They are an investment company based and registered in Panama.  The (U.S.) Securities and Exchanges Commission  may perhaps "take an interest" in them if they sell to American citizens/residents, but oterwise it should have no jurisdiction over them.

Thanks!  It may be sign that they are progressing towards opening oversea operations, perhaps?

I understand that Sunlot made a deal with the people who where suing Mark and Jed in te US, and they have withdrawn the lawsuit.  Also Sunlot claims that Jed (and Gay-Bouchery) have approved their plan, in exchange for being freed of any responsibility in the collapse.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=587295.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=587295.msg6511936#msg6511936
They are rather ambiguos about what they will do with Mark, in particular if he will get a share of the recovered coins like any other client:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=587295.msg6728528#msg6728528
(AFAIK, management always has the last priority in bankruptcy cases, even if there is no evidence of wrongdoing.)

For whatever it is worth (via Google Translate):

比特币两月狂涨80% 起死回生还是回光返照
Bitcoin two months shot up 80% to revive or supernatural
Sina Finance, 01:12 on June 5, 2014
http://finance.sina.com.cn/money/lczx/20140605/011219315838.shtml

This Chinese article from 2014-06-10 seems to report some deal between blockchain.info and OKcoin:
http://3c.ycwb.com/2014-06/10/content_6936946.htm
Google Translate is not very helpful.  Any hints?

Really?  Last time I checked, deposits through bank transfers had been disabled, but withdrawals through bank transfers were still working.

The isolated buying spikes since May 20 could be due to some Chiinese traders getting rumors that bank widthdrawals are about to be closed too. Or to rumors of Huobi and/or OKcoin being about to open offshore operations (which they once said they had intention of doing). Or to something else entirely.

IIRC, it was confirmed (by Snowden?) that the NSA had weakened a random number generator used by some OS (Windows?) to  generate keys in some popular crypto protocol (https?).  The numbers were drawn from a smaller domain than clients expected,  making the keys easier to find by brute force. 

Er, sorry, what is your point?

First, let me say that I was just reacting to that "pure incorruptible mathematics" bullshit by the reporter.  I am not arguing that the lack of mathematical proof iis a flaw of bitcoin.  My skepticism does not come from that "flaw" (or from any other strictly technical issue), but from political/social/practical problems, for which my probabilities are obviously different from those of most people in this thread.

As for the P != NP conjecture, I do not need to tell you that it makes sense only if the problem instance size n is allowed to go to infinity, since the difference between polynomial and superpolynomial appears only in the limit, when n is "just about to get there".  The two classes are indistinguishable if one assums that n is bounded, say n < 10^500.  But the bitcoin mining problem and the signature forging problem have a fixed n, threfore only a finite number of instances; in that case, complexity theory says that both problems are trivial and can be solved in constant time (e.g. by a simple table lookup).  Obviously this theoretical conclusion is irrelevant to the practical question. 

The sad fact is that theoretical computer science does not have any tools yet that can provide useful lower bounds for problems of fixed size.   Even assuming P != NP, there is no way to prove that the current protocol, with specific key and hash sizes, is safe.  It may even be the case that forging a bitcoin transaction signature is easier than checking it, or that finding the right nonce for a block is easier than computing SHA256 twice -- independently of whether P = NP or not.  We simply do not know.

If someday one were to find fast solutions for  those puzzles, then complexity theory indeed says that there must exist safe replacements for them -- assuming P != NP, of course.  But the theory cannot identify those replacements, not even tell how many bits one needs to use in keys and hashes to ensure that inverting those functions is hard enough.  Conversely, even if P = NP, the current protocol may be safe, or there may exist safe alternatives for those two puzzles.  (As you surely know, "polynomial" does not mean "computable in practice", and "superpolynomial" does not mean "impossible to compute in practice".)

The difficulty of those two puzzles, for the currently chosen key and hash sizes, has been verified only experimentally, by tests that have ruled out some weaknesses that people have thought of checking.   (For a trivial example, someone surely must have checked that the leading bits of the block hash are not linear functions of the nonce bits, not even approximately.)   However, a thorough check would require testing all possible algorithms (or boolean circuits) up to some large size, for all possible inputs -- which is totally outside the realm of practicality.

With no known shortcuts, exhaustive enumeration is pretty much the best way we now have to solve those puzzles.  That is all one can say about the issue.

