He may be referring to the recent probation hearings for Sonny, when the judge said that there was a strong smell of scam but let Sonny go free with only a extension of his probation.

I seem to recall that the Vleisides's lottery scam had legs in several countries, including the Netherlands.  Is that correct?

If it is, could it be that the real slok (whether he is that Steven or not) was one of those legs?

Among the accused in the lottery scam case, was there any mention of Dutch nationals, or people with Dutch surnames?

Surely there will be fractional banking with bitcoins, just as there was with dollars when these were officially backed by gold.  An account in a "bitcoin bank" is only an entry in the bank's ledger. People do not need to see "their" bitcoins in the bank's "vault", they only need to trust that the bank will hand them over if and when they decide to withdraw.  Bank clients gamble on that trust, even when they know that the sum of all bank accounts is more than what the bank actually owns.  Meanwhile they can pay with those virtual bitcoins, that exist only on the bank's ledger, just as if they were actual ones on the blockchain.

MtGOX was an example of that.  People were buying with real dollars, at or above market price, some 600 k bitcoins that existed only in MtGOX's database.  Even after people realized that MtGOX was insolvent, some managed to sell their "GOXcoins" on other markets, for way more than their actual worth in real bitcoins.


I don't think you need universal adoption to use that formula.  Not everyone in the world accepts euros, or Brazilian reals. As long as the currency is accepted and fungible in some market, the formula should hold.


The seigneurs may think so, but the rest of the people will not like the idea.

That is why every minimally functioning government will stamp out private currencies: even if they succeed (or, rather, to the extent that they succeed), they are essentially scams, that take billions or trillions of wealth from the users and transfer them to the seigneurs' pockets.  It is hard to tell precisely when and how the users lose wealth, but the losses are real because they must add up to the seigneur's gains.

That, by the way, is the motivation for the existence of so many altcoins.  "Why should I use bitcoin, and let Satoshi & friends get filthy rich at my expense, when I can create an altcoin, and hopefully get filthy rich at its users' expense?"

The US government forcibly destroyed the Liberty Dollar partly for that reason, and acted to ensure that game currencies such as Linden Dollars were not widely used outside of the gaming context.  China and other countries banned bitcoin from the mainstream economy, for that same reason.

(Indeed, the thing that still puzzles me most about bitcoin is why the governments of the US and their poodles close allies are so warm about it --- even though the most enthusiastic bitcoiners openly claim that its goal is to weaken the US government's control of the economy and render the dollar worthless.)

You cannot ignore the velocity.  If everybody would pay their bills the same day they get the money, instead of waiting to the end of the month, the same amount of trading would require 1/30 as much currency in circulation.  If the currency it bitcoin, the smaller demand would imply a lower value per BTC.

Moreover, the creation of virtual forms of the currency is inevitable.  I could pay a merchant with a signed paper "I owe you 10 bitcoins, payable in 10 days", and the merchant can pay his supplier with that paper, if they trust me.  We could deposit all our bitcoins in a "bitcoin bank", and pay each other with checks from those accounts.  Such virtual bitcoins would reduce the demand for actual bitcoins.


The second case has happened with many private currencies in the past, such as Platinum Pieces of the World of Warcraft game (is that right?), Second Life's Linden Dollars, and, presumably, the Liberty Dollar.

In the first case, the central banks are supposed to use the wealth that they take from the people through seignorage for the benefit of the people.  That makes the practice acceptable to the majority of the population. (Whether the governments actually use that wealth for the people's benefit is a separate issue.) With private money like bitcoin, seignorage transfers wealth from the general population to the private individuals who created the currency.  In the case of bitcoin, some seigneurs expected to suck in trillions of dollars that way. 

But bitcoins are not equity in the bitcoin network.  Buying one bitcoin does not make you owner of a fraction of its hashpower. At any time, the bitcoin miners could abandon the Satoshi20090103 blockchain for any other coin with similar protocol that is more profitable to mine; and bitcoin owners will not have any say in it.

