Welcome to the Brave New Free World...

1. Since the last post BY @JorgeStolfi some six hours and four pages ago,  there may have been 30 posts ABOUT @JorgeStolfi.  I am flattered and moved.  Sorry @fonzie, but as the poet wrote

  Cesse tudo o que a antiga Musa canta
  Que outro valor mais alto se alevanta 

2. Thanks again for the offer, but I would rather not have any bitcoins, and I do not intend to help distributing bitcoins to anyone, my students or not.  I am sure you will find charities or other worthy projects that will make much better use of the money.

3. I got to 65k tweets before knowing about bitcoin; mostly on politics, a bit of thechnology, humor, etc.  I was looking forward to commemorate my 65535th tweet, but then Twitter switched to the approximate "65K" count format.  Darn. But I was bored of politics anyway and decided to take a long twitter vacation.  By the way, it was through Twitter (specifically @falkvinge's tweets) that I first learned of bitcoin.  Since December I have been mostly wasting the stolen taxpayer's money here instead, using twitter only once in a while to warn people about bitcoin.

4. Why do people assume that I "still do not understand" bitcoin?  In my view, it is the shrillest bitcoin enthusiasts who do not understand much about it and how the world works.  Like those who still claim that bitcoin will let people evade taxes and buy illegal things, or that bitcoin is a safer investment than plain cash, or that China is irrelevant, or that the volume in the blockchain shows that people are using bitcoin --- or that the right technology, by itself, can save people from corrupt politicians and greedy bankers.

No, I am a paid government apologist.  Truly.  And not ashamed of it.

As for banks, they are taking maybe 60% of all the taxes I pay now, via interest on Brazil's public debt.  And yet they are trying to topple the President that I voted for.  So, rest assured that I have no love for them.

(In fact, a few years ago I sued a Brazilian bank over some 30 k USD of inflation adjustment fees that they had wronglfully made many years ago to the financing of our home, that was not even ours at the time. It was a standard lawsuit, the courts had already decided that those particular adjustments were illegal; but each victim still had to sue the bank individually, for the joy of the legal profession.  There are even lawyer offices that do nothing else but those lawsuits, and we hired one of them.  But, when the process finally got to court (a couple of years later), the lawyer just forgot to tell us and did not show up in court -- so we lost for WO, and that meant a lot of troubles besides the loss of the money.  We then sued the lawyer, and his fault was so obvious that we actually won; but the judge reduced the claim to ~8 k USD, since he considerd that we might have lost the original suit anyway.  We should have got that money and forgot the case, but our (second) lawyer talked us into appealing; and that was some 8 years ago, which means that in another 7 the appeals court may look at out case again, maybe.)

You may be glad to know that the Willy Report page has just been taken down by Wordpress for "violation of the terms of service".  Does that explain the price recovery? 

Igualmente, meu caro. 

That is utter bullshit, please stop repeating it.

I had the numbers somewhere that I cannot find now, but from memory: commercial payments through credit cards amount to over 7 trillion dollars a year, so 11 billion dollars of fraud is 0.2% of the total.   In comparison, Bitpay claims that it processed 100 million dollars of payment last year; even if you multiply by 4 to account for other bitcoin e-commerce outside Bitpay, that is still less than the MtGOX heist alone.  Even if you leave MtGOX out (since, technically, it may have been "embezzlement" rather than fraud), the KNOWN scams and heists in 2013 add to several million dollars at least.  So, KNOWN bitcoin fraud must already be at least 10x worse, in percentage of total e-commerce, than credit card fraud.

Did they?  Lots of stupid things were said about the internet back then, but scamming was not as big a problem for the internet as it is in the bitcoin world.   Perhaps because it was mostly classical scams (such as chain letters and credit card theft) that the police already knew how to recognize and handle.  One big "advantage"  of bitcoin is that law and police often cannot even tell whether a crime was committed. 

I have no reason to believe that Bitstamp is insolvent, but, if it were, it could and would easily fake that test.  That the test is accepted without criticisms only confirms how gullible bitcoiners are.

Bitcoin is not itself a scam, but I have never in my life seen an economic sector so chock full of scammers.  Every crook in the world who learns a little about bitcoin would want to "adopt" it.  It is a much more lucrative and "safe" vehicle for scams than the classical ones -- stolen credit cards, counterfeit cash, phony viagra, nigerian heirlooms, penny stocks, ponzi funds, ...

Yawn.  Another "audit" that proves nothing, but reassures those who want to believe. 

At least we know the sum of the balances of all Bitstamp client accounts (if we trust Bitstamp, that is).  A useful datum, although useful to what I can't say at the moment.

The impact on price is not proportional to volume traded.  Most volume recycles the same coins and/or follows the price set by a few traders.  The effect of Markus's lump buys in August, for example, is quite evident.

