I have a similar problem but the grey part is at the bottom instead of to the right.  I use Fedora on Linux, but the problem only occurs in this forum.  

The bug appared when the forum started using an image service (imgur) to store and "sanitize" images.  It may have to do with the size of the file and the speed of the internet connection to the source where the image is uploaded from; basically there is an insufficient timeout somewhere along that path, and the file gets truncated.  Reducing the image size usually helps.  Try saving as JPEG format with quality 80 or less; it may get a bit fuzzy, but then you can wrap it in a link to the full version.

It is rumoured than, when the bitcoin price will reach 10'000 USD, the admins will be able to afford to hire a teenage programmer to fix this bug (and re-enable the uploading of avatars).

Slight correction about OTCQX?
https://twitter.com/LiquidXCoin/status/551620608275259392"

That is a rather indelicate question to ask.  Just because the goxBTC were fetching 20% of face value in the bitcoinbuilder market, it does not mean that the smbitBTC will necessarily go the same way.

Let's investigate methodically: which is more scary, a daisy or a chain?

Yeah, well, I cannot hide my skepticism about bitcoin and bitcoin entrepreneurs in general.  Which is only growing the more I read (and not at all because of the price, which may even recover, I don't know).

Oh the irony: The USMS had the right to auction all 144'000 BTC back in 2014-12-04, when the price was ~375 $; but they choose to sell only 50'000 and postpone the sale of  the rest, because they did not want to depress the price.

Those buys were discussed earlier.  To me they look like a single entity investing ~6600 BTC per week.  Maybe it knows something that we don't know.

Objectively, the clients who bought the first ~400'000 shares before 2013-11-07 were smart, those who bought the other 950'000 shares after that were stupid.

If those clients had been able to liquidate on 2014-10-28, the smart clients would have been smarter, some of those stupid clients would have been smart, and the rest would have been less stupid.  As it is now, all clients must resign themselves to become stupider every day, and only pray that some day things will change so that they may become smarter again.

For (a), do you mean that short-time contracts are a bad idea for the client, or for the company that offers cloud mining?  In the first case it does not matter, the attacker will spend only ~75 BTC/h while running the attack.  In the second case, the attacker could rent for the minimum period allowed by the company, mine honestly for most of that time (thus presumably recovering most or more of the rent paid),  and launch the attack during one hour.

For (b), how could the cloud mining companies tell that some entity that already controls X% of the network's hashpower is now renting 51-X% from them? This entity could pretend to be N diferent clients.  And I bet that no company requires miners to undergo psychological fitness tests. 

(By the way, I like to think of Dr. Strangelove as a rather bland documentary.  Countries already put their nukes in control of mentally unstable or psychopathic individuals.  )

I suppose that (c) would require a substantial change in the bitcoin protocol, correct?

Indeed; my apologies for the undue reading of your post.

Indeed the paper had too much rhetoric and boldface for academic good taste.  But he points out flaws in some arguments that are commonly used to dismiss the risk of a 51% attack, e.g. that with cloud mining one could rent 51% of the power for 1 hour at much smaller cost than actually buying that much mining equipment.

I did not bother to read his proposed fix to the longest-chain rule because it seems to involve timestamping transactions, and I suspect that such thing is even harder to get right than achieving consensus about the chain.  I will wait until someone tells me that that section is worth reading.  

That is a non-trivial "if"...

What is it exactly that prevents those potential COIN buyers from buying BTC directly, or SMBIT shares?   The fact that they are not traded on an exchange like NASDAQ?  Or some intrinsic property of the asset?

Note that COIN shares will uninsured against theft or loss, besides being backed only by a "stock" (BTCs) that itself has no backing assets.

The Fortress investment group bought a bunch of BTC in 2013.  Those BTC were the only red stain in their Q1/2014 report.  So Fortress promptly swapped those BTC for equity in the Pantera Fund's managing company (not shares of the fund itself).  If COIN existed in 2013, and Fortress had bought COIN instead of BTC, the result would probably have been pretty much the same.

What I mean is that COIN may not be much more attractive to large investors than BTC itself.  Large investors are not likely to be impressed by a 5-year logscale plot with a red straight line on it.  In case you have not been paying attention, to people outside the bitcoin community bitcoin does not look like the financial miracle that it seemed to be 13 months ago.

And it is a fact that no one who has some money to spare believes that bitcoin will be worth 3000 $ in 2015.  Otherwise they would rush to buy those coins that are now being offered for sale at 290 $/BTC, and no one is buying.

What do people think of this paper:
On The Longest Chain Rule and Programmed Self-Destruction of Crypto Currencies
Nicolas T. Courtois
(Submitted on 2 May 2014 (v1), last revised 10 Dec 2014 (this version, v11))
http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0534

Trivia: This address is claimed to have the private key "1" and therefore to be the secp256k1 generator
http://btc.blockr.io/address/info/1EHNa6Q4Jz2uvNExL497mE43ikXhwF6kZm
Funny that it has activity at all.  Reddit thread about it:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2ra24j/til_the_secp256k1_generator_point_has_had_a_lot/

The MOX fuel in #3 was provided by AREVA, the (semi-State?) French nuclear energy company.  France has a spent fuel reprocessing facility, in Normandy or Bretagne IIRC. 

IIRC Japan also has a reprocessing program, started not long ago, which has already had a minor incident.

In the 1970s the nuclear industry and/or the NRC sponsored a detailed study of the risks of nuclear accidents.  They evaluated all the possible paths of failure through the thousands of components of a nuclear plant, and concluded that the risk was negligible, less than one major accident per century or so, among all the reactors in the word.  Yet Fukushima had FOUR major accidents, one after the other.  The first three of them much worse than the accidents considered in the study -- and the fourth one was not even loaded with fuel...

In the 1980s NASA asked for a similar study of the risk of loss of a Space Shuttle.  After careful analysis of all paths etc etc they concluded that it was less than 1 in 100'000 launches.  The empirical number was about 1 every 50.

OTCQX is a higher-class version of "pink sheets", with some very big, solid companies.

---------------------------------------
Situation by 01/Sep/2013
* Whales had 135 k BTC that cost them next to nothing
* Fund had nothing
* Clients had 67.5 M $
---------------------------------------
Happened since then:
* Clients bought 1.35 M shares from fund at average price of 50 $/share (say)
* Fund bought 135 k BTC from whales, at average price of 500 $/BTC (say)
----------------------------------------
Situation today:
* Whales have 67.5 M $, no BTC
* Fund has 135 kBTC worth 37.8 M $ today
* Clients have 1.35 M shares of fund, nominal value 37.8 M $ today
---------------------------------------

The number 500 $/BTC for the average buying price of the 135 k BTC is guessed, but could be easily computed from the buy dates and amounts, and a price table.

The 67.5 M $ that the clients put into the fund will never come out again.  They became the net and definitive profit of the Whales.

If the fund does not allow redemption anymore, the only hope of the clients to get their money back is that the BTC price will recover and they will be able to sell their shares to other clients, and so on.  So the clients will be passing the 67.5 M$ loss to each other forever.  Sort of like this:
http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2014-02-17-HowToMakeSomeEasyMoney.html

The funny thing is that the BTC/USD curve does look like that, except for two extra "mini-bubbles" added to it (the one starting ~2014-05-20, and another one starting ~2014-11-04. 

May be a sign that these two mini-bubbles were generated outside China, perhaps?  LTC seems to be largely a Chinese thing.

Darn, will I ever run out of things to learn?

Easy to tell: does it end with a question mark?