Wouldn't Einstein say that one cannot ever know whether it was the bar that walked into the man instead?

Well, two chemists would never walk into a bar; because, how could they ever decide which alcohol they want?

Does that mean that the price will keep increasing steadily all the way to single digits? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzNzgsAE4F0

Thanks for the link!  

Indeed, those amounts match 6828 k /  ~315 and 16298 k /  ~725 are approximately equal to 22'000 BTC.

You saw those articles too, so I was not dreaming.  Perhaps the deal got sour after it was announced?  Or perhaps Fortress actually swapped the raw BTC for PBP fund shares, not for Pantera equity; which, being pegged to BTC, are counted as BTC for the purposes of the report?
   
EDIT: since they spent 20 M$ on those coins, they must have bought when the price was ~910 $/BTC, i.e. around 2013-11-26 --- only 3 days before the peak. (They could have bought in early or mid Dec/2013, near the peak of the first reboud; but that seems rather unlikely.)  It is comforting to know that big whales make mistakes too...

If two bored physicists walked in instead, and he asked 'what's da matter', would he get a two-hour lecture about it, including inertia, gravitation, leptons, baryons, quarks, neutronium, relativity, and the Higgs boson?

In terms of safety, investing in bitcoin (remotely) by buying GBTC shares does not seem to be much safer than buying and keeping (a bit more directly) in a Coinbase wallet. 

As for institutional investors: recall that Fortress Investment (a multibillion financial outfit, not to be confused with TradeFortress) bought some number of bitcoins directly in 2013.  Bitcoin was the only red stain in their 2014 quarterly reports.  Fortress quicky got rid of their bitcoins, swapping them for equity in the Pantera subsidiary that runs the PBP bitcoin fund. (Note: not shares of the fund, but shares of the managing company).

This example shows that some big institutional investors could invest in raw bitcoins, but currently don't want to, presumably due to its high risk and unpredictable future.  These same reasons should prevent them from buying GBTC or COIN shares, since their financial risk cannot be better than bitcoin's.

That Resolution (not law, passed by a very narrow margin) merely creates a Council to study the issue, but study it very carefully:

65     BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Legislature and the Governor encourage the
66     council to share its findings, including recommendations, with the Revenue and Taxation
67     Interim Committee before September 1, 2016.

 

It also says

68          BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that a copy of this resolution be sent to the Utah state
69     treasurer, the director of the Division of Finance, the executive director of the Governor's
70     Office of Management and Budget, the executive director of the State Tax Commission, local
71     advocacy groups that support the use of bitcoin, and other public or private entities that may
72     have interest in the Council on Payment Options for State Services as proposed by this
73     resolution.

What, no Prof. Bitcorns?

And what about Litecoin, Dogecoin, or Monero?  I thought that in Utah a man was "able to share his love with as many cryptocoins as he likes" ...

IIRC, the government that deposed the left-leaning president Zelaya wanted to hand over the administration of some towns to private companies instead of elected mayors and aldermen.  I don't know what came of it.

I posted a few weeks ago at the SeconMarket BIT thread:

The explanation of the plot is here.

Note the four steps in the blue and magenta lines in Nov/2014, in a plot that was otherwise flat since may/2014.  Those steps are four investments in SMBIT, at 1 week intervals, adding to ~10 M$. They triggered the acquisition by SMBIT of ~7000 BTC.  Those buys need not have been imemdiate; the blue line suggests that, buy it is computed from the magenta line, not from independent data.

Curiously those four investments almost coincide with the rise of the Nov/2014 "mini-bubble".   Could those buys have been the cause (or trigger) of that mini-bubble? 7000 BTC seems too little to have a visible effect...

PS: in that financial report by DigitalBTC (now renamed DigitalCC?) they also say that they had a "Net Loss After Tax of 2.3 million AUD due primarily to non-cash accounting adjustments to the fair value of bitcoin inventory and performance rights and depreciation".

The only miner for which we have reliable data is the Australian company DigitalBTC, because it is publicly owned (i.e. its shares are traded on the Australian stock exchange) and therefore they have to publish audited and detailed quarterly reports.  They also act as BTC brokers, and are trying to become a software company.

In their financial report for the second half of 2014 they say

    Bitcoins held on 30 June 2014: 3,600
    Bitcoins earned from mining: 9,717
    Bitcoins sold from mining: (12,559)
    Bitcoins purchased for acquisition of mining hardware: 3,165
    Bitcoin paid for acquisition of mining hardware: (3,165)
    Increase in Liquidity Desk bitcoins: 1,614
    Bitcoins held on 31 December 2014: 2,372

Browsing through the exchange "wallets" exposed in http://www.walletexplorer.com/ we can also find transactions that move largish lumps of BTC from some miners to some exchanges.  For example, in Bitpay's presumed input wallet we find these deposits by KnC

