Yeah, a year or so ago someone vandalized that page, adding a claim that I owned one of the largest bitcoin hoards and was an ethusiastic supporter, or something like that.     So I had to replace it by that line to set the record straight.

Bitcoins (or any currency) are not wealth, they are tokens that people can exchange for wealth with other people.

When you are measuring the wealth of one person or company, it is correct to include any currency that they own, because currency is so easily exchanged for other wealth with other people or companies. 

But when you are measuring the wealth of a country or of a planet, you cannot include the currency that its inhabitants own, unless they can easily exchange it all with people outside the country or planet. 

In that example, before Satoshi spent his stash, the Greeks owned a lot of houses and land, and 9 million bitcoins.  After Satoshi's buying spree, they would own a lot fewer houses and land, and 10 million bitcoins.  Unless they can use that 1 M bitcoins to buy 10 billion USD worth of stuff from people outside Greece, they will be poorer by 10 billion USD.

Even miners who sell immediately are making a profit that comes entirely from people who buy bitcoins expecting to profit from them by that mechanism I described.

Miners who mined long ago and held, as well as the early adopters who bought thousands of coins for nearly nothing, are just like the issuers of private money who keep some of their issuance to spend when it has been accepted as currency by other people.

There are few already, and the list seems to be slowly growing. 

If a large group adopts bitcoin now, at the current price or at a higher price, they would be sharing their wealth with the early adopters in proportion.

For example, if Greece adopted bitcoin, and 9 million BTC were circulating there with a value equivalent to 10'000 USD/BTC, then Satoshi's 1 million BTC would allow him to buy 10 billion USD worth of Greek property.  Greece then would become 10 billion USD poorer.

That is why no sane government should allow privately issued money: the people who issue it take wealth from those who use it.

When the government issues more money, the government is taking wealth from its citizens, so it is just another tax.  It may be a stupid kind of tax, but people tolerate it because the government is supposed to give that wealth back as public services. 

When the banks issue more money through fractional reserve lending, they are taking that wealth for themselves.  Citizens should not tolerate that, but most do not understand what is going on.  I have only a foggy notion myself...

Will the trades themselves be visible in the trade log (or in a separate trade log), after they have been executed?

Cute that they still wear the ID wristbands from the maternity yard.  I suppose that, if they took them off, they would no longer know who is who.

 

Could it be that all buyers so far have been by people who already held BIT shares?

* They know what BIT is, few other people do.
* They believe that bitcoin will someday be worth a lot more than now.
* They are prepared to wait many years for that.
* They probably bought other shares for 400-800 $/BTC, so 290 is cheap.
* Buying more of something is an easier decision to make than buying the first one.
* They may be tempted to buy just to keep the price from falling.

Are you joking, or did you mean "top bitcoin core developer"?

This chart claims that they have 6% of the total hashpower, so they must be mining ~215 BTC/day, 7 days per week; or ~300 BTC per workday. 

The average trade volume last week, converted to BTC, was ~390 BTC per work day.   But surely there was quite a bit of re-trading of the same notes.  When KnC issues more notes, which broker sells them? "NON"?

... but the honchos now admit that sidechains will not solve the scalability problem:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/393h73/blockstream_to_release_first_opensource_code_for/cs09dsq?context=4

As for the Lightning Network, the buzzword du jour, I am still trying to find out whether it is snake oil, or just plain bullshit...

IIRC, they had already removed mtgox from the latest (5th) amended filing.

It seems that a somewhat more accurate headline would have been: "BTCChina and Huobi agree that the current 1 MB block size limit is too small, but think that 20 MB would be too big"

You forgot to say that bitcoin will end poverty (read it in Forbes, and Sir Branson approves).

It will also end election fraud (see Swarm and the Bitcoin Foundation election).

It will also give each human being his due share of land (Factom will see to it)

It will also let the unbanked in rural Africa order cocaine through their iPhones (conflating a bit).

It will also cure cancer, obesity, baldness, and erectile disfunctions (obviously).

It will also fix the extremely unequal distribution of wealth.  Wait, no, nobody wants that.

I believe that it is possible to merge-mine two coins only of one of them has the protocol tweaked to allow it.  Isn't that so? 

If that is the case, surely the new bitcoin will not want to allow merge-mining, and the old bitcoin obviously will not.

That seems to be the current plan, yes: trigger the fork when 800 of the last 1000 blocks have been mined with new-version software.  

This plan is better than the previous one (hard fork at programmed block number), because no one will be able to predict when it will occur.  

Also, a fixed-date fork had a good chance of achieving a 100% to 0% split, since  the anti-fork minority would switch once it realizes that it has lost; whereas the new adoption-triggered plan, if it triggers, it is guaranteed to fork when 20% of the miners (and god knows how many clients) are still on the old chain.  

Much better.  I mean, better for those who wish to see bitcoin collapse in the most comical way possible.

Well, a clean hard fork would be the most reasonable and safest option, IMHO.

But, in the discussion lists, some people seem totally  convinced that hard forks are tools of the Devil.  So they would rather have some sloppy mushy sticky gooey fork situation --- by which a client will never know which chain will process his transactions, leading to possible double spends and unfixable inconsistent wallets.  

I read that Mircea Popescu even promised that, if a hard fork happens, he will re-send on one chain all transaction requests that are intended for the other, so as to frustrate the fork.  

So you may still keep your hope.  As for me, I am drooling at the thought...  

The new version of the basic software will be deployed now, but the max block size increase and the fork will only happen after a scheduled block number, to be mined at least 6 months from now.  So there would be plenty of time for people to upgrade (if they want to) and the fork time will be known in advance, except for the variation in block mining time.

After the hard fork, you will automatiall have the same amount of bitcoins in both chains.  Hopefully a consensus would have been reached before that time so one of the clones will be worthles and unusable for lack of miners, and "bitcoin" will be the other clone.  In the unlikely chance that both versions survive, if you have the privatekeys you will be able to move or sell each clone independently by using the proper version of the software.

That was the original plan, but now people are discussing fancier (and unpredictable) schemes for triggering the fork, and fancy dynamic block size limits that will require lots of changes to programs that parse the blockchain, and will make it impossible to predict the memory needed to run a node or client.  I hope that folly prevails... 

They have such a list in their SEC filing document, in a lengthy section where they discuss the risks of the fund.  One of the things that they fixed in the 5th amended filing was removing MtGOX from that list.

Hopefully the FUD being spread by the developers (how I love to say that!  ) will subside, everybody will upgrade to some big-block version, and the fork will be uneventful, with the old branch dead at birth.

But otherwise that is good advice.  If you have coins in an exchange or some other place where you don't have all the private keys, then after the fork you may be able to withdraw only the version of coins that the service owner chose to work with.