The Everything Bitcoin Thread

[AbbyNucksFan]

I had free power (included in my rent cost no matter what I used) at my computer shop, so mining coins was basically free. I had computers to spare, and free power. Ah, the good ol days lol Too bad I really never thought bitcoins would amount to anything.

[Dittohead]

Good way to launder money I guess.

[SabreFan1]

Good way to launder money I guess.

Before you cash in you are supposed to provide documentation on your identification. If someone manages to setup a bank account that can't truly be traced to who they really are after they manage to fool one of the market exchanges with convincing fake ID documents then it would be an excellent way to launder money. They would also need to cover their digital tracks.

It's a drawback to Bitcoin, but to be fair it's almost as easy to launder US cash. Several large banks were caught not long ago in being complicit with a host of money launderers.

[nuckin_futz]

European Bitcoin exchanges paralyzed by hackers.

Hacker attacks have forced two large Bitcoin exchanges, Slovenia-based Bitstamp and Bulgaria's BTC-e, to suspend withdrawals. The attacks seem to have focused on Bitcoin's vulnerability called "transaction malleability," which allows a hacker to change a transaction record in a way that allows double spending.

Earlier, the Bitcoin universe's biggest exchange, MtGox, stopped external transfers because of the same design flaw. Other exchanges will spring up or expand, but for now much of the Bitcoin infrastructure is paralyzed, showing that the system is still too experimental for broad acceptance and, for not, fit only for the most reckless of speculators.

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Price was north of $800 USD 10 days ago. Now fetching $583.

The paralyzed Mt.Gox exchange has it priced at $400, but who cares when they won't let you withdraw your money.

What a disaster.

[SabreFan1]

European Bitcoin exchanges paralyzed by hackers.

Hacker attacks have forced two large Bitcoin exchanges, Slovenia-based Bitstamp and Bulgaria's BTC-e, to suspend withdrawals. The attacks seem to have focused on Bitcoin's vulnerability called "transaction malleability," which allows a hacker to change a transaction record in a way that allows double spending.

Earlier, the Bitcoin universe's biggest exchange, MtGox, stopped external transfers because of the same design flaw. Other exchanges will spring up or expand, but for now much of the Bitcoin infrastructure is paralyzed, showing that the system is still too experimental for broad acceptance and, for not, fit only for the most reckless of speculators.

*********************************************

Price was north of $800 USD 10 days ago. Now fetching $583.

The paralyzed Mt.Gox exchange has it priced at $400, but who cares when they won't let you withdraw your money.

What a disaster.

The market is still trading but it's all schizophrenic right now. Mt. Gox trading is falling really fast while a few other big players are still going about business as usual. Right now people are in panic mode. Either some people are really going to pick up some Bitcoins very cheap soon or the market is just going to absolutely collapse. I think that the market will correct itself at some point unless this hits national news.

Just as I've been predicting all along, Bitcoins are losing their luster.

I'm gonna watch the trading volume on the markets to see if there are going to be a load of buys after the price bottoms out. Some people may actually come out of all of this panic trading making a killing if they can get their transactions to go through while the prices are at their lowest.

If anybody wants to see a live feed of what's going on in the market places right now, here's a re-post of the link. http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/currency/USD.html

[nuckin_futz]

The market is still trading but it's all schizophrenic right now. Mt. Gox trading is falling really fast while a few other big players are still going about business as usual. Right now people are in panic mode. Either some people are really going to pick up some Bitcoins very cheap soon or the market is just going to absolutely collapse. I think that the market will correct itself at some point unless this hits national news.

Just as I've been predicting all along, Bitcoins are losing their luster.

I'm gonna watch the trading volume on the markets to see if there are going to be a load of buys after the price bottoms out. Some people may actually come out of all of this panic trading making a killing if they can get their transactions to go through while the prices are at their lowest.

If anybody wants to see a live feed of what's going on in the market places right now, here's a re-post of the link. http://bitcoincharts...rrency/USD.html

Silk Road 2.0 'Hack' Blamed On Bitcoin Bug, All Funds Stolen

The same bug that has plagued several of the biggest players in the Bitcoin economy may have just bitten the Silk Road.

On Thursday, one of the recently-reincarnated drug-selling black market site’s administrators posted a long announcement to the Silk Road 2.0 forums admitting that the site had been hacked by one of its sellers, and its reserve of Bitcoins belonging to both the users and the site itself stolen. The admin, who goes by the name “Defcon,” blamed the same “transaction malleability” bug in the Bitcoin protocol that led to several of the cryptocurrency’s exchanges halting withdrawals in the previous week.

