Bitcoin itself is not a scam.

Telling common folk to invest in bitcoin because it is safer than stocks, because it will be worth a zillion in a few years, because it will be the currency of the inerne, etc. -- that is a scam.  Even, or especially, if supported by pseudoscience like the logscale straight-line extrapolation, the (total e-commerce)/(finite suppliy) argument, blockchain statistics passed off as usage statistics, etc.  Especilly if the victim is not told that the price will depend on the mood of the Chinese tea traders, that no one will care if his bitcoins get stolen, etc..

(TelexFree had a non-scam product, some uninteresting VOIP card.  The scam was getting millions of people to invest all their savings in the MLM scheme.)


That is what I am very skeptical about.

I tell people why i am skeptical.  Ultimately it will be their decision to invest or not.  I will run the risk of being wrong.

Have you considered the scenario where the price will crash to 100$ or less?  Will the people whom you convinced to invest their savings at 800 $/BTC hate you for that?

Sorry, but the belief that it is possible to get rid of governments, and that society will be better without them, is religion. One cannot be convinced of that by argument or historical examples; one has to take it on faith. 

More so for the belief that bitcoin will achieve that goal.

(By the way, Satoshi's goal when he described bitcoin was to design a digital cash system that did not require a trusted authority.  Period. The implementation was only meant to verify that the design was correct.  Period.  Bitcoin was not intended to be a replacement for credit cards, a way to buy sex and drugs safely, to evade taxes, to dodge the SEC, to destroy dollars, gvernments and banks, to keep your savings safe from inflation, or to get rich; or even to be THE method of internet payment used by everybody in the future.)

Sigh, I have replied to this many times before. 

As with electronic voting, biometric identification, mass user profiling, etc.,  the really important issues with bitcoin are not the technology itself, but the  consequences of using it - legal, political, economcial, social, practical, etc.  However, most of these consequences are hard to evaluate without understanding the technology.  That is why computer experts without vested interest have a moral obligation to enter the discussion of such issues.  Otherwise, the discussion will be dominated by the "salesmen" of the technology, who will only mention the good tings and hide or deny the bad things.

Brazil recently was plagued TelexFree, a huge multi-level marketing scam that stole billions and ruined the life of milions.  For a while it looked like that Bitcoin was going to be another TelexFree.   Fortunately it hasn't happened so far; perhaps it is the memory of TelexFree has made people wary of miraculous investments.

My advocacy (which is apparently not much needed, thank god) was and will be done in local channels.  I don't want to "save" anyone in this thread.   As I said many times, I consider short-term speculation a form of gambling, and I have no problem with that -- as long as people know that they are gambling.

I post most of the time here because this thread is more active than all other ~50 threads in my watchlist together, it has the most varied (and interesting) audience, and news on all topics get promptly posted here.

If everyone here posts their beliefs, and respond to posts that they disagree with, not for personal gain or public service but just for the sake of debating -- why shouldn't I do the same?

I have been advocating also for safe electronic voting for 14 years now.

No one that I know invests in Brazlian Reals.  Or dollars, or euros.

Is that why you folks think that bitcoin is such a great investment --- because you are comparing it to "investing" in cash?

Come on!  The difference between economics and religion is that religion states very clearly what you are required to believe without proof. 

The eventual success of bitcoin depends also a lot on psychology, sociology, businesses, and politics.  People have different probabilities for future events in those areas.  What is your probability that the US government will ban bitcoin?  That Monero will supplant Bitcoin?  That the largest miners will form a cartel and ruin bitcoin to maximize their short-term gain?  That PayPal will switch to Dgecoin?  That the Chinese traders, whose mood currently defines the market price of bitcoin, will get bored and dump all their holdings tomorrow?

For many believers, bitcoin certainly has become a religion, in the most literal sense.   (People in this thread are relatively pragmatic, but what I have read in some other threads is far beyond voodoo..)

(1) I am a prof of computer science and I am supposed to understand computer things.  (2) I am really bothered by people "selling" bitcoin to ordinary folk as an hedge against inflation, fantastic investment, etc..  I view such marketing as a scam, and I consider to be within the obligations of my job to alert the public (who pays my salary) against that scam.  (Fortunately, that marketing does not seem to have had much result yet, and seems to have become more discrete.)

I do not write paid articles.  On the other hand, most of what one finds in the net and other media about bitcoin, if it is not just press releases, is written by bitcoin owners, who have an obvious vested interest in pushing bitcoin.     

Yes.

By the way, "too small to bother" was the answer of the Brazilian Central Bank, back in January or whereabouts, when someone asked them to regulate bitcoin.


Yes.  (But, as the BoE noted, the cost of Satoshi's solution is way too high.)


Conceivable, sure.  But I don't believe bitcoin adoption will get to the point of threatening the "old economy".  On the other hand, I expect there will be regulation that will substantially hamper its adoption.


Could ... maybe ...


This is just a statement of the idea of distributed digital currency.

Do you really care for my opinion?  (Please stop reading if you don't...)

Well, the market has not taken much notice of those news, has it?  (Perhaps because they don't matter to China?)

You already know my view of such "adoptions":  they mostly encourage owners fo old coins to sell them on the exchanges, through Coinbase/BitPay.   A Coinbase-to-Paypal connection will certainly increase that effect.  Will it will attract new users? I doubt it.

Buying bitcoins to pay for e-payments may save some money for international purchases, like airline tickets and hotels.  For domestic purchases I have yet to see an advantage over credit cards and bank transfers, only disadvantages.

Anyway, if there is an increase in real use for e-payments, it is not visible in the blockchain.

