I believe (on no basis whatsoever, just a blind guess) that such thing will not happen before he bitcoin protocol becomes obsolete for some other reason, with or without loss of the blockchain balances.

But, just to discuss hypotheticals, if that were to happen it would be a nightmare scenario.  At the very least it would mean the freezing of all cryptocoin payments until the new protocol is defined and the miners and clients upgraded to it.  That could take weeks or months.  Any business that depended entirely on bitcoin payments would  have a hard time.

Depending on who breaks EC, bitcoins may get silently stolen for months before the maintainers realize what is happening.  By that time, there will be many legitimate transactions mixed up with illegitimate ones, and it may be practically impossible to distinguish them, or do a general rollback.

The idea of prioritizing small clients is not bad by itself, but that could perhaps be proposed to the liquidation court.  AFAIK, Japanese liquidation law already establishes a "socially just" priority scheme: first any unpaid salaries and benefits, then actual creditors (banks, suppliers, landlords, contractors, utilities, etc.), and lastly investors.  I don't know where MtGOX clients would fit in this priority ranking.

The Sunplot proposal obviously cannot change the priorities of employees and actual creditors; the court could not possibly agree to that.  It apparently inserts the new owners and managers, as well as the expert investigator (Mr. Karpelès?) into this ranking, before the clients.  Isn't that so?

There is also the question of what should count as the claim of a client against MtGOX:  (1) the account balance he had at some point before the final shutdown (when, exactly?) according to MtGOX's internal ledgers, or (2) the total amount he deposited, minus the total amount he withdrew?   It is known which approach the liquidators will follow?

Since it is possible that the ledgers may have been altered with fake trades, or that some clients may have used insider knowledge or other fraudulent means while trading, approach (2) would seem safer, besides being arguably more just.  (If we were to trust the crowd analyses of the leaked MtGOX database -- which of course can be itself fake -- Mark and several of his friends are among the largest BTC balances.)

Perhaps the implicit aim of the Sunplot proposal is also to ensure that any distribution of coins will follow approach (1), rather than (2) or some other scheme that would exclude suspicious balances?

Some things that should be obvious to anyone who has lived for a while in the real world:
* Once you find that someone told a flat out lie (such as "MtGOX is solvent and all your coins are safe"), you should not give ANY weight to absolutely ANYTHING he has said or will say, by voice or in writing. Ditto for any digital data that he may produce.
* Any digital document or database may have been altered or faked.  Yes, even cryptographically signed ones..
* An anonymous leak may have been leaked by ANYONE. Yes, even by that guy.  Or that other guy.
* When a huge pile of money disappears from inside a company, the first suspects are its top executives, then other staff, then outsiders, then the cat, then time-traveling lizards from an antimatter galaxy, and only lastly errors/bugs/accidents etc..
* Scammers ALWAYS sound and look honest, competent, reliable, etc.  If they didn't, they wouldn't be scammers.
* Someone who made a pile of money with a scam, and walked away free with it, is strongly motivated to do it again.
* If someone can pocket a large pile of money without any risk of concrete punishment, he most surely will.

BTW it is still 08:00 am Sunday in China, the exchanegs should be as busy as a parka shop in Tahiti.

I see a few buyers raising some large bids well above everyone else's (at 2730 rather than 2660) and a few large sellers popping up at that price.  But it is hard to tell for sure.

At onepoint there was a sell order of 200 BTC at 2740, and a buy order of 120 BTC at 1739.99 (or the otehr way around maybe) and they just stood there for a while, nose to nose.

Could you explain exactly how it is doing that?

(A bank should not need cryptocurrencies to send money to its own branches in other countries.  The point of CCs to transfer money between partners that do not trust each other, isn't it?)

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Sunday May 04

Prediction valid for: Sunday 2014-05-04, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 2600 CNY
Bitstamp's predicted price: 427 USD





[ Plot legend ]

Today (May/03) Huobi suddenly started trading heavily at 04:30 am local time (20:30 UTC).  Even though the weight of that hourly interval in the mean V_h is rather small (0.071), it resulted in a very large slumber activity ratio S = V_h/V_d (0.0169) and therefore a very low relevance weight W (0.003) for today's data point.

Still, with only two points since the last confirmed trend break, we must assume the straight line trend defined by them, namely A + B*(d-D0) where (d-D0) is the number of days since May/02, A = 2744, B = -72.

The Bitstamp prediction, as usual, is the Huobi prediction divided by the currency conversion factor R.  That factor was 6.17 CNY/USD today (May/03), but given today's very low weight W it seemed better to retain the value assumed yesterday, namely R = 6.09. It was 6.08, 6.11, 6.22, 6.25, 6.05, 6.09 on the previous good sample times.
 
Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Saturday 2014-05-03, 00:29 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Saturday 2014-05-03, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~18 hours later)

Huobi's predicted price: 2744 CNY
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 2672 CNY
Error: 72 CNY (~12 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 451 USD
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 433 USD
Error: 18 USD
 
NOTE: "The Internet: Learn what you know. Share what you don't." (unknown; qt. Daniel Harms)

Could be...  I would guess that only a few traders are playing.  The "wall movie" looks more bizarre than usual, doesn't it?

