Silk Road effect
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[quote name=“Tony” post=“30709” timestamp=“1381251846”]
The whole drug/illegal items aside what silk road did was prove that an anonymous marketplace can exist and that it can work entirely with crypto currencies. Why do we not see other market places taking off like SR but selling legal items? because its easier to use ebay + paypal. At the moment its only really geeks who use crypto currency… o yea and drug users ;)
When access to crypto’s becomes alot easier for the average person is when we might see changes, until then I see the biggest use for cryptos being gambling, drugs and anonymous hosting/VPN’s/VPS’s etc, probably in that order. I left out trading on purpose.
[/quote]Finally someone who’s paying attention! Thank you Tony… The rest of you make me want to scream sometimes.
A certain seediness seems to be a necessary element in getting people’s juices flowing about virtual currencies: speculative fervor, some international crooks, the Winklevii, the demise of sprawling online black market fueled by Bitcoin transactions… it’s these things that are making the currency relevant! By saying, “Oh, look at me in my little glass tower, isolated from the public perception and therefore the market makers, isn’t it CLEAN?” you’ve effectively ignored the striking evidence that Silk Road has done nothing but good things for Bitcoin, it’s acceptance, it’s adoption, and consequently it’s value. Just look at a price chart for Bitcoin, and compare that to the timing of Silk Road. The evidence is so blatant it practically screams, “GIVE ME MORE!”, and yet your celebrating how it was a non-event for Feathercoin.
Did you not notice that Bitcoin transactions increased by 5000% on the day of the shutdown news? Have you not seen the massive amounts of press that’s being generated for Bitcoin? Did you think for one minute that all this press won’t result in a higher valuation of Bitcoins over the long term as it’s increasingly pushed into mainstream perception and usage? Did you really think that the price of Feathercoins being uncorrelated to other currencies is a strong indicator of it’s potential value? Does anyone honestly believe that independence of price within a market is a sign of acceptance and therefore a strong future? Did you sleep through your Economics 101 course in college?
[b]You should all be kicking yourselves for not encouraging more adoption through services that are in high demand.[/b]
If Silk Road had adopted Feathercoins instead of Bitcoins, Feathercoins would be worth dollars instead of cents today. It’s attitudes like this that are holding the currency back. Attitudes like celebrating it’s lack of adoption and patting your collective selves on the back for missing the boat with regards to generating true value and wealth with the currency. These are mistakes to be learned from, not accomplishments to be celebrated. When the price of Feathercoins RISE against a falling BTC price instead of fall with it (which they did, and today they continue to fall), THAT is an indicator of independence, THAT is an indicator of strength, and THAT is the indicator of an amazing community that focuses on the more positive aspects of cryptography.
What you saw was an indicator that it’s so insignificant to the market that no one even bothered. Change that fact, and I’ll buy all the champagne we can drink and celebrate with you. That’s what ChrisJ is entirely focused on, and pushing towards, and devoting a lot of time and effort to, and that’s what you should be putting your energy towards… not keeping it away from where the market demand is.
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Exactly!! Keeping FTC “clean” could be a mistake, some people don’t like drugs, some people don’t like gambling… both can ruin lives as I’m sure we are all aware but as Kevlar said if SR used FTC it would be huge now. Also either in moderation can be fine imo.
Cash can be used to purchase anything so if we want feathercoin to be “digital cash” then why have a problem with certain things being bought or sold for it. For just about any product or service that can be sold, illegal or not there will more than likely be someone who does not agree with it… -
I think we need the Dread Pirate Kevlar! FTC only, learn from previous mistakes, make millions :)
Other than that maybe FTC needs another selling point, yes ACP is ok but removes the decentralisation, I think the next coin to do big things will be a truly anonymous coin, yes bad things will happen but also good things, its kinda like the VPN and tor debate… yes it allows criminals to hide… but it also provides vital protection for some people who really need it. -
[i]Well, Roberts had grown so rich, he wanted to retire. He took me to his cabin and he told me his secret. ‘I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts’, he said. ‘My name is Ryan; I inherited the ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from is not the real Dread Pirate Roberts either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired fifteen years and living like a king in Patagonia.’[/i]
Yes yes… I’m working on the “Let’s secure the blockchain” post. Give it time, I promise it’ll be worth the wait.
In the mean time, I bring you this joke. If you don’t laugh, it’s because you’re still thinking about it wrong:
You: So, how much for your BMW?