2013-11-18 10:46:54 085b09cfbe1d6f5214842ded9d8d2a50e467a6b51f82fbdaefecc63e7d2b2ebb   +2900.00000000 KnCMiner.com
2013-11-23 17:40:08 c61b49f50a6fd7112747375f4cd14cde6e4a2c28d9b88b0ed64b838087fc258d   +1000.00000000 KnCMiner.com
2014-01-03 07:20:58 a53e12545d054126d422fdb4f664107843ba5aa2555d9bdb1f759631febb82cd    +888.67670000 KnCMiner.com
2014-01-06 15:00:31 fe378b97f1f5dc4dbf3ee6059c6f226988c090eb149a90a66baf0bf5c7a0fb9e   +1375.69510000 KnCMiner.com
2014-01-13 10:34:52 fb49859a319462afccea88d50ef0238ada66679ebbb64f172dc5a6dcf57fa41e    +849.35700000 KnCMiner.com
2014-01-21 06:29:42 1e89707414df189934e21ef7c200ef7833e2867a062e4084c9a07636d5d0fa3d    +497.57430000 KnCMiner.com
2014-01-22 16:06:12 fc0c75776779c48ba4b6fd843848ae7b26ab56263c99aaf0024e4c9056c5a779    +672.85790000 KnCMiner.com
2014-01-27 07:31:57 98435bdcabee4aa43d951f8f4d402fa61ae0006a8388aba49baae3e74af2d8fc    +493.60870000 KnCMiner.com
2014-01-27 16:44:32 4570a7a8ae134099def4b6c26c79c8f90b8c754339dafb941ac508835956e1b0    +182.79950000 KnCMiner.com
2014-02-18 08:24:31 a6b640f6b3ccc0a88730797b925a558f25daf8e6390636861583246a810601a3   +4496.11720000 KnCMiner.com
2014-02-20 08:13:24 026f92da78db19fe561a05f0a77104619783452a8f24a4efed8719abd9553a95    +460.31630000 KnCMiner.com
2014-02-24 16:09:50 0621cddd70fb86f74adda088209831516e6ab9384663fd517bc7fbee7a12f30b   +1758.82190000 KnCMiner.com
2014-02-27 14:38:24 7396ca676a238a21fb45f0b96d6191053b25daef0e3e56ad2d54c7cd46442479   +1420.45130000 KnCMiner.com

These amounts may be KnC paying their bills and buying equipment.   BitPay presumably sold those coins soon afterwards (One can see in that wallet also many large transfers to Bitstamp and Bitfinex.)

These are only samples, that show only that miners like KnC sometimes sell some of their coins; but we cannot tell how much, because only some of their addresses are identified as theirs in that site.

Oops, thanks for the correction.

The people in charge of the auction don't care much for the sale value per se, because they don't get comission on it.  Their main worry is not doing anything that they can be blamed for.  If the auction fetches somewhat less than market, and/or the price rallies just afterwards, *shrug*.  If the auction fetches much below market because  the lots and/or the total amount were excessive, *oops*, that may leave a stain on their service record.  If they fail to follow some rule or law, and some bidder makes a fuss abut it, that is *oops* too.  (There may be corruption, e.g. leaking of bids to other bidders, but that shoudl not make much difference on the sle price.)

SecondMarket did not bid for themselves on the previous auctions.  In both cases, they only formed syndicates (assaciations) of small bidders who would not bid for a whole 2000 or 3000 BTC lot, and merged their bids into full-lot bids.  On the first auction they did not get a satoshi, Tim Draper took all the ~30'000 BTC.  On the second auction they got 48'000 of the 50'000 BTC, and Tim took the other 2000.  SecondMarket promptly distributed the 48'000 BTC to the small bidders, after taking a 1% service fee from them.

Their BIT fund only buys BTC when investos buy BIT shares.  BIT now has ~135'000 BTC in their possession, but it has not grown since May/2014, except for a 10 M USD  "freak" investment in November.   Only a few investors had the opportunity to withdraw; redemptions have been disbled since October, and it is not clear whether they will ever be re-enabled.

BIT investors have been barred from selling their shares to other people since the beginning.  The listing on OTCQX and the possibility OTC trading of the shares (only those older than 12 months) does not directly cause buying or selling of BTC by the fund.  However, if the BIT shares get traded at significantly more than their nominal value (the market price of 0.1 BTC), BIT may buy more BTC and issue more shares to sell to the brokers.  Conversely, if the BIT shares get traded at significantly less than their nominal value, BIT may buy back those shares from the brokers and sell the corresponding BTC.

How much is the Wordpress hosting fee/subscription?

I already posted this, but there seem to be many new users who may need the information:

The English suffix "-ant" can be attached to some verb roots to yield an adjective or noun that means someone or something who is doing (or just did, or customarily does) the action signified by the verb.  The root verbs that take this suffix seem to be mostly of Latin origin, that had infinitive ending in "-are"; those with "-ere" Latin infinitives take the "-ent" suffix instead.  Thus for example, while "to solve" gives "solvent", and "to precede" gives "predecent", we have "protestant" from "to protest", "claimant" from "to claim", "entrant" from "to enter" (Latin "entrare"), etc.

Remeber this whenever you feel the urge to click "ignore".

But you said that ignoring what I can ignore is not good, so ignoring what I can't ignore must be worse than just 'not good', right?

Oh... but, if ignoring the truth is not good, what about ignoring the consequences of one's ignorance -- is that a criminal offense?

But didn't he himself say that I can ignore the truth?

If it is true, then, is it OK if I ignore it?