The nightmare scenario that has enthralled /r/Bitcoin for weeks has now happened. Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange, has ceased to exist. (self.SubredditDrama)
SubredditDrama
719 ups - 204 downs = 515 votes
The discussion is happening [here] (http://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yuopj/tradingdisabledonmtgoxitshappening/).
Try to keep in mind when commenting that lives have been ruined.
I see some of you guys are already having your fun
http://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yuopj/tradingdisabledonmtgoxitshappening/cfnxame
The 'this is actually good news' post that isn't a joke
http://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yuopj/tradingdisabledonmtgoxitshappening/cfnzpx8
618 comments submitted at 05:22:25 on Feb 25, 2014 by datums
"the best part about bitcoins is that you get to watch libertarians slowly discover why financial regulations exist to begin with"
From what I've seen with bitcoin is that it crashes over and over again, with people losing huge amounts of money each time, and they don't learn. How can you have a usable "currency" that is so unstable and untrustworthy?
I love the complete ignorance of reality in this thread.
>The lesson is not that nobody can be trusted. There are countless good men and women in this community who are worthy of trust, and some of the very best people I've ever met.
>And finally, the lesson is not that we ought to seek out "regulation" to save us from the evils and incompetence of man.
That is what regulation is for! Human beings are untrustworthy, lazy, people who do not give a shit about other human beings. Regulation is to ensure these people don't fuck you over and lose millions of pounds worth of money belonging to thousands of people. Had this exchange of been regulated it most likely wouldn't have collapsed, even had it of collapsed people wouldn't have lost so much and the owners would probably go to jail for negligence.
At this point it amuses me more than anything that people still have faith in bitcoin, crash after crash and still they pump more money in. Maybe this will be a wakeup call after they've lost literally hundreds of thousands of pounds in pretend internet money.
The guy who wrote that is making money off the ideologically blinded and economically illiterate.
He totally serves to profit off of all of this. I don't know why reddit takes this shit when it comes via a selfpost when a bank CEO could same the same bullshit and reddit lynches them. They're too willfully ignorant to realize that this is the same exact thing.
"Keep buying bitcoins! It's good for the currency*
*my personal wealth that is completely tied to this internet money that is freefalling currently"
You pretty much described the entirety of the Right Wing, libertarianism and Bitcoin included.
I'm about the furthest thing from a libertarian, but:
> Human beings are untrustworthy, lazy, people who do not give a shit about other human beings. Regulation is to ensure these people don't fuck you over...
...this is pretty funny. So regulation is untrustworthy, lazy people who do not give a shit about other human beings telling other untrustworthy, lazy people who do not give a shit about other human beings what they can and cannot do. Nope, no downside there!
Bitcoin is entirely voluntary. In the interest of future hilariousness, I hope it continues to attract suckers and crooks.
> Bitcoin is entirely voluntary.
Don't you see that the state has innate right to stick their nose in and regulate any algorithmic computation that might one day possibly hurt some foolish people?
I mean, it crashes a lot, but it's trending up overall. If I had kept my first bitcoins from 2 years back instead of buying weed (1/2), I would be $9000 richer than I am today.
How easy is it to get that $9000 back into USD though?
no idea
That's my real question about bitcoin millionaires... could these people with tens of thousands of dollars in this currency simply pull out 50k one day? Or are they holding out hope that the shit they'd spend money on would just start accepting bitcoin?
That's what just happened at Mt. Gox.
They sold for millions, took away the ability to sell BC for USD and transfer your BC hosted by Gox to other sources.
I assumed their plan was to then start to buy back BC from their customers at a significant lower price, but I haven't followed what they have done very closely.
> could these people with tens of thousands of dollars in this currency simply pull out 50k one day?
Nope. Most exchanges limit customers to withdrawing $5k per day. Most of the people with substantial quantities of cash in BitCoin are locked in. I suspect this is a large part of why so many people are so damned zealous about plugging BitCoin no matter how ridiculously it is failing. They are trapped with no way out.
