I don't see why those "proofs" are necessary.  Bitcoin believers will totally trust anyone who claims to love bitcoins and any outfit that deals with bitcoins. 

They even believe that those "proofs" prove anything...

Indeed they are the same thing, the problem is that it seems much easier to tie an innocent person to a "dirty" bitcoin address than to a "dirty" bank account.

EDIT: Note that, in the original scenario, address A1 is created and controlled by X, not by Y.  So it is  not the same thing as depositing dirty money into someone else's legitimate bank account (or dirty coins into someone else's legitimate address).  The crucial difference is that X can take out the bulk of the dirty money from that account.

I wonder if the anonimity of bitcoin addresses could create risks of misidentification of address owners by the police, even for people who have never used bitcoins.

Suppose that a "bandit" X generates a new address A1, deposits a pile of "dirty" bitcoins in it.

X then makes some small purchase from a retailer Z, pretending to be some other person Y who has nothing to do with the matter.  He provides Y's physical address for delivery (if the purchase is a physical item) and pays in bitcoins out of address A1 to the retailer's address A2. Then X moves the rest of the dirty coins from A1 to a tumbler, or whatever.

While following the trail of the "dirty" bitcoins, the police gets to address A1, notices the small transaction to address A2, that they recognize as belonging to retailer Z. From the retailer's record of the purchase, they identify Y and conclude that he must be the owner of address A1 and hence of the "dirty" coins.

For bandit X, the purpose of this this ruse would be to delay the police's pursuit, or even permanently derail it.  He could choose the innocent decoy Y so that the suspicion would seem plausible -- eg. someone not very computer-savy and with criminal background, large debts, drug addiction, etc. 

Many variants of this trick seem possible.  Bandit X could do the same with dozens of decoys, to get the police bogged down into checking dozens of false leads. 

Is this risk significant?  If so, how could it be reduced?

Criminals already use this trick with bank accounts. However, the risk for bandit X is very high in the bank version, because he must steal Y's identity and impersonate him when creating the bank account A1.  On the other hand, the police usually can figure out very quickly that Y did not create that account nor issue the payment and transfer orders.  (Here in Brazil, the innocent victim Y is called "an orange" in fraud jargon, and he is usually some poor semi-literate guy who does not even have a bank account and lives far from the branch where the account is opened.)

With bitcoin addresses, however, the risk for X is very small, since he does not have to get Y's documents nor interact with anyone else to pull the trick, other than issue the bitcoin transaction requests and the bogus purchase order in Y's name; while Y can be any person in the world, and he has no way of proving to the police that he is not the owner of address A1 and did not make the fatal purchase.   His only hope is that the police can trace the path of the purchase order and/or the bitcoin transaction requests on the internet, and determine that they could not have been issued from any computer that Y could have accessed.

Ancient Greeks believed that when the Gods wished to punish a mortal, they would grant his most ardent wish. 

Maybe... It depends on what is the aim of the December decree.  Methinks that PBoC is satisfied with the current situation (bitcoin not used for commerce or by financial institutions), but law enforcement and national security agencies may still see risks in it.
 

Huobi's recharge cards are called "火币点卡充值" in their Chinese homepage (火币="Huobi" 点卡充值="TOPUP" via Google Translate) and "CCYOU" in their English homepage.

I am largely guessing, but they seem to be like debit cards issued by some card company, that can be recharged by sending money to the card company and can be spent only(?) at Huobi.

The OKCoin "recharge code" system seems to depend on one or more OKCoin users with lots of CNY in their OKCoin accounts ("brokers"). As far as I understand, a normal client pays a broker somehow, without involving OKCoin or their bank account, and the broker gives the client a code that he uses to transfer CNY from the broker's OKCoin account to his own.  (In their forum, one client complained that the only broker has a 10,000 CNY minimum so how could one do small occasional trading?)

This system may be usable also by clients outside China who, say, pay the broker in dollars on an US account.  I note that a substantial part of OKCoin's volume goes on 24/7, unlike Huobi's that stops at night.

PS. However, Huobi's "recharge cards" apparently can be recharged by bank transfer, so in practice the bank transfer channel is still open but indirectly.

It would be interesting to know

(1) how many BTC the BTC users in each bracket have moved.  E.g., "a user who now has 0.1--1.0 BTC has sent 3.14 BTC on average since Genesis."

(2) when have those users used their BTC.  E.g., "50% of the users who now have 0.1--1.0 BTC have sent or received bitcoins in the last 3.14 months."

All of them, I believe; but I am not sure. 

Huobi's page lists their "recharge card" as the only deposit option. 

I can't find OKCoins info on their site (may need to login for that; their FAQ is more than 1 year old) but from the messages I believe that they too had only their "recharge codes" and perhaps cards too.  Ditto for BTC-China.

Withdrawals through bank transfer still works it seems.

Bitcoinwisdom down?

Come on folks, each one has his Ultimate Object of Desire, and "realizes the gains" when he gets hold of that.

If your goal is dollars, you have "realized" when you converted to dollars.  If your goal is gold, you "realized" whe you exchanged the dollars for gold.  If your goal is marriage, you "realized" when you exchanged the gold for marriage. 

Actually, the idea is to buy when the price is about to go up and to sell when it is about to go down.   

(But, admittedly, there are practical difficulties in the implementation of that theoretical principle.   )

Missing a pic of a bear?