Since it is FUD time, why not:

I wonder how many people here know how this pic is related to bitcoin:
Bogart Pediatric 2009 Wine Aficionado Dinner
Here is another one (the URL is a spoiler):
Bogart Pediatric 2010 Wine Aficionado Dinner

There are several things to worry about re this person, but one in particular that may be relevant is that, before getting interested in bitcoin, that man went into the business of acquiring and selling virtual currencies and goods in internet games, and took over the entire market.

Others have explained: among other things, the investors
* do not have to register and interact with dubious exchanges;
* can invest largish amounts without slippage;
* do not need to worry about computer security;
* can use some retirement money that cannot be applied in bitcoin directly.
These reasons seem to be enough for some people.

Thanks! 

I agree that the chance of those assumptions being broken is not worth worrying about; it would be like worring that three nuclear reactors may melt down and explode at the same time. 

However I would dispute the assertion that the two assumptions that I listed are "well grounded in reality" -- in the same sense that, say, physical laws like gravitation, conservation of energy etc.  are.

Basically the only "proof" of those two assumptions is that many bright people have spent lots of time trying to find fast ways to solve those problems, over the last 40 years, and failed. But that is not a statistically significant result, because the space of all algorithms, even of modest size, is extremely large; so even all that work has explored only an infinitesimal fraction of it.

For the physical laws, in contrast, one can argue that all our collected experience and measurements are statistically significant  "proof" that they work, at least in the realms that we have experienced.  Doubting them (in those realms) is certainly a waste of time.

Moreover, the techniques that we scientists use to find fast algorithms are such that we can only find "obvious" ones, in a sense. So there may exist a relatively short algorithm that quickly solves the bitcoin mining problem, say; but, even if we find it somehow, and check that it works in quintillion of cases, we may be unable to understand how it does it.  (You are aware of the Collatz problem I suppose.)

(You are not referring to the P != NP conjecture I suppose?  It is just as uncertain, but it has absolutely no relevance to those two assumptions in the bitcoin protocol.)

(By the way, until the 1980s many people were quite certain that the linear programming problem could not be solved in polynomial time, because many bright people etc. etc..  Some even had started to build a theory of "LP-complete problems".  Then a Russian mathematician found a polynomial algorithm, by thinking out of the box.)

Thanks! 

Actually it is two independent assumptions: (1) solving the mining problem requires a lot more computation than checking the solution, and (2) forging the signature for a transaction requires an impractical amount of computation.  AFAIK, either could be false with the other being true.

Because I am only an old retard, you are the ones who know bitcoin inside out.  Do your homework, and tell me: where is that "pure incorruptible mathematics" proof?

OK wise bitcoiners who think you "understand the math", do you know why the mining problem is hard?  Or why it is hard to sign a transaction without knowing the private key?

Which is bullshit, unfortunately.

There is no mathematical proof that the mining problem is hard, or that it is hard to get the private key of any given address.

No one has found how to do either of those things efficiently yet, but a smart teenager may find one tomorrow.  Or may have found it  already.

But bitcoiners need not worry, if that happens not only bitcoin, but all current e-commerce protocols will be compromised...

In the Huobi BTC/CNY chart, 30m or smaller intervals: when the cursor is over the order book plot, the text that shows cost and receive ends with "The average ... SATOSHI/BTC" instead of "... CNY/BTC".

AFAIK, the way the fund works, SecondMarket makes money (fees) whatever happens to the price.

It is the people who invest in the fund (i.e. who buy their shares) who assume all the risk.  Specifically, the investors who bought SMBIT shares when the BTC price was below 650$ are currently happy, the others are currently at unhappy.

The investors cannot do anything for the first six months; after which all they can do is liquidate their shares, at a price proprtional to the current BTC market price.  Thus SMBIT does not have to do any smart trading: it could just buy when someone invests, sell when someone liquidates, always at the current market price, and it would still make a good profit.

SMBIT could make some extra money, for itself and/or for their investors, by playing the market with the coins that they are holding for their investors; but I assume that they are prohibited to do so by the contract, even if the investors wanted them to.

Is this correct?

If I were the FBI or Interpol I would set up a dozen mixer sites out there, with the best interface and lowest fees; and quietly stamp out or co-opt any real ones.  That way I would get a list of suspicious bitcoin users and I would not have to chase their btcoins in the blockchain.

Fortunately the FBI and Interpol are dumber than me. 

Only if it is relative to Bitstamp and/or BTC-e?

In the 1m chart, the last pump was

  Bitfinex: first hint 19:09, for real 19:10

  Huobi and OKCoin: first hint 19:07, for real 19:08