A pity that @ChartBuddy does not show Huobi's order book.  The pictures should be far more interesting than those of Bitstamp.

By the way, here is an idle question (but which may have to do with the reasons behind the Chinese bans):  Suppose that colluding traders A and B have accounts at Huobi, and their goal is transfer 50'000 yuan in cash and/or bitcoins from A's account to B's account through the standard trading interface.  That is, A should make a sequence of mostly bad trades, and B a sequence mostly good ones, so that at the end A's account should have lost that amount, and B's should have gained that amount.  How fast could they do that, roughly?   (For definiteness, assume that both accounts start with 10'000 extra "working" yuan or their equivalent in bitcoins; that no one else is colluding or aware of their goal; and that A is willing to lose several thoudand of his extra yuan to other lucky traders in the process.)

It is almost 5:00 am in China, and suddenly there is a rally with ~3500 BTC either already bought or in raised bids.  It does not seem to be coming from the West. 

The track record and reputation of a person are independent of the currency, no?  One cannot be a con artist with euros but honest with dollars, a criminal with rubles but a respectable businessman with pounds.  If a guy has had "serial bad luck" directing money-based companies, why should one expect better success with a bitcoin-based one?

Yeah, it may get them confident enough to buy TWO bitcoins and leave them in the New MtGOX.

At some point you will have to spend the bitcoins or convert them to cash.  How can you buy a house or a car anonymously? How can you get half a million dollars in cash anonymously?


Indeed, only you and the tumbler's operator will know that.

China already managed to pull it down below 350 (Apr/11, Bitstamp) because of some short-lived scare.

One exchange (FXBTC) has already shut down; only withdrawals are still enabled, until May 10.  They said that they had been operating at a loss, but presumably they still have enough funds to honor all account balances.

I am wondering about Huobi.  They have not updated their main webpage or posted any public announcement since Apr/17.  I suppose that their total client account balance is much bigger than FXBTC's.  Will they be able to wind down as cleanly as them?

OKCoin apparently has been answering client questions in their blog, but I do not know whether they have announced any plans for May/10 and beyond.

By the way, completely off topic: the standard safety exit for a con man who sets up a scam company is to sell it when the scam begins to unravel.  Then the scammer claims "I don't owe anything, the debts were made by the company and I now have nothing to do with it", while the new owners say "What debts? The sales contract did not mention any debts."

Some examples of this trick can be found in the Bitcoin Stealing Hall of Fame (the BitcoinRain/MercadoBitcoin being one in my country) and other bitcoin sinkholes not listed there, such as this one.  Another interesting example has been reported here

Sorry for the interruption, now back to the threads's topic.

It seems that in Bitcoinland there is only one crime, "not being a fan of bitcoin".  Things that should send people to jail, in any country, are quite OK; badges of honor, even.

And, conversely, anyone who praises bitcoin is, ipso facto, a thoroughly good person; who can be trusted to take money or bitcoins from other bitcoiners, without contracts and outside the reach of the law, and shower them with unmeasurable riches.

Like Danny Brewster... 

Someone put up a 2000 BTC buy wall @ 2720 CNY on Huobi, just 10 CNY below the current price.

(Now no one can say that I am in the wrong thread.  )

EDIT: wall gone untouched, poof.

I woud think that the PBoC has the legal power to issue such orders to the banks.  In the US it may be the Federal Reserve Bank ("the Fed") and/or the Securities and Exchanges Comission (SEC) have some such powers, I don't know.  Here in Brazil the Central Bank has substantial regulatory powers over the banks, by law.

The Exchanges could try to challenge the PBoC orders, but I doubt that they would have a leg to stand on.

Needless to say, Google finds no mention of that name except that same news article.  However it could be a mangling of "Romualdas Antonovicius", a valid Lithuanian name, e.g.

http://www.employmentrecruitment.co.uk/cv-resumes/im-very-hard-worker-and.125

Please note that the name "Romualdas Antonovicius" is just my guess, that the person above may not be the only person with that name in the UK, and that Mr. Brewster may have been using the "Keyser Söze" trick with the reporter.

EDIT: On the other hand. that (undated) CV has Mr. Antonovicius living in Colchester Coventry with previous work experience in Wisbech.  Mr. Brewster was said to have lived/worked in the Doncaster area.  Colchester Coventry, Wisbech, Lincoln, and Doncaster are all in Eastern England, almost in a straight line.

Wait, this can only mean one thing ... could Mr. Antonovicius be ... Satoshi Nakamoto?    

EDIT 2014-05-05: Mr. Antonovicius's residence was Coventry not Colchester, sorry. Closer to Manton, Lincoln, and Doncaster, but not in a straight line (and more like Central than Eastern England).

I picked "thrill" at random, because there was no "impatience".