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June 11, 2014, 09:47:59 PM *
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1  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: Today at 07:57:27 PM
Huobi is maintaining prices about $12-$13 higher than Stamp...that doesn't happen all that often...
That difference may not be real.  The price in USD displayed by Bitcoinwisdom is computed by the chart scripts using some value for the CNY:USD exchange rate (presumably the official one, not necessarily up-to-date), that may not be the one assumed by arbitrage traders. 
2  Economy / Securities / Re: Neo & Bee talk (spam free thread) on: Today at 06:59:40 PM
I'm really surprised Havelock hasn't been shut down by the SEC already. BTCT and Bitfunder have both been shut down. Why is Havelock still around?
They are an investment company based and registered in Panama.  The (U.S.) Securities and Exchanges Commission  may perhaps "take an interest" in them if they sell to American citizens/residents, but oterwise it should have no jurisdiction over them.
3  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: Today at 06:28:18 PM
The ex-"technical chief supervisor"* of Blockchain.info joins OKCoin
Thanks!  It may be sign that they are progressing towards opening oversea operations, perhaps?
4  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: Today at 05:55:26 PM
Well, Jed Caleb [ ... ] is also creator and co-owner of Gox (12% shares). And co-defendant with Karpeles in the trial.
I understand that Sunlot made a deal with the people who where suing Mark and Jed in te US, and they have withdrawn the lawsuit.  Also Sunlot claims that Jed (and Gay-Bouchery) have approved their plan, in exchange for being freed of any responsibility in the collapse.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=587295.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=587295.msg6511936#msg6511936
They are rather ambiguos about what they will do with Mark, in particular if he will get a share of the recovered coins like any other client:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=587295.msg6728528#msg6728528
(AFAIK, management always has the last priority in bankruptcy cases, even if there is no evidence of wrongdoing.)
5  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: Today at 05:35:46 PM
For whatever it is worth (via Google Translate):

比特币两月狂涨80% 起死回生还是回光返照
Bitcoin two months shot up 80% to revive or supernatural
Sina Finance, 01:12 on June 5, 2014
http://finance.sina.com.cn/money/lczx/20140605/011219315838.shtml

Quote
[... ]
"Daily Economic News" reporter from the K -line pending Bitcoin Chinese market noticed from early April bitcoin lowest price 2419 yuan / BTC to June 3 up to 4211 yuan / BTC, or nearly 80 percent , yesterday afternoon, 18 point 19 points , bitcoin prices fell slightly to 3975.31 yuan / BTC.

Recently, Apple App shelves and allows the virtual currency Bitcoin Paris opened its first center in the industry have been interpreted as good news Bitcoin .

Bitcoin senior players Songhuan Ping told the " Daily Economic News" reporter , "My view is very simple, well bitcoin domestic development , particularly in the United States, Britain and other places. Law gradually clear , mining costs are increasing rapidly , Bitcoin directly raise the price . "

"Now Exchange , mining machines , payment, consulting and other fields have a lot of competition in these areas if all goes well , there will be a heavyweight domestic companies ." Songhuan Ping said.

However , a senior adviser to the Royal Bank of Canada by Chen into the "Daily Economic News" reporter , said Bitcoin market is still too small, the scale of billions of dollars , a few large easy to raise its price . If there is no volume prices, it is possible pitfalls. "The recent rise is clearly Bitcoin Makers eating short sellers , some of the people who lost a lot of short while before Bitcoin prices also plummeted dealer in the harvest. Bitcoin access to financial markets after more than a casino also black , flicker quite a few retail investors ."
[ ... ]
6  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: Today at 05:30:50 PM
This Chinese article from 2014-06-10 seems to report some deal between blockchain.info and OKcoin:
http://3c.ycwb.com/2014-06/10/content_6936946.htm
Google Translate is not very helpful.  Any hints?
7  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: Today at 01:32:53 PM
I was expecting something like that when it was announced one cannot withdraw fiat anymore from Chinese exchanges.
Really?  Last time I checked, deposits through bank transfers had been disabled, but withdrawals through bank transfers were still working.

