Seriously, the original motivation was what I wrote above.  (I have been doing a similar public crusade against all-digital voting for over 10 years, for example. I see such things as being part of my job.)

At this point, it is mostly the "sunken cost fallacy": I have spent so much time reading and analyzing this topic that I cannot just stop and go waste time on something else.  I'd better watch the movie to the end.  Plus, there are still some interesting questions and analyses that I can play with.

That could happen too.

However, I wonder how many bitcoins are stil held by the Chinese investors and traders.  I suspect that the missing MtGOX bitcoins were sold there in 2013, so the Chinese may have bough perhaps a couple million BTC altogether, over that year.  They may also have saved some of the coins that they mined, but that cannot be more than a few hundred thousand BTC.    Depending on how much they still hold, a dump of 200'000 BTC by the Winkles may not be enough to bring the price below 100.

Actually, at first I was worried about attempts to sell bitcoin around these parts as hedge against inflation, get-filthy-rich-quick schema, etc..  But thankfully my Country does not seem to need my services in that matter: Brazilians do not seem to be much interested in bitcoin, and you bitcoiners are already doing a great job at saving the world from yourselves. 

Does he mean to question why someone would answer the question of why people would give some anonymous poster the authority to appoint me as barrister in some case that might otherwise get overlooked?

Erm, "presumed" in what sense?  That is probably what the victims expect and would like, but the point is that the law and/or legal precedents seem to be different -- and they woudl prevail over the victims' convictions about "right".  (The MtGOX website warns that the balance is provided only for information, and should NOT be assumed to be the claim.)

Not to mention that, according to what I have read, the database has been doctored and/or some of the trades recorded i it are not legitimate.  If that is the case, those balances cannot be taken into account.  Even if your balance is correct according to your accounting, if other people's balances are artificially inflated, your refund would be diminished.  Ditto if some large accounts are owned by MtGOX managers or associates (they should not get any refunds).


I don't know, but If the claims are defined as deposits minus withdrawals, clients may have to submit at least a list of such actions with dates.  Also, I gather that there are old accounts without full ID information, or may have been created with bogus IDs. 

I think that is possible, if:

* The BIT fund fails to attract substantial new investment
* The COIN ETF is not approved, or its demand is limited too
* Usage for e-commerce does not explode
* There is no boom in new markets  (India, Africa, Latin America)
* China abandons bitcoin completely

I am increasingly convinced that Chinese demand created both 2013 bubbles (not only the October-November one, but also the January-April one).  Therefore, I would guess that, if China pulls out and nothing else takes its place, the price could return to the levels of late 2012, namely ~15 $/BTC.

The price may also drop significantly if there is some event that destroys confidence in the coin among the more technical users, such as a serious flaw in the algorithms or incentives, a wave of coin theft, new stifling regulation in the US and Europe, etc.

The deadline for victims to file claims was 2015-05-25, right?  That is only 1 month away, and AFAIK Mr. Kobayashi has yet to tell former MtGOX clients what will constitute a valid claim, and what they will have to provide in order to prove that they are entitled to it.

Perhaps you may have noticed my bazillion warnings that "your claim" may not be just your balance in the MtGOX ledgers at some random date, but instead the difference between what you deposited and what you withdrew, with the market price *at the time* used to evaluate BTC deposits and withdrawals.  AFAIK, the latter method, rather than the account balances, has been used in similar cases, such as the Madoff ponzi liquidation. 

But it seems that no one is worried by that question, because apparently no one has thought of asking Mr. Kobayashi which of the two alternatives he will use.  It seems that everybody is still convinced that the preferences of the victims will prevail over the laws, the legal precedents, and the trustee's preferences.

I don't even fell like saying "good luck to you" any more...

It is a pity that BFL did not keep any records of when their products were manufactured and shipped.  Does that mean that the world will never know how much bitcoin could have been mined with the customers' prepaid machines, if someone hypothetically had the idea, the opportunity, and the determination to do so?

Some posters just use a semicolon instead of a period to separate the two sentences; while that may not be legally sufficient to make the whole thing just "one question", who would be so pedantic to hire a lawyer just to dispute that point in court?

Are you asking me, or everyone who reads this thread?

Well, if an arbitrager dumps 300 BTC at Bitstamp that he bought at OKCoin, you can be sure that those Chinese coins were real.

Unless most accounts at Bitstamp and OKCoin are NotLambChop sockpuppets, and he is having fun selling to and buying from himself, just to manipulate the price and have fun at the expense of the other traders. 

Arbitrage transfers a dump anywhere to all other exchanges very quickly -- in less than a minute, it seems.  The 1-minute charts rarely show a delay.  One would have to look at the logs of individual trades to tell who started it.

Interesting defense strstegy: "we have no idea of what we did with our money, products, and customers during the life of the company, sorry".

They are refusing to inform the blockchain addresses used by employees, including the top management, is that right?

I estimate your imagination to be 2.7 meters wide, 6 meters tall, and 30 cm thick; did I guess right?

O men of little imagination: from the scars on the stem pictured above, can't you infer that, not long before that picture was taken, there were several other fruits attached to it?

"Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake."  -- Napoleon Bonaparte

There are no trades because the BIT shareholders still cannot sell their shares, at any price.  (I wonder if those brokers who put up the 40$ bids are aware of that.)  Patience, the carrier turtles are on their way.

If I were a cynical person I would say that BIT is stalling on purpose (since last October) because they know that there will be a stampede as soon as they open the gates.  But I am not a cynical person, at least not always.

The price is boring for everybody, it seems...

Just to enliven the conversation, here is an article that was just censored from /r/bitcoin:

International Business Times, 2015-04-15
Bitcoin Foundation founder Gavin Andresen: Mark Karpeles and Charlie Shrem a disgrace to the cryptocurrency industry
i bet that Charlie and Mark now regret bringing Gavin in, too.  

EDIT: seems that the article was deleted from /r/bitcoin only because it had been posted already, a day ago.

Why is the price chart on the back wall reversed left-right?  

EDIT: Also you can tell that the company just started operating, because four of the Board members still haven't got their standard coffee mugs.

No one bothered to answer my question about the conjectured stickiness of the pulp of the fruits of Eastern mistletoe of North America, but would you be surprised to know that I unexpectedly ran into a species of Brazilian mistletoe whose fruits, albeit much smaller (4.5 mm diameter, by my measurements) than those of Eastern or European mistletoes, and of a strikingly different bright orange color, also have a very sticky pulp, that presumably should firmly attach the single tiny bulbiform seed to a tree branch, if a greedy but sloppy bird happened to scrape it off its beak there?