(The Milnesium tardigradum is a bear, but a rather small one)

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Tuesday April 22

Prediction valid for: Tuesday 2014-04-22, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 3091 CNY
Bitstamp's predicted price: 494 USD





Plot legend

Today's data point was so-so, (S = 0.0051 W = 0.598) but almost exactly aligned with the last two points.  Therefore it seems best to assume a straight-line trend, fitted by weighted least squares to the last three points.  Namely, A + B*(d-d0), where d-d0 is the number of days since Apr/19, A = 3144.19 and B = -17.62.

The Bitstamp prediction, as usual, is the Huobi prediction divided by the currency conversion factor R, which was assumed to be 6.26 CNY/USD. It was 6.27, 6.25, 6.26 at the last three Slumber Times.
 
Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Sunday 2014-04-20, 23:02 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Monday 2014-04-21, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~20 hours later)

Another lucky break:

Huobi's predicted price: 3097 CNY
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 3110 CNY
Error: 13 CNY (~2 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 496 USD
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 496 USD
Error: 0 USD
 
NOTE: "There is a 70% probability of tomorrow." (actual weatherman quote. 1988)

Yes, those coupons or vouchers were the only method used by BTC-China right after the December decree. (Eventually they too started accepting deposits through their corporate bank accounts, but these are again closed now.)  I am not sure how those vouchers work, but a client buys them somewhere, somehow (not from internet shopping sites, it seems) and then uses them to deposit into his internal BTC-China account.

Before March 27 all exchanges (except perhaps Bt'er) accepted deposits through wire transfers from the client banks into their corporate bank accounts.   That deposit channel has been closed , piecewise, in all Chinese exchanges.   It remains availabe for withdrawals, for now.

Some exchanges also used to accept deposit money through 3rd payment processors.  Those channels clearly violated the December decree and were the first to be closed.

Huobi, and perhaps others, also had "recharge cards" (sort of debit card it seems) apparently issued by a "4th party" card company. A client could put money into his card (presumably through bank wire transfer and/or 3rd party processor), and then use the card to deposit money into his internal Huobi account.  Huobi suspended this channel for a while but reopened it on Apr/17.  OKCoin either did not have it, or closed it and apparently did not reopen it.

OKCoin instead created a "recharge code"system, that, as I understand, allows a client A (a "broker") to transfer CNY from his OKCoin internal account to that of another client B.  For that, B has to negotiate with A and pay him in CNY outside the OKCoin system and their bank account.  A couple of days ago, it seems that they had only one such broker and he set a minimum of 10,000 CNY per transfer.

I don't know how the other exchanges are doing.

EDIT: BTC-China installed an ATM in Shangai and plans to install more eventually. They also have a smartphone app that allows clients to trade cryptocoins directly p2p; I don't know any more details.

The pattern I see repeated dozen of times since Sunday morning (China time) on Huobi: a sudden jump upwards, by a variable amount, then a steady decline at about 10--12 CNY/hour.

All seems to be quiet on the China front.

Huobi has only one option for deposit on their homepage, that "recharge card".  Withdrawal by bank still OK (24h)  Could not find that info for OKCoin.

The announcement on Huobi's page has not changed since the 17th, about reactivation of the recharge card pathway.  That on OKCoin is from the 19th, about an Android app.  There are several post on their internal forum from today with various client questions.

Yeah, sorry, I skipped several pages.

Cash itself may be anonymous, but most cash transactions are not.

I have lunch at the corner cafe every day; the owner notes the amount down on a 3x5 card, and every Friday I pay whatever he says I owe, with cash; and he doesn't mind waiting until next Monday if I am out of cash in my "hot wallet".  That is because we both know and trust each other.  But I would not send cash in an envelope to pay for a bill, of course.

Even when the parties have never met before and don't know each other's name,  they can tell a lot about each other, with passable confidence, just from their appearance and context.  The mere fact that the other guy is NOT hiding his face may be sufficiently reassuring. I might buy a hot dog from a seller in a stadium, even if I never saw the guy before; but not from a stranger in a run-down street who wears a ninja costume and a ski hood...

In the political context: anonimity may be a valuable "tactical weapon" when fighting an oppressive illegitimate government.  However,  by the time it is necessary, it will be very difficult to obtain.  Moreover, it is not very effective -- because  anonimity is essentially act of cowardice, an admission of weakness and defeat.  It is fleeing rather than fighting, the way of the rat rather than of the badger.  The most effective time and way to fight such governments is before they take power -- openly, not anonymously.

There is a list of physical heists and robberies in Wikipedia, that someone posted already.

I suppose that few if an of those bank heists resulted in losses to the bank clients (unlike the bitcoin exchange heists, where the customers invariably take the loss.)

Even so, I wonder how much money the banks lose per year in physical heists, as a percentage of their total holdings.


The list above includes many cases of embezzlements and incompetent/reckless management.  Obviously, for these crimes it makes little difference whether it was bitcoin transfers, credit cards, or bank wires.  In the case of  Neo & Bee, for example, both may have occurred. 

My question about MtGOX is more curiosity than a bitcoin issue. What is the largest amount of money stolen from a single person or company by a cybercrime attack (unauthorized login, malicious software, phishing,  etc.) Anyone knows?

Also, do we know how much money was actually stolen/wasted as a consequence of a massive creditcard-data heist (such as Target's), and who took the losses?  (Yes, I know that it was not the card company.)