Me: I’ll accept 2 Feathercoins.
You: Really? That’s a bit much isn’t it?
Me: Well, it’s a big company… -
I don’t like drugs and silk Road, but any main stream currency is used for illicit. $ and Euro are the 2 top. BTC had enough stability and way to transfer them to be safe for been used at silk road by the big illicit dealer without significant lost(fiat laundering cost ~50%). and Bitcoin is way more difficult to track then fiat.
FTC need to be used to gain value. It will be used in illicit as any other currency or pseudo currency(gold, diamond, stocks, treasury bond, etc.). Kevlar has a drama way to expose things, but the bottom line is true. FTC need to develop usage to be [i]the coin[/i]. Many side usage will happen and it already do some more illicit then others.to be used currency need to be available and usable. both side are very difficult for FTC at the moment. going to exchange with fiat is more problem and cost a lot more then transferring 20K$ between 2 persons from Canada to China and back(yes i have done all). Transferring 20K$ cost around 70$ total and require only 2 Id cards(yes it is between 2 banks accounts).
for availability I really think FTC need to explore some distribution mechanism not yet used by other crypto-currency.
For example a FTC scratch card that can be sell everywhere like many cell phone operator do. those cards can be a way to distribute. This is difficult to do as it require to fix the amount and exchange rate as you sell them in store at fix price. And require to find a way to secure the card to be verifiable and not spendable before the scratch(another problem is I would not trust most scratch card manufacturer to put private key of the coin address to be scratch they would stole the key and cash them when they this just becomes a bit popular). plastic mag strip and other storage just require too much hardware or fiat network link to be possible at the moment. -
[quote]for availability I really think FTC need to explore some distribution mechanism not yet used by other crypto-currency[/quote]
Yeah, that’s another post in the technical forums after the whole secure the blockchain discussion.
[quote name=“groll” post=“30741” timestamp=“1381286639”]
Kevlar has a drama way to expose things
[/quote]I accept that you interpret my passion, energy, commitment, flair, lack of filter, and overall fabulousness as ‘drama’. I’ve certainly been accused of worse things.
If it helps, here’s a picture of what I look like when I’m typing these replies…
[img]http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/tumblr_lp2epd7QrL1qbhtrto1_500.gif[/img]
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I agree Kevlar. What I’m trying to say is due to it’s immaturity, FTC is in a unique position. It’s too young to have adopted wide spread acceptance at the same time it avoided the stigma of being associated with the Silk Road bust. It dodged a bullet that at this point of it’s lifespan would have probably killed it. Bitcoin can survive without the Silk Road due to it’s nature of being the first and earliest adopted technology.
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[quote name=“corather” post=“30744” timestamp=“1381289545”]
I agree Kevlar. What I’m trying to say is due to it’s immaturity, FTC is in a unique position. It’s too young to have adopted wide spread acceptance at the same time it avoided the stigma of being associated with the Silk Road bust. It dodged a bullet that at this point of it’s lifespan would have probably killed it. Bitcoin can survive without the Silk Road due to it’s nature of being the first and earliest adopted technology.
[/quote]There’s no bullet to dodge here. Any adoption is good adoption. If what you are saying was true, then UNOCS would have killed it. But it didn’t. There’s is NO stigma, because there was no disgrace, and all the price charts prove just how incorrect that statement is. UNOCS was a disgrace and left a stigma on Feathercoin… one the market has generally ignored.
It’s quite the opposite of what your saying: Instead of being shamed or humiliated as you keep suggesting, Bitcoin [b][i][u][size=14pt]gained widespread adoption and rocketed to 100x it’s value inside a year![/size][/u][/i][/b]. It stood up, loud and proud, and said, “Not only is this just fine, it’s what I’m good at!”. The rest is history in the present making! You think there’s a sigma merely by association, but there isn’t, and the price charts are the proof.
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FYI Kevlar is being POSITIVE above. This is a positive statement.
It’s a call to arms.Let’s innovate!
Now, who wants to buy some “candy” from a “stranger”?
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There is no stigma in the charts, because the charts don’t say what caused the rise. In fact, they obscure the causes.
Did the use of bitcoin in drug trade raise the price?
Did the media hype and bad boy image raise the price?
Did the speculator hype and steampunk wannabes raise the price?
Did the perceived anonymity and proven resistance to counterfeiting raise the price?We. Don’t. Know. Period.
The charts tell no tales. Liars and fools do.
