Does anyone else feel that many users who were very active six months ago have gone missing since then?

Are you sure that that's what you want?



PS. When will @theymos fix the image truncation bug?  

Speaking of anagrams: shoot, I am Satan, OK?

If I am not mistaken there are 9081072000 of them, which one do you want?

Noblesse oblige...  

The total fees being paid now are only ~10 BTC/day (~5000 USD/day), which divided by 70000 tx/day gives only 0.00014 BTC/tx, or little more than the minimum fee.  If one is tumbling 680'000 stolen MtGOX coins, a loss of 10 BTC/day is nothing.  If one is expecting to sell 200'000'000 USD of fund shares, one may be willing to spend 1% of that to simulate a vigorous bitcoin economy for a year.


All bitcoin indicators grew enormously over those five years.  I would question whether it is appropriate to call it 'exponential growth' and then extrapolate to the future, but that is not the point.


Like the Metcalfe Law plot that others have posted, the above plot squeezes the data for the last year into a tiny corner region of 3 by 0.2 cm at normal resolution.  One must look closely at that corner to notice that the number of transactions has not increased substantially over the last year.  One must look even closer to notice that the tiny wiggles in that plot are swings by 40% or more.

Now look at this plot of the estimated USD transaction volume per day, for the last year:


"Estimated" here apparently means "excluding the return-change outputs" as identified by some heuristic.
Note that the daily transaction volume in USD mostly decreased from ~Jan/01 to ~Mar/07, and was approximately constant from ~Mar/23 to now, apart from a couple of peaks/bumps (~Mar/07--Mar/23, ~May/22--Jun/20) and a depression (~Apr/27--May/21).  This is quite at odds with the "increasing adoption" that was supposed to be happening during this time, which should result in steadily increasing USD volume.

The plot of  the estimated BTC transaction volume per day is perhaps more revealing:


Note that the daily transaction volume in BTC was even more constant, arount 100'000 BTC/day, from Jan/01 to this day.  (While the March peak is more striking in this plot, the other bumps and dips are somewhat smaller.)  It is puzzling, for example, that the BTC volume on Jan/01 was almost the same as on May/01, even though the price dropped by 50% in the meantime.  I take this fact as evidence that most of the traffic is not payments, but activities for which the price is irrelevant -- such as tumbling.

The plot of number of transactions per day is also strange:


Note that this quantity too is fairly constant, between ~60'000 and ~70'000 tx/day, from ~Feb/10 to this day.  (The vertical scale of this plot starts at 40'000 tx/day, so the relative variations are smaller than what they appear.)  The March peak of the other plots is here an inconspicuous bump of about 8%.  (Therfore, that peak was the result of larger transactions, rather than more transactions.)   While the increase of ~20% in January could signify increased adoption, the stagnation since then again contradicts it. (Increased adoption should cause more transactions as well as more USD volume.)

Are you trying to push us into looking for anagrams of "gleb gamow"?

That lawsuit, and the crucial verdict, was about property of a specific physical note:
The verdict merely said that that banknote was no longer the victim's property, because its current holder had received it by legitimate means in good faith:
But the verdict obviously did not say that stolen cash ceases to be the property of the victim just because "cash is fungible".  Police routinely seize money from cash thieves and return it to the victims.  If the thief exchanged the cash for other valuables, without the merchant's knowledge, the cash then is "clean", but the valuables are still seized, as being conceptually the victim's property.


I am sure that the police in most countries would, in principle, consider bitcoin theft as any other property theft.  And it seems that some people have succeeded in convincing the police to investigate bitcoin thefts.  For example, check this thread about the Intersango scam; and I understood that the MtGOX liquidator has asked the Japanese police to investigate the disappearance of some additional 27'000 BTC.

However, catching a bitcoin thief will be quite hard in general.  The transaction that stole your bitcoins may have been issued from your own computer, automatically, by some self-erasing malware, while the hacker was not even online.  You can point to the stolen coins in the blockchain, but the thief may leave the coins there for years, and no one can take them from him. Or he can hack into an old PC in Mongolia, and from there tumble the coins so thoroughly that it will be practically impossible to trace them to his person when he finally spends them.

