81
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: April 19, 2014, 09:49:12 AM
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Every single thing you listed above could be applied to fiat alternatives such as credit cards, online banking services, payment processors etc.
You know this. Either you know all this or you wilfully ignore everything you disagree with. I guess you're far too "academic" to let facts get in the way of your agenda.
See above. Yes, the tools can be used for both bitcoins and bank instruments, BUT the "finalization" of the theft is much easier for bitcoin. Both logic and the facts thoroughly disprove the claim that bitcoins are easier to secure than the current alternatives. It resists only as a religious dogma, it seems...
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82
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: April 19, 2014, 09:28:14 AM
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But we do not need to discuss theory. The MtGOX heist alone stole 5% of all the money in the bitcoin economy. There have been dozens, if not hundreds, of other heists; the total may be 10% of all the money. AFAIK, none of those thieves has been identified, much less caught; and none of those stolen coins were retrieved.
That is 10% of all the money in 5 years, which is 2% per year. Inflation alone steals 3-9% of our money every year. Try harder Euro inflation is 1% this year, isn't it? But never mind. Devaluation of bitcoin has stolen ~50% of your money in the last two months. Your turn.
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83
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: April 19, 2014, 09:21:36 AM
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And these haven't been used to illegally obtain fiat on millions of occasions?
Of course; so we know that the danger of having keys stolen (particularly from users who are not computer security specialists) is not just a theoretical possibility. Now compare a trojan that steals bitcoin keys with one that steals bank passwords or credit card data. The bitcoin trojan can immediately sign and send off a request to transfer all the bitcoins in the compromised address to the thief's address. The theft will be complete and irreversible before the victim has a chance to check his balance. The thief does not have to intervene or even monitor the action, and he can be anywhere in the world. Once the theft is complete, the victim has no recourse: he cannot even prove that the transfer was a theft. A million such thefts can be performed on the same afternoon, or a single address can be emptied of one million bitcoins, and no one will suspect of anything. A trojan that steals a bank password may try to send the stolen data to the thief, but that is risky since that communication could be traced. Instead, the trojan could perhaps log into the bank by itself and issue a wire transfer to the thief's bank account. The transfer may take hours or days, depending on where the thief is. During that time, or even after it, the client may notice the theft, call the bank and cancel the transfer. If the amount it too large, the bank may get suspicious and call the client. Ditto if ten clients empty their accounts on the same day. Either way, the thief still has to get the stolen cash out of the bank, within a couple of days at most. That is risky because accounts owners must provide identity, and cash can be traced across multiple bank transfers. The thief cannot open thousands of accounts to receive the stolen money. And so on. Credit card theft has similar difficulties and risks. Therefore, it is not surprising that bitcoin thefts are already so common, in spite of the small "market" and the novelty of the concept. Bitcoin theft must be the hottest thing in the black hacking field now. Bitcoin is still wearing diapers, and yet bitcoin theft already amounts to well over 500 million dollars -- perhaps more than all the money that has been invested in bitcoin ventures so far (SMBIT, for instance, has got only 50 million). As bitcoins become more widely used, we can be sure that the hackers who now steal credit cards will turn their weapons to bitcoins.
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84
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: April 19, 2014, 08:17:56 AM
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Do I need to tell the many ways in which the private keys of a victim can be obtained by a thief? Please enlighten us. OK, where do I start? You know what a 'computer' is? A 'program'? A 'hacker'? A 'trojan'? A 'key logger'? A 'hardware patch'? A 'memory dump'? A 'covert channel'? A 'malicious wallet software'? A 'pseudo-pseudo-random number generator'? A 'social engineer'? A 'disgruntled employee'? A 'naive user'?
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85
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: April 19, 2014, 08:02:36 AM
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I honestly don't understand why you spend so much time to spread some random misleading FUD.
Because bitcoiners keep repeating the same shameless lies? TLDR; please refer to one of the many rebuttals to this argument found earlier in this thread. Cash, credit card data etc. etc. etc.
