"Are you the Son of God, or just His Nephew?"

"Is there a Galt's Gulch after this life?"

OK, sorry, apologies for the heresy. 

Roger Ver launches bitcoin-based tax evaders paradise:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=654068.msg0

Thanks for the answers about reverse patterns!  (Is there such a thing as a reversed cup and handle, specifically?)

By the way, after a long disappearance, Mark Karpelès just tweeted about weather & quake in Japan: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=179586.msg7344311#msg7344311   Could that be the fundamental that caused the price to retreat?  

A curiosity question for those who believe in TA (which I still don't, sorry): are its rules symmetrical with respect to up and down? Namely, if a certain pattern is supposed to impliy This and That, is the same pattern, but upside down, supposed to imply the opposite of This and That?

(I am asking because I recently edited the Wikipedia article on 'cup and handle' (wait, no need to panic yet  !), and it only discusses the 'upside-up' version, no mention of an 'upside-down' one.  But wasn't a reversed cup and handle mentioned in this thread, some time ago? Or maybe it was some other upside-down pattern?)

I was careful to say "has to be", not "is".   

Funny that you claim that misappropriations will not happen with bitcoin.  Can we at least wait until one of the dozens (hundreds?) of bitcoin thieves, scammers and embezzlers who have acted in these few years is caught and punished?

Just ONE?

Could be...  but if he kept the mined coins for himself, then there would not be much room for doubt, I'm afraid

What he was doing was not research, obviously.  

"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing."(*)  He knew very well that that he was making money.  

(*) I have seen that definition attributed to Von Braun and to Einstein, possibly with different words.

Indeed it seems complicated.  Each member will have to hand in upfront some fraction F of 200'000 dollars, and if the group wins the auction he MUST immediately wire in F times  3000 times X, where X is the price that the group bid at (which of course the member cannot be told in advance), so that the group can send the total to the USMS by wire -- all that in a very short time.

If one member fails to pay, or has the payment delayed the entire group loses the auction AND their deposits. 

So it seems that every member will have to send to the group leader, right from the beginning, a sum greater than F times 3000 times the maximum X that the group leader is allowed to bid.  But that maximum X cannot be much lower than the estimated market price at the date of closing, otherwise competitors (who can easily infiltrate a spy) will outbid the group.

Bitcoins by themselves were never declared illegal, and by allowing trade etc the USG has already made that clear.  Moreover the IRS has already declared them property with value (hence taxable), so they could not destroy them -- they would be destroying valuable public property.

That is a point that people seem to miss: the philosophy behind govenment auctions.  Any seized property belongs, by right, to the US citizens as a whole; the government is supposed to be merely its custodian.  The sale of seized property exchanges it for dollars; these dollars then belong to the US citizens as a whole, and therefore are collected by the Treasury or other government branch, suposedly to be used for the public good. The government's motivation for exchanging property for dollars is that dollars are easier to manage and use rationally than random property.  The exchange has to be done by public auction to ensure that no citizen gets an undue advantage over other citizens.

But: http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2014/bitcoins/

The deficit is not created printing more cash, but by borrowing from banks and selling treasury bonds.   I don't see why bitcoin would prevent that.  Even if bitcoin replaces the dollar, there will be banks that lend bitcoins, even 10 times more bitcoins than they do actually own.  People would still have to pay lots of taxes so that the government can pay the interest on those borrowed coins.

I agree that most people here would disagree.    But I still think that the drop comes mainly from China, caused by (rumors of?) further tightening of the clamps around the yuan input channels, and perhaps disappointment about whatever expectations caused the rally two weeks ago.

One (admittedly weak) argument is that the price seems to want to go up while the Chinese traders are asleep, but is pulled down once the Chinese pandas wake up.  (It seems that there is a handful of Chinese water buffaloes who wake up half an hour earlier and help the price rise, but are then overcome by the pandas.  Like, right now.)

Is that true?  I would think that anyone who knows a little about how the U. S. Government works would have guessed quite accurately when and how the auction would take place.   They must dispose of any property that they seize according to the law.  They had neither  the choice nor the motivation to keep the coins, trade with them, or sell them in a private deal.

Did the court authorize the sale yet?

I know that he hasn't exhausted the appeals, but I seem to recall a claim that the court can authorize the auction if he is convicted on first trial, and he will get refunded in USD if the decision is reversed on appeal.  Is this true? If not, then the appeals will probably drag on for a year, perhaps?

For whatever it is worth, here are plots of the Huobi/Bitstamp price ratio, that is, the effective CNY/USD exchange rate, since Jan/2014.
(Click on the image for a fullsize version).


