I may know what articles you are alluding to.  Or maybe I don't.


Good insight... I believe that there is a chance that the blockchain will be maintained for the next hundred years, if only as a fun challenge.


It obviously has been, until now.  Will it continue to be? 

I wouldn't say that it is a good investment, but it is certainly a great gambling game.

I believe that the price will drop to zero eventually, but won't dare to guess what it will be one hour from now.   I think I understand a bit about the market now, but not not enough to predict the price.

For instance, I bet that the Esteemed Colleague who predicted "10$ by mid 2014" was not quite aware of the situation in China.  In my view, the Chinese traders may continue their gambling for many months still, and the price may wander between 300$ (or less) to 1200$ (or more), depending mainly on their mood.

The problems and argument flaws that I see are simple enough that one does not need to be a specialist in those fields to understand them.  On the other hand, some of them (such as the risk of theft) require knowledge of computers and cryptography that experts in those fields rarely have.  Moreover, few of them seem to care enough about bitcoin to learn about its economic and social fabric (exchanges, funds, payment processors, scams, miners, castles,  frappucinos, ...)

Thanks, no grudge kept.  I will say a good word for you to the Bitcoin Goddess next time I meet her. All the best. 

We went through this, perhaps 4000 pages ago...

I have no technical criticisms about the protocol.  I am satisfied that it works as it was claimed to do.  There may be some efficiency problems, but I am willing to assume that they can be solved in due time.

My skepticism about its longterm success is due to economical, political, social and practical issues.  Many of the predictions that bitcoiners take for granted seem highly improbable to me.  They minimize, or ignore altogether, many problems (such as the risk of theft) that I believe are quite serious. And so on.

For me, Mark is indeed the chief suspect, but I know no evidence that will rule out other possibilities -- including embezzlement by some other MtGOX manager or staff, theft of paper wallets by a physical intruder, hacking by a complete outsider, etc..

The people who were suing MtGOX in the US claimed to have evidence of wrongdoing, but unfortunately the withdrew their lawsuit to support the Sunlot proposal.

We can only hope hope that a police investigation will someday find the culprit.

First you give me an example of hackers stealing credit card information from a properly secured server.

Stupid for stupid: I propose that you write a malware that can steal a 10$ bill from my pocket.

(And note the word MEASURE.)


Sure.  You scan the QR code on the screen or catalog and send 1 satoshi there.

Then you check the blockchain and see that the satoshi was indeed sent to the address displayed on the screen.

You call the dealer, and Bill from Sales confirms that the satoshi was indeed deposited in their payment address.

You then send the other 999.99999999 BTC to the same address.  So you think.

You check the blockchain and find that the second transaction went to a DIFFERENT address!

You call the store, and Bill says that the second address is not theirs.   

Then what?

OR, TO KEEP THINGS SMPLE:

One day you find that all your bitcoins were stolen from all your paper wallets.

Then what?

(How could that happen? Hint: how did you create the paper wallets?)

I am feeling a bit dizzy now.  More than 600'000 coins were stolen or embezzled from MtGOX by parties unknown, an established bankruptcy executor was duly appointed by a Japanese court with the mission to take away what is left from Mark and distribute it to the victims in the fairest way possible --- and somehow HE is now the villain against whom the weapons must be turned?

Every day miners "print" a bit over 3600 new BTC.  Have you checked  what is the resulting inflation rate, in % of the existing BTC per year?

They may be legit, of course.  Or they may be legit but not as competent and effective as they say they are.

That list of "updates" is mostly pointers to articles and news published by other people.  I don't see them doing much on their own...

 

Quite possibly.  I don t think one has to invoke obscure conspiracies for that.  Financial privacy is already so cumbersome and costly to achieve that most people will rather just give up on it.  It is like trying to pay for rent and groceries with gold dust in order to avoid dealing with "evil fiat".

You obviously hope that Monero or some other cryptocoin will allow people to retain financial privacy without joining some savage tribe and subsisiting on berries and monkey meat.  Good luck with that.  Need I tell you that I am rather skeptical about the idea?

Please think a bit harder instead of just repeating the usual sales tripe.

There is a big gap between stealing credit card data and stealing the money of the owners of those cards.  There is no such gap for bitcoin.

If you lose money to credit card fraud, you have hope to recover the money, or at least a big company that will be interested in hunting down the thief. If your bitcoins are stolen, you will never get them back, and all you will get from the bitcoin community is shrugs and jeers.

Sure, there are many ways to store private keys securely.  Yet bitcoins still get stolen.  How is that?


Yes I do.  How do you propose to measure that?


Just for curiosity, if some day you use bitcoin to buy a car, how will you make sure that the address that you are sending the bitcoins to is indeed the car dealer's?  What will you do if the car dealer tells you that they did not receive any bitcoins, and that their payment address is not the one you used?

Hm, this site looks very suspicious to me.  Could be an attempt to steal people's data, or worse.

