Bitcoin going ballistic.

[unknown]

In the last 48 hours, the price of the virtual currency has surged by 50% from $94 to $141 as the rate of expansion goes more than parabolic.

It was like $20 at the beginning of the year...

So the implication is that the "Fed" is intentionally causing a self-destructive bubble...

Well, we do know how they feel about competing currencies.

[Zippyjuan]

Now the Fed is manipulating BitCoins? I better check their balance sheet and see how many they are buying.

[brushfire]

Now the Fed is manipulating BitCoins? I better check their balance sheet and see how many they are buying.

Rumor has it that they're using federal super computers to mine

/ninja

[ronpaulfollower999]

The last 12-24 hours has certainly been somewhat parabolic for Bitcoins, but there is absolutely no evidence that the Fed is buying Bitcoins. I wonder what exchange they're doing it through?

[Zippyjuan]

Rumor has it that they're using federal super computers to mine

/ninja

Probably using this one (story is from April 1st but is NOT an April Fools article):
http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/01/wo...ecommissioned/

World’s first petaflop supercomputer obsolete after 5 years, faces decommissioning
April 1, 2013 7:59 AM

John Koetsier

Five years ago it was the world’s fastest computer, running over a million billion calculations per second, but today Los Alamos Lab’s Roadrunner supercomputer is being decommissioned.

Just like your old desktop machine.

Roadrunner came online in 2008 to help nuclear scientists model and understand how nuclear weapons age and degrade. It occupied 6,000 square feet, cost $125 million to build, and reached a top speed of 1.45 petaflops with a hybrid processor model that combined 6,563 modified Playstation 3 processors with the same number of AMD Opteron CPUs.

One of the reasons it’s being shut down? While it’s still a fast computer — globally ranked at number 22 last year — Roadrunner is an energy hog, consuming 2.3 megawatts to reach peak operating speeds. That’s as much as a large house consumes in a month. The super-computer that is replacing Roadrunner cost $54 million, takes up much less space, and uses less energy.

“Future supercomputers will need to improve on Roadrunner’s energy efficiency to make the power bill affordable,” Los Alamos National Laboratory said in a statement.

While Roadrunner’s primary job was nuclear physics, scientists also used the supercomputer to investigate nanowire material, lasers, HIV genetics, and a complete simulation of the universe — at a 70-billion particle scale.

And there’s still a little more work for the shut-down supercomputer:

“Even in death, we are trying to learn from Roadrunner,” said Gary Grider of the Laboratory’s High Performance Computing Division.

Scientists will be studying memory compression techniques as well as optimized data routings for another month before dismantling the computer.

Anyone looking for some heavily used Opteron and Playstation 3 chips, cheap?

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/01/wo...4ScXPAzSgHo.99

[Sam I am]

Why would you imagine the average person would want to buy bitcoins right now?

1. They're worried about their existing money, and are buying bitcoins to be more certain about their future

OR the fiat money is pushing them away

2. They're observing this massive surge in bitcoin prices, and are seeing people make tons of money off of speculating on bitcoins, and they're trying to make a profit too.

OR the bitcoin is pulling them in.


One of those options is super likely to result in a crash.

[Romulus]

It is dropping like a rock now!

someone or something is doing some obvious manipulation here.

[Sam I am]

It is dropping like a rock now!

Pardon my asking, but how do you track this?

[Romulus]

preev.com

bitcoinity.org/markets

[unknown]

preev.com

bitcoinity.org/markets

Theyre showing a $7 difference in the value...

Holy arbitrage.

[kcchiefs6465]

Best of luck to whoever is involved. I would get out now if I bought them for 3 dollars or 10 dollars, though. Things too good to be true, usually are.

[FSP-Rebel]

Introduction to Bitcoin

Forget most things you've heard. People discover Bitcoin in a variety of ways, but usually pick up some sort of misconception like "Bitcoin gives free money to people with computers" or "in order to use Bitcoin I have to use a program that wastes electricity for nothing" along the way. Here is a good summary to help you understand Bitcoin in general, by focusing on what Bitcoin is and what problem it solves. These two things are not typically well explained on most websites, and it is difficult to appreciate just how effective a technology Bitcoin is until they are understood.