If there is an increase in buy demand from non-owners who buy in order to make payments, it is not visible in the exchanges.

As for the Apple thing, I am puzzled by claims that "it is bullish because it will increase public interest in digital money".  I see it as direct competition to bitcoin for e-payments, with a marketing force that bitcoin (or PayPal) cannot match.  It will not matter if it will be terribly more expensive than paying with bitcoin; apple customers obviously enjoy giving Apple their money...

I watched the video, it does not seem to say anything very different from what the central banks have been saying.  I haven't had time to read the articles byond their abstracts.

I wonder where thy got their estimates of number of bitcoin owners.  The "1-2 million worldwide"  may be from Risto's analysis.  The '20'000 in UK" is new to me.

Yeah, I lost my temper for a bit too...  No offense taken, apologies on my part.

When will you realize that there are people who understand bitcoin but honestly do not believe in it?

Why do some of you feel compelled to insult the non-believers, just because they don't believe? 

Speaking of which, you may like to know that my crusade to warn my fellow Brazilians away from bitcoin has been an embarassing failure so far.

Almost everybody I talked to about bitcoin was already way more skeptical about it than I am, and would never consider buying it.  All I could do was to give them a few more reasons to be skeptical -- which they listened to impatiently, only out of politeness, because they did not need any.

Perhaps the problem was that those people were much smater than me.

The only exceptions were two young chaps who now and then insult me on twitter, and love bitcoin because they believe that it will let them buy illegal drugs in total safety.

I suppose that, even if the equipment is not yet paid off, it is worth mining as long as the mined coins are worth more than the electricity bill (and other running costs, like cooling and salaries for large mines).  Even if there is no prospect of recovering the investment, mining will reduce the final loss.  Is this correct?

Because they still don't know who the legitimate clients are, how much each is due, and therefore how big a slice of the leftovers (including that OKPay amount) each one will get.


There are many people who would like to stop the liquidation and reopen MtGOX, presumably because they have dirty money in there, or don't want the truth about the "theft" to be found.  But the court has already decided that there is no hope to let MtGOX resume and pay all its obligations,  so the liquidation will go on.


The balance in your MtGOX account not your property; it was only a promise by MtGOX that they would send you so many BTC and so many dollars if you chose to withdraw it all.  Unfortunately, the spoils of MtGOX do not cover 1/5 of those promises.   For months, if not years, their clients were trading with coins and dollars that did not exist.

Client preferences and their opinions as to what is the "just" division are usually irrelevant in liquidatons.  The process is usually predefined very tightly so that the liquidator does not have to negotiate with thousands of creditors with different desires and opinions.   

Check how the Bernard Madoff liquidation was handled.  AFAIK the court ignored Madoff's inflated account balances and considered only the investor's deposits minus withdrawals.  I am told that this is the standard rule for liquidations, in the US and in Japan.

IF Kobayashi chooses to rely the final balances, rather than deposits minsu withdrawals, he may choose to distribute what is left of the BTC as BTC.  That has one advantage (saves him the work of auctioning them) but several potential legal problems.

However, to anyone who is not a fanatic bitcoiner, the demand to have the spoils returned as BTC rather than yen sound childish and irritating.  "Do those guys want their wealth back, or do they want to keep on playing their silly bitcoin game even in the court?"


I would be VERY surprised if those accounts will get any consideration.  The court will not deliver anything, yen or BTC, to people that are not fully identified.


If those coins were really stolen, I believe that the stolen amount (500 M USD) is already way more than the largest bank heist/robbery in history.

If it was embezzlement by the MtGOX management or staff, however, I doubt that it will be among the top 10 largest.

Correct. The situation is still rather liquid with the police investigating what happened to some of the bitcoins. I would say it's an open question exactly what proportion should be paid out in liquidation. It's not even clear how many bitcoins were originally present, so that makes it a little difficult to figure out the percentage missing. Opinions vary on what percentage of Mt. Gox bitcoins have been recovered, and there's a complete absence of any proof one way or the other. Hopefully, the police will eventually make known the results of their investigation.
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Indeed, and then there is the question of what will Mr. Nobuaki consider to be your claim -- your final balance on MtGOX, or your deposits minus your withdrawals.

I find it totally bizarre that the former MrGOX clients do not seem to care for this question.  Or even understand it.
 

Citizenship is not important.  You should file a claim with the Japanese court-appointed liquidator, Mr. Nobuaky Kobayashi.  Links and information were posted in this thread a couple of weeks ago; look for "creditors meeting".  Some information is available in the MtGOX original website http://www.mtgox.com, but that site may still be managed by Mark, I dont know.

The deadline for filing claims was Nov/2014 but has been postponed to May/2015.  There is no date yet for when the spoils will be distributed.  Be prepared to get only 1/5 of your claim, at most.

Methinks you read quite a few paragraphs between the lines there.

Could he be thinking of questions like 'Well, dunno, ahem, does he want to, you know, scoop out its insides, you know, and kinda sew shut its, its, its openings, you know, and sorta like stuff it with straw, man, and hang it over the door of his thing, I mean his hut, to, say, ward off evil spirits or something, you think?'?

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.'

The VP of a certain insectonymous mining manufacturer recently bought a fancy car and a house worth half a million $, and paid with bitcoins (through Bitpay or some such).  More precisely, he paid with bitcoins that he "test mined" over many months with equipment that he built or bought with preorder money from thousands of clients who only got their equipment when it has become uneconomical.

So, he did not put any money of his own in the deal.  Guess who actually paid for his 0.5 M$ house?