My parents were Italian, from the Veneto region.  But I was in Nàpuli recently, and I happen to know a bit of Napulitànu, e.g.  http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/misc/PigliateNaPastiglia.txt

I have it from a reliable source that when God created the English language He initially meant to call the city "Neaples", from the Greek, and the things from there "Napolitan", from Italian; but He then switched the spellings around, and does not remember why.

For some reason that not even God knows, the city is called Naples in English, but anything from there is Neapolitan.

Is a question posed with images an imaginary question?

There are some rather suspicious things in this story, that demand a good explanation.  Chief of them is: what sort of twisted mind would choose "Boi qaaf" as a nickname for a fake German miner?

 

Well, if the manufacturer of a hardware wanted to get the client's keys, they could do it very easily. 

If you use a special-purpose hardware to store your keys, you have to trust the manufacturer.  I see no way around it.

To me it seems an attempt to prevent an independent police investigation.  Like the Sunlot proposal. 

If the exchange is honest, nothing special.   Trading would stop of course and the exchange would stop collecting fees.

If the exchange is dishonest, they may have invested some of the clients' money into stock, Ferraris, caviar, strip dancers... then the exchange may be unable to satisfy all withdrawals and then will be forced into bankruptcy.

Indeed, if the price is rising fast, they will be faced with an "unsurmountable opportunity": hold on to their coin reserve as long as they can, by telling customers that they ran out of coins.

In general, a middleman in any trade will take some of the profit for himself, as much as he can.

If the price is falling fast, it would be stupid for them to buy lots of BTC beforehand just to be able to sell to people with no delay over the next few days.  The loss could easily wipe out all that they make from fees, and more.  Better leave the clients waiting. 

Seems I was not clear. 

Sure there has always been volatility, and large drops before, but until two months ago it was "expected volatility" that fitted the grand model: namely, average 1000% growth every year, through a series of bubbles more or less regularly spaced in time.   The drop after the November peak was eevn seen as a good thing because it was seen as a repeat of the drop after the April 2013 peak, and thus confirmed that pattern.  And the rise from May/20 to Jun/10 and the following plateau recalled what happened  from July through the end of September last year.

But this drop does not fit that pattern any more.  It is not the panic drop from ~125$ to ~85 on Oct/02, that was quicly reversed.   Analists were expecting the next bubble a month ago, but instead got a week of almost steady drop that brought the price down to the same level as the bottom of the "2014 Silk-Road-Like Dip".   So, what is the grand model now?

I thought that when the hash rate passed 150 PH/s the Network would become self-conscious and would take control of everything, so we would not have to worry about that anymore.

The price may recover, perhaps even in a few days.  What will be hard to recover is the credibility of bitcoin, and of bitcoin "experts".

No one saw this dip coming, no one could tell where it would end.  No one can tell whether it will stop at 460$, keep falling, or reverse.

No on can explain why it happened.  No one can tell for sure even where it was made in China or in the West.

So how could people tell whether and when the price will rise again, and by how much?

The "exponential trend" and the "periodic bubble theory" now seem rather far-fetched. 

Fund salesmen will have a hard time convincing people to invest.   How could an analyst honestly recommend it to his clients?

Or maybe not, there will always be suckers who will belive a good sales pitch and buy without researching... 

Got another post deleted from the official AMT thread.  First the context:


Now my deleted post:


I don't know why AMT deleted this post, I thought that mining manufacturers were a brotherhood where everyone helped each other. 

Isn't that diagram drawn precisely when a student asks if someone could explain those sets to him?

Sure.  70-100$ was the estimate last March or so.  This is the bullish view of where we would be without China now:



Ah, the power of extrapolation...

I can think of many theories, and the truth is prbably more complicated than any of them... 

Some things I am quite convinced, though:  Mark knows how it happened but he refuses to tell, on the contrary he tried to blame some external hacker exploiting the "malleability bug".  But that excuse has been debunked already by some people at MIT.   Therefore nothing that Mark Karpelès has said or written can be trusted.  There must have been other people involved.  I cannot see how his associate Gay-Bouchery could not have been aware of the loss; and he has not said anything either. 

Unfortunately there is no real data that people could trust and understand.  That leaked database is incomplete, hard to interpret, and may have been doctored to hide the true culprits.  People who know the truth may be keeping quiet to protect themselves, or have been bribed or threatened to shut up.  It is obvious that many MtGOX customers want to avoid a police investigation, because they were doing something illegal -- even if was not related to the disappearance of the coins.

As you guessed, not from personal experience.    And I bet you have never misused a screwdriver, either. 

But I have been close enough to people with such personal experience.  And it was not funny at all... 

Or worse: they may be trying to preempt an independent criminal investigation.  The hint of a connection to Roger Ver is troubling, since he was a major client of MtGOX, and possibly a friend of Mark Karpelès (both were living in Tokyo at the time).

That possible connection alone should disqualify them for this task.

And the Sunlot proposal has the same strong smell.

Indeed it isn't.  My point is that they are behaving as if it were, instead of doing what an ordinary customer should do when he gets scammed by an ordinary store.

Could be denial, as you say, ... but for nine months?

That unfortunately is true, I feel that I have become more cynical with time.  Not because of this thread, I think, but of other threads I have been reading.   Some of them are beyond crazy, totally surreal.   

For example, reading the threads about Butterfly Labs, AMT, and other mining rig scams, I could not understand why the victims kept asking and pleading and discussing with the companies for almost a year, still accepting their phony explanations, promises, deals, upgrades -- even sending them more money.  Those clients must know that the CEO of one of those companies was convicted, not long ago, of running an international lottery scam that stole 25 million from old pensioners and such.  Being told so, a sane client should have stopped wasting time and gone straight to the police to file charges for fraud.  Why did their clients instead keep asking, whining, pleading, insulting, sometimes even praising the scammers?

Then I had an epiphany (what a swell word, must use it more often!  ): that is the way drug addicts interact with drug dealers who failed them.  They know that the merchant is a criminal and what he did to them was fraud.  But they of course won't go to the police, and know that he is the boss so their only hope is to convince him to deliver.  When they finally get some product from him, even if it is late, junk, and much less than they paid for, they will be thankful and forget the damage and come back the next day for more, nice and smiling.

Could it be that buying illegal drugs was the only non-trivial "business experience" that those clients had in their life?