In the Middle Ages, the appearance of a comet in the skies was a sign of foreboding. It was thought to predict the death of a king.
Of course, we now know that these dirty snowballs re-enter our solar system with clockwork precision every hundred years or so, and the life expectancy of European kings in the middle ages meant you were lucky if you had time to wash your funeral codpiece before the next royal was murdered in the abbey by his brother.
Maybe its nothing.... I'm an old man now, and I've seen the rise and fall of many marketplaces, big and small. Maybe it's just bad luck, bad timing, or "the Curse of BBMC" but I often find myself accidentally caught up in the center of things when a marketplace decides to exit scam, or I've just bought my cruise ticket and the ship is scuttled, like Abraxas, Nucleus and Oasis. Like I said, maybe it's nothing, but I keep getting a whiff of that smell.
Its the smell you get on the blockchain before a really big market goes. Go on, take a sniff of the front page of https://blockchain.info/ watch those transactions ticking away, and really LISTEN. Did you hear that? Or is it just me? Shush for a minute....maybe it will do THERE! Hear that? Like a cross between a air raid siren, and one of those crazy machine guns helicopters had in the vietnam war! No?
Well I definitely heard it. Its the sound of bitcoin faucets, the great unsolved mystery of the blockchain, having a bitcoin dropped into them, and being cranked up to "vaporize" instead of their usual "drip drip drip". I first heard that sound in February 2014, the week MTGOX stole 1.2 million bitcoins, and SilkRoad 2.0 (it's sister site) had to steal it's own escrow to survive.
There was a hailstorm on the blockchain, coming from three "bitcoin faucets". There is a minimum transaction size on the blockchain, but these three faucets (sites which give away tiny amounts of bitcoin for no apparent reason) had been turned up to full and were smashing bitcoins into hundreds of millions of pieces. Every wallet in the world was being hit by shrapnel which said "UNSPENDABLE" because it was so tiny.
There is no trace of it now. Miners have gradually resolved it away as a mistake, the rules of the blockchain don't allow it. At the time, you couldn't see a thing for it, and bitcoin miners were struggling to create each new block in the 10 minutes before the next one was due.
Take another look at https://blockchain.info/ and look at all those 999kb blocks. The machine guns are laying down a hailstorm of covering fire, miners aren't able to fit everybody's transactions in their block, so they're leaving them for the next miner to do. Yesterday, lots of you were complaining of bitcoin taking ages to confirm.
I've got that feeling in my bones, like a big marketplace, tumbler, or exchange is about to go, without saying "goodbye". Its just a feeling though, and you know what I'm like.
Where were those faucets when oasis blew?
You know, you're the king of FUD. If vendors were rappers, I would say you are "The Game" just coz of the way you always seem to talk a gang of shit, about shit, that's none of your business (by your own choice might I add).
Well, I'm already sorry I said that so hell, carry on speculating. Please consider my first question though.
=)