What Bitcoin is: An agreement amongst a community of people to use 21 million secure mathematical tokens--"bitcoins"--as money, like traditional African and Asian societies used the money cowry. Unlike the money cowry:
•there will never be more bitcoins
•they are impossible to counterfeit
•they can be divided into as small of pieces as you want
•and they can be transferred instantly across great distances via a digital connection such as the internet.

This is accomplished by the use of powerful cryptography many times stronger than that used by banks. Instead of simply being "sent" coins have to be cryptographically signed over from one entity to another, essentially putting a lock and key on each token so that bitcoins can be securely backed up in multiple places, and so that copying doesn't increase the amount you own.

Because bitcoins are given their value by the community, they don't need to be accepted by anyone else or backed by any authority to succeed. They are like a local currency except much, much more effective and local to the whole world. As an example of how effective the community is at "backing" the bitcoin: on April 4th 2011 30,000 bitcoins were abruptly sold on the largest Bitcoin exchange, consuming nearly all "buy" offers on the order book and dropping the price by nearly 1/3. But within a couple of days, the price on the exchange had fully rebounded and bitcoins were again trading at good volumes, with large "buy" offers slowly replacing the ones consumed by the trades. The ability of such a small economy (there were only 5 million out of the total 21 million bitcoins circulating then, or about 3.75 million USD worth at then-current exchange rates) to absorb such a large sell-off without crashing shows that bitcoins were already working beautifully.

What problem Bitcoin solves: Mathematically, the specific implementation of the bitcoin protocol solves the problem of "how to do all of the above without trusting anyone". If that sounds amazing, it should! Normally a local currency has to trust all kinds of people for it to be able to work. So does a national currency. And in both cases, that trust is often abused. But with Bitcoin, there's no one person who can abuse the system. Nobody can print more money, nobody can re-use the coins simply by making a copy, and nobody can use anyone else's coins without having direct access to their keys. People who break its mathematical "rules" simply end up creating a whole different system incompatible with the first. As long as these rules are followed by someone, the only way Bitcoin can fail is for everyone to stop using it.

This marvelous quality of not having to trust anyone is achieved in two ways. First, through the use of cutting-edge cryptography. Cryptography ensures that only the owner of the bitcoins has the authority to spend them. The cryptography used in Bitcoin is so strong that all the world's online banking would be compromised before Bitcoin would be, and it can even be upgraded if that were to start to happen. It's like if each banknote in your pocket had a 100-digit combination lock on it that couldn't be removed without destroying the bill itself. Bitcoin is that secure.

But the second way of securing the system, called the blockchain, is where the real magic happens. The blockchain is a single, authoritative record of confirmed transactions which is stored on the peer to peer Bitcoin network. Even with top-notch digital encryption, if there was no central registry to show that certain bitcoins had already been "paid" to someone else, you could sign over the same coins to multiple people in what's called a double-spend attack, like writing cheques for more money than you have in your account. Normally this is prevented by a central authority, the bank, who keeps track of all the cheques you write and makes sure they don't exceed the amount of money you have. Even so, most people won't accept a cheque from you unless they really trust you, and the bank has to spend a lot of money physically protecting those central records, whether they are kept in a physical or digital form. Not to mention, sometimes a bank employee can abuse their position of trust. And, in traditional banking, the bank itself doesn't have to follow the rules you do--it can lend out more money than it actually has.

The blockchain fixes all these problems by creating a single master registry of the already-cryptographically-secured bitcoin transfers, verifying them and locking them down in a highly competitive market called mining. In return for this critical role, the Bitcoin community rewards miners with a set amount of bitcoins per block, taken from the original limited quantity on a pre-agreed schedule. As that original amount gradually runs out, this reward will be replaced by fees paid to prioritise one transaction over another--again in a highly competitive market to ensure the lowest possible cost. The transactions are verified and locked in by the computational work of mining in a very special way so that no one else can change the official record of transactions without doing more computational work than the cumulative work of all miners across the whole network.

In conclusion: All this mathematical technology may be a bit of a mouthful, but what it means in practice is that Bitcoin works just like cash. Bitcoin transactions are intentionally irreversible--unlike credit cards or PayPal where chargebacks can invalidate a payment that has already been made. And there are no middlemen. Transactions are completed directly between the sender and the receiver via the peer to peer network.