But there is a stigma among the people who would rather believe they have moral means to align with their moral choices. And that is a shitload of people. And they’re wrong. But that’s reality.
Another thing: High stakes and common denominator reality about human behavior are the reason drugs and gambling were first online.
The fastest moving products get to market fastest. The canard about drugs and gambling is a load of crap. All new transaction and transmission technologies are adopted by the fastest moving markets. The stigma is real, but the reasoning that motivates it is marginally rational, but most of the time it’s elitist and paranoid.
Kevlar, just because you’re sane, doesn’t mean people around make sane decisions. Question is whether we let the stigma hold us back.
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[quote name=“Kevlar” post=“30746” timestamp=“1381291539”]
[quote author=corather link=topic=3951.msg30744#msg30744 date=1381289545]
I agree Kevlar. What I’m trying to say is due to it’s immaturity, FTC is in a unique position. It’s too young to have adopted wide spread acceptance at the same time it avoided the stigma of being associated with the Silk Road bust. It dodged a bullet that at this point of it’s lifespan would have probably killed it. Bitcoin can survive without the Silk Road due to it’s nature of being the first and earliest adopted technology.
[/quote]There’s no bullet to dodge here. Any adoption is good adoption. If what you are saying was true, then UNOCS would have killed it. But it didn’t. There’s is NO stigma, because there was no disgrace, and all the price charts prove just how incorrect that statement is. UNOCS was a disgrace and left a stigma on Feathercoin… one the market has generally ignored.
It’s quite the opposite of what your saying: Instead of being shamed or humiliated as you keep suggesting, Bitcoin [b][i][u][size=14pt]gained widespread adoption and rocketed to 100x it’s value inside a year![/size][/u][/i][/b]. It stood up, loud and proud, and said, “Not only is this just fine, it’s what I’m good at!”. The rest is history in the present making! You think there’s a sigma merely by association, but there isn’t, and the price charts are the proof.
[/quote]I don’t completely agree. The huge sell off spoke volumes. Tell me that didn’t leave a lasting impression on anyone involved who frantically sold off out of pure paranoia.
Or maybe I’m paranoid?
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Obviously we can’t prove causality, so let’s deal in facts and charts (shamelessly lifted from The Genesis Block) and see if we can’t draw some strong correlations, shall we?
On December 30, 2010, bitcoin was traded at $0.30/BTC. The court documents point to Silk Road’s first known publicity occurring via posts from Ulbricht on internet forums and an explanatory WordPress page beginning on January 27, 2011. Bitcoin tripled in value, reaching parity with USD, just two weeks later on February 8.
Bitcoin then traded between between $0.65 and $0.80 for the next two months until interest was reignited by coverage in major publications, including TIME Magazine and The New York Times. In the weeks following the NYT piece, bitcoin prices and volume exploded, drawing significant attention from the media. Notably, Gawker broke a story about the Silk Road itself, pushing up the last gain of one of bitcoin’s early bubbles.
As bitcoin reached a remarkable 100x year-to-date growth at $30/BTC on June 7, the relationship between Silk Road and bitcoin would see its first true test. On June 8, 2011, Senators Charles Shumer and Joe Manchin wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, urging him to investigate bitcoin for its relationship to online narcotics purchases, as well as “urge [Holder] to take immediate action and shut down the Silk Road network.†Bitcoin plunged 66% to $10 over the next three days, trending downward to $2 by November 2011. It would seem that in 2011, direct use of bitcoin on Silk Road or speculators on its adoption comprised between 66% and 93% of the currency’s value.
[img]http://thegenesisblock.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2011-bubble.png[/img]
Over the next few months as the calendar rolled over into 2012, once again coverage from a number of important press outlets like TIME and Wired rallied enthusiasm for bitcoin, pushing prices up to a stabilized $5 by February. According to the complaint that is also around the time Ulbricht began to add features to Silk Road, including the establishment of a forum and “stealth mode†for top vendors.
In June of 2012, bitcoin began another rally. By this time, infrastructure in the bitcoin world had begun to increase dramatically, including the first bitcoin ASIC companies to begin advertising products and new exchanges being formed. Gawker ran another story about Silk Road in July 2012, which appears to have had positive impact on bitcoin prices, though not nearly to the extent it did previously. The months following proved to be highly transitional, with Bitcoin Foundation putting a public face on the new industry and early 2013 seeing the European financial troubles that led to the climb to $260 in April of this year and unprecedented global attention.
