Silk Road effect
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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.