Unfortunately the thieves did not read those rebuttals, and continue to steal bitcoins even from computer-savy people.
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86
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: April 19, 2014, 07:33:22 AM
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Bitcoin is easier to secure than any other exchange medium in the world.
Compared to other forms of theft, stealing bitcoins is actually very easy, very safe for the thief, and extremely lucrative. Do I need to tell the many ways in which the private keys of a victim can be obtained by a thief? Once the thief gets hold of the private keys, it can immediately use them to transfer the victim's bitcoins to any other address. This is easily automated so millions of coins can be stolen from millions of victims while the thief is taking a nap on the beach. (Or even dead!) Compare that with trying to steal the same amount of cash from the same number of victims by stealing their credit card data or bank passwords. A bitcoin-stealing virus or trojan does not need to communicate with the thief or leave any other clue that could identify him. The thief can leave the stolen coins "sleeping" on the receiving address for years, and then "cash them out" in many ways. Again, try doing that with credit cards or bank wire transfers. Another way to steal bitcoins is address phishing: the victim thinks that he is sending bitcoins to his car dealeer, but in fact the account address he got from their webpage is the thief's. But we do not need to discuss theory. The MtGOX heist alone stole 5% of all the money in the bitcoin economy. There have been dozens, if not hundreds, of other heists; the total may be 10% of all the money. AFAIK, none of those thieves has been identified, much less caught; and none of those stolen coins were retrieved.
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88
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Buy support is nonexistent over Huobi
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on: April 19, 2014, 05:41:32 AM
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Huobi's clients hardly trade between 02:00 am and 06:00 am local time, every day (unless there are big things afoot, like regulation changes).
China's local time is UTC + 8 hours, so the low-volume period is 18:00 to 22:00 UTC.
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90
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Economy / Securities / Re: NEO and BEE talk (unmoderated)
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on: April 19, 2014, 05:00:26 AM
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the people who have been asking for evidence (at least some of them) explicitly denied that the Cyprus Mail artilcles were evidence. What else could they be then? Well, people asking for explicit evidence are obviously people looking for evidence. Sorry if the sentence was ambiguous. "They" referred to the articles, not the people. If someone says that the Cyprus Mail articles are not evidence, he is accusing the reporter who wrote them of either having consciously lied, or of having copied rumors from anonymous posts without checking them. But those quibbles are irrelevant at this point, agreed? For all we know, you are also one of the speculators, after all. Why would you attack people looking for evidence otherwise...
No, I am not an investor trying to pull the stock price up, nor a speculator trying to push it down; and I do not care about either. I just don't like scammers and liars, and I am worried about the legion of bitcoin opportunists who are already turning their sights to Latin America as the last large repository of suckers with money. Isn't that reason enough for me to be interested in the Neo & Bee case?
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91
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Economy / Securities / Re: NEO and BEE talk (unmoderated)
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on: April 19, 2014, 04:34:24 AM
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You are wasting time by speculating what Danny had done before this venture this is irelevent Important is what he is doing now
Agreed, "where is Danny now" is the most important question; but the police will not need our help in that. On the other hand, what he did before going to Cyprus is relevant because it may help us understand how this mess took off and got so far. Which in turn may help people recognize and avoid similar disasters in the future. Part of the reason for the MtGOX disaster was the "libertarian pilosophy" that has come to be associated with bitcoin. In that philosophy, a shady past, running afoul of the law, lack of proper accounting, financial opaqueness, and avoidance of regulations are not defects; they may even be seen as virtues. Thus, in particular, MtGOX's clients were not bothered by Karpeles's troubles with the FBI (that apparently made him avoid traveling to the US), or the fact that his exchange was completely unregulated and unaudited. They did not think of checking Karpeles's past; and even if they did, they would probably not object to what they would have found. As long as bitcoiners continue to think that way, the already long list of bitcoin scams and failed-from-the start bitcoin ventures will only continue to grow.
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93
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: April 19, 2014, 03:30:04 AM
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I would timidly guess that there will not be much change in the price today (Saturday).