AFAIK no theft of bitcoins by outside hackers has been solved, by the police or anyone else.  In several cases of insider theft, the culprit was identified with high probability, but I don't know of any case where the evidence was sufficient to get a conviction.


DPR was not a bitcoin thief.  He ran a large website selling illegal drugs, and was caught for that.  They tailed him digitally for some time, hacked into his computers, collected the evidence they needed (and perhaps the private keys), and phisically grabbed him only when they felt that they had enough evidence.   As others pointed out, that investigation was relatively easy, because SilkRoad was a continuing operation, with lots of traffic and many people involved.

I know what "fungibility" means, But note the boldfaces in my post.  That is exactly what I wrote.  The court ruled that that physical  banknote was not the victim's property any more.  But of course the 20£ (as abstract amount) that the thief stole remained the victim's property, and the government would take 20£ from the thief and return then to the victim, if they were to identify him and found that he had that much money in his possession or in his bank account.

EDIT: quote markup

Note that the verdict there was based on the fact that the current owner of that physical note acquired it by legitimate means in good faith, so the court had a good argument to decide that that physical note was no longer the victim's property.   The victim of course still retained the right to get the amount of 20£ (not that physical note) back from the thief, if he would ever be identified; in which case the government would take that amount from the thief's possessions, in whatever form they would find it, and return it to the victim. 

Ideally the same should happen in bitcoinland: if a hacker steals one bitcoin from you, and buys a megapizza with it, you should be able to ask the government to hunt down the hacker, and take one bitcoin (not THAT bitcoin), or equivalent dollars, from HIS possessions (not from the pizza parlor's possessions)  and return it to you.

But, in reality, you will not even be able to prove to the police that a theft took place.

Do you know of any case?

Precisely!

One fundamental flaw of  cryptocoins (that supportes consider a feature) is that they are intended to eliminate the notion of "property" for money, and leave only "possession" instead.

You have "possession" of something if you physically can use it or dispose of it as you like.

The thing is your "property" if, and only if, the  government thinks you should have possession of it, and you can get his cops and courts to get it.

If a thief steals your car, it becomes his possession; but it is still your property, because the government thinks so, and is expected to take the car from him and give it back to you, by force if needed, once he is found.  If your tenant stops paying the rent and refuses to leave, the house is still your property because the government thinks so, and will help you get the guy out.    If a hacker empties you bank account, he may get possession of the money, but that money is still your property -- only because the government thinks so.  If you fail to pay taxes by the due date, you retain possession of that money, but it will be property of the government -- just because they think it is.

There is no way to define propeprty without reference to some government.  If there is no government, there is no property, only possession; and when something gets stolen from you, it becomes the thief's possession, and that is it.  YOU (and your friends) may think that it is still your property, but the thief (and his friends) will disagree; what then?  

By design, cryptocoins (as the libertarians see them) are meant to be impossible for any government (or any other entity) to take away from their possessors.  But then, by design, no government (or any other authority) can enforce any property rights on cryptocoins.  (Indeed, early adopters had hoped that the government would be unable even to discover who has possession of the coins; and now that bitcoin has been found to be inadequate in this aspect, they  are turning to more sophisticated "truly anonymous" altcoins.)  

Therefore, there is no concept of "property" in the realm of cryptocoins.  Only "possession".

The notion of "property" as distinct from "possession" is very old; it may have been invented when humans adopted agriculture and settled down, abandoning the "share the catch" economy of nomadic hunter-gatherers.  It has become such a basic feature of society that people seem to forget what makes it work.  

Do we really want to eliminate the concept of "property" with regards to money?
  
(PS. And then there is the misleading use of "possession" instead of "knowledge" when talking about keys; but that is another issue.)

You go to the police and hope that they can catch the thief and get your coins back.
 