At the peak value of btc, not hard. Not easy either, mind you, and the IRS might have some pointed questions for you, but the actual mechanics of getting cash for coins wasn't terrible.
Hell if I hadn't bought a bunch of acid I'd be about 75k richer right now. As is I'm okay with having just got acid and not buying into the insane hype train like some of my friends thougj.
Pretty easy actually. MtGox hasn't done USD withdrawals reliably for a long long time (one of the many warning signs they've been talking about over there at r/bitcoin), but there's several other options that still work.
Well, it was trending up. Ever since it reached it's ~$1000 peak it has been oscillating between ~$500 and ~$750.
I think your post sums up bitcoins. You're viewing them as a commodity that changes in price rather than a currency to be spent. You should be spending them on products rather than hoarding them.
They have some uses, if you need to transfer money anonymously. It's the people who are speculating on it that are making the price vary so much.
Nah man, it'll be better this time.
If it were regulated (and large enough), it would've been bailed out at taxpayers' expense. At least in this case only the people with their money there lost it.
As I see it, bitcoin has value, has momentum, and people actively use it to buy and sell. We can easily convert currency to and from bitcoin. It's sort of already achieved what it set out to do. I'm not a member of /r/bitcoin, and I don't even have any bitcoins, but I don't understand how bitcoin went from being a paragon of internet ingenuity to some kind of trolololol fedora finance.
Bitcoin is here and doing stuff and some of that stuff might be bad but, hey, so is much of the regulated finance sector. I wish bitcoin weren't so relentlessly attacked. It's an actual usable virtual currency, and that's a pretty great achievement. I feel like some of the resentment bitcoin faces comes from that we all read about bitcoin years ago before it was up to values of even $5, but we all missed the easy money train, so now every week we sit around and suck each other's dicks over bitcoiners being idiots and their currency losing value.
> we all read about bitcoin years ago before it was up to values of even $5, but we all missed the easy money train,
Like the begining of a pyramid scheme?
"A fraudulent scheme in which people are recruited to make payments to the person who recruited them while expecting to receive payments from the persons they recruit"
I hate it when 'pyramid scheme' gets thrown around like this. A pyramid scheme is a specific scam. Bitcoin is certainly not a pyramid scheme. Bitcoin is or was a speculative bubble. When you see a stock on NASDAQ go up by 500% in a year you don't point to it and call it a scam or a pyramid scheme.
What you're really putting forward is that the bitcoin bubble was manipulated, but there's not really any evidence of that. At the moment it looks like the market value of a bitcoin genuinely is somewhere between $100 and $1000. These makes sense considering its popularity and scarcity.
> What you're really putting forward is that the bitcoin bubble was manipulated, but there's not really any evidence of that.
Surely you're joking. There have been charts showing a massive sell off hours before the MTGOX sell off. There have been other scandals about pools challenging the stability of the entire system by using a more profitable, but less fair algorithm.
Honestly, you sound really naive about this whole thing, almost as if you're just seeing this for the first time.
It has been manipulated on smaller scales of course, but the rise from cents to dollars to hundreds of dollars is in line with its demand. It's not just investors, it's doing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of transactions every day.
it can't be a viable currency as long as it continues to be a volatile investment vehicle. Isn't that really the meat of this argument? Why buy something in bitcoin when it could gain 20% tomorrow?
I don't think you quite understand what a bubble is. A bubble doesn't need to involve market manipulation (although many do). A bubble is the increase of unsustainable market prices for a product that is overvalued, especially by speculators. Speculators are all over bitcoin because they're hoping it'll continue to go up.
I realize we can argue about things and whether they have inherent value/utility (gold yadda yadda yadda) but I very much doubt Bitcoin can sustain these prices in the long run.
He already said that it was a bubble.
I think the parallels come from the idea that you get your bitcoin, and then you bring other people in the increase demand and inflate the value of your already purchased coin.
It's not 100% accurate, I know, but as I understand it, as a layman admittedly, the value of bitcoin is entirely dependent on demand outstripping supply.
