because they didn't pay fiat withdrawals in a timely fashion, or at all, so in effect cash on their site was worth less (hence the higher buttcoin price) than on rival sites, because the only sensible way out was to buy butts and transfer them out.

They shutdown the buttcoin transfer facility a couple of weeks ago, and now the inevitable as happened at the whole site is bust. Some people have lost millions of dollars. Most of the big losers were drug dealers from when buttcoins were used for what it's best suited for -criminality, but a few s**t-for-brains morons cashed in their life savings and put everything into butts, and they are now contemplating suicide.

Of course while a lot of butts got stolen, there are still plenty of sites that are solvent for now, but unless you are an absolute mouth-breathing idiot, you have to conclude that the majority of buttcoin exchanges now in existence will suffer similar fates, as has been the pattern with the majority of buttcoin sites since it started.

People are advising that holding butts on butt exchanges is very risky, and you need to basically guard them yourself, but this too is proving a risky venture, as the number of people losing butts directly off their PC is rising, and is likely to continue to rise because there is free untraceable unreversable money to be stolen. The owner of the pastebin site lost $200,000 worth of butts from his PC https://bitcointalk....hp?topic=485194 basically because he installed some open source software without fully reading the very very small print, which said that basically people can run arbitrary code on your PC.

For the real buttcoin fanatics none of this is bad news, and buttcoin represents a libertarian utopian ideal, where you can lose all your money because you don't know enough about computer security, or because you tossed out an old file with your buttcoin key stored on it, or because your PC got stolen, or any number of the infinitely many other creative ways that buttcoin users have found to lose vast sums of money over some minor detail. None of this, to the true buttlievers, is a bad thing, it's just Darwinism taking care of the weak, and by just following simple precautions your butts will be perfectly safe, and buttcoin is the ideal way to store large sums of money and the people who lost money deserved to lose it for being so dang stupid.

To most sane and rational people, however, having to become a computer security expert, to keep track of which buttcoin site is coded competently, and which one is run by crooks, is just more trouble than it's worth - unless of course you can get rich overnight, in which case they are willing to overlook a lot of this. With butts going from $1 to $1000 for no real reason, the buttcoin dream was very much alive, but now with them having lost value and bad news following bad news, the actual real uses for buttcoins are likely to dwindle back to the narcotics they were only really used for a year ago (and even this market has dwindled, as one drug dealing site after another has either been hacked, stolen users' funds, or taken down by the FBI or other national law enforcement agency).

I suspect this giganto-buttcoin thread will continue to run, fuelled in part by crackpot liberatarians, and in part by people still buying the buttcoins-for-$1 million-each dream, for some time to come. Normal people are just ignoring it entirely, it's too complicated, and devoid of utility, or income (even BTL offfers that!), to even consider."

I thankyou, DiggerUK.
..._

[Deleted User]

Archi_Bald wrote: »

Wonder where he is trying to talk the Bitcoin price up these days.

If someone wants to talk up the price of bitcoins why on earth would they come to a forum primarily used by people looking to save every penny or have significant debts? There are much better places to go than MSE to try and talk up the price of BTC.

SailorSam wrote: »

When i first read about Bitcoins they were on the up and seemed a good investment, but i never understood how a virtual currency could work so i held back. Sigh of relief when i watched the news tonight that i wasn't tempted.

It's speculation, a gamble, not an investment. Bitcoin is still brand new, barely more than a few years old, if Bitcoin is going to succeed (or die) it's going to take years and years. You made a good decision by choosing not to buy in because you don't understand it, people putting blind faith in cryptocurrencies are making a big mistake, although if you have the time it's always worth learning about something new, then you could make an informed decision as to whether or not you want to speculate.

atush wrote: »

So how much you lose today (over the price crash or the exchange closing or both?)

If they don't sell it's not a loss ;-)

[Deleted User]

DiggerUK wrote: »

Of course while a lot of butts got stolen, there are still plenty of sites that are solvent for now, but unless you are an absolute mouth-breathing idiot, you have to conclude that the majority of buttcoin exchanges now in existence will suffer similar fates, as has been the pattern with the majority of buttcoin sites since it started.

Go back 6 months in this thread and you'll see people saying do not touch Mt.Gox with a bargepole in fact I think I used those exact words. Mt.Gox has been known to be a catastrophic mess for a long time, the only people that put money into Mt.Gox were either people driven by greed (thinking they were smart enough to "beat" everyone else) or people who didn't do their research and blindly bought in.

A number of the other exchanges and wallet services have pledged to provide evidence that they are operating properly, for example yesterday Coinbase (the most popular American wallet service) allowed a third party security expert to inspect their operation and he concluded that they are acting properly and do have the funds they claim to have.

Mt.Gox is not representative of a genuine company in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

DiggerUK wrote: »

People are advising that holding butts on butt exchanges is very risky, and you need to basically guard them yourself, but this too is proving a risky venture, as the number of people losing butts directly off their PC is rising, and is likely to continue to rise because there is free untraceable unreversable money to be stolen. The owner of the pastebin site lost $200,000 worth of butts from his PC https://bitcointalk....hp?topic=485194 basically because he installed some open source software without fully reading the very very small print, which said that basically people can run arbitrary code on your PC.

A very important and very valid criticism of Bitcoin. This is my biggest problem with Bitcoin and why I believe that it has very little chance of success: If technical people can barely manage their funds properly, how can a non-tech person be expected to do so?

However, as the ecosystem matures and companies like Coinbase, Blockchain, Circle and PayPal get involved the chance of Bitcoin becoming suitable for the average joe consumer grows. Yes, Bitcoin will probably fail but if it succeeds... it's going to be huge.

Those that are speculating on Bitcoin aren't necessarily deluded libertarians, they just have a high risk tolerance.