The isolated buying spikes since May 20 could be due to some Chiinese traders getting rumors that bank widthdrawals are about to be closed too. Or to rumors of Huobi and/or OKcoin being about to open offshore operations (which they once said they had intention of doing). Or to something else entirely.
8  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: Today at 04:08:58 AM
Not to forget, there's some speculation in the more tinfoil-hatty segments that the NSA may have supplied algorithms that are "pre-weakened". Seems unlikely but with everything that has been coming out lately, perhaps not to be dismissed out-of-hand so quickly.
IIRC, it was confirmed (by Snowden?) that the NSA had weakened a random number generator used by some OS (Windows?) to  generate keys in some popular crypto protocol (https?).  The numbers were drawn from a smaller domain than clients expected,  making the keys easier to find by brute force. 
9  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: Today at 03:57:19 AM
Let's try it with fiat money:
With no known shortcuts for printing more money out of nothing or confiscating someone's funds…ahem…oops?  
Er, sorry, what is your point?
10  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: Today at 02:43:05 AM
(You are not referring to the P != NP conjecture I suppose?  It is just as uncertain, but it has absolutely no relevance to those two assumptions in the bitcoin protocol.)
I am. And it has. At least to 'what the protocol can handle in principle being thrown at it', not 'what the protocol is and does right now'. As long as there are problems that are hard to solve but easy to check, the protocol can be adapted to the threat that a particular problem turned out to be easy to solve after all.

First, let me say that I was just reacting to that "pure incorruptible mathematics" bullshit by the reporter.  I am not arguing that the lack of mathematical proof iis a flaw of bitcoin.  My skepticism does not come from that "flaw" (or from any other strictly technical issue), but from political/social/practical problems, for which my probabilities are obviously different from those of most people in this thread.

As for the P != NP conjecture, I do not need to tell you that it makes sense only if the problem instance size n is allowed to go to infinity, since the difference between polynomial and superpolynomial appears only in the limit, when n is "just about to get there".  The two classes are indistinguishable if one assums that n is bounded, say n < 10^500.  But the bitcoin mining problem and the signature forging problem have a fixed n, threfore only a finite number of instances; in that case, complexity theory says that both problems are trivial and can be solved in constant time (e.g. by a simple table lookup).  Obviously this theoretical conclusion is irrelevant to the practical question. 

The sad fact is that theoretical computer science does not have any tools yet that can provide useful lower bounds for problems of fixed size.   Even assuming P != NP, there is no way to prove that the current protocol, with specific key and hash sizes, is safe.  It may even be the case that forging a bitcoin transaction signature is easier than checking it, or that finding the right nonce for a block is easier than computing SHA256 twice -- independently of whether P = NP or not.  We simply do not know.

If someday one were to find fast solutions for  those puzzles, then complexity theory indeed says that there must exist safe replacements for them -- assuming P != NP, of course.  But the theory cannot identify those replacements, not even tell how many bits one needs to use in keys and hashes to ensure that inverting those functions is hard enough.  Conversely, even if P = NP, the current protocol may be safe, or there may exist safe alternatives for those two puzzles.  (As you surely know, "polynomial" does not mean "computable in practice", and "superpolynomial" does not mean "impossible to compute in practice".)

The difficulty of those two puzzles, for the currently chosen key and hash sizes, has been verified only experimentally, by tests that have ruled out some weaknesses that people have thought of checking.   (For a trivial example, someone surely must have checked that the leading bits of the block hash are not linear functions of the nonce bits, not even approximately.)   However, a thorough check would require testing all possible algorithms (or boolean circuits) up to some large size, for all possible inputs -- which is totally outside the realm of practicality.

With no known shortcuts, exhaustive enumeration is pretty much the best way we now have to solve those puzzles.  That is all one can say about the issue.
11  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: June 10, 2014, 09:28:52 PM
Since it is FUD time, why not:

I wonder how many people here know how this pic is related to bitcoin:
Bogart Pediatric 2009 Wine Aficionado Dinner
Here is another one (the URL is a spoiler):
Bogart Pediatric 2010 Wine Aficionado Dinner

There are several things to worry about re this person, but one in particular that may be relevant is that, before getting interested in bitcoin, that man went into the business of acquiring and selling virtual currencies and goods in internet games, and took over the entire market.
12  Economy / Speculation / Re: SecondMarket Bitcoin Investment Trust Observer on: June 10, 2014, 06:51:01 PM
So if they are not doing anything, why would any investor invest? Easier to get a stake in Bitcoins through this method?
Others have explained: among other things, the investors
* do not have to register and interact with dubious exchanges;
* can invest largish amounts without slippage;
* do not need to worry about computer security;
* can use some retirement money that cannot be applied in bitcoin directly.
These reasons seem to be enough for some people.
13  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: June 10, 2014, 12:26:19 PM
There is none. But you know that much.

There are a select few assumptions that seem to be so well grounded in reality that it is a waste of one's productivity to constantly doubt them. If the day comes that they'd break, we'll be as well prepared as we are now to tackle the fallout from the event.
Thanks! 

I agree that the chance of those assumptions being broken is not worth worrying about; it would be like worring that three nuclear reactors may melt down and explode at the same time.  Wink

However I would dispute the assertion that the two assumptions that I listed are "well grounded in reality" -- in the same sense that, say, physical laws like gravitation, conservation of energy etc.  are.