I actually have anywhere between 60 and 400 USD worth of BTC I mined at the beginning depending on the price of the day and I still think it's stupid. It could have been useful but a growing group of "get rich quick" investors turned it into this thing that's about increasing your dollars rather than lubricating the gears of internet trade.
Dogecoin is fun because it's not like that. You can mine 2000 DOGE in a few days with a good GPU then tip it or donate it because it's not even worth a dollar. Mining BTC is now impossible without dedicated hardware and tipping 0.000001 BTC looks like an insult.
yes. bit coin mining has become the domain of very wealth people running ASIC rigs in the USA, because that is the ONLY place electricity is cheap enough.
Bitcoins entire value and momentum is wrapped up in its cult like community. John Q Average isn't touching bitcoin yet, and may never will.
>John Q Average isn't touching bitcoin yet, and may never will.
Not to mention by the time usage picks up, transaction times are going to take 10-30 minutes, as the way BTC works it doesn't scale well. So "John Q Average" is going to be asking himself why every young person is telling him he should use this complicated currency that has no backing, no way to insure it, and no protection, and on top of that takes a long time to process. Meanwhile, his debit/credit card works just fine, transactions take seconds, and he has fraud protection and large regulated institutions behind it.
Other than the "IT'S ALWAYS GOING TO GO UP IN VALUE!!!!!" people, there's no real benefit of switching to bitcoin for a normal person who doesn't care about buying drugs online anonymously, and doesn't care about libertarian/ancap ideals of some governmentless utopia that bitcoin is going to usher in.
>Not to mention by the time usage picks up, transaction times are going to take 10-30 minutes,
Can you explain why this is?
> there's no real benefit of switching to bitcoin for a normal person who doesn't care about buying drugs online anonymously, and doesn't care about libertarian/ancap ideals of some governmentless utopia that bitcoin is going to usher in.
Well, it's good for sending money around the world or buy stuff online. The transaction fees are a lot smaller and you don't have to deal with the asshole that is paypal.
>Can you explain why this is?
BTC transactions take time, as the BTC "ledger" that records all transactions is Gigs in size, and has to be read/updated in multiple places everytime a transaction occurs. Right now BTC trans can take minutes. If more people were using that, the transaction time are going to go up as a result of A. more volume, and B. The ledger itself growing in raw size.
>Well, it's good for sending money around the world or buy stuff online.
It is good for sending money around the world (no transaction/handling fees!), I agree, but buying stuff online is already plenty easy with a card. And the nice part about a card is it has a big bank behind it who can get your money back should it be taken imporperly or fraudently. If your bitcoins get taken your out of luck.
>Bitcoins entire value and momentum is wrapped up in its cult like community
The bitcoin community you see on Reddit is not representative of its actual userbase. It has a market capitalisation of about $6.5 billion USD.
That's not much money at all. The Reddit userbase could easily represent 1 billion or more. Hell, all it takes is a few of the early miners to eclipse that figure, and I'm sure they're hanging around Reddit. It's also not just Reddit, there are other forums with similar craziness.
The people invested in bitcoin right now, for the most part, are the fringes (ultra libertarian, heavy tech), the speculators, the institutional investers, the market manipulators, and a few lemmings. It's not representative of what any healthy asset class should look like.
exactly.
My Meryl lynch banker uncle said the same thing.
Offtopic, but do girls make bank selling panties? I have you res tagged as pantypimp for some reason.
I am a moderator of /r/pantyselling.
Males and females can both make a bit of money on the side by selling their underwear. Once you've had a successful transaction, and particularly after you've made a name for yourself, you can start charging quite high prices. I don't think anyone would consider it their job, but it's some nice money to have for doing something that you'd practically be doing anyway.
What sells better boxers or briefs? What seperates top sellers from the rest?
Definitely briefs for girls. We don't have many male sellers, but those that we've had in the past have been successful. I'd guess that briefs would be the more popular for males too.
