Not useless at all. Like Roger Ver's  audit of MtGOX, and Neo&Bee's profit-only non-voting shares, it tells a lot about the sophistication and shrewdness of bitcoin investors. 

By the way, Neo&Bee shares were traded in two places: Havelock, a Panamanian unregistered "bitcoin securities" exchange, and LMB Holdings, that belonged to Neo&Bee CEO's himself.  The CEO is still missing and unreachable, and LMB Holdings site apparently has been shut down (perhaps because of the heartbleed bug?): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=529946.msg6122876#msg6122876

Still frozen for me, by coincidence during a freefall, with the order book out of date.  A trip switch perhaps?

Indeed. But it is not among the worst.  I believe we have been rather lucky for the past 10 years,
we have been much worse before.

Of course without government there would be no universities and therefore no parasitic profs. 

Someone at the unmoderated thread boasted that they had more substantial discussions there than here.  

No new news about Neo & Bee this Monday?  Did anyone check whether their offices are really deserted?

Yes, that one.

What was your Russel quote? I had the wrong name, thought it was this one:

"Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."
George Bernard Shaw

But I think this one is slightly better:

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
H. L. Mencken

And this one:

"In democracy, only your vote counts. In feudalism, only your Count votes."
Unknown

 

Actually my salary from the university does not depend at all on what I post or don't post.  I could even stop showing up at my classes, and it may be a couple of years and several pounds of paperwork before the university manages to cut my salary.  That, if I do not put up a fight.

(Some 15 years ago the university extinguished its Forensic Medicine Department in a desperate attempt to get rid of a particularly inconvenient prof there.  It did not work, the prof found a friendly judge who ordered the university to re-hire him.  To this day he has his salary, even if he does not teach or do research, has no office, no students, and no duties.)

I do not know how Somalia and Sudan are doing these days, but not long ago they were libertarian paradises. 

And if you quote Russel, I will quote Churchill. 

TibonneTheCat is the owner's cat.  It will not complain because it knows that it will be the first in line to withdraw when there is a rush, I mean, when the usual hacker attacks and steals 100,000 bitcoins sorry folks.

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Tuesday April 08

Prediction valid for: Tuesday 2014-04-08, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 2782 CNY.
Bitstamp's predicted price: 452 USD.


Plot legend

This last data point was fair (S = 0.0035, W = 0.782) but totally off the trend followed by the four previous points. Obviously there was a break in the trend.  With a single data point, the best one can do is to use the banal prediction, "tomorrow will be the same as today".

The Bitstamp prediction, as usual, is the Huobi prediction divided by the currency conversion factor R, which was assumed to be 6.17 CNY/USD (it was 6.15, 6.23, 6.20 at the last three Slumber Times).
 
Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Sunday 2014-04-06, 23:00 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Monday 2014-04-07, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~20 hours later)

Foiled again:

Huobi's predicted price: 2929 CNY.
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 2782 CNY
Error: 147 CNY (~24 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 472 USD.
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 452 USD
Error: 20 USD
 
NOTE: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." --P. K. Dick

Would someone please explain how one becomes a paid troll? Perhaps I can bill them for a hundred bucks (old-fashioned money, of course) for every insult I get here. 

If bitcoin is banned (again, an hypothetical scenario -- I don't think it will be), BitPay will close.  You will not be able to use bitcoin to pay for purchases on internet stores lke Amazon and Overstock.  You will not be able to pay for hotels, travel or entertainment,.  You will not be able to use bitcoins to buy newspaper, coffe, groceries, pay the rent.  You may be lucky to find a plumber or real estate agent that accepts bitcoin, but it will be risky (IRS etc.) Your salary will be in old money and you will not have any legal way to convert it to bitcoin.  If you pay for something in advance with bicoin, and the other side does not deliver, you cannot complain to the police.  And so on.

So, what would you use your bitcoins for? 


Although many people (myself included) are unhappy about the government they have, the vast majority actually wants a strong government with effective laws,  police and courts -- because they know what happens when those things fail.


Er, which premises are absurd?

Sigh,  another pseudo-audit trying to fool people with a thick cloud of colorful technological smoke.

As the "auditor" admits, the exchange can easily fool him about the amount of bitcoins that it owns.   What is the point of doing that "audit", then?

Besides falsifying their BTC holdings, the exchange can falsify the other half of the "audit", too.  Suppose the exchange is short of 100,000 coins, but the owner has a cat named Tibonne and client TibonneTheCat has 100,000 BTC in its account.  The exchange creates a version of their database omitting that account.  The auditor verifies that the total of balances in that doctored database is less than the bitcoins that the exchange supposedly owns.  Using the fancy cryptographic machinery, all the other clients verify that their balances are included in the database.  So?

