Brief thoughts - Monday, September 29, 2014

[Steve Sokolowski]

Here are a few summarized thoughts for today:

"Reverse bubble"

What is happening with bitcoin prices recently gives me even more hope for the future. When the price was stagnant, or slightly falling, some people could have argued that nobody was using the network and bitcoins were doomed to fail.

They may be doomed to fail, but they certainly aren't doomed to fail like the people in /r/bitcoinmarkets are saying. It's almost as if this is a huge "reverse bubble." The panic is so out of proportion with everything else that I read it and can't make sense of it. It's like people are jumping on the bandwagon against all logic, except this time in the opposite direction.

It's also funny to see how many people are arrogant enough to care only enough about themselves; the number one post is "I look like the joker of the family." Why do these people care what their family members and friends think? If bitcoins were to fail, which they aren't, and those people give the posters trouble, then the posters need to hang around with other people. I don't waste my time with people who make jokes about me, and those who do are limiting their own potential significantly.

I had not planned on increasing my stake. However, given what's happening, I've started preparing to make a large buy. Just like in May, I have a lot of money waiting for the day that "bitcoins are dead." It's hard to imagine now, but if I could again buy 100 bitcoins for $10,000, I'm not going to pass that up.


Bitcoin centered spam

I noticed an increase in bitcoin-centered spam lately. It's probably due to my posting my E-Mail address on our website. The spam instructs recipients to send money to an address and they will magically get double their bitcoins back.

Who actually believes that is going to work? What's amazing is that some people send dust to those addresses to "test them out."


Circle finally launches

While everyone was screaming that the sky is falling, I signed up for a Circle account. My goal is to get a bank account verified as soon as possible, so that if the price falls below $300 or $200, I can get more money in without having to pay Coinbase's fees.

So far, Circle seems to work fine. My concern with it is that its oversimplified interface makes it too difficult to do what people come there to do: buy bitcoins. They don't use the word "bitcoin" on their front page, which is stupid - what other service do they provide? Balances are listed in dollars and there's no way to change it, so you have to read in fine print to see what your bitcoin balance actually is. The lack of a simple indication that the purpose of the site is to buy and sell bitcoins is confusing.

I'll see how the buying and selling process goes once I can get a bank account verified. If it's as cheap as people say, then Coinbase has a new competitor, which is great. But I'm less impressed at how Circle is presenting bitcoins as dollars everywhere. It doesn't make sense to denominate everything in dollars when the dollar amount is constantly falling. They're going to get a lot of tech support tickets asking why balances have suddenly fallen.

But Circle's main advantage is that it isn't Coinbase. It doesn't charge high fees, and so far, they are standing up for user privacy.