Top sellers tend to be those who have a track record of successful sales, who take high quality photographs, and in the photographs pose in ways that appeal to men. That last point seems to be the most difficult for sellers to grasp. Buyers want to see the panties tight against the seller's body. The buyer isn't buying panties so much as he is buying her scent, and he wants to see in the photo evidence that she's going to impart her scent onto it. Top sellers tend to be younger females with conventionally attractive bodies. Sellers also do well when they are flirtatious and interactive, and value-add by selling customised videos and photos with the panties.
Every day I find out how out of touch I am with the rest of the world.
The rest of the world can touch itself to your dirty underwear. Come join us. /r/pantyselling
I don't think you're the one who's out of touch here...
This subthread is massive amounts of completely fucked.
Have any of the sellers tried to expand to oversea markets like Norway or Japan? This is all so fascinating.
So as a dude, if I made a video giving myself a wedgie that would increase the value of my briefs? Or are people more looking for ball musk?
Sellers are from around the world and designate their country in the title. Some sellers do international postage, but we advise against long post times as the panties can lose its scent.
There seems to be a market for everything, so if you advertise wedgie briefs I'm sure someone will want to buy it.
Seems like vacuum sealing the panties would keep their freshness? in.
I might have to corner the wedgie market before others catch on. So which country would you say has the most buyers?
I had thought about this at one time but I hate talking with people and being friendly, don't want to post images of my ass/privates online...also I wondered about period stains- do they make them more valuable?
Wat? Why not just sell one's favorite perfume then?
I don't find anything wrong with the practice, but good god some of those panties are filthy and just look plain gross. But, whatever floats your boat. That is certainly a fetish.
> We can easily convert currency to and from bitcoin.
Uh, no. What you can easily do is convert bitcoin to play dollars that you'll more than likely never see again.
>It's an actual usable virtual currency, and that's a pretty great achievement.
Here's the difference between your buttcoins and the $5 bill in my pocket:
I can walk ANYWHERE and get me a fucking sandwich, where can you go to get a sandwich? I can plop that fucker right on the counter and it's taken at any location. Where can you plop your buttcoins and have an easy, quick, painless transaction to get said sandwich?
>We can easily convert currency to and from bitcoin.
LOL. Fucking LOL.
Apparently we can't, which is why this thread exists.
> bitcoin went from being a paragon of internet ingenuity
blinks
When was this, now?
When the tech blogs were starting to write about its rise, before it jumped up to ~$20 per bitcoin.
Hrm, I mean, it was seen as vaguely interesting from a distributed systems point of view, but nothing hugely special. From an economic point of view, it was always looked on pretty skeptically.
Are you kidding me? It solved a problem that has been with us for thousands of years: decentralized trust. On the technical side, it is a major breakthrough.
> Human beings are untrustworthy, lazy, people who do not give a shit about other human beings.
So let's let a small group of human beings "regulate" other human beings by force! That'll work!
Couple of things.
It's 2014. Why is there still this bullshit debate about whether or not humans are fundamentally good or evil? Ignoring the fact that good and evil are culture dependent concepts, I thought it was common fucking knowledge that humans had complex behavioural patterns. You can be untrustworthy/lazy/ignorant/selfish to some people or at some points or in some ways, whilst being reliable, hard working, knowledgeable and selfless in others. So if you can't sum up the moral fibre of a single person with one derogatory or praising word, by what jaded authority do you claim that all human beings are 'untrustworthy, lazy, people who do not give a shit about other human beings'?
Also all money is pretend money. Most of our 'real' money is electronic anyway. It has no backing, like your argument.
I don't even care that much about your actual point. I actually kind of agree. That is what regulation is for, and rightly so. It's your black and white hyperbole that pisses me off.
My real money is backed by the us government. Not some website that sold magic cards. The end.
>How can you have a usable "currency" that is so unstable and untrustworthy?
currency controls and mass surveillance?
It works for every other currency.
Not really. AFAIK the only (legally) nonconvertible currencies are the North Korean Won, the Transnistrian ruble, and possibly the Cuban Peso.
> How can you have a usable "currency" that is so unstable and untrustworthy?
The currency is technologically sound. Trust is lost in people, not the protocol.