Units of accounting in the unspent transaction outputs in the longest branch of the Satoshi20090103 blockchain (aka "bitcoins") are indeed scarce, as long as Gavin and the miners refrain from changing the protocol; but there is a potentially infinite number of blockchains with the same properties.

If, at some time in the future, a better altcoin comes along (say, with a 0.1 second mean confirmation time, or a distributed trustless way to seize and return stolen bitcoins), and takes over the bitcoin "market", there will be no central bank to swap old bitcoins for new ones at a fixed rate.  Some owners of old bitcoins may be able to sell them to suckers in exchange for new ones, before they become worthless; but many will inevitably lose the money that they invested in BTC.

Bitcoin mining is currently financed by an "inflation tax" of 5-10% per year.  At some point, that inflation will stop and the miners will start to require transaction fees.  No one knows how much those fees will be, but mining is already an oligopoly market so a cartel of 2-3 mining companies can set the fees to whatever gives them maximum net revenue.  By the way, those fees will apply to every transaction, including hotwallet-coldwallet moves, BTC deposits and withdrawals, etc..


The "market cap" is pretty meaningless for bitcoin, because most of the 13 million extant BTC were never traded, or were last traded for a very small fraction of the current price; and the market has little liquidity.  If all the current owners of Apple stock decided to sell everything within a month, they would find plenty of eager buyers, and the total dollar amount of those sales would be close to the market cap.  If the same happened to bitcoin, the price would plummet to unpredictable lows, and the total sales volume would be a very small fraction of its nominal market cap.

Almost, except for two small details called "backing assets" and "dividends".  Stupid things really, but the reason why bitcoin is not seeing wider adoption out there is that most people somehow got convinced that they do matter.

Dear @Chang_Hum, I hope you are enjoying the warm welcome that this thread reserves for those who have the bad habit of pointing out the obvious. 

Sorry, it must be something on my end.  The linkedin URL works, but the facebook one gives "This content is currently unavailable". (Do I have to login? I don't have a facebook account, and would rather not open one.)  And my browser says that all the image URLs are dead.

Anyway, congrats for the catch!

The links are dead. Is that confirmation that you nailed it?

Thanks... but, in my post above, please replace "is" by "is supposed to be"; my question still stands.

Would the ripple fans please help me understand it?

Ripple is a system, based on cryptocurrency ideas but centralized, that banks can use for international remittances and interbank transfers of national currencies.

Ripple (XRP) is also the name of an altcoin, created by the same company that is developing the Ripple system; it is somewhat linked to the system, but is not a necessary part of the system, and probably will not be used by the banks that will use the system.

Is the above correct?

Thanks...

How could we possibly stop, given that the Original Poster did not state any rule for that?

You don't know whether you think so?

If that request is about the OHLC chart type, I like the single blue version, better than the previous red-green one. (The shape of the plot itself shows whether the price went up or down from one interval to the next; and the open and close prices are not very informative when trading goes on 24/7.)

If it it is going to be changed, could that be a separate style option (red/green vs. monochrome)?

Oops, please disregard my post above, my recollection seems to be garbled...

If I recall correctly, the probation officer was aware of BFL, and she even visited the premises at some point.  But she did not know what was really going on.

Several pages ago we discussed the All-Seeing Eye of Dog (or God, can't remember now); have we gone full circle?

Chinese Standard Time is 8 hours ahead of UTC (UK Standard Time).  Trading is usually much lower, and price more stable, between 18:00 and 22:00 UTC (02:00 am to 06:00 am, China time).  There are no sharp peak hours; the volume grows gradually from early wake-up time until ~09:00 UTC (17:00 China time) and then decreases gradually until late bedtime.  The pattern is fairly obvious in the 1h volume charts.

However, there are many random peaks and valleys superimposed on that basic pattern.  Also, when the price is varying a lot (like in the last few days) that general daily pattern disappears, and trading goes on unabated straight through the night.

You mean that The Search for Slok is over? 
 

Wait, you don't mean --- a seeing eye dog can read poetry?