Basically the only "proof" of those two assumptions is that many bright people have spent lots of time trying to find fast ways to solve those problems, over the last 40 years, and failed. But that is not a statistically significant result, because the space of all algorithms, even of modest size, is extremely large; so even all that work has explored only an infinitesimal fraction of it.

For the physical laws, in contrast, one can argue that all our collected experience and measurements are statistically significant  "proof" that they work, at least in the realms that we have experienced.  Doubting them (in those realms) is certainly a waste of time.

Moreover, the techniques that we scientists use to find fast algorithms are such that we can only find "obvious" ones, in a sense. So there may exist a relatively short algorithm that quickly solves the bitcoin mining problem, say; but, even if we find it somehow, and check that it works in quintillion of cases, we may be unable to understand how it does it.  (You are aware of the Collatz problem I suppose.)

(You are not referring to the P != NP conjecture I suppose?  It is just as uncertain, but it has absolutely no relevance to those two assumptions in the bitcoin protocol.)

(By the way, until the 1980s many people were quite certain that the linear programming problem could not be solved in polynomial time, because many bright people etc. etc..  Some even had started to build a theory of "LP-complete problems".  Then a Russian mathematician found a polynomial algorithm, by thinking out of the box.)
14  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: June 10, 2014, 11:10:09 AM
The proof is conditional upon an assumption.  You are averring to the unproven nature of the assumption.  Your detractors are averring to the proof which it conditions.  Of course both are right, and of course both are wrong, in different senses.
Thanks! 

Actually it is two independent assumptions: (1) solving the mining problem requires a lot more computation than checking the solution, and (2) forging the signature for a transaction requires an impractical amount of computation.  AFAIK, either could be false with the other being true.

15  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: June 10, 2014, 10:50:01 AM
why don't you enlighten us as to why it isn't?
Because I am only an old retard, you are the ones who know bitcoin inside out.  Do your homework, and tell me: where is that "pure incorruptible mathematics" proof?
16  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: June 10, 2014, 10:44:53 AM
OK wise bitcoiners who think you "understand the math", do you know why the mining problem is hard?  Or why it is hard to sign a transaction without knowing the private key?

17  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: June 10, 2014, 10:26:54 AM
I love this bit from the article (emphasis mine):
Quote
Now we have a small piece of pure, incorruptible mathematics enshrined in computer code that will allow people to solve the thorniest problems without reference to “the authorities”.
Which is bullshit, unfortunately.

There is no mathematical proof that the mining problem is hard, or that it is hard to get the private key of any given address.

No one has found how to do either of those things efficiently yet, but a smart teenager may find one tomorrow.  Or may have found it  already.

But bitcoiners need not worry, if that happens not only bitcoin, but all current e-commerce protocols will be compromised...


18  Economy / Service Announcements / Re: BitcoinWisdom.com - Live Bitcoin/LiteCoin Charts on: June 10, 2014, 10:10:37 AM
In the Huobi BTC/CNY chart, 30m or smaller intervals: when the cursor is over the order book plot, the text that shows cost and receive ends with "The average ... SATOSHI/BTC" instead of "... CNY/BTC".
19  Economy / Speculation / Re: SecondMarket Bitcoin Investment Trust Observer on: June 10, 2014, 01:15:29 AM
Not really, they bought most of them between $700 and $1,100  Grin
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=337486.msg6449073#msg6449073
They are already at a big loss then.  Why do not they do short term speculation?
AFAIK, the way the fund works, SecondMarket makes money (fees) whatever happens to the price.

It is the people who invest in the fund (i.e. who buy their shares) who assume all the risk.  Specifically, the investors who bought SMBIT shares when the BTC price was below 650$ are currently happy, the others are currently at unhappy.

The investors cannot do anything for the first six months; after which all they can do is liquidate their shares, at a price proprtional to the current BTC market price.  Thus SMBIT does not have to do any smart trading: it could just buy when someone invests, sell when someone liquidates, always at the current market price, and it would still make a good profit.

SMBIT could make some extra money, for itself and/or for their investors, by playing the market with the coins that they are holding for their investors; but I assume that they are prohibited to do so by the contract, even if the investors wanted them to.

Is this correct?
20  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Any free ways to anonimize your bitcoins? on: June 09, 2014, 09:59:13 PM
If I were the FBI or Interpol I would set up a dozen mixer sites out there, with the best interface and lowest fees; and quietly stamp out or co-opt any real ones.  That way I would get a list of suspicious bitcoin users and I would not have to chase their btcoins in the blockchain.

Fortunately the FBI and Interpol are dumber than me.  Cheesy
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