And people have faith in the US dollar, even though the economy has crashed several times as well. With and without regulations.
Because in general the system works, same goes for Bitcoin. Whoever lost (a lot of) money in MtGox, should also look at blaming themselves. You just don't leave so much money in the control of some company, that isn't regulated and showed several times before how incompetent they are.
When was the last time the dollar lost 50 per cent of its value in a week? When was the last time the dollar did that multiple times every few months?
> And people have faith in the US dollar, even though the economy has crashed several times as well.
The thing is, if the USD had even half as much erratic swings as BTC does, everyone with money to invest would be running to the hills, and the American economy would crash into Third World status in mere weeks.
No one in his right mind would hold on to an actual currency that loses 25% of its value overnight. Why does BTC get a free pass when it does the same?
"free market"
"the future"
"[bullshit buzzword combination to pretend this isn't monopoly money]"
It gets a pass because people have seen the value recover before and they want to be the next people to get rich from its recovery.
I know everybody loves this line, but it doesn't quite sit well with me. Honestly, the problem with Bitcoin isn't that it lacks regulation. The problem is that it has, and has always had, practically zero liquidity. Cashing out has always been notoriously difficult.
By analogy, when I was much younger, I used to be seriously into the Star Wars collectible card game. It was a brief contender to Magic: The Gathering, and for a while all the card-trading magazines posted charts claiming that the rare cards were worth $5, $10, $20, and more! I bought several hundred dollars worth of cards, secure in the knowledge that my "investment" was only going to go up in value. After all, the card magazines all said so!
And then, after several years, I tried to sell my cards. And I found out something astonishing: nobody wanted to buy them. My cards were not a store of value, because despite what those magazines (that I paid for!) were telling me, nobody was going to give me fifty dollars for my limited edition Darth Vader. Without a buyer, my cards were worthless.
I don't blame "a lack of regulation" for the worthlessness of my trading cards. It's a lack of buyers. And that's always been Bitcoin's problem. Those prices were almost entirely theoretical, because just not enough people want to trade American dollars for ~~Obi-Wan's Lightsaber~~ Bitcoins. So we can have a chuckle about "libertarians", but in the end these are just kids who got sold a bunch of trading cards.
The game was a lot of fun though, except for force drains.
One of the few card games where it was actually more fun if you both knew what kind of deck your opponent was making
I had a fantastic time playing a "Commence Primary Ignition" Imperial deck against an "Attack Run" Rebel deck. You actually re-enacted the plot of the first Star Wars movie, and it was genuinely fun.
MtG is way more fun if you know what your opponents are doing too. Then you just build a blue control deck and shit all over whatever that might have been.
I meant if both players know what the other player is doing. Agreeing to build space decks or ground decks for example. Or agreeing to have one person run a blow up the death star deck while another runs a blow up the planet deck.
From my experience MtG is too counter based to work like that. If you know what deck your opponent is running then you can easily set up a deck built specifically to counter theirs. If you both know then you both just try and out counter each other. MtG also has too many cards that create bullshit bullshit combos that are near impossible to counter unless you have a very specific card set.
MtG also doesn't have the location component that I liked about SWCCG.
Oh I know, I played the star wars game too. I was being tongue in cheek.
In all seriousness though there are a lot of fun semi-perfect knowledge formats to play mtg with that are way, way more fun than generic constructed or limited. One of my group's standing favorites is 'commander decks'. 100 card deck, No duplicates, each player picks a legendary to be his 'commander'. That commander locks you into your colors. The commander is kept separate from the other cards and can be played at any time as if it was in your hand. Each time the commander dies, it costs another 2 colorless to bring it back out.
I only play MtG when using other people's cards. It can be a fun game, but the amount of money you need to spend to have even a semi viable deck is stupid. Not even a competitive deck, just a deck you can play with friends casually and even have a slight hope of winning.
Yeah, you really need an unholy amount of Cards to do fun variants like that. Luckily all my friends and I started playing in high school so we have binders full.
So there is a silver lining to this.
Please sticky: U.S.A. Suicide Hotline 1-800-273-TALK (8,255). Remember,, it's just money.