“I am sweating as I write this… I must utter words all too familiar to this scarred community: We have been hacked,” Defcon wrote. “Our initial investigations indicate that a vendor exploited a recently discovered vulnerability in the Bitcoin protocol known as “transaction malleability” to repeatedly withdraw coins from our system until it was completely empty.”

Just how many bitcoins were stolen wasn’t said in the post, although it listed a series of Bitcoin addresses that the Silk Road administrators believe to have been involved in the heist. Those transactions seem to point to a single Bitcoin address that contains 58,800 coins, worth more than $36.1 million at current exchange rates. But tracing Bitcoin’s pseudonymous transactions is always tricky–other estimates range from 41,200 by a Silk Road user and 88,000 by the Bitcoin news site.

Update: Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, estimates the total theft of Silk Road’s bitcoins at a much lower number: just 4,400 or so coins, worth around $2.6 million.

Based on the Silk Road’s data about the attack, the site’s staff point to three possible attackers, two in Australia and one in France. “Stop at nothing to bring this person to your own definition of justice,” Defcon writes.

Silk Road’s users, predictably, didn’t take the announcement at face value, and many instead suspect that the site’s staff have used the “transaction malleability” bug as a scapegoat to cover their own incompetence–the site has been plagued with more pedestrian bugs since launching in November–or even that they’ve run off with the users’ bitcoins themselves. “Transaction malleability,” after all, has been a known issue with Bitcoin for two years, and is described by most Bitcoin security experts as more of a major nuisance than a real threat that would allow funds to be stolen.

“Something’s not correct: The bug…can’t be made responsable if bitcoins are missing now!” writes a user named pathfinder.

“Oh, this is rich. How many users called for the shutdown of SR2 to fix the problems? They were ignored,” writes a user named aqualung on the site’s forums. “Admins did this. Not some vendor.”

Defcon denied those accusations, but took full responsibility for allowing the theft. “I didn’t run with the gold,” he writes. “I have failed you as a leader, and am completely devastated by today’s discoveries…It is a crushing blow. I cannot find the words to express how deeply I want this movement to be safe from the very threats I just watched materialize during my watch.”

The hack is just latest in a series of mishaps, crackdowns and scams that have roiled the “dark web” drug market since the shutdown of the original Silk Road anonymous drug site in October by the FBI. Among the more than half dozen sites that have sprouted to pick up Silk Road’s lucrative stream of Bitcoin-based drug transactions, at least three have run off with the users’ funds and two have shut down after being hacked. Several drug site administrators have also been arrested, including three former Silk Road staffers and five men in the Netherlands and Germany who launched their Silk Road copycat, Utopia, earlier this month.

Amidst that chaos, the relaunched Silk Road has been perhaps the most stable and popular marketplace for drugs and other contraband, with over 13,000 product listings at last count. And its hacking and sudden bankruptcy shakes the anonymous ecommerce community more than any of those other dark web eruptions.

While some Silk Road users wrote on the site’s forums that they planned to take their business to other marketplaces like Pandora and Agora, others declared the Silk Road model altogether dead. All the sites currently keep users’ bitcoins in “escrow” before a transaction is complete to prevent fraud, a model that often allows the funds to be stolen, seized.

Defcon ended his message to the site’s users by announcing that the Silk Road will no longer use an escrow, and will instead ask users to send money directly between buyers and sellers, a model that will no doubt lead to many more scams on the site. But he said that the site will move to so-called “multi-signature” transactions, a largely experimental use of Bitcoin that would require multiple users to “sign off” on a transaction before it’s made. That means a third party could serve as a trusted escrow with no way to steal a user’s funds. He promised a “generous bounty” to anyone who could help Silk Road to implement the change.

“Silk Road will never again be a centralized escrow storage,” Defcon writes. “Hindsight is already suggesting dozens of ways this could have been prevented, but we must march onward.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-0-hacked-using-bitcoin-bug-all-its-funds-stolen/

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The party's over.

[SabreFan1]

The party's over.

Not quite yet. There's money to be made with all of this panic trading. In the last 3 hours the price at Mt. Gox has gained back $117 per coin. Anybody who bought some coins at $300 a few hours ago has already made about 35% in profits if they stay in Mt. Gox. If they can unload some of those $300 coins into the exchanges that are trading around $600 per coin then they will double their money. Right now this second there are some people who are seriously gaming the system and making a boatload of cash doing so.