Just a few weeks later the markets would see another test of the relationship between Bitcoin and Silk Road. Between April 24 and May 1, Silk Road suffered a series of DDoS attacks that sent bitcoin prices sliding downwards. The negative price action was timed perfectly with the attacks, indicating a strong relationship. While the drop was significant at 35% initially before leveling off around a 25% loss â€" it was notably lighter than the impact of negative Silk Road news previously.
[img]http://thegenesisblock.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/april-2013-ddos.png[/img]
Looking at the impact from the most recent news, we see a similar pattern emerging. Despite being the definitive end of Silk Road, with its founder detained and the logos of federal agencies plastered across the site, the impact on bitcoin prices was relatively muted. On the initial news break USD/BTC rates fell 20-35%, depending on the exchange, before settling around 10-15% lower than before the news shortly thereafter.
[img]http://thegenesisblock.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/October-2013.png[/img]
Also contained within the filings were a number of aggregate statistics about Silk Road’s transactional volume that shed significant light on how much of the bitcoin market was built around the company’s narcotics trade. Specifically, the complaint states that site’s total revenue between February 2011 and July 2013 was 9.5 million bitcoin. Over that same period approximately 225 million bitcoin were transacted over the block chain, of which the 9.5 million in Silk Road sales accounted for just 4%.
Similarly, total exchange volume over the same period was roughly 75 million bitcoin, making Silk Road approximately 12% of total volume. This, of course, assumes all bitcoins used for purchases on the site were purchased on exchanges rather than obtained from in person transactions, mining, earnings, gifts or reused by sellers to purchase from others on the site.
Important to remember is that these figures are aggregate stats over two years of revenue. Unless fiat-equivalent sales on Silk Road were growing exponentially alongside bitcoin exchange rates over the past two years, this also means the bitcoin volume listed in the filing is front loaded into the periods when more bitcoins were required for the same fiat equivalent purchasing power. This coincides with the market reactions that also indicates a significantly reduced importance of Silk Road on the bitcoin economy.
The huge sell off DID speak volumes: It demonstrated conclusively that the Silk Road’s effect has encountered decreasing importance on the bitcoin economy compared to the past, and that bitcoin has entrenched itself into our global economy and [u]it’s importance and value has grown proportionate to it’s adoption[/u].
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False. $30 to $2 was caused by GOXOCAUST. The GOXOCAUST destroyed faith people had in the coin.
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Honestly, FTC price may be significantly decreased.
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[url=http://www.coindesk.com/silk-road-alternatives-emerge-public-hammers-fbi-bitcoin-wallet/]http://www.coindesk.com/silk-road-alternatives-emerge-public-hammers-fbi-bitcoin-wallet/[/url]
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[quote name=“mirrax” post=“30758” timestamp=“1381310340”]
[url=http://www.coindesk.com/silk-road-alternatives-emerge-public-hammers-fbi-bitcoin-wallet/]http://www.coindesk.com/silk-road-alternatives-emerge-public-hammers-fbi-bitcoin-wallet/[/url]
[/quote]Honestly that was pretty much the response on some of the top discussions of Reddit. I wouldn’t be surprised if three or four marketplaces pop up that are each around 60-70% the size of users and available product of Silk Road. A hole in the market is just seen as opportunity to some folks. And why they didn’t sprout out immediately was because they’re going about it smarter, using what caught DPR as a guidebook. Servers in other countries, making sure their physical identity was never attached, smarter op sec, simpler site with less opportunity to exploit, decentralized 3rd party services (mixers, wallets, etc.) and so on.As far as FTC being used in these markets, it will happen but I don’t think it’s going to happen even within the next 6 months. Anyone affiliated with that kind of marketplace would be weary to incorporate FTC because they’d likely be [i]one of us[/i]. There’s nary a person bullish and contributing to Feathercoin that doesn’t also have a presence here. That would narrow it down pretty quick for law enforcement since that person would essentially be making the same mistakes DPR did. And if they have tools (like they say they do) in order to match writing styles to each other to determine how statistically likely it’s the same person… it’s just bad news for someone trying to incorporate FTC into that atmosphere. I’m not opposed to it any more than I’d be opposed to someone using cash to operate it (money is money is money is money) because there’s no point in deifying the currency -only recognizing it’s value.
We’re going to get down to the point where a bunch of these altercurrencies eat each other up or die off. When you’ve got five or six that have their act completely together, that’s the ones you’ll wind up seeing on these marketplaces.