And the audit also did not check the sum of the MONEY balances against the exchange's bank accounts and outstanding money debts.

An "audit" is not a real audit if it checks only half of the company's books, or if it has no way to check whether the books are complete that is outside the control of the audited entity.  This "audit" fails miserably on both counts.

A potential "auditor" who is smart, honest, and mindful of his reputation should refuse to take part in such a meaningless exercise -- that will mislead clients about the safety of the exchange, and could make him an involuntary accomplice of a scam.  See Roger Ver's "audit" of MtGOX.

What do you mean by "a mature black market"? 

Is a black bitcoin market possible on the internet, if one cannot convert cash to bitcoin annimously, the government can snoop your email and set up fake mixers and drug sites, and all payments are publicly displayed in the blockchain?

Anyway, Bitcoin was not meant to be used by outlaws only.  I don't think governments will will want to ban bitcoin, but if they do, it would have failed.

It is 22:00 in China. 

May be people returning from the extended holiday and discovering that the price climbed above their dump level.

May be some negative mention of bitcoin on the TV news.  (Neo & Bee collapse perhaps?)

Yes, the strategy is simply to be all USD when the daily mean price is about to fall, and all BTC when it is about to rise.  One only needs to read the future up to the next trading opportunity.

There may be some adjustments to this basic strategy at the ends of the whole session, depending on how one enters and how one prefers to exit (with USD or with BTC).  The script I posted has these options.

Shrem and Ulbrich are (or will be) jailed for other reasons, not for bitcoin fraud or theft.  Part of the bitcoin community even sees them as heroes/martyrs. 

AFAIK, the only bitcoin thieves/scammers that have been jailed so far are the owners of GBL, a Chinese exchange.

Business Insider
A Bitcoin Exchange Holding $4.1 Million For 1,000 Customers Has Simply Vanished
http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-exchange-gbl-holding-41-billion-vanishes-2013-11

BBC News
Five held over Bitcoin scams in China and Germany
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25217386

While the "China bank account closure" drama was unfolding, it seems that Neo & Bee collapsed in Cyprus, in a rather ugly way. The CEO left the country without telling staff, and is not answering questions from anyone.  The staff did not receive their March salaries and therefore quit en masse.  There are unpaid debts, and two customers complained to the police that they gave money to N&B to buy bitcoins but did not receive them.  A financial report that was promised at the IPO is overdue, and investors who chipped in 12,000 BTC want to know where the money went.  Its shares (that were not equity but only "profit shares") crashed to 1/10 of their IPO price.

The collapse is being reported by the local press. Presumably bitcoin is dead in Cyprus now...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=529946.msg5891432#msg5891432

This gradual upward trend should continue for another 18 hours at least, until the banks reopen on Tuesday morning in China.

After that, if there are no other bad news, or (better) the April 15 rumor is denied, perhaps this trend will continue (or accelerate) up to the range 3000--3500 CNY = 485--570 USD, where it was before the rumor  I do not see why it would rise beyond that.

If the April 15 rumor is confirmed, I expect another substantial drop, perhaps stretched out until that date.  It seems pointless to speculate beyond that, since the shape of the world will have changed.

That's where being "omnisubtle"  comes in handy. 

How much would God make by trading bitcoin?

God is the best day trader because, being omniscent, He can see all the way into the future, and thus He knows when to buy and sell for maximum profit.  (Being omnipotent, He could also manipulate the price at will, but being omnihonest He would not do it.  On the other hand, being omnisubtle, He can buy and sell as much as He wants without disturbing the order book.)

Suppose that God decided to start trading BTC versus USD on Nov/29, 2013 00:00, a little before the all-time high. Suppose that He started with 1000 USD, and (out of habit) did at most one trade per day, at the day's weighted mean price (total USD traded that day, divided by total BTC traded).  If He aimed to maximize his USD account at 2014-04-01 23:59, what would He do, and how much would He have at the end?

Unless the Devil put bugs in my code, this would be His strategy:

This plot shows how much USD (green) or BTC (orange) He would have at the start of each day.  By this strategy, He would end up with about 8,901.88 USD, that is, almost 9 times his starting capital -- even though the BTC price went mostly down from that day.

If he started instead with just one dollar on Dec/24, 2011 00:00 (when my Bitstamp data file begins), he would do this:

and He would end up with a bit more than 8.672 million USD.

Of course He could make MUCH higher profits if He traded once every hour, or every minute. Figuring out how much is left as a penance for the sinners.

Recipe (for GNU/Linux)
Scripts and data files