EDIT: DISCLAIMER: ,There is no emotion is this post. Please do not ban it. Please follow that link to voice your opinion about the new anti-feelings rules on this subreddit.
This is a, big crash and it's coming at a pretty tough time of year for most people. They're is a spike in suicides this time of year, even without the tough, times for BTC (edit: I've been told this is a myth).
EDIT: Please also see /r/.
13 11 14 for Lifeline Australia.
70 201 201 for Denmark.
EDIT: More here
Beijing -- 0800-810-1117
Osaka -- +81 (0) 6 4395 4343
Russia -- 007 (8202) 577-577
Mumbai, India -- +91 22 2754 6669
Ive been upvoting suicide line posts everywhere I see them in the bitcoin subreddits. Its shameful that their own community is downvoting them as propoganda.
Of course they would downvote it. Why would they want to help people who have no net worth? Clearly the free market has decided that those who lost money don't deserve to live! /s
Oh god. How terrible is it that I can see this being said seriously?
Scrooge: If they'd rather die, then they had better do it and decrease the surplus population. Good night, gentlemen.
So making jokes about suicide is okay when it's libertarians committing it.
Cool, just wanted to make sure I understood.
It's not a joke about suicide, just the Libertarian attitude towards it. Which is reprehensible
So a non-libertarian is telling a libertarian what their attitude towards suicide is. ...Interesting.
But jokes aside, I see suicide as a personal choice that someone has the right to make, like abortion. But like abortion, it's a very sensitive topic that deserves to be treated with some sensitivity. You comment contained nothing of the sort. It was just another "ha ha libertarians are bad people and I think it's funny when they kill themselves".
That is reprehensible. There was an admin post recently that said something along the lines of "remember the human", and it doesn't look like anyone here bothered to read it. I honestly think some people in this subreddit don't see libertarians as human beings.
[deleted]
Removed: Please avoid direct personal attacks
Suicide hotline spam - are they legitimate concern or super edgy passive-aggressive ridicule? Either way it is delicious scootin' fruity popcorn.
No! /u/david-me would never sarcastically post the suicide hotline as a way to ridicule people who have stupidly squandered their life saving.
Never.
Inconceivable
What the actual fuck??? Why are they downvoting those posts???
Because the crazy zealots don't like people mentioning the fact that people are losing money in bitcoin.
Honestly, I kind of feel like this is starting a self fulfilling prophecy.
It's really sad. Bitcoin might be a dumb idea, but people's lives are at stake and I'm sure there are many good people who made dumb decisions about their investments.
I feel bad for people who bought in at the top thinking this might actually be a good currency.
They should add gambling addiction hotlines, too.
You should, like, get a different keyboard, or something... :-\
I did it on purpose. automod was deleting the post, so I fucked it up
[deleted]
No U
I don't know if we need "geniuses" like these.
Smart and thoughtful post. If this even makes one person reconsider their own demise, it's worth it. Not sure why people would downvote it
these messages have been far too effective at keeping bitcoiners from suicide imo
That's an awful thing to say...
It's someone's troll account. Just ignore.
Shit, my (MTM) profit from Bitcoin is only $70,000 now, better kill myself.
> Did you lose money @ Mt. Gox? There is a silver lining! 'United States tax law allows capital gain losses to be rolled forward without a statute of limitation. Thus, your Bitcoin losses will be deductible forever until you’ve used them all.'
Good thing our make believe money is insured by the corrupt system we purported to be free from! Maybe I can deduct my Diablo 3 losses and Montana Militia dollars too!
I deducted my losses on my last Monopoly game where I lost my ass on a 4-house Boardwalk, as well as the last Settlers of Catan game where I was robbed of one of like 3 freaking clays that were rolled the entire game.
I've seen that quote posted often, and I don't believe it. Libertarians/bitcoiners are as dumb today as they were when the whole thing started up.
They aren't learning anything. They get ripped off on such a regular basis, it's not even worth counting any more.