I personally am going to leave it alone. Like I said before, I don't have the cajones to mess around in virtual currency. The floor is likely to fall out soon.

Edited February 14, 2014 by SabreFan1

[Grapefruits]

http://www.forbes.co...s-funds-stolen/

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The party's over.

I'm gonna bet the party is far from over.

There is money to be made right now, and people are taking advantage of it. I messed around with the mining but quickly learned the money is in the resale of mining equipment.

If the bottom drops out, so be it. I've already made some money off of it, hopefully I'll continue to make more.

We shall see.

Edited February 14, 2014 by Grapefruits

[nuckin_futz]

Not quite yet. There's money to be made with all of this panic trading. In the last 3 hours the price at Mt. Gox has gained back $117 per coin. Anybody who bought some coins at $300 a few hours ago has already made about 35% in profits if they stay in Mt. Gox. If they can unload some of those $300 coins into the exchanges that are trading around $600 per coin then they will double their money. Right now this second there are some people who are seriously gaming the system and making a boatload of cash doing so.

I personally am going to leave it alone. Like I said before, I don't have the cajones to mess around in virtual currency. The floor is likely to fall out soon.

While I personally have not traded BTC. I have friends who have. They all say the same thing, the executions are terrible. The support from the sites is abysmal.

One friend has an account at Mt.Gox, he's been trying to fund it for three and a half months. The support is just that inept.

Panic trading is great, but there has to be liquidity. There isn't much in BTC at all. Right now the exchanges have zero credibility. I can't imagine what they can do at this point to gain any back. Can you?

You can't unload those coins directly on to other exchanges. Perhaps you could arb your position through a second exchange. But then you have money tied up at 2 Donkey exchanges that you can probably kiss goodbye as these markets and brokers are unregulated.

If you're bored in the evening and want to trade something nutty I suggest looking into Hang Seng (Hong Kong), or KOSPI (Korea) futues. Both instuments are pretty nutty and may provide excitement and opportunity if that's what you seek.

This whole BTC thing reeks of Tulip Mania or better yet Kuwait's Souk Al Mankh bubble. I'll post a link for you as you may find it interesting. Some highlights from the article

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"Perhaps the greatest speculative mania of all time was Kuwait’s Souk al-Manakh stock bubble in the early 1980s, which is as fascinating as it was devastating. The bull market began when investing in local “Gulf Companies” became in vogue with Kuwaitis who wished to ride the coattails of the Middle East’s oil-driven economic boom of that time. A peculiar Kuwaiti custom allowed traders to pay for stocks using post-dated checks, under the assumption that default would be unthinkable. Unsurprisingly, human avarice prevailed as some traders speculated in stocks paid for by billions of dollars worth of unsecured checks, causing the stock market to inflate like a balloon and pop in a most analogous manner."

"The height of the society-wide insanity occurred when eight speculators, known as “the Cavaliers,” floated a total of $55 billion in postdated checks, seemingly in an attempt to corner the market. The most prolific check writer among the Cavaliers was Jassim al-Mutawa, a Passport Office employee in his early-twenties, who managed to pass off $14 billion all by himself. Sloppy accounting on the part of his brother and partner, Najeeb al-Mutawa, caused Jassim to become a staggering $3.4 billion overdrawn. (1) According to “Collapse of the Souk”

“Eventually, approximately 29,000 checks – amounting to $93 billion – were estimated to have been written against the shares of companies that were, for practical purposes, worthless.”"

"In August of 1982, a female speculator presented one of Jassim al-Mutawa’s postdated checks for payment ahead of its due date, catching him unable to pay his debts. Within an instant, the Souk al-Manakh house of cards imploded"

http://www.thebubble...souk-al-manakh/

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At it's height the Souk Al Manak had a market capitalization that ranked it 3rd in the world. Only behind the US and Japan. It was valued at more than the London's FTSE exchange.

Edited February 14, 2014 by nuckin_futz

[nuckin_futz]

I'm gonna bet the party is far from over.

There is money to be made right now, and people are taking advantage of it. I messed around with the mining but quickly learned the money is in the resale of mining equipment.

If the bottom drops out, so be it. I've already made some money off of it, hopefully I'll continue to make more.

We shall see.

Hey I am all for scalping dead cat bounces, but you have to be able to trust the exchanges and trust that you'll get your funds back. That trust has been broken. Anyone opening an account with these exchanges must be allergic to money.

[MillerGenuineDraft]

Hey I am all for scalping dead cat bounces, but you have to be able to trust the exchanges and trust that you'll get your funds back. That trust has been broken. Anyone opening an account with these exchanges must be allergic to money.

