/r/buttcoin controversy
Apparently, someone posted a link in /r/buttcoin to http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinThoughts ... _you_then/, which attracted 76 comments.
Reading through the comments, it strikes me that the people there don't seem to hate bitcoins. It would be odd enough if someone who hated a concept but wasn't affected by it (as opposed to, for example, political decisions that increased their taxes) wasted their days lambasting it on a forum. It seems to me that people in /r/buttcoin simply hate /r/bitcoin. I can agree with them on that one, although my reasons are lack of moderation, rather than making fun of people who post there.
/u/_trp hits this one right on: "I don't like cosplay, but I don't spend all day on r/cosplay mocking adults for dressing up like power rangers, it isn't worth my or any rational persons time. They are people I have never met, so while I may mock it in passing, no drive exists in me to ridicule them day after day." However, his response doesn't go far enough. The correct response to /r/buttcoin is not to suggest that those people refrain from expressing their disdain; it's to suggest that their disdain is wrong in the first place.
If your actions have no effect on anyone else, then it is highly arrogant of me to claim that I am any better than you or that my beliefs are correct. What people who post in /r/buttcoin are missing is that their views are not any more correct than the views expressed in /r/bitcoin. By putting others down for their behavior that is self-contained to another community, they are making a statement that their way of life is superior to the other group. Unless we are talking about the other group actively seeking to cause harm, that is an ethically wrong belief.
Who is the winning bidder?
At this point, we have many losing bidders having been announced, but no winning bidder. There must be a reason why there is no winning bidder at present.
Some people subscribe to the conspiracy theory that the US Marshals Service has somehow lost all of their bitcoins. That seems like an odd argument for an agency that has, with one exception, appeared to execute the auction very well and obtained a high price for its assets.
A more compelling argument is that the winners may be people who have never before been interested in bitcoins, but who have unannounced plans that need to be funded. eBay would be an example of a corporation that might want to acquire a large number of bitcoins to jumpstart a new service.
People are saying that the reason that we don't know the winners is because the privileged information is the price. I believe the reason we don't know the winners is because the privileged information is who actually won. The winner might have no qualm about releasing the price, except that doing so would reveal who he or she is, which could create a competitive disadvantage.
An explanation for the stalling out (this time)
Last week, I stated that I was concerned because I predicted that people would find out what the bids were for the auction, and would raise the price in advance of the submissions. When that didn't happen, I said that there was something I didn't know.
Now that time has passed, my theory is that what I didn't know is that the banks still wanted to obtain the same number of bitcoins, but they couldn't buy any because if they won the auction, they would end up with too large a stake. Therefore, they waited until they found out whether they won or lost, and then those who lost returned to the market to complete their purchases.
It's too early to tell if the cycle resumes. If the bubble resumes rising until July 24, then this would be an example of how the auction itself wasn't really that important; all that matters to its results is the timing. The market simply found an excuse to adhere to the cycle. I'll talk more about that tomorrow.
Delayed bubble means suppressed demand; too long means no bubble
You'll notice that I never stopped counting down to the next bubble. Until the price breaks the lower boundary as defined by /u/moral_agent, or a week or two after July 24 passes with no rise, the cycle is not broken.
Some people creating charts in /r/bitcoin make a great point that seems to agree with /u/moral_agent's reasoning. The longer it takes until the next bubble starts to form, the higher the peak will be. Previously, /u/moral_agent predicted that the high for the bubble would be around $3k. However, with this delay, some commenters posit that the bubble will peak at $6k. It would be within reason to say that the next bubble could be late by a few days without breaking the cycle. If so, then the high would be higher than a quicker cycle would cause.
This is common sense, as well. If the network continues to grow at a certain rate, and demand is held back for whatever reason, then the pent-up demand would be all released at the same time, driving prices up more than otherwise. I'm not going to talk about the news and the feedback loop and how all that feeds upon itself exponentially more with more pent-up demand, as you've seen that happen several times before.
On the other hand, I don't believe that a two-month delay to September 24 with a peak at $12k, as some suggest, is reasonable, as that has never happened before. Some people, like /u/lowstrife, are trying to explain that the cycle is still valid, just significantly delayed. You can't extrapolate a pattern into a new set of circumstances that don't fit the pattern, and then suggest that according to the previous pattern we will simply have a larger bubble. This is what some of the expert "TA wizards" on CryptoCoinsNews attempt to do. If nothing has happened by September, the bubble cycle has long been broken and we need a new model other than the bubble cycle to explain what happened.
Finding good friends
If you aren't interested in anything other than bitcoins, then feel free to skip the following two sections. I'm going to go a bit off topic, and in the past some people have become angry with me for doing that. Fortunately, this isn't /r/bitcoinmarkets and I won't be derailing other contributors' threads.
I had an interesting thought experiment to post that I was exposed to a few days ago. A family member, who rents a house to a roommate, had an incident with the roommate. The roommate was climbing through the attic, when he stepped on the drywall and fell through the ceiling into the garage below. His fall was broken by an expensive piece of machinery, which caused $700 in losses.
When the family member asked him to pay for the damage, he replied "you can't prove it." That's significantly different from "I didn't do it" or "Yes, I did it, and I'll make good on it."
The family member, knowing him from a social circle, does not want to cause negative feelings amongst the friends by asserting herself against him to demand payment. We had a debate over this. She argued that it was worth losing the $700 in order to keep rumors and bad blood from costing her friendships.
I believe that this is a situation where one needs to reevaluate what "friendship" means. Someone who is unwilling to take responsibility for his actions is not a friend, so I personally would not care what he thinks of the situation. Not only that, but anyone who sided with the "friend" against me without finding out both sides of the story is also not a friend.
When you allow people to get away with things like this, you set a precedent that personal responsibility isn't important, and that is wrong. It will be interesting to see if there is anyone here who would actually suggest just throwing away the broken equipment and saving the "friendship."
Searching for miners
We're looking for a group of miners to provide us with data in preparation for our pool's launch. Only scrypt coins will be supported during the testing period, and the miners can have GPUs or ASICs. Testers will be able to play around with the unique features of the pool before anyone else.
The goal during this testing period, which would begin in 3 or so weeks and could last a month, is to prove a few things. We first need to determine if there is any interest in the pool in the first place, or if all the testers will leave before the end of the test period. We need to determine what fee we need to charge and ask testers what they would be willing to pay. We need to figure out if our algorithms accidentally destroy coins when more miners are added or take out all the buy orders for weak coins. We need to compute what our hardware requirements are, and whether we need more servers or can optimize code. Finally, we need to examine user actions and determine if users are misunderstanding features or finding them difficult to use.
If you are interested in being one of the testers, E-Mail chris@shoemakervillage.org and ask to join. During the testing period, we will pay out 100% of everything we actually earn to the testers.
There are a few caveats. If there are display issues that show that you earned more than we actually made, then you will still be paid what your miners actually contributed. We will stand by our product once it is released, but during the testing period it is possible that we will not be able to pay out more than other multipools due to bugs or downtime. If we receive too many testers, or the testers have too many hashers, we could politely decline some offers so as not to risk miners losing money. Finally, while you will be paid eventually, payouts could be delayed during the testing period because you can't truly test the payout algorithm until there is money to pay out.
You'll be invited to a subreddit where you can offer comments and follow progress.
*Note that we are only collecting names at this time and it will be a few weeks until we are ready to get started.* Right now, we are delayed mainly by factors outside our control: a bug in Cryptsy's system that is costing us 4.5% more in fees than we should be paying, and waiting for parts to arrive through the mail.
Other
- Days until July 24: 23