Someone noted that COIN will be insured against theft.  Do they already have an insurance arrangement?

It would be interesting to know the premium and the safety procedures that were/will be required by the underwiter. 

The precautions that an individual should take to guard against theft of his personal coins seem to be well understood and adequately safe.  It is less clear what a company can do to guard against insider theft (technically embezzlement, right?), which could be committed by anyone, including its chief officer(s).

The unique features of bitcoin seem to make the risk of theft from the firm's cold wallets more severe than the risk of theft of ordinary money from its bank accounts.  All it takes is to get copies of the private keys.  Even Trezor-like hardware wallets could have secret factory-istalled backdoors or be swapped for malicious counterfeits...

Yeah, sorry, it must have been in some other thread.

The "free" in capitalism's "free market" does  not mean "free from regulations", but rather that "suppliers and customers can freely choose each other, and new suppliers and customers can freely enter the market if it seems advantageous to them". Thus, even a highly regulated market can be free as long the regulations do not prevent the entry of competitors.  Theory says that such a free market will tend to achieve a fair price -- cost plus a small percentage of proft -- that makes it as profitable as any other market.

However, a strong government and proper regulation is necessary to keep a market free; because otherwise the leading suppliers will use their position to keep competition away, e.g. by dumping, controlling the supply of raw materials, false advertising, lobbying for exclusive laws, etc.. Without adequate antitrust and consumer protection laws, every market quickly becomes  a monopoly or oligopoly, that converges to a price that will maximize the suppliers' net revenue -- usually much higher than the fair price of a free market.

Sorry to restate the obvious, but once you realize that someone has been trying to dupe you, you should not give ANY weight to ANYTHING that he says or promises.  You must try to base your conclusions and decisions only on information that you get from independent and reliable sources.

A scammer is necessarily an expert in the art of disarming his victims and leading them astray with bogus explanations, plausible lies, and empty promises that cannot be easily checked.  A scammer will paint himself a victim of his victims and dismiss incriminating facts as lies or misunderstandings.  Here is a fine example of the art: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/232v5n/the_full_picture_from_danny_brewster/  

A scammer will not lose any sleep because of public exposure, no matter how widespread and strident.  Even if 1000 customers are turned away by bad press, there will be 10 who will trust the scammer, and he will still make a profit from them.    Hundreds of blogposts and articles did not stop people from depositing tons money into MtGOX after it became a roach motel, for example.  

Hm, we have been through this discussion before, haven't we?

People seem to mean very different things by "free market".  The Libertarian definition seems to be "totally unregulated market" which in my experience instantly degenerates into oligopoly or monopoly market, typical of crony capitalism.  If "ultra-capitalist" is not that, what would it be?

I believe that a relatively free market can only be sustained if it is regulated by a government that is commited to it and is stronger than any individual supplier (or consumer), or any small group thereof. 

That is visibly no longer the case in the US, for many markets (such as TV, energy, banking, operating systems, ...)  It has always been worse in Brazil...

Mine, for example.  A little bit less now than 20 years ago perhaps, but still much more plutocratic than the US.

Yet another suggestion: in the 1h to 12h charts, especially with compressed (2-pixel) bars, the time scale at bottom skips several days, even a whole month, between tic marks.   The label at the bottom end of the cursor shows only the hour, and one has then to guess the day of the month by eyeball.  If the time tic interval is 30 days, that is nearly impossible.

Should that cursor label perhaps display the day and the hour, in those cases?

Actually, any exchange may be faking its data; perhaps lakeBTC is just not as clever as the others. 

Perhaps you should post a small-font disclaimer, e.g. in one of the drop-down menus or the home page. Something like "All data is provided by the exchanges and is not independently verified or verifiable.  BitcoinWisdom does not guarantee its significance or truthfulness in any way." 

I grew up and still live in a country that was plundered by the IMF, with corrupt banks and politicians, and all that.  I have experienced runaway inflation, high taxes, stupid prohibitions, rotten public service, unfair justice, and more.  But I would still choose all that to the libertarian "Mad Max" utopia, and I put more trust in my government than in the Shrem Karpelès & Pierce Global Cryptobank Inc.

Ha! Try using any ultra-capitalist third-world country instead of East Germany, and you will reach the opposite conclusion...

I don't stay bitcoin-free because I trust my competency, but because (among other things) it seems to turn those who own it into religious fanatics, obnoxious salesemen, or worse...

The eventual approval of the COIN fund is obviously likely to increase the price.  However, the magnitude of the increase does not seem so easy to predict.  Some complicating factors:

(1) I expect that, at first, the fund will buy the bitcoins that it needs from the Winklevosses and other investors like Tim Draper (and the eventual DPR  coins auction).  That is presumably why the Winklevosses are after that fund.  So the demand on the exchanges is likely to be indirect, from people who expect the price to rise because of the ETF, rather than from buys by the ETF itself.

(2) Granted that SMBIT and PBP are less glamourous than COIN, but they do not seem to have had much success, or much effect on the price.  SMBIT holdings have grown only 2000 BTC, from ~105 BTC to ~107 BTC, over the last two months.  They grew ~30 kBTC from December to April, but the price dropped almost 50% in that period.   

(3) Bitcoin's only intrinsic value is its utility as a method of payment.  Its value as an investment depends entirely on that utility.  Bitcoin is a high-risk invstment because no one can tell what the demand for that use will be, and there is a positive probability that such demand (and therefore its value) will go to zero at some point.   Approval of the ETF will not affect the expected demand for that use, nor that probability of failure. Therfore COIN shares will be just as risky an investment as bitcoin itself.  If large institutional investors do not trust bitcoin now, why would they trust COIN?

I can name one.    But what are those people doing in /r/bitcoin then?

Well, he could have said "50,000 USD by the end of Q2". 

Oh.  But, as far as I know, that hasn't happened to a singe one of the many exchange-owners-turned-thieves.  AFAIK, the only such case where justice may be done was in China, where the police arrested the culprits.  Have there been any others?

And, last time I checked, no one knew who the owners of BTC-e were.  That may complicate the revenge plans a bit.

Indeed.  But the lower end is unreliable too. People who own less than 0.1 BTC probably don't bother to read /r/bitcoin, and that may hold also for those in the 0.1-1.0 range.

In the case of BTC-e, it is not known whether the owners have foreheads. 

That may not be a big item in the budget of that particular exchange, I suppose. 

Are there companies that offer customer identity verification services for other businesses?

Imagine that a car maker takes payments from thousands of clients, builds the cars, but then opens a taxi company that uses those cars for a year, ostensibly to "test" them, before sending them to the clients.  How would the Law see that?

I see no mistake in the calculation; but that is the revenue, not profit.  Considering that they have to pay salaries an other expenses, the profit from fees may be ratehr modest.

But they also make money from withdrawal fees; and the may be trading against their clients, with the advantage of knowing the orders of all traders before each trader knows those of other traders. (AFAIK this is illegal in stock exchanges, but there are no regulations for bitcoin exchanges, so why wouldn't they do it?)

Thanks! I thought that the main advantage of SMBIT over bitcoin itself was that it could be used for retirement accounts, some of them at least (Roth?)