There was a +60 CNY sudden jump on the Chinese exchanges at about 2014-07-11 11:30 UTC, which is 19:30 China time.  It could have been someone hearing something about that (the Forbes post is dated 2014-07-12).

I believe that the Forbes blogpost author misses the point.  If you own a large amount of bitcoin, creating a bitcoin-backed investment fund (BBIF), like SMBIT, is an efficient way to sell those coins without depressing the price or looking like you lost faith in the Moon.

The idea is that instead of selling the bitcoins directly, you sell shares of the BBIF, which are pegged to the daily BTC market price.  Whenever some client buys some BBIF shares, the fund management company (FMC) is supposed to use his money to buy bitcoins.  If you are the FMC owner and manager, you just sell your own personal bitcoins (which you acquired for pennies years ago) to the FMC, at market price.

That way you can discreetly sell 20'000 BTC of yours in one go, at market price -- without the huge negative slippage you would face by selling on exchanges.  And the FMC gets to buy 20'000 BTC, to satisfy their contract with the BBIF client, at market price -- without the huge positive slippage (and hence loss) of buying them at the exchange.

Even if the bitcoin price crashes some day, the loss will fall entirely on the BBIF clients, since the BBIF shares will crash too; whereas the FMC and its shareholders will have still made a nice profit from the BBIF administration fees.

Indeed, if the FMC management can see a crash coming, they could make additional profit by selling the coins beforehand while the price is still high, and then liquidating the BBIF shares at the crash-bottom price.  Or vice-versa if they see a rally coming.  More generally, they could make additional profit, beyond the posted shares, by playing the market with the FMC coins (although that may be risky, and should be severely constrained by the BBIF contract).

The FMC could also use its coins to manipulate the market (given its minuscule liquidity) to inflate the price while selling the BBIF shares, and lowering it when some BBIF client decides to liquidate.  But, of course, no bitcoin entrepreneur would resort to such sleazy banker tricks in order to make money.

Ugh. You mean you intend to robot-spam all kind of sites, bypassing their captchas and such?  You want to annoy a dirty scumbag who stole money from 20'000 people by wasting the time of millions of readers and administrators who have nothing to do with that?

You lost me there.  I hope the law gets to you somehow, as well as to the BFL scumbags.  Bye.

I owe you to check on that Brazilian thing.  (It may be just about "digital money", such as debit cards and boletos. When the BCB issued the standard warning to the people about the risks of cryptocurrrencies, they had to add a paragraph clarifying that cryptocurrencies were NOT "digital money"in the sense of Article NNN of Law XXX.)

But I can tell you already that Caixa Econômica is not just a Brazilian bank; it is the only remaining retail bank majoritarily owned by the federal government.  The federal government appoints its CEO, and uses it for its social assistance programs, like the Family Grant program and financing of low-cost housing.  It could not get any worse for Libertarians, I guess. 

It is my understanding that all bitcoins will be converted to cash by auction, and all the claimants will receive reimbursements in Yen, no matter what their claim is.  That is the usual liquidation rule in Japan as well as in the US, it seems.  (However MtGOX is a rather unusual bankruptcy, and perhaps they will treat it differently.) 

I think that read somewhere that Mark managed to convince the liquidators that a certain amount of the bitcoins in question were not owned by MtGOX but by the parent company Tibanne, so they should not be included in the MtGOX liquidation.  Did I only dream of it?

I failed to get the point across, sorry.  The comparison with Apple x Xerox only goes so far.

(Actually Xerox was much bigger than Apple at that time, they had the largest marketing firepower, and they were experts on networking.  (The Ethernet LAN had been invented there, they created the first internet-wide forum, and my boss's boss Bob Taylor at the time had been the director of DARPA in the 1970s when DARPA invented the internet.) And the Xerox workstations were better than the first Macintosh in many respects.  But the Mac was 1/20 of the price, and had Jobs and Wozniak.)

My point is that Brock Pierce is not the typical bitcoin enthusiast or bitcoin entrepreneur or even bitcoin VC investor.  He not only has experience in playing the industry takeover game, but is the kind of guy who changes the rules of the game to suit him.  The mere fact that he bought his way from being an unknown outsider with no businesses in bitcoinland to the helm of the Bitcoin Foundation in a few months should get people on alert.

