Bitcoin Forum

So after roughly a year of bitcoining I have come to the conclusion that mpex.co or Mircea Popescu Exchange (Formerly Mircea popescu options emporium?) does literally nothing but move bitcoins from one wallet to the next and in most cases ending up in Mircea Popescu's wallet.

30 Bitcoin Registration Fee and you get the choice of an failed video game company, bitbet.us (not sure why they need funding with all the fees), and MPOE itself whose profits consist mostly of those 30 bitcoin registration fees.

Normally "investing" is when you give capital to someone who needs it to create something of value. I don't see any value coming out of mpex.co whatsoever. Their biggest success story is a gambling website (again not really creating value, just taking btc from one person and giving it the next.)

One last thing that does not really prove that mpex.co is a scam but I cant be the only one to notice that Mircea Popescu speaks like a sci-fi super-villain.

I would love for someone to explain to me how mpex.co is not a scam bit I simply cannot understand.

In the end it looks like Mircea Popescu is walking away with 30,000 btc (according to some richest bitcoiners thread)

Has anyone else besides him made a profit from the site?

With Bitcoin breaking the $1,000 barrier, it is extremely risky to invest in these crypto-stocks anymore. I have learnt my lesson after I lost half of all my bitcoins in BTC-TRADING-PT.  You never know when these exchanges will shut down. Better not to invest in them.

More like 700k (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321265.msg3449849#msg3449849).

ok you have 700k btc or roughly 700 milllion usd invested in your company.

What the fuck do you even do?? Seriously how can you justify nearly a billion usd company evaluation when you literally have no value.

To clarify look at asicminer. They make asic hardware and mine bitcoins. What do you do?

And it made it even without any basic css work, amazing.

What I learned from investing in the bitcoin world is that you don't need to do anything but sit tight on your coins.

MP is and has been the only major thing happening in BTC. See here (http://trilema.com/2013/in-which-noobs-learn-lessons-and-pay-for-the-privilege/), for instance.

MP says what's what and who's who. That's what he does.


This is correct, look at the S.MG (http://trilema.com/category/smg/) reports for instance.

And for that matter: MPEx paid ~85k BTC dividends over ~850k mkt cap in fiscal year 2012 (May to May (http://trilema.com/2013/mpex-one-year-of-dividends/)).

Meanwhile Asicminer, since you happened to use that example, paid about 50% more, for a significantly lower valuation. This is what you get for having poor management (http://trilema.com/2013/the-analysis-of-a-failure-asicminer/) instead of MP.

Unrealized gains are very different from actual BTC on hand.

Ok so it is your blog that is worth nearly 1 billion USD? I noticed you charge an incredible 0.01 btc for unlimited reading access is this your only source of revenue?

I would love to know what the "ministry of games" does if you could provide a link that is from any source other than your own.

As for the ~85k BTC dividends, Impressive but where did that come from?

This is the best part. With a 1 billion USD website you would think that they could hire a css web designer for a week or even a day costing ~1btc at the most.

Listen, you can go say the same thing on the yahoo finance boards associated with JPM, "oh, so is the JPM blog the source of revenue??!!?!?!?"

There's no requirement for you to understand what's going on, or agree with it, or sign off on it. This is why you're irrelevant, that's the definition of the term.

Reality just is what it is, whether palatable or not, acceptable or not. You may submit to it, go do your reading, learn what's what and change to match, or else enjoy insanity, play on forums and reddit all day and so on.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is an American multinational banking and financial services holding company, and the largest bank in the United States by assets

If you think JPmorgan consists of only a blog, you might be the one out of touch with reality. JP Morgan owns more shit than any bitcoiner can dream of and it is because of over a hundred years of dominating market after market.

So what exactly do you do? Are you a bank?

You keep telling me I don't understand what you do and you are right. I don't think anybody understands what you do and we want to know.

MPEx is the largest Bitcoin financials entity, by a very large margin. JPM is 1-2% of the fiat market, MPEx is somewhere way up over two thirds of the Bitcoin space.

Which is why MPEx is valued at about 5% of all Bitcoin and JPM at about 0.0x% of all fiat.

Do you hold 5% of all bitcoins? JPM has a massive amount of money and a massive amount of revenue streams. How much bitcoins does MPEx hold and what sources of revenue are adding to that?

Figure it out, sparky.

Bullshit.

Have you seen the MPEX web site? Case closed. User ignored.

go to mpex, pay mpex 30 bitcoins, profit?

LOL.  You're a comic genius.

Isn't MPEX the only place you can reliable underwrite and buy options against the USD value of BTC?

I would say this is value enough, given April 2013 would likely have been a lot worse had MPEx not existed.

The shareholder report for March: http://trilema.com/2013/mpoe-march-2013-statement/ kinda shows that.

Additionally, those who bought MPEx accounts in 2012, and as well bought S.MPOE before the 2nd batch of the IPO are likely all millionaires (in USD terms) at this point.

So to be honest, I really don't see how it is a scam. Perhaps the other businesses in their infancy seem a tad questionable, but MPOE-bot I think has proven itself as a valuable asset to the Bitcoin world as a whole.

What.. So options and the MPOE bot bring in enough revenue to justify nearly 1 billion dollars?

Again what do they do? Options are a fancy way of gambling but really no value is created so how exactly did this help bitcoin in april?

