Did the leak of names influence bidding?
In a sealed-bid auction, there are two pieces of information that the bidders need to guess right about in order to win the auction. First, what is the right range in which the others will be bidding? Second, who are they bidding against? Knowing who one is bidding against can help a person come to a conclusion about what the opponents are bidding.
I have no doubt that when that list of names was leaked, the executives at the banks looked at it as a gold mine. They probably said things like "I know person X - he's a coward and would never pay more than market price," or "Company Y has been buying bitcoins for months and cannot satisfy their clients' requests, so they will be willing to pay any price." Conversely, the person who was willing to pay the most looked at the list and said "Hmmm, there's nobody on this list as rash as I am, so I can feel safe in lowering my bid."
Completely wrong about volatility
Two weeks ago, I predicted that the volatility today would be through the roof. Last week, there were days when only $2.5m of bitcoins changed hands. That's barely more than one block is worth today. One would expect that when the transaction volume increases by a factor of 8 overnight, something was going to happen.
But of course, nothing has happened. The story of the past few weeks is that nothing at all seems to affect bitcoin prices, whether it be bubbles, news, world events, the auction, or whatever else. I was completely wrong when I said that volatility would be up and down today as companies jockeyed to submit their bids.
I also predicted that the coins would sell above market value, but given that no insiders have been flooding exchanges with bids, that prediction is also in jeopardy. There are certainly people who would know if their companies were going to bid high. Maybe we could still see some sort of rise at 6:05pm, if someone decides to brag about how much they paid now that it no longer matters to their chances of winning.
I still think that the "up or down" idea will hold. If we find out that prices were below market despite such a long list of names interested, the doubts over the past few weeks about bitcoin adoption are going to finally release and cause a crash, breaking the bubble cycle. I wouldn't be willing to make a prediction of what happens after that, because it would be unprecedented. If, on the other hand, the insiders somehow all decided to keep quiet and not show their hands this week, then the cycle would resume where it left off.
Horowitz on a publicity tour
Andreessen Horowitz is on a tour that is obviously designed to gin up publicity for bitcoins. He keeps repeating those ridiculous figures that 10k developers are working on bitcoin and that it is the largest R&D project in the world, both of which seem wildly inflated. It's easy to get misled into thinking that bitcoins are bigger than they actually are if you look at the Google News searches, as his interviews are reprinted numerous times in many newspapers with slightly different text. He even seems to give interviews to multiple outlets with the same exact talking points, just with different words.
The guy loves attention. His comments seem especially tone-deaf during a time when bitcoin development is at a near-standstill.
Bitcoin stopping at store of value?
The following comment by /u/andreasma doesn't make any sense to me: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comment ... sarily_be/. Why would bitcoin be used as a store of value but not as a transactional currency, despite its having all the features necessary to be one?
Comparing bitcoins to gold is a bad idea. If you have a vault full of gold, then you can't decide on a whim spend it on a car. If you have a lot of bitcoins that you're using as a store of value, then you can decide within ten minutes to use them to buy a car, and anyone would be glad to have them. Why would bitcoin be used solely as a store of value when people can send the store of value around so easily?
There are many issues that might prevent bitcoins from being turned into the store of value that he is talking about, but once they get there, I don't see how they are stopped from becoming the world currency. The difficult part is getting people to own bitcoins in the first place. We already see that merchants are more than willing to accept them, so why would merchants suddenly stop but consumers hold bitcoins instead?
Other
- I hope that something actually happens in an hour so I can write about it tomorrow.
- Days until July 24: 26