I am trying to imagine armed robbers breaking into Taaki's home to steal his car and valuable trinkets, pointing their guns at the blockchain, and leaving frustrated because it won't transfer his property to their address.

By the way, wasn't Taaki involved with Intersango?

Just psychology. A bitcoin thief runs a non-negligible risk of being caught by a bounty-hunting hacker, or denounced by a friend.  But if the victim gets part of loot back, he will cancel the bounty and almost always give up on the chase.

At this point, for example, if the MtGOX victims were to get 20% of their coins back, they would probably "turn the page" on the incident and stop harassing Mark and his partners.

Well then, if you are glad that you lost 700 BTC, I am glad for you too. 

And there goes another successful bitcoin entrepreneur, who has found a way to earn hundreds of BTC from a single "customer", with little work and without any legal risk.  May his career be long and prosper.

 

Following the Scammer's Manual to the letter: "Once the victim begins to doubt that he will ever get his money back, offer to return part of it; he will be so happy that he will let you walk away free with the rest."

It was Andreas who said that. Gavin apparently disputed his claim.

If the mission of the BF was limited to maintaining the software and coordinating protocol changes, a closed management might be justifiable.  

However, the BF was created with the goal of keeping its founders in control of the Bitcoin "industry", e.g. by endorsing or blacklisting exchanges and other bitcoin ventures, by being the obvious representatives of the community for the media and in negotiations with the government, by running and being keynote speakers at bitcoin conferences, and so on.  Wanting to do that with a closed-club structure is totally evil, no matter what one thinks of bitcoin.  

The BF has in the past endorsed MtGOX, and given the 1984 treatment to bitcoiners who would not cooperate with the club, like Mircea Popescu and the Chinese exchange owners other than Bobby Lee.

If someone decided to corner the Bitcoin "industry" for his own profit, he should begin by buying his way into the top ranks of the BF.  Then he could even create his own centralized altcoin to compete with bitcoin, and the BF would not even whisper a "but-but-but...".

Could be... he started poking into the dirty doings of some big shots like Pierce, then of some really big shots (of the kind that employs a dozen lawyer full-time), then of some really, really big shots (of the kind that appoints Supreme Court judges) ...  He may well have received a letter from a lawyer firm with a dozen names in its name.  He does not seem to be rich enough to afford a legal battle over that.

But, just before he left, he also had painted himself into an awkward corner over an old claim that he once lost over 1000 BTC in the InstaWallet "hack". He had been demanding refund from the InstaWallet ex-owner, but the ex-owner claims that there is no record of those BTC deposits in their database or the blockchain. (But, on the other hand, it seems quite possible that their search procedure was inadequate.) The InstaWallet ex-owner is an admin of this forum, by the way.  Phinneas offered a bounty for the return of even a small part of his BTC, but it was phrased in such a way that the thief could just give him that small part, minus the bounty, and walk away free with the rest: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=649176.0.
 
But also someone claimed that Phinneas owed him a refund for a used mining machine that he sold through an Internet auction and was damaged on arrival: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=667460.0.

And his last log-in is exactly three years and 1 day after his first one. Perhaps he realized that, and thought that it was a good time to quit the habit. 

I thought of a new way to make money with bitcoin.  Design a mining machine with state-of-the-art ASIC chips, get pre-order money from thousands of customers, build thousands of units with that money, run them for a few months (with centralized PSU and cooling) in order to test them, keep all the bitcoins that they mine during that test, and when the rising difficulty makes them uneconomical, ship them to the customers (with bogus FCC/CE stickers and some cheap PSUs) to make space for the next generation. 

Do you think this idea could work?

Actually I remember the day I asked 'why' about something, it was almost exactly 50 years ago, in my high school English class, the same day I asked the teacher, what is the difference between 'how' and 'why'?

Like, "Why do people say 'Y' to ask why?"?

I read hundreds if not thousands of posts about that around 1990 in the old sci.space forum. People were confident that in a couple of years one could launch and assemble a self-sufficient Moon base, distilling oxygen from rocks with solar power and mining helium-3 for export, if only the politicians saw the light.

But those plans were technically unfeasible at the time, of course. How could one go to the Moon without Bitcoin?

Speaking of which, @Phinnaeus_Gage, the most prolific poster on this forum by far, has been absent since 2014-06-17.  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=24792  
People who miss him or not have been speculating https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=667460.0