Maybe... But the cryptocurrency principle of offline generation of key/address pairs so distinct from the traditional models that it  is hard to compare the risks.  It removes some weakeness but adds others.

For example, consider the risk that a malicious version of a popular wallet software will choose the keys from a small set known to the thief (with, say, only 2^30 possibilities).  There is no test that can reveal the weakness of those keys, and the probability of a collision would still be very small. The malicious code can erase itself after some time, leaving no trace of its action.  Such a malware may run undetected for months, providing thousands of users with weak keys; until the thief strikes and empties all the compromised addresses at once.  This attack will work even on computers that are isolated from the internet, and could hit cold wallets as easily as hot ones; so the damage could be quite substantial.

(The wallet software itself could be tested after each release by generating a few billion keys and looking for collisions; but the malware could be programmed to detect intensive use, or to generate weak keys only in special situations -- such as in machines with a specific range of IP addresses, or in a certain range of dates -- that the test setup may not satisfy.)

4f

Indeed, there seems to be a fundamental dilemma there.  Satoshi solved the problem of secure trustless e-payments, but there is still no solution for the problem of recovering stolen coins without spoiling that primary goal.

Perhaps because, if one answered without quoting, it would be hard to tell which "question above" one is replying to?

People buying at the ICO hope to get not just some SuperNET tokens, but shares of a functioning enterprise, with solid software, that they can profit from.  Escrows will not guarantee this.

I hoped that people had learned the lesson with Neo&Bee, but...

That someone has the right to hide his identity, of course; but, whatever his excuse, the smart option for you is to walk away.

In a commercial exchange, the party that delivers first has the right to know the identity and past history of the other party.  If someone asks you to pay upfront but refuses to identify himself, you should assume he is a scammer, and not have any business with him. 

The exchange rate is irrelevant, what matters is whether banks and government can survive without issuing new money.  (The Italian lira was worth a fraction of a penny when Italy switched to euro, yet Italians did not suffer more than Germans with the conversion.)


What?!? But... they eat boiled tomatos at breakfast, and spread mint jelly on their meat... 

 

Well, how many possible questions are there?

I am assuming that this graph counts addresses that appear in the blockchain (as output addresses) for the first time on each day, and does not subtract addresses that have become empty on that day.  Is this second assumption incorrect?

(Sigh, blockchain.info should have explained more precisely what is being shown in each chart...)

In the extreme tumbling scenario I just described, there would be 150'000 new addresses created every day, and all would be non-empty at the end of the day.


Exchange deposits and withdrawals may contribute little to the new address count, but they may be a substantial part of the <transactions per day> and <total output volume per day> plots.  After MtGOX, exchange clients are advised to keep their balances to a minimum.

It does not seem right to count those BTC transfers as real use: although the input and output addresses have distinct owners, the coins in the exchange logically belong to the clients, so they are not "payment" for anything.  It would be like counting cash deposits and withdrawals at banks as part of the GDP.

The blockchain traffic from Chinese bitcoiners, for example, must be almost 100% exchange deposits and withdrawals; its use for e-payments is probably very small.


Banks and businesses are required to report their activity to their government, for tax and other purposes, and there are many thousands of people whose full-fime job is to extract useful statistics from that raw data.  For example, the published numbers on credit card usage are probably accurate to 2 digits, at least; and we know the subtotals by country and purpose.  Ditto for total salaries, total company income, etc.

There is no such data for bitcoin.  We don't know how much of the traffic shown in the blockchain.info plots are payments for goods and services.  It could be 10% or 90% -- and the fraction could vary substantially from month to month.

In fact, the shape of those plots over the last couple of years suggests that most of that traffic is NOT commercial payments.


Inflation of the blockchain traffic would obviously benefit all bitcoin enterprises, especially bitcoin invstment funds.  For example, I have seen a couple of articles recently claiming that bitcoin has already passed PayPal in volume of payments --- using the blockchain.info <total output volume> as the bitcoin number.