They haven't posted their actual XBT holdings since April 30, is that correct? (They used to post about once a month before that.)

Does anyone have a copy of their actual Terms of Service?  I wonder whether they are required to hold all the clients' investment in XBT all the time?  Or can they hold up to X% of it in USD or other liquid assets that, at current market price, would be equivalent to that much BTC (perhaps with an extra Y% of safety margin)?

You mean, like that stupid manual that, forty years ago, made me commit millions of neurons to the task of policing my fingers to make sure that they used the Oxford comma when writing in English, but avoided it when writing in Portuguese, not knowing that I could have just omitted it all the time and be just as correct?

Wait, why could they not know how to do that?

I read the story of the "KEEP CALM AND" meme on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Calm_and_Carry_On
Unbelievable that some scumbag registered the slogan as a trademark in the EU and is trying to do the same in the US.

How could I know the reason why I don't know that?

Hm, if someone paid his new half-million home with bitcoin, then presumably it did not come out of the company's official accounting, but from the mined bitcoins -- that the judge did not know about?

Sorry, did I mix up a previous loan with a new one?

Design OK, but I will look better with a white bitcoin symbol.

That symbol is not as striking as it should be, because that gray color has almost the same brightness ("Y component") as the red backgound.  The brain uses only the brightness channel to identify outllines, ignoring the color information.  Therefore, it is possible to create texts with grey lettering on colored background that are visible but totally unreadable -- if the background happens to have the same Y as the font.  (But it suffices maybe a 0.2% difference in Y to make the outline visible again.)

If you read the verdict, the judge did see most of that.  But it seems that he did not fully understand what it meant.

It seems that BFL succeeded in painting the situation as merely "yeah, we are terribly late with our deliveries, but we are working hard on that and if you give us a chance we can still deliver and make good on the clients".  The judge apparently believed that BFL had just been testing the miners, and did not understand that those miners now are worthless.  BFL also described the house thing as mere "loans" to the officers, and the judge basically said "OK, let's pretend they are loans for now, so that you can keep working to make your clients happy, but you can't do that and should not have done that, I should be sending you to jail for it"

This:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg4642235#msg4642235

I am a government employee but a bit too old to start a political career now.  My best plan for retirement is that Papalcy thing.  Infallibility, lifetime post, and nearly guaranteed posthumous sainthood are not things to scoff at.  (Being an atheist should not be an insurmountable obstacle, I hope.)

"Consumer protection" for fraud of this caliber takes years.  Have you read the judge's verdict on a certain BFL person last trial?

ArsTechnica 2014-04-22
Digging for answers: The “strong smell” of fraud from one Bitcoin miner maker

Bitcointalk.org
Sonny Vleisides (Butterfly Labs CEO) 2014 Court Transcript (The TL/DR version)

IIRC, the defendants barely managed to convince the judge that BFL still intended to deliver.  I suppose that the judge did not understand clearly the difficulty thing, therefore neither the magnitude of the scam nor the extent of damage done to BFL clients.  So the judge pondered that, "in the interest of clients", it was better to extend that person's probation and impose stricter controls on his finances, rather than send him to jail for a couple of years.

I cannot be more explicit, but I believe that it will take a new and broader criminal trial to make some justice in this case. Hopefully the people involved will not be able to squeeze through the holes this time.

Meanwhile, OKCoin International has improved their webpage but it does not seem to get off the ground.  I have yet to see their volume reach 1 kBTC/day, and it does not seem to be growing.

Does anyone know how BitVC (Huobi's international branch) is doing?  They show the same volume as Huobi China; do they share the order book?

BTC-China's volume seems to be recovering somewhat, finally, after its crash last December; but it still has a long way to go before regaining the throne.

Now seriously, why are people here claiming that "whales are keeping the price down"?  Because of wall dances?

I have not paid attention to the walls, but I am looking at the 1 minute price charts of Huobi and OKCoin, and I see the same general pattern that has been going on most of the time since May/20: a general steady downwards drift with small trades, broken now and then by large jumps upwards, and much fewer sudden drops.  If anything has changed, the up-jumps have become smaller and more frequent.

So I would rather think the opposite: the general market wants a lower price, but there are a few whales (maybe just one) who are spending a lot of money in order to keep it just above 500$. 

Anyone else sees this too?

Yep, if I were an old-timer, I would be unloading my hoard now, too, as quickly as possible.   

Seriously: did any of those companies release actual numbers?

(By the way, the growth of my BTC hoard over the last week exceeded  my expectations too, by 250%.  )

Well, we still have absolutely no clue as to what happened to those coins, not even when.   The only thing that seems fairly certain is that it was NOT an exploit of the malleability bug, as Mark claimed.  A study by some folks at MIT concluded that at most a couple hundred BTC could have been stolen that way, possibly none.