Significant changes could only be caused by news about the money input/output channels to the Chinese exchanges, positive or negative; or from the absence of such news when such news could have appeared, since traders could see that absence as a positive sign.
However, between today and Sunday no news are expected, and probably there will be none. So there should be no reason for sudden changes in the traders' mood.
The transition from Sunday to Monday is more uncertain. It is possible that some traders will decide to change their BTC:CNY positions on Sunday night or Monday morning in antecipation of whatever news they think many come out on Monday.
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95
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: April 19, 2014, 02:10:25 AM
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Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Saturday April 19Prediction valid for: Saturday 2014-04-19, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after) Huobi's predicted price: 2888 CNY Bitstamp's predicted price: 467 USD Plot legendToday's data point was rather weak, (S = 0.0053, W = 0.565), but still usable, and almost right on top of the current trendline. Therefore we used again a straight line trend, fitted by weighted least squares to the last three points; namely, A + B*(d-d0), where d-d0 is the number of days since Apr/16, A = 3187.6 and B = -100.0. The Bitstamp prediction, as usual, is the Huobi prediction divided by the currency conversion factor R, which was assumed to be 6.19 CNY/USD. It was 6.18, 6.21, 6.23 at the last three Slumber Times. Checking the previous predictionPrediction was posted on: Friday 2014-04-18, 03:42 UTC Prediction was valid for: Thursday Friday 2014-04-18, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~15 hours later) Today was my broken clock moment of glory, it seems: Huobi's predicted price: 3001 CNY Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 2983 CNY Error: 18 CNY (~3 USD) Bitstamp's predicted price: 483 USD Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 483 USD Error: 0 USD NOTE: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts." -- Richard Feynman
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96
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: April 18, 2014, 11:46:59 PM
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I don't know whether this is useful to the readers of this thread, but it seems to be at least interesting: From George Papageorgiou and Øystein Aaby, former top employees of Neo & Bee http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/23cjd9/the_full_picture_of_former_neo_bee_employees/[ ... ] In defence of the sudden announcement on the 19th of March that the company only had 140 bitcoins remaining, Mr. Brewster stated in front of the same people that he had mis-accounted for 5000 of his own bitcoins, bitcoins he thought he owned but after “checking” a wallet, realised had actually spent them all. [ ... ]
Mr. Brewster claims varying amounts between 1400 and 1700 of the company’s bitcoins were lost in We-exchange/Bitfunder. Mr. Brewster’s claims that none of the company’s coins were lost in Mt. Gox directly contradict information given on the 19th of March to the whole of the management team, that we [ N&B ] in fact lost 2480 bitcoins in Mt. Gox. [ ... ]
At the same time, it appears to us, that he customarily made payments through his Bitstamp account to creditors, and many of us have multiple indications that he was trading there and in every other major exchange. When asked, he always replied that it was his personal holdings. There are conflicting statements from him, which indicate that he never separated the company funds from his personal. Bitcoins lost in the exchanges were at some points reported to be his, and at other the company’s.
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99
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Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
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on: April 18, 2014, 04:08:52 PM
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Curiosity: The OKCoin note (1008440) seems to come from their blog. Note 1008442 seems to be a question by a customer: https://www.okcoin.com/t-1008442.html标题:停了银行卡汇款。充值码最小一万怎么办? 【紧急通知】OKCoin平台防诈骗指南 1#发表于:2014-04-18 22:05:19 - IP:112.241.*.*
停了银行卡汇款。充值码最小一万怎么办?难道不让小散玩了?
Title: Stop the bank card payment. Minimum ten thousand recharge code how to do? [emergency notification] OKCoin platform Fraud Guide # 1 Posted :2014-04-18 22:05:19 - IP:. 112.241 * *.
Stop the bank card payment. Minimum ten thousand recharge code how to do? Do not let small, scattered play?
If I understand correctly, their "recharge code" alternative has a 10,000 CNY minimum, and, since bank transfers are closed, the client is asking how one can do occasional trading with small amounts.
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