Why a troll? I am very skeptical that Bitcoin will succeed, I already explained why I think so.

To see where my "bearish" probabilities came from, look at the weekly price chart on any exchange, pretend that you are a bear looking at the market price of square blue tomatoes, and say how likely you think it is that a square blue tomato will sell for 1250$ sometime this year (which is already 1/4 over).

Well, here I learn about many things that get posted to many other forums; but the converse is not true.   

And about bets, you know Pascal's Bet for sure.  What is the probability that handling bitcoin will get one's soul sent to Hell for eternity?  Since that is either true or false, and we have no information, we must assume it is 50%.... 

Indeed, but (as I wrote some time ago) I never bet  more than a pizza and beer, and that only when I am fairly certain that I am right and the other guy is wrong, and I know why.  (Some 10 years ago I bet with a few net friends that the Voynich manuscript was in Chinese or some other Asian language. The bet is still undecided.  Once I met one of them in person and offered to pay the bet, just to "clean up the account", but he gallantly refused.  After that, I bet wiith a physicist here in Brazil that the Gran Sasso faster-than-light neutrinos were just expermental error.  I still have to collect that one, he lives 500 km from here. I feel that I have taken too much risk already for this decade  )

My bear-masked estimates are

LET'S GIVE PROBABILITIES TO THE FOLLOWING EVENTS
a) In 2014, price will visit below 100 = 40%
b) In 2014, price will visit below 200 = 60%
c) In 2014, price will visit below 300 = 70%
d) In 2014, price will visit below 400 = 80%
e) In 2014, price will visit above 500 = 30%
f) In 2014, price will visit above 750 = 5%
g) In 2014, price will visit above 1000 = 1%
h) In 2014, price will visit above 1250 = 0% (for practical purposes)
/LET'S GIVE PROBABILITIES TO THE FOLLOWING EVENTS

Since it is free, why not:
LET'S GIVE PROBABILITIES TO THE FOLLOWING EVENTS
a) In 2014, price will visit below 100 = 10%
b) In 2014, price will visit below 200 = 20%
c) In 2014, price will visit below 300 = 30%
d) In 2014, price will visit below 400 = 40%
e) In 2014, price will visit above 500 = 40%
f) In 2014, price will visit above 750 = 10%
g) In 2014, price will visit above 1000 = 3%
h) In 2014, price will visit above 1250 = 1%
i) In 2014, price will visit above 2000 = 0.1%
j) In 2014, price will visit above 3000 = 0.01%
k) In 2014, price will visit above 4000 = 0.001%
l) In 2014, price will visit above 5000 = 0.0001%
m) In 2014, price will visit above 7000 = 0.00001%
n) In 2014, price will visit above 10000 = 0.000001%
/LET'S GIVE PROBABILITIES TO THE FOLLOWING EVENTS
These numbers were picked while wearing by bull mask. 

It is 2:30 am in China, they should be in bed, but Hobi still has significant volume (1500 BC in 1/2 hour, on "calm" days it is 1/10 of that).

AFAICTFGTO, today Apr/14 was the last day that deposits could be made into Huobi via China's Mechant Bank (CBC).  Withdrawals are still possible.  Huobi had another account in another bank (ICBC) closed a couple of days ago.  Huobi still has accounts open at a few other banks, which have not yet. received closing orders from their headquarters. 

Huobi apparently is pleading with these banks, hoping that it can keep the accounts open by implementing additional controls against money landering etc.

I posted such a plot a while ago, the average yearly appreciation from date X in the past to the present.  It was something like 900% gain for any date X up to Oct/2013, and 90% loss or worse for most X since Dec/2013.

Why would that be more fair?  What matters is what 1 unit of currency can buy.  That is not determined by how many units could be printed, not even by how many exist, but by how many are in circulation, and the demand for them.

Speaking of demand, I recall someone claiming that the bulk of bitcoin "commerce" (excluding investment and speculation), right now, is internet gambling.  Is that true?

Approximate annual inflation rates since Jan/2014:

Euro Area (Euro) 1%
USA (Dollar) 1.6 %
China (Yuan) 2%
Brazil (Real) 6.5%
Argentina (Peso) 11%
Venezuela (Bolívar) 54%
Bitcoinland (Bitcoin) 350%
 

There is a woman pushing bitcoin now in Argentina, IIRC she is claiming 1 M USD/BTC; I think she was mentioned in the WSJ.  And those numbers were still thrown around last December, when I started gawking.

It is possible of course.  It is possible also that 1 DOGE will be worth 1 trillion dollars too, if DOGE gets to be the only internet currency in use, and there will be only 1 DOGE in circulation (all the others being owned and hoarded by @fonzie).  Crazier things have come to pass...

I have absolutely no idea of what the price will do.  However the market clearly is not that optimistic, otherwise the price today would be at least 4000 x 50% = 2000$.