Haven't posted in a while, but your best option is physical exchanges. Bitcoiniacs operates in the West End and you can ensure your transactions to go through.

That's the biggest pitfall with online exchanges, you just don't know where they're based/where your moneys getting toyed.

[SabreFan1]

While I personally have not traded BTC. I have friends who have. They all say the same thing, the executions are terrible. The support from the sites is abysmal.

One friend has an account at Mt.Gox, he's been trying to fund it for three and a half months. The support is just that inept.

Panic trading is great, but there has to be liquidity. There isn't much in BTC at all. Right now the exchanges have zero credibility. I can't imagine what they can do at this point to gain any back. Can you?

You can't unload those coins directly on to other exchanges. Perhaps you could arb your position through a second exchange. But then you have money tied up at 2 Donkey exchanges that you can probably kiss goodbye as these markets and brokers are unregulated.

If you're bored in the evening and want to trade something nutty I suggest looking into Hang Seng (Hong Kong), or KOSPI (Korea) futues. Both instuments are pretty nutty and may provide excitement and opportunity if that's what you seek.

This whole BTC thing reeks of Tulip Mania or better yet Kuwait's Souk Al Mankh bubble. I'll post a link for you as you may find it interesting. Some highlights from the article

Some of what you wrote is false and some of it is true. I don't have the time at the moment to break everything down. I've written about how bad of an idea Bitcoin is throughout this whole thread and have no desire to trade in it. I don't like taking any large risks with my money. I'm always to worried about losing it somehow.

Your friend should get on the trail of his money fast, and at the very least file a complaint with the SEC and state/federal attorney generals office if he lives in the US. I have no idea what his options would be in Canada. From what I've gathered in the past, exchanges should take hours, not multiple days/weeks/months. He is either getting screwed somewhere along the way, or has somehow become lost in the shuffle.

You can go to different exchanges with the same Bitcoin. All you need to do is get your Coinage back into your wallett. So let's say someone bought the coins last night at Mt. Gox at $300 and the transaction arrived in his wallet a few hours later. Then all the person has to do is sell the Bitcoin at somewhere like BitStamp for whatever the going rate is. Let's for arguments sake say that Mt. Gox took a week or two to get your Bitcoins into your wallet then by the time they arrive then say you go to one of the other big exchanges and they take a week or two to get your coins sold at a much higher price. Then that takes a week or two. At some point you would make your money with your own personal wallet as the first middleman.

If these high volume exchanges were that untrustworthy and incompetent then they wouldn't be doing the volume that they do. In the last 24 hours BitStamp has done $40,000,000 in exchanges.

I have no desire to play in any fast foreign or domestic "try and get rich quick" markets. I don't have the guts to do that.

[SabreFan1]

Hey I am all for scalping dead cat bounces, but you have to be able to trust the exchanges and trust that you'll get your funds back. That trust has been broken. Anyone opening an account with these exchanges must be allergic to money.

Definitely agree. As I've said all along, Bitcoin was once the shiny new thing. Now that it's losing its luster, it's starting to crash. I like being right...

[nuckin_futz]

Haven't posted in a while, but your best option is physical exchanges. Bitcoiniacs operates in the West End and you can ensure your transactions to go through.

That's the biggest pitfall with online exchanges, you just don't know where they're based/where your moneys getting toyed.

Please for the love of God tell me you're not actually buying and selling Bitcoin through those charlatans?

Was just on their website and saw that you can purchase 1 BTC for $762.56 CAD and sell the same BTC for $626.06.

That's a spread of nearly 18%. That's insane. That's way worse than the currency exchange thieves at any airport.

By way of comparison, The larger exchanges currently quote a price of $663.25 x 664.17 for a spread of about 1/4 of a percent. Mind you this price is in USD but we're only talking about the spread.

The Canadian Virtual Exchange is currently quoting BTC at $740.01 x 747.88999 for a spread of approx 1%. That price is quoted in CAD.

Buy from Bitcoiniacs and sell it right back to them. The price would need to appreciate 18% just to break even.

Edited February 14, 2014 by nuckin_futz

[nuckin_futz]

Some of what you wrote is false and some of it is true. I don't have the time at the moment to break everything down. I've written about how bad of an idea Bitcoin is throughout this whole thread and have no desire to trade in it. I don't like taking any large risks with my money. I'm always to worried about losing it somehow.

