The method for computing the NAV is detailed in one of the documents available from the OTCQX page.

That fact sheet is from a month ago.  My recollection is from early 2014, when they had promised an open market (for Q1 2014, IIRC), but OTCQX was not mentioned. 

Redemptions too used to have an N month maturation period (originally 6, extended to 12?) before they dould be redeemed. Isn't that going to be the case still?

From the posts on the SecondMarket observer thread, I understood that the company contracted by Greyscale already finished its part of the task; but the shareholders who wish to sell still have to do some paperwork, that may take several days.

I think I saw one somewhere.

I humbly propose "godot" as the SI unit of BIT share liquidity, namely 1 traded BIT share.

Read the two quotes from the investors. They do not mention bitcoin nor crytocurrencies, intead they say "digital payments". 

Apart from the investment, the big news in the article is basically


Ditto for the plans to service China:  since the Chinese merchants and services cannot quote their prices in bitcoins, Circle will be a way to convert bitcoins or dollars in the US to yuan in China.  Guess which of the two services may generate enough fees to repay 50 M$ of investment. (BitPay's bitcoin-to-dollar service processed ~160 M$ of payments in the whole of 2014, which may have generated 3--4 M$ of fee revenue at most.)

By the way, the article says


When Coinbase opened their exchange they too made this claim.  Somewhere in their FAQ, however, it was explained that Coinbase's bank account was FDIC insured against failure of the bank, for the standard 250'000 $ total.  They also claimed that they were licensed to operate in NY and CA, when in fact they just had assumed, erroneously, that they did not need licenses there; and that their BTC holdings were insured by a private company, when only the 5% max that they keep in their hot wallet was.

I wonder if Circle's statement above too is making full use of the wonderful flexibility of the English language?

That is my point, the VC investors of Circle and Coinbase must not be interested so much in bitcoin as they are in the fiat-to-fiat service.  That market is MUCH larger than bitcoin-to-fiat or fiat-to-bitcoin.


You were too subtle. I really thought that you were finally seeing the light. 

Nice, but bitcoin is actually becoming less relevant to Circle's business, it would seem...

Suppose a person in the US sends USD throught Circle to a person in China who will receive CNY.  Circle does not necessarily have to use bitcoin for that.  If it has enough reserves at both ends, it only needs to adjust its own internal ledgers.  Like Western Union, or any bank. 

They need to send bitcoins, and sell them in the local markets, only if their reserves get too unbalanced.

Indeed, that was my guess for the reason for Coinbase and Circle getting so much VC investment: they intend to become competitors to PayPal in the "fiat" e-payment business, using bitcoin only occasionally if at all.

Attempt to determine how much of the raw blockchain transaction volume is gambling, how much is spam, how much is e-payments, etc.

While planning that event, you may want to consider this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/347qix/the_only_woman_going_to_richard_bransons_big_butt/

Confirmed. I already swapped half or my Bitcoin holdings for equal number of Fonziecoins.  Is there going to be a guaranteed 1:1 BTC:FZC floor?

I did not mean to say that it devalued 30% from the value it had at the time of approval, athough my use of "after it was approved" could be read that way.  Sorry for that.


And it did not work well as a store of value, either.  That was my point.


It would have been a severe hit to anyone who invested in euros; but no sane investor should invest in a currency. 

The drop may cause hardship to those who have pensions or salaries fixed in euros; but it will take some time for the exchange rate drop to be translated into a drop of local purchasing power.

While the price is above the  hard floor, GLD and COIN will be ultimately zero-sum games.  The losses suffered by those who bought too high are not just "acceptable collateral damage", but the very reason for the existence of those funds: because the profits of lucky speculators can only come from those losses. 

It is true that the "wallet" log provided by walletexplorer is not official, and may be missing some addresses that belong to Bitpay but were never used together with the identified ones.  However, the data from that wallet is consistent with the little information that BitPay itself has released, and other indirect evidence.  For example,  the payment made by Josh Zerlan (of BFL fame) for his new home, which was announced in local newspapers and the bitcoin media, can be clearly identified there.  The shape of those plots also does not show any indication of missing data.

As I discuss in Tim Swanson's blogpost, the flatness of the second plot is quite surprising (but, again, consistent with BitPay's figures).  Not even the Nov/2013 bubble had any effect on the BTC daily volume (whereas it clearly affected the number of deposits per day).  Note that the price of bitcoin varied from ~13 to ~1200 and back to ~300 in that interval.  I had expected to see the payment volume in USD to change gradually, so there would be more BTC being processed when the price was low, and less when the price was high.  The only explanation that I can think of for that flatness (and for the lack of a weekly pattern) is that the bulk of the BTC volume is miners spending their coins, which were produced at a constant rate of 3600 BTC/day through that period.  But even that explanation has some problems. 

Anyway, the discrepancy between the first and second plots suggests that the number of deposits per day is dominated by e-payments with fairly small value, so that the bulk of those transactions account for 10% or less of the total BTC (or USD) volume processed.  BitPay's  own data says that, excluding mining, travel, precious metals, and gift cards, their e-payment volume in 2014 was about 500 USD per merchant in the whole year.  By the 80-20 rule of thumb, I would guess that half of their 50'000 merchants did not make a single bitcoin sale in 2014.

Yes, gold had a speculative bubble after GLD was approved -- thanks in part, it seems, to an intensive FUD-based marketing campaign about the impending collapse of everything else, a la Max Keyser and Zerohedge.  But the bubble has already deflated 30%, which must have ruined many people who believed those "specialists" and did not realize that the price was holding itself by its own bootstraps.

I understand that, in the moral value system of the financial industry, anything that may result in fat profits for smart and/or lucky speculators is by definition "good".  Well, sorry, I am not of that religion myself.

It makes investing in such assets a gamble with unknown and unknowable odds and prizes.  Gold at least has a hard price floor, based on its industrial and decorative uses.  Bitcoin doesn't.

I understand that the SEC will not block risky instruments, as long as the potential investors are clearly informed about the risks.  The question is, can one really do that with bitcoin, without scaring the investors away?

I think that it is totally immoral, if not worse, to try to sell bitcoin -- whether bare or wrapped in fund shares -- to people who do not have the necessary knowledge to really understand the risks, and may be taken in by the glowing predictions of Anotonopoulos, the Winkles, and other "bitcoin evangelists".  But, unfortunately, the expected market for those funds is precisely that kind of investor...

If you read carefully that blog post, you will learn who was the creator of those plots and the author of most of the text in it.

I don't recall whether I posted those plots on reddit or here or on both places, but that full explanation was attached to the plots at the time.

Why is doubting the approval and asking for data on SEC performance "spreading FUD"? 

I am not sure COIN will be approved either.  It has certainly the same problem as GLD, namely being based on an asset whose price is almost entirely speculative, not grounded on concrete fundamentals.

Actually, gold does have some fundamentals, only that they account for only a small fraction of the current market price.  And GLD (like gold) lost 1/3 of its value after it was approved by the SEC.  Would that fact influence SEC's decision about COIN?

No, those are PRICE ratios. Can't help if you can't understand them.  And the price of bitcoin may be vaguely on-topic here, I suppose.


Bitpay is still supposed to be the largest bitcoin payment processor, with over half of the total number of merchants that "accept bitcoin", including some of the biggest names like Dell.  If you know where I can get similar data for Coinbase, I (and other serious students of bitcoin out there) would like to know about it.  And, again, "increasing adoption" is claimed HERE all the time as one of the main reasons why the PRICE should start going up "any time now".

Like, for example, actually reading the 5th amended COIN filing?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzmzQja7a2M

Because otherwise it gets curly, joe?