It's different people getting ripped off with each new iteration of the cycle. I think those that lost a significant amount do learn their lesson. It's just that there's always two new idiots to take their place in the cycle.
Edit: missed a word
think about it like you're making a sauce. you put a bunch of shit on over heat, and then you cook the filler off, right? the heat is reality and the filler is sensible people. the end product? flavor.
Yeah, I feel so ripped off now that equivalent of 40 billion $ got transfered from private retirement funds back to the public system, which will be bankrupt any year now. My mother is retiring in 4 years, I wonder how will I be able to support her. But sure, I'm the dumb one for distrusting my government.
Yes, yes you are.
...Oh I think the massive recession did a good job of that.
Some variation of this statement pops up every time bitcoin is mentioned here.
I don't understand why people assume these guys losing millions in coins are rich dudes and not early adopters with no knowledge of financial markets. A rich dude who is investing would have sold on his way up, be involved in multiple markets, and taken serious steps to mitigate risk. These aren't millionaires they are college kids who never realized their gains.
Dunno why people keep repeating that.
Technologically enforced financial regulation is the strength of bitcoin, not its weakness.
The whole idea of bitcoin was to enforce two pieces of financial regulation that the existing system lacks:
Shouldn't surprise anyone to see them adding more as time goes on.
>A global ledger that tracks all transactions
Where's all the MtGox btc?
>Restrictions on printing money out of nothing
This strikes me as ironic considering that people just lost a massive amount of money that never really existed in anything but a digital form...
> Where's all the MtGox btc?
Same place your US Dollar cash goes when give it to MtGox for them to hold.
Dunno why people would trust putting any meaningful amounts of cash of any sort into a Magic The Gathering trading card website.
[Edit - or is your question in which wallet are those coins. Apparently here: https://blockchain.info/address/1Drt3c8pSdrkyjuBiwVcSSixZwQtMZ3Tew?offset=0&filter=0 ]
>Where's all the MtGox btc?
mt gox had a bad implementation of the bitcoin protocol. they lost 750,000 coins in entirely visible transactions, scattered across the block chain over 2 years, because they believed the transaction id was the only thing they needed to check to see if a transaction happened. That is false
Those aren't regulations though. Things they're missing (and are opposed to since government) are things like:
Bans on insider trading Federal deposit insurance Regulations on how banks (exchanges) operate. General rules on trading.
It's pretty much a free for all with bitcoin, and things like this happen. If a bank holding that much $US went under FDIC would help insure most of the money wasn't lost and regulations may have helped prevent it in the first place. That's the kind of thing that hopefully people can learn.
Just knowing where the money is isn't what would prevent economic chaos, and inflation isn't the devil incarnate.
Plans to prohibit creating Bitcoin wallets without ID are already underway.
Edit: downvotes, really? The law will say "one not-so-private key per citizen", believe me!
Won't matter much with the existence of tumblers anyway.
Plans for tumbler licenses are already underway. Haven't you read that Bitcoin rediscovers all regulation?
Won't matter much in the long run as it won't stop people from using integrated trustless mixing wallets such as this.
Let me repeat myself:
No matter how much Bitcoin already is regulated and how impossible it is regulate Bitcoin, I will still claim that Libertarians are stupid, regulations are good and Bitcoin will soon suffer for it's arrogance because this subreddit will give me upvotes. Now please stop your free market propaganda.
u mad
YUM YUM POPCORN.
I'm glad we agree. Libertarians are stupid.
There are tumblers outside of US jurisdiction.
Easy: border checkpoints will not allow large numbers of Bitcoin to leave the country without special permission, just like US cash. Incoming Bitcoin will be interrogated and checked for sings of having been tumbled (drowsiness etc).
We have financial regulation for a reason, folks. You had your fun with your internet play money, now it's time to grow up and bend over.
Well, the REVOLUTIONARY Bitcoin ATM already needs your ID, phone number and palm vein scan to authorize you.
Can't be! SRD told me Bitcoin is unregulated
I agree. It's not like any of our heavily regulated financial products/services have done anything similar to anyone. Oh wait...