Knowing the blockchain addresses where the coins went to is only the first, relatively easy, step.  The real problem is identifying the owner of those addresses.  And by now the coins must have been throroughly mixed and scattered, so even if they are spent or sold it may be impossible to detect the operation and catch the thief.

before the heist, the coins must have moved many times for legitimate purposes (e.g. cold/hot wallet flow) while in MtGOX's possession.  Blockchain analysis cannot reveal when the chain of transactions stopped being MtGOX's housekeeping and became a theft.  For that the police will have to examine other logs, subpoena the internet providers for access logs, interrogate Mark and other workers, etc. 

It is quite possible, if not likely, that the heist was an inside job (i.e. an embezzlement rather than a theft), perhaps with accomplices among the staff workers, clients, and their friends.   If that is the case, it will take a lot of work to identify the culprits, determine their actions and roles, and collect evidence against them (bank records, phone calls, emails, skype logs, etc.)

It seems that many clients of MtGOX, even if not involved in the Great Heist, were using it for things that they would rather not have the police look at.  That is the declared reason of some (and, perhaps, the private reason of many others) for supporting the MtGOX revival projects by Sunlota nd others -- which make as much sense as digging up Nixon's corpse to enter him as Republican candidate for the US presidency. In particular, some clients support the revival because they hope (naively?) to use again their unverified accounts, which did not identify the owner.  Thus many clients would rather hinder the investigation than help it.

Charlie Shrem and Mark Karpelès were among the Founding Members of the Bitcoin Foundation.  Mark was eventually expelled, with visible reluctance, but Shrem (who may have used MtGOX for the "business" he is charged with) is still there, as well as several people which I would consider prime suspects in the case.

It is quite normal and apprpriate for the police to refuse giving out any information while an investigation is underway. 

Would you find it weird if I said that I liked that video?

Well, that is the bullish view of course. The other version is that the Bitcoin Network is very oversized.

Free market theory implies that the network should adjust itself so that mining is moderately profitable (in dollar terms).  It can easily become unprofitable after a price drop.

However, I suppose that even if mining is slightly unprofitabe, a large miner with several employees, equipment depreciation, and other fixed expenses may find that his losses will be smaller if he keeps mining.  He may also save the coins hoping for a price spike in the near future. (To tell whether mining is profitable or not, one should consider the price when the coins are sold, not when they are mined.)

Moreover, there may be miners who are not mining for profit, but are being subsidized by investors who aim to control the network or whatever.   In partiular, there are miners who get their equipment subsidized by "involuntary investors": namely, certain equipment makers who collected pre-order payments from thousands of clients, but instead of delivering the machines they used them in their own mining farms, "testing" it until it became obsolete.  You all know the names, right?

I have not seen any hint that the Chinese government objects to bitcoin mining or the manufacturers of mining equipment.  They have banned the internet sale of mining equipment inside China, but they must love those industries since coins and machines are mostly sold abroad, making China richer.

I suppose that the Coinsman trip report to a Chinese mining farm is perfectly legitimate, but for some reason it reminded me of another report that circulated on the internet in pre-historical times, maybe in the 1980s, about "the only remaining legal brothel in Texas".  The author described his visit in a couple of pages, all quite credible and matter-of-fact, with plenty of details --- including how to get there (off some highway, so many miles after somewhere).  I can imagine an endless stream of cars driving up and down that highway and asking for directions.  

Well, that is almost a perfect description of the current Brazilian voting machine.  What it prints is the exact result of the election on that voting section, by definition... of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, who has the last word on the matter, as absurd as it may be.  It was instituted in 1996 with great fanfare, before the people could be made aware of the huge risk (malicious software stealing, say 10% of the votes on every one of the 400'000 voting sections).   The people is slowly getting wiser, but it may be another decade before the TSE is forced to replace it.
 

They are not ridiculous at all.  With a purely digital system, a well-placed insider can steal votes on a national scale, without leaving any evidence.  With a paper-only system, ballot boxes can be stuffed or tampered locally while no one is looking.  With both, fraud becomes much, much harder: the fraudster would have to hack the software before the election, and then physically tamper with every ballot box after the election, replacing the paper ballots to exactly match the totals chosen by the software.   Thus the combination of the two systems is considerably more secure than each system could be by itself.

Ideally, every voting section should count the paper ballots immediately after the election closes.  If the totals don't match, there should be an investigation, but neither should be assumed to be more correct than the other.  If the differnce is considerd significant, the votes in that section should be invalidated and everybody who voted there should  vote again.  If that happens at more than a few sections, then a global digital fraud should be suspected and the entire election should be redone.

Congratulations for your superb imitation of an AMT sockpuppet account pretending to be a client.