If Markus/Willy it was indeed THE arbitrage trader that brought the rally from China to MtGOX (and I still have not seen any argument to the contrary), then it was responsible for 90% of the all-time high.

Other arbitrage traders may have arisen if Markus/Willy wasn't there, and some such may have operated, in a less obvious manner, in the later stages of the rally.  However, direct arbitrage with China may have not ben trivial to set up.  Certainly is was not trivial after the December decrees, when BTC-China lost its convenient bank-mediated money channels.  Also, until Nov/29 the arbitrage flow was all in one direction, while after Nov/29 it had to work in both directions, and quickly.  Different arrangements with China, and other money channels, would have been required then.

The price had a sudden drop minutes ago.  I suppose that it is the Chinese traders reading the Willy Report, realizing that they never existed, and dumping their non-existent coins on their non-existing exchanges. 

No need for alarm. It is just the Chinese traders reading the Willy Report and realizing that they never existed.  They are just selling their few non-existent coins on their non-existent exchanges, that is all. 

Just for curiosity: the Willy Report got some coverage in Chinese e-media today (which is alread Tue May/27 in China)

比特币去年年末暴涨，是因为机器人交易？
[GT]Bitcoin skyrocketed late last year , because the robot trading ?[/GT]
2014-05-27 08:32:59 Source: ZDNet
http://tech.163.com/14/0527/08/9T85SOTU000915BF.html

In case anyone cares, the Willy Report got coverage in Chinese e-media today (which is alread Tue May/27 in China)

比特币去年年末暴涨，是因为机器人交易？
[GT]Bitcoin skyrocketed late last year , because the robot trading ?[/GT]
2014-05-27 08:32:59 Source: ZDNet
http://tech.163.com/14/0527/08/9T85SOTU000915BF.html

There seem to be an interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly about the future of digital payments in general, many Chinese sources are copying it.

If I understand correctly this camera review article, even consumer video cameras are being infected with bitcoin mining viruses:
http://www.qianjia.com/html/2014-05/27_231277.html
商用网络摄像机，你往何处去
[GT]Commercial network cameras, you where to go[/GT]

Today's Chinese lesson:

暗黑币 = Ànhēi Bì = Dark Coin

(Its recent 15-fold price rally got some attention in Chinese e-news today.)

A Chinese article on the situation of bitcoin in China:
比特币被禁用银行账户 交易平台或现倒闭潮
[GT] Bitcoin is disabled or is currently trading platforms bank account closures
Source: NetEase 2014-05-26 Author : Hu Wen
http://money.nmgcb.com.cn/news/140526/2/story_254620.html

Although the date is recent, the article may be a bit outdated, it does not seem to mention the current rally.  The last date menioned in the body is May/21. I can't tell whether it has new information really, except
* There was another exchange that closed ("called Bitcoin Exchange"?), besides FXBTC.
* Some exchanges have enough venture capital to survive for a couple of years.
* In a Financial Stability Report dated Apr/29, the PBoC expressed concern about "price manipulation and false trading and other acts" at the exchanges.
There may be other relevant hints that Google couldn't meaningfully translate.
 

Two men go sailing on a balloon, get caught in a dense fog and realize they had no GPS or instruments. After drifing for hours they dare to lower the balloon enough to see the ground, and spot someone down there.  They shout, "Hey you, please, we are lost, could you tell us where we are?"  Several minutes later comes the answer "You are on a balloon!".  One of the men says to the other, "The guy took a long time to answer, his answer was totally accurate, but also totally useless.  Darn, with so many people in the world, we had to run into a mathematician!"

Back to your question, in three weeks I will have an accurate answer. 

That poll was opened long ago (a week? two weeks? polls should be dated too...)

Yes indeed.  Could perhaps that explain why there were so many bankrupt poker sites?

Doing that with a bitcoin exchange is even more fun and profitable.  Just claim that there was a hack. 

This university outsources its janitorial services.  Every couple of years, the contractor declares bankruptcy, after accumulating huge debts in labor benefits and taxes, and fires all its janitors and managers.  The university then solicits again bids for janitorial services; the best bid is usually from a newly created company, that hires back all those janitors and managers.  Can't avoid that, unfortunately...

I don't get your point. The court does not care about any deals you may have made outside or inside the system.

The auditor will find an unverified account with lots of withdrawals, and will try to identify its owner.  If emails, http logs, or other evidence connect that account to you, and you did not subtract those withdrawals from your claim, you are fried. (Here in Brazil, the penalty for making a false statement in an official document for personal advantage is 1 to 5 years in jail, apart from other crimes incurred.)

If the auditor fails to identify the owner of that account, well, lucky of you.  It would be just as if you had stolen a pile of cash from the supermarket's cash register, and by luck the security camera was not working at the time.  Some people do make plans like that, indeed.

Thanks, but I would not be so indelicate as to take that pleasant task away from you. 

The nickname "Willy" was given to the robot shortly after it was noticed, back in December IIRC.