Yeah, Mircea Popescu seems to be determined to be the least likable person on the internet.  But he is a precious resource, because although he is a "bitcoin magnate" (worth 200'000 BTC, IIRC) he seems to enjoy kicking the sacred cows of bitcoin.

MAT 21:12: "Jesus hacked into the exchange and wiped out all who were buying and selling there. He deleted the tables of the fiat changers and the order books of those selling bitcoin futures."

MRK 10:25: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for an early adopter to enter the kingdom of God."

EDIT: Rats, @NotHatinJustTrollin bet me to it (by some 5 pages at that).

If music was like science (or internet detectives), the audience would just ignore the player while he plays totally out of tune and rythm, but applaud wildly and give him a prize when he gets just one note right.

That "old format wallet" could be it, yes: 200 kBTC that had not been moved since the end of mid 2011 (about 1000 days before).

Sorry, what is the point?  I did not say anything about that number increasing or decreasing.  I just used its current value.

However, eyeballing that chart, some 200 M BTC-day were destroyed in Mar/2014, and some 150 M in Feb/2014.  I wonder what those events were. 

By the way, note that the 0 level in that chart is the second line from bottom, not the first one.

Independently of whether the Chinese exchanges are solvent or fake or whatever, I still believe that lots of coins (at least 500 000 BTC, perhaps a couple million) went from "Western" hand to Chinese hands last November.

And I also believe that those coins have been coming back to the West since then (via arbitragers), as the Chinese are gradually losing interest in "bitcoin gambling".  But the Chinese day-traders still have enough coins in the exchanges to set the price.

And I believe that the price has been generally dropping since then (apart from the two mini-bubbles I mentioned earlier) because there aren't enough people in the West willing to buy those coins that the Chinese want to sell -- plus the 3600 coins that are mined each day, plus the unknow number of old cheap coins that early adopters may be cashing out.

This chart shows that each day about 4 million bitcoin-days are destroyed, considering only coins that have not moved in the past year.  That could man people moving 11'000 coins that were not moved for 1 year, or 5500 coins that were not moved by 2 years, etc.  

It is hard to interpret these numbers, because "coins moving" does not mean "coins changing hands".  Even so, it seems quite possible that early adopters are cashing out 1000 BTC/day.  In that case, the people who are starting or increasing their BTC holdings would have to give 270'000 US$/day to those early adopters, in addition to the 1 M US$/day they must give to the miners, in order to maintain the price.

Since he/she/it is no more, can we say that he/she/it still is something?

Newspapers are struggling to survive, and many (most?) now accept paid advertisements that are formatted and placed to look just like regular articles.  There are jargon names for them, like "native advertising", "paid co-creation", "paid syndication", ...
http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2014/08/nytimes_reduces_label.php
http://adage.com/article/media/wall-street-journal-introducing-native-ads-site/292044/
http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2015/01/04/forbes-takes-native-ads-to-new-level-with-att-sponsored-cover/

Would Heraclitus say that, each time you post in it, this thread is a different thread?

Andreas Antonopoulos has been unbanned from reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2s26po/andreas_is_unbanned_everybody_can_relax_now/

That was over faster than a bitcoin price rally. 

Andreas Antonopoulos was permanently banned from reddit for a post to /r/bitcoin:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2s1ye7/andreas_antonopoulos_is_shoadowbanned/cnlf2xb

The man in that gif was obviously willing to undergo the procedure.  He was probably an undergrad student who volunteered for the test of a new cure for hangover.  I am sure that he signed all the proper authorization forms.

Those 25 bucks must have came in handy.

Do you realize that this is the only thread in this forum where posters admit that they do not know everything?

The logo of Sergei Mavrodi's "MMM" company was spotted among the sponsors of the Bitcoin Foundation, last December:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2mgi7w/well_known_ponzi_scheme_become_silver_member_on/

It was removed after people noticed it, maybe his membership was canceled:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2mgi7w/well_known_ponzi_scheme_become_silver_member_on/cm4vdcu

None especially at the moment, but Paycoin seems interesting, perhaps it will be even more interesting than Neo & Bee.  I had great hopes for Brock Pierce's RealCoin, but I have never heard of it again.  I wonder if Autumn Radtke was working on one.  Perhaps Sergei Mavrodi will launch something, now that he is in the Bitcoin Foundation?

Zoom out to the 30 min chart, and it will not look so nice...

I see bitcoin as a computer technology experiment, that was appropriated by various groups and pushed as something that it was never intended to be, and is nowhere ready to be.

That was a rhetorical quesiton, right? he was CEO of SecondMarket and still is CEO (or whatever) of SecondMarket's BIT fund.

The frauds and crimes are the features of this "industry" that I find most entertaining.  Danny Brewster story, for example, would be too ridiculously unbelievable if it was a a work of fiction.  I have been following closely MtGOX, AMT miners, BFL, GAWminers, BitcoinRain, ...

SecondMarket is the only bitcoin fund for which we have day-by-day investment data, thanks to the user who monitors it and maintains the thread devoted to it.  Too bad that we don't have similar threads for PBP and the other funds.   I don't even know how much investment PBP got.  Nor GABI, Exante, ...

As you may know, SM BIT has suspended withdrawals (redemptions, liquidations) since last October.  With a good excuse, of course.

EDIT: And I am not invested in any fund or venture related to any cryptocoin either.

Like that old piece of Unix wisdom:

  Q: How many system administrators does it take to change a light bulb?
  A: Just one, to lock the room and declare it off-limits to everybody.

Seriously, someone explained why @theymos disabled avatars: because of a post out there showing that one can hide javascript in headers of image files. 

However, he must have misread that post.  It said that the hacker can post an HTML page containing a tag <script src="logo.gif"></script> and put malicious javascript inside the gif file.  When victims download that page,the javascript obviously gets executed.

But the only bad thing about that is:  if an admin is trying to analyze a malicious webpage and is looking at the javascript files it downloads, he may miss that one, because its name ends in ".gif" instead of ".js", and it can even be displayed as an image (for instance, in a previous <img src="logo.gif"/> tag). 

However, that risk does not exist for this forum.  The forum's HTML pages are not served by the hacker, only by the bitcointalk server; and they will not have <script> tags with avatars in them, only <img> tags.

To be doubly sure, the forum server could just pipe every uploaded image through a format conversion (e.g. GIF to PNG).  That conversion would mangle any javascript hidden in the header, so that it would not work even if used in a <script> tag.