Also anyone holding large amounts of bitcoins during the time of mpex ipo would be a millionaire now in terms of usd but that is entirely because bitcoin has created huge value over the dollar not mpex.

Your avatar suits you well.

Wasn't Facebook valued at $85 billion while bringing in less than a 1% of that in revenue in 2011?

I don't see the issue here to be honest.

Not sure how Facebook is comparable to mpex.co.  Facebook has ad revenue and has established itself as a useful social media tool with potential to make bitchloads of revenue with the amount of users it has.

Does an options robot really justify the value of mpex.co?

I don't disagree that mpex.co made a few people very rich. But it still looks like all that happens on that site is taking btc from one unfortunate hand and giving it to the next (Probably ending up in mircea or other ipo shareholders pockets).

Well done brave Sir Lolcow. This is the story of your loss (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=348977.0).

No, actually, shares sold originally for 2k satoshi. Some of those people sold recently in the 70-80k satoshi range. That's a 40x increase, which actually outperformed BTC for most of the interval.

Lol, coming from a guy white knighting Havelock -- a company trying to pass off its ludicrous failed "IPO" as a "gift to [its] loyal supporters."

Facebook is certainly a scam.

Again I am impressed with the profits you seem to have made I just have no idea where this money comes from. What do you do to create value?

Wow. I'm sorry MPOE-PR, you must have quite the patience to deal with this all day.

Volume of Mpex's non-Mpex stocks in the last month: 110 BTC

I'm still laughing that he values his worth as 5 % of all bitcoins in existence.

This can't be real.

A lot of financial related stuff creates the impression of being without any value for some.

The sad truth is that a lot of PR's statements have some valid point to some distinct.* That an exchange with four stocks, which are trading on lowish volume, all involving the creator (probably a good thing in this case) and some option trading, has such a high valuation seems to tell a lot of Bitcoin world. But this is probably just half of the truth: MPEx is rock solid, innovative (GPG order system!) and seemingly profitable for investors. MPEx' alleged irrelevance is also not the only reason why it survived three other exchanges and is probably here to stay for a long time.

http://trilema.com/category/mpex/ provides some further insight. Here (http://trilema.com/2013/mpex-ddosed-an-epic/) is a good example, that it's more than a shitty website from the 90s.

*Especially sad, because many have a (sometimes eye-opening) "cold, hard reality" character. ;)

I must say that mpoe pr is probably the most active bitcoin pr person I have seen. But sadly I think this is because mpoe/mpex profits are directly tied to the amount of unfortunate noobs who pay 30btc to register and fail with options.

I honestly don't think mpoe has a problem dealing with questions lime mine as all he does all day is advertise his website/blog on other somewhat related threads.

Not sure what your point is. Looks like you just quoted a trillema post. So is it the "solid functionality" or "innovative gpg order system" that makes it worth 1 billion? I don't think your post clears up any confusion.

Jimmothy, egalitarian predisposition is my one great weakness, but even i will concede that there are things too complex for a feller like yourself to ever understand.
And no amount of explainin' will make one bit of difference.
If i could only undo the slights dealt you by fate and poor breeding...  At this point... nothing can be done :-\

The quasi-options available are generally priced by a bot which maintains a usurious spread and ludicrous levels of implied volatility frequently far above historical volatility -- making them a perfect way to extract cash from those who don't ignore the place entirely because they don't realise there are cheaper ways of doing this stuff. As for reliability, the operator claims in his site's FAQ that he "doesn't hedge...options positions".

However, a reliable market maker -- one which does not introduce inordinate levels of counterparty risk -- does not enter into naked positions. (No pun intended, despite MP's history of involvement in the Romanian porn industry: I mean naked options positions). Not entering naked positions means, for example, taking a long position in the underlying whenever one becomes net short in calls on that underlying. This type of hedge is part and parcel of any competent market making activity in derivatives. Failing to do so means failing to deliver under a non-trivial set of possible market outcomes. (It also means profiteering by continuing to run that risk of failing to deliver and not spending the resources to reduce that risk.)

As far as I can tell, judging by the shellacking which the bot sometimes takes, the claim about failing to hedge is correct. This suggests that with respect to options market making, the operation is not reliable from the standpoint of counterparty risk. To someone not paying attention to the counterparty risk which is necessarily introduced by a failure to hedge, the operation may appear to be perfectly safe and reliable...right up until it isn't. This is little different than the appearance that a 20-sided die will never come up showing '1', because it hasn't yet done so during your first 10 rolls.

Oh, and just as a reference point, the combined revenue for MPOE options contracts sold during August, September, and October was something around 2180 BTC.

The current open interest on ICBIT just in the March 2014 BTC/USD futures contract is 387,424, while volume is showing at a little under $13 million. Also of note, during just the last 7 days, the top trader on ICBIT generated a profit of around 755 BTC, and during the last 30 days, the corresponding figure was 1877 BTC. In other words, the profit generated by just one trader during the last 30 days is approaching the entire MPOE options revenue across all contracts for a 3-month period.

ICBIT carries significant counterparty risk too, but at least it comes clean about it, as distinct from disingenuously promoting a failure to hedge as a positive point, rather than as an indication of what it really is.

Who knew this tread could get interesting!

For reference here is MP's take on ICBIT http://trilema.com/2012/icbitse-the-bucket-shop/