IIRC, analysis of the database yielded only 70'000 accounts that had some nontrivial balance (I don't recall the threshold, but it was 1 BTC at most). 

I would think that a client with less than 500 USD balance (1 BTC) would be very unlikely to  file, since his return would be at most 1/5 of that, or 100 USD.  Many of those above that threshold will not file because they have dirty hands.  So the claims should be less than 50'000 probably much less.

More victims may give up if Kobayashi goes by "method X" and require claimants to provide the full history of their deposits and withdrawals.

I don't know what Ecuador intends to do actually.  perhaps they don't know either.

If I had to guess, it would probably be just that: a system for e-payments using some cryptocurrency techniques, with a currency controlled and backed by their Central Bank, perhaps pegged to the dollar, perhaps not, for use by their citizens.  

It is possible that it was not even their idea; rather, the bill may have been pu$hed trough congress by some company who expects to be contracted to implement the system.  This is often how the governments around here come up with technically innovative projects.

For example, here in Brazil the government recently spent a lot of money on a project to give useless toy-like laptops to K12 students (pushed by Intel, whose CEO visited Brazil for the purpose) and on another project to replace the paper ID cards by smartcards (apparently pushed by the same company that provided the smartcards for the Great UK ID-card fiasco).  

With my triple-layer tinfoil hat on, I would even guess is that the future EcuadorCoin is none other than brock Pierce's Realcoin (that is supposed to be pegged to the US dollar, which is Ecuador's official currency at present).

A good balance of the situation.  I am not a lawyer and not even a client, but anyway here are my guesses as to what will Mr. Kobayashi do:

I would almost bet on these.  Paying in bitcoin could lead to squabbles later, due to variable value of bitcon etc.  Paying in yen will simplify his accounting, and he has plenty of legal and practical excuses for going that way.  The trade history is irrelevant if he chooses "method X", and could be obtained from the MtGOX databases if he chooses "method Y".

Even if there are a few thousand claims, the "army" of validators would not have to be that big.  The main difficulty, I suppose, will be to verify the BTC deposits and withdrawals (if by "method X") or whether the MtGOX accounting of trades and balances have not been doctored (if by "method Y").  Apparently he has already hired bitcoin-savy computer experts to help him with the technical details.

Almost certain, too, unless (perhaps) if the buyer has strong proof of the transaction (like, a notarized contract).   Even then, selling one's account may be seen as an attempt to evade the banks' KYC/AML measures, and so it may bring trouble for buyer and seller.

To be safe, the original owner who registered at MtGOX and provided his ID would have to file the claim, and then turn over the spoils to the buyer.

If the payout is to be in yen, he will have to auction the coins anyway, and then the proceeds of the auction (minus the auctioner's  fees) will be added to the money to be distributed.

This rule is implicit in "method X" above.  Those lucky bastards will walk away with a profit, at the expense of those who failed to withdraw in time.  But such "injustice" is inevitable; their situation would be like that of the Madoff clients who withdrew before the collapse, or WorldCom shareholders who sold all their shares in 2000.

You have a point there: the number "800 k" ultimately comes only from a highy suspect source, that has flatly lied to customers in the past.

But, if the actual sum of all balances was only 220'000, it means that the balances of some clients have been artificially inflated, by 600'000 BTC in total.  A malicious management would have an obvious motivation for doing that: namely, ensuring that those special clients will get awarded the lion's share of the 220'000 actual coins, at the expense of other clients.

I hope that Mr. Kobayashi is aware of that possibility, and is aware that many clients are aware of it.

The problem is not hackers breaking the bitcoin protocol, it is hackers stealing your bitcoins. 

Bitcoin is worse than other forms of payment in ths regard because the theft is instantaneous, can be fully automated, has no limitations of place, time, or amount, cannot be reversed, and the thief does not have to expose himself.   Furthermore, it may be impossible even to convince the police that the coins were yours and that they were indeed stolen; and the police will probably be unable to do anything about it.

In contrast, cash theft requires the thief to physically handle the money.  Bank or credit card fraud requires sending the stolen data to the thief and the thief exposing himself in order to actually complete the theft; there is then a window of several hours, at least, during which the fraudulent transfer can be blocked or reversed.

If even expert bitcoiners can have their coins stolen by hackers, imagine having millions of non-tech-savy users, each with thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin in their wallets on windows machines.  Hardware wallets like Trezor can help, but there are dozens of ways of getting around them.

Well, if hackers actually deserve to be rewarded for stealing all our money, why should we bother about governments and banks stealing only 30% of it?  If they managed to get hold of the biggest guns, they are the fittest, right?  

Sorry if the sarcasm was not clear; you must not have seen what people wrote here about me. 

Can't he use SEPA to pay the merchant? (Honest question, I don't know the answer.)

I understood that Dell accepts payment by check or bank transfer for orders placed by mobile or e-mail.  Not clear why this restriction, or whether it is a restriction: do they say that because no client would use those slow means if they can pay "instantaneously" by credit card?