The market today does not give more than 12% probability of that happening; probably much less than that.

It is Monday 3pm in Cyprus, a business day, correct?  Has anyone tried to call the central office, the store, or the "software company", to verify @CAFE_NEO's claims that they are all working normally?

AFAICTFGTO(*), OKCoin's "recharge codes" allow users to buy CNY from other users.

UserA has CNY in his OKCoin account.  UserB ran out of CNY in his OKCoin account, has CNY in hand but cannot deposit it because the bank routes are blocked (assuming that they will be at some point).  So userB gives CNY to userA in some way (without involving OKCoin and their bank accounts), and userA transfers the same amount minus fees+profit from his OKCoin account to userB's OKCoin account.

If that is correct, this system may convince clients to keep their money in their OKCoin account even after withdrawals are blocked.  Clients like userA could make lots of money from those external "fees". Presumably they will find ways to get CNY in or out of OKCoin without going through the bank accounts.

Perhaps UserA can be OKCoin's CEO, or his cat...

(*) As Far As I Can Tell From Google Translate's Output.

Strictly speaking, yes, of course.  I meant that it would be saved in encrypted form and only one or two people would keep the decryption key, for such cases.  But life would be much better if the keeping of such records was not necessary.

Come on, it was not that petty vandalism of Wikipedia that gave me that negative view of the bitcoin "ecosystem".  It is the bulk of what I have read over these four months, especially the hype coming from the "great names". 

Bitcoin was crippled by two great disasters: first, its adoption by "libertarians", and, second, the blooming of the Chinese market.  These developments turned what could have been a great e-commerce invention into the instrument of a legion of skimmers, scammers, and common criminals.  Will the "pure" bitcoiners (if there are any left) have the will and power to get rid of those parasites, before they kill the idea?  I don't see that happening.

Yes it can: I (and thousand other editors) have spent many hours over these years fighting that sort of vandalism of Wikipedia.  That is why I cannot take that joke lightly. 

I just noticed that on Apr/09 some "nice person" edited my entry in Wikipedia, adding the statement that I am an enthusiastic bitcoin investor and owner of one of  the 500  largest bitcoin fortunes.  (The anonymous "nice person" who did it used the IP 145.101.24.158, which is registered to "Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam, Keizersgracht 440, Nl-1016 Gd, The Netherlands".) 

Apart from the attempt to harm me personally, I deeply resent the vandalization of Wikipedia for such purposes.  But I should not be surprised. Unfortunately the bitcoin "ecosystem", from the "patriarchs" and "whales" down to the drooling daytraders, seems to be heavily infested by people who are capable of much worse things.

Which is another reason why I am extremely skeptical about the success of bitcoin.  Why would the world agree to cede control of the global internet currency to such "adorable" people, and let them steal a large slice of its wealth? 

The difference between assets and expenses: if you had two cars, bought two more for 25'000$ each, one is stolen, and you find that the the three remaining cars are worth 10'000$ each in the market,  your expenses are "50'000$ to buy two cars" but you assets are "three cars worth 30'000$".

Agreed, If someone delete a post of his own, it seems better to delete its contents completely and permanently.  In my proposal the placeholder record would contain only the dates of posting and deletion, and the corresponding usernames.

(Depending on the jurisdiction, there may be legal requirements to keep a copy of the contents, e.g. in case of libel or other crime; but in that case the copy must be saved in such a way that not even the admins can read it without judicial order.)

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Monday April 14

Prediction valid for: Monday 2014-04-14, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 2575 CNY.
Bitstamp's predicted price: 414 USD.





Plot legend

Huobi's clients traded until late night, so the data point of Apr/13 UTC was very weak (S = 0.0125, W = 0.045), but was very close (ahem!) to the previous trend.  Therefore it seems reasonable to assume that the trend will hold for one more day still. Weighted least squares fitting to the points of Apr/07, 08, 09, 11, 12, and 13 (assuming that Apr/10 was an outlier) gives practically the same line as before, namely A + B*(d-d0), where d-d0 is the number of days since Apr/07, A = 2797.46, B = -31.81.

The Bitstamp prediction, as usual, is the Huobi prediction divided by the currency conversion factor R, which was assumed to be 6.22 CNY/USD. It was 6.21, 6.24, 6.32 at the last three Slumber Times.
 
Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Saturday 2014-04-12, 22:32 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Saturday 2014-04-13, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~20 hours later)

Not bad for Doomsday's Eve:

Huobi's predicted price: 2609 CNY.
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 2575 CNY
Error:  46 CNY (~7.40 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 417 USD.
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 413 USD
Error: 4 USD
 
NOTE:
  "If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a thumb."
    -- Peter Gutmann

"Tchu tchu" but also "tchuu tchuu" or "chu chu" or "chuu chuu"...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfwXy9n7vQE