Your friend should get on the trail of his money fast, and at the very least file a complaint with the SEC and state/federal attorney generals office if he lives in the US. I have no idea what his options would be in Canada. From what I've gathered in the past, exchanges should take hours, not multiple days/weeks/months. He is either getting screwed somewhere along the way, or has somehow become lost in the shuffle.

You can go to different exchanges with the same Bitcoin. All you need to do is get your Coinage back into your wallett. So let's say someone bought the coins last night at Mt. Gox at $300 and the transaction arrived in his wallet a few hours later. Then all the person has to do is sell the Bitcoin at somewhere like BitStamp for whatever the going rate is. Let's for arguments sake say that Mt. Gox took a week or two to get your Bitcoins into your wallet then by the time they arrive then say you go to one of the other big exchanges and they take a week or two to get your coins sold at a much higher price. Then that takes a week or two. At some point you would make your money with your own personal wallet as the first middleman.

If these high volume exchanges were that untrustworthy and incompetent then they wouldn't be doing the volume that they do. In the last 24 hours BitStamp has done $40,000,000 in exchanges.

I have no desire to play in any fast foreign or domestic "try and get rich quick" markets. I don't have the guts to do that.

I think you might have misunderstood. The friend with the Mt.Gox account has never been able to fund his account. There has never been any money in it at all. Despite his many attempts to fund it. He gets little help from Mt.Gox in his effort to fund it.

These Bitcoin dealers are not regulated by the SEC. So they will do nothing. I have dealt with the SEC before and can assure you they're completely useless. FINRA is a little bit better, but not much.

How is anyone supposed to trade this market when like you said it could take a week or two for the coins to end up in your wallet?

You've seen how fast this market moves. I doubt many would find that acceptable.

Edited February 14, 2014 by nuckin_futz

[Papayas]

Some of what you wrote is false and some of it is true. I don't have the time at the moment to break everything down. I've written about how bad of an idea Bitcoin is throughout this whole thread and have no desire to trade in it. I don't like taking any large risks with my money. I'm always to worried about losing it somehow.

Your friend should get on the trail of his money fast, and at the very least file a complaint with the SEC and state/federal attorney generals office if he lives in the US. I have no idea what his options would be in Canada. From what I've gathered in the past, exchanges should take hours, not multiple days/weeks/months. He is either getting screwed somewhere along the way, or has somehow become lost in the shuffle.

You can go to different exchanges with the same Bitcoin. All you need to do is get your Coinage back into your wallett. So let's say someone bought the coins last night at Mt. Gox at $300 and the transaction arrived in his wallet a few hours later. Then all the person has to do is sell the Bitcoin at somewhere like BitStamp for whatever the going rate is. Let's for arguments sake say that Mt. Gox took a week or two to get your Bitcoins into your wallet then by the time they arrive then say you go to one of the other big exchanges and they take a week or two to get your coins sold at a much higher price. Then that takes a week or two. At some point you would make your money with your own personal wallet as the first middleman.

If these high volume exchanges were that untrustworthy and incompetent then they wouldn't be doing the volume that they do. In the last 24 hours BitStamp has done $40,000,000 in exchanges.

I have no desire to play in any fast foreign or domestic "try and get rich quick" markets. I don't have the guts to do that.

but how many of those 40 millions are actually legit money from legit traders? Not an expert from bit coins so I could be wrong, but from what I know about it so far, most of those money are just control by a small group of people. The profits comes from the casual people who try to tap into the market for a quick profit.

The whole market is unregulated by any trust worthy organization. It is extremely easy to control the value of the coins and that's why the value of the coins would jump up and down in this kind of scale...

I won't touch this market with a ten feet pole

[Offensive Threat]

Every site from MTGox to AVA all seem like gambling portals to me. Watching the value fluctuations is crazy. 600 to 900 then down to 400 in less than 30 days? Yeah, somebody is making money but more are losing their shirts.

I would not get into this market under any conditions BUT if I was already in it, like if I had got in early on, I maybe wouldnt sell right now. But with the long lead times for sales to go through and the genuine possibility of a complete collapse at any time...Id sell, yeah.

[Dittohead]

BitCon No thanks.

[Dittohead]

http://www.bloomberg...ut-at-firm.html

Bit coin go bust..

Edited February 25, 2014 by Dittohead

[nuckin_futz]

http://www.bloomberg...ut-at-firm.html

Bit coin go bust..

To further erode any credibility, the Winklevoss twins (yes those two knobs who sued Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg) have launched there "Winkdex" which is a Bitcoin index.

http://winkdex.com/#/