Because of Bitcoin's intricate design, the network remains secure no matter where or how you process Bitcoin transactions. Which is incredible--no one else has ever tried to create a system that worked this way! All previous monetary systems have relied on trusting somebody, whether it was the king, town hall, the federal reserve, or banks. Bitcoin doesn't. It's guaranteed instead by the laws of mathematics, and that's why it has everyone from technologists to economists very excited.

[brushfire]

Probably using this one (story is from April 1st but is NOT an April Fools article):
http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/01/wo...ecommissioned/

The fed pays their electric bill with printed currency

A lot easier than converting t-bills.

[Romulus]

Theyre showing a $7 difference in the value...

Holy arbitrage.

even more of a range....no consistency right now.

[MRK]

Down to $116 lol. That's a lot of volatility for something even if it has "only" around 1 billion market cap.

[Zippyjuan]

When the supply of something is limited, the price can be very volitile- it doesn't take much action to move it a lot.

[ronpaulfollower999]

Asks are going down, while bids are at an all time high of +11 million. Possibly another rally today.

[Barrex]

If Fed guys have 2 brain cells they would print few m(b)illions and buy all Bitcoins. Problem solved?

Seriously why not?

[amonasro]

The BTC community is being cautiously optimistic.

The more I read about its adoption around the world, and the instability of banks/currencies, the more bullish I become.

[amonasro]

If Fed guys have 2 brain cells they would print few m(b)illions and buy all Bitcoins. Problem solved?

Seriously why not?

This would drive the price through the roof, making many of the early adopters enormously wealthy. Besides this action being fairly transparent, many would would just buy back in once bitcoin bottoms out anyway, waiting for it to rise again or create another one to take its place. The idea is too good for people to get scared away.

Hear that MasterCard? Helicopter Ben? That's the sound of inevitability.

[dannno]

The BTC community is being cautiously optimistic.

You mean they aren't acting like Wall Street on internet stocks?!?

[anaconda]

Sunday 4/7/13 5:44 PM Last price = $164.51 per Mt.Gox.

https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130228.html

[Keith and stuff]

Sunday 4/7/13 5:44 PM Last price = $164.51 per Mt.Gox.

https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130228.html

It is $169.74 right now. http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html

[enter`name`here]

My god where does it end? I sold half my holdings at 94... D'oh! I am a believer in btc, recently convinced my mother to start looking into it, but this is madness right? ... Right?

[newbitech]

My god where does it end? I sold half my holdings at 94... D'oh! I am a believer in btc, recently convinced my mother to start looking into it, but this is madness right? ... Right?

Yeah pretty crazy. It's looking to blow thru 180 in probably the next hour. I think the price is gonna be bumping up along that large stack around 200 by morning. If it chews thru that 200 and breaks it, we'll be talking about price rises in terms of 10's instead of 1's.

I might be looking to grab $100 bucks worth before it breaks 200. After it breaks 200, its gonna be a lot riskier to get in IMO.

[well_met_sir]

My god where does it end? I sold half my holdings at 94... D'oh! I am a believer in btc, recently convinced my mother to start looking into it, but this is madness right? ... Right?

It "ends" at $0 or $10000+. The prices now do not make sense and thus they are temporary. If bitcoin succeeds each one will be incredibly valuable. If bitcoin fails then each one will be worthless. Until we know whether bitcoin has succeeded or failed expect high volatility, mostly upwards.

[ronpaulfollower999]

I wouldn't be surprised if it hit 200 by tomorrow morning. Where it goes from there, who knows?

[gwax23]

Wow I shoulda bought then. Is buying now worth it? How much higher could is seriously go?

[Petar]

Wow I shoulda bought then. Is buying now worth it? How much higher could is seriously go?

It's still early, almost no one accepts them.

This can go to the moon.

[kpitcher]

It's still early, almost no one accepts them.

This can go to the moon.

I agree that this is totally uncharted territory. This evening I did convert some BTC I have to gold and silver to cover the last of my original investment. Never had a Gold Buffalo before so looking forward to having that in the coin collection. Very simple and hassle free ordering process.

The rest of my bitcoins will stay in the system. I'm in this for the duration.