Dot area: total Huobi trade volume in that UTC day.  The largest dot is 353 kBTC (on Feb/25).


Dot area: "slumber tranquility weight", 0.0 (smallest dots) to 1.0 (largest dots).

The prices used in the ratio are the arithmetic mean of the high and low trade prices in the 1 hour interval 19:00:00 to 19:59:59 UTC (which is 03:00 -- 03:59 AM of the next day in China).  

The "slumber tranquility weight" is a function of the trade volume observed in the 3-hour interval 18:00:00 to 20:59:59 UTC (02:00 to 04:59 AM in China), compared to the total volume in that same UTC day (from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 UTC, or 08:00 AM to 07:59 AM of the next day in China).  The higher the ratio of the two numbers (meaning, relatively more trading in the late night hours) the smaller the tranquility weight.

EDIT: clarifying, the "total daily volume" is at Huobi only, not the World's total.

If one pool has 51% of the hash rate, it will still have 51% of the hash rate even if all the other pools are merged together. 

A pool can only mount a "majority attack" if it can control the transactions that are included in the blocks that its miners work on.  Is that necessarily the case?  If each miner in the pool was free to get the block's transactions (except the generation one) from any other node, then the malicious pool owners would need to obtain the complicity of enough miners to make 51% of the hash rate.  Is it possible to force pools to leave that freedom to their miners?

On the other hand, if the two largest pools each have 26% of the hash rate, they could still conspire to mount a 52% attack.


 

But how would the group decide on the bid price?

If it is a large informal group, it may include spies who will tell competitors what the group plans to offer, and they will bid 0.01$ higher.

The group would have to choose a trusted manager, who will decide the bid price without telling anyone in the group.  If he loses the auction because he bid too low, or people lose money in the end because he bid too high, would the group forgive him?

Guy works for a company, embezzles a large sum, flees the country, company collapses.

Guy works for a company, gets paid a nice sum by competitor to sabotage it.

Guy manages the finances of a company,  "borrows" a large sum from its bank accont to invest in some rich-quick venture, venture fails, company goes bankrupt.

Guy owns a company, decides to use cheap unsafe components in his product to increase profits, clients get harmed and sue the company for damages, company goes bankrupt.

Guy manages a company, fire the highest-pay employees to increase profits, hires inexperienced workers who cause huge accident. 

And so on.  You can easily find uncoutable examples in the media of people killing their golden-egg goose out of greed.

It was not me who raised the topic of SecondMarket's plans for the auction.  Besides, the movement of large quantities of coins it is obviously relevant to the price.

Also, there is no need to speculate about the motives of trusts and exchanges: their goal is to maximize the net revenue of their owners, obviously.  We can only speculate about the means that they may choose to use in order to pursue that goal.  Dealing fairly with their clients is only one of their options -- and we know that it is not always the one they choose.

Noblesse oblige, you leave me no choice ...  

If SecondMarket grabs those coins, they will then "sell" them to SMBIT investors (in the form of SMBIT shares) at market price, by definition.  Therefore they will probably bid at the auction somewhat lower than market price.  How much lower?  The lower they bid, the greater will be their profit (note that the SMBIT investors will not get any of that profit, it will go all to the SecondMarket owners), but also the greater the chance of losing the auction.  So it is hard to guess.

At their current growth rate, SMBIT will take many months to "sell" a substantial slice of those 30'000 BTC (say, 9'000 BTC) to new investors, in the form of SMBIT shares.  If SMBIT does already own enough coins to cover for their current investors (as they are supposed to), then buying thousands of BTC at the auction, with their own dollar reserves and near market price, will be a big gamble about the future price of BTC and the future attractiveness of SMBIT.  That is another reason to expect a bid significantly lower than market price.

SecondMarket is looking for partners for the auction, and maybe some of the partners will be short-term speculators who will then try to sell their share of the coins on the exchanges.  If the auction closes 30% below market, they may not mind selling with 15% slippage.

Finally, we do not know whether the syndicate will gather enough resources to bid for all 30'000 coins; so that SM plan does not remove the fear.

(That said, I must also say that I don't see that auction as responsible for the current drop.  I imagine that most traders knew it would happen, so they have it "priced in" already; and most traders should not see it as a big deal.)

The claim is that most of the people paying through Bitpay are people who already own bitcoin, including investors and miners; as opposed to people who will buy bitcoin expressely for that purpose.  So Bitpay is more likely to increase the supply of coins in the open market, rather than increase the demand.

(And this is not just my own view, by any means.)