Sorry for the pessimism, but my image of the bitcoin blockchain with all those appendages is the first image above with 20 chairs bolted to each wing and three cargo containers attached underneath the fuselage.  Then, moving away from bitcoin as currency would be like removing the engine and propellers to make room for more luggage.

Shouldn't that be "the 'the' and the 'a'"?

On the contrary, you came at the right time, we need your opinion: which topic is most actual among indians, dice, UFOs, collisions, elevators, or self-referential questions?

EDIT: or galaxies?

Well, seen from the outside, SMBIT is starting to look more risky than buying bitcoins at Bitstamp and keeping them there.  At least, Bitstamp has no lock-in period and has a handy open market in-house.

Investors who bought SMBIT shares in September 2013, at 13 $/share, and are firm believers in the long-range success of BTC, may not be bothered by those problems.  But I am trying to imagine someone who invested in January at 90$, could have liquidated in July at 60$, but has been forced to hold and now sees the shares worth only 30$.  I can't believe that all of those January investors are hold-at-any-cost types. 

I wonder if these "problems with the SEC" are blocking withdrawals also from the other funds (PBP, Exante, etc.)

The text shown by that site
http://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/b8a9acbcddcbe307?from_address=1FdwDuV2qgsw2w1Lza8nsea7L6mQxsc7g3
is a bit confusing.  Your 1Fdw address was not assigned to MtGOxAndOthers.  The site could not find any "sibling" connection to other addresses, so it assigned it to a wallet of its own, that it calls "[b8a9acbcdd]".

That address received two deposits of 0.001 BTC by the same transaction
http://www.walletexplorer.com/txid/11dae7a65b8503ad866b1a0be710d9b5a77f428191f79d36cc206c2b5363b01f
Nothing was ever withdrawn from that 1Fdw address.

That transaction had a single input of 0.20 BTC from address 12edRmh8qvaXuMwSLjpgbxMAaptCb5dHQt, and zillions of outputs, including the two above.  It is this 12ed address, not the 1Fdw one, that was assigned to the wallet that the site called "MtGOXAndOthers".  

I may have misunderstood, but you seem to assume that the "true" value of an F-coin is the energy that was used to make the bitcoinium the F-coin is made of; so the overvaluation of the F-coin over bitcoin is inherently "fraudulent".  However, the F-coins also have a value that derived from their utility as currency, and that may be arbitrarily higher than that of bitcoin, if the F-coins have some technical advantages (e.g. faster block time).

Ever since paper money was invented, it usually was first backed by precious metals, and had value equal to its backing.  But then more of it was printed without the required backing, and soon the purchasing power of the paper was below that of the original. 

However, the opposite could conceivably happen.  Just after it was first isolated, aluminum was extremely expensive.  Suppose that, at that time, the Republic of Paflagonia issued aluminum 1 pataca coins.  Af first, people would assign to them a value equal to the metal's value.  Suppose that, ten years later, aluminum was only 1/10 as costly, but there had been little further issuing (or counterfeiting) of patacas.  Then the coin would still be accepted for almost the same value it had originally (just as paper dollars are accepted today.)

This may be an alternative view of your F-coin scenario, with the difference that the overvaluing of the pataca would not have been fraudulent, but a decision of the market.   The same applies to my GNC scenario, or to sidechain coins (as far as I understand them): an increase in value of the secondary coin relative to the primary coin need not be fraudulent, just a plain free market decision.

In fact, the same applies to BTC itself.  Today the market has decided that 1 BTC is worth 312 USD, even though most BTCs in existence cost less than 10$ to make, and even today the marginal cost (minus miner profits) may be 250 $ or less.  And there is nothing hard to prevent the price of a bitcoin from falling well below that cost.

One objection is that (as in the "benevolent 51% attack that I outlined before) the miners would have an immediate incentive to merge-mine the altcoin, namely collect its block rewards and fees. 

As you say, the use of the BTC chain to secure the GNC chain has to be public, but it may not be possible to detect it in time.  For example, suppose that, in order to sanctify a block B of the GNC chain, some GNC node must insert in the BTC blockchain the string y = (SHA(B) XOR x), where x is a random 256-bit string; and then publish the string x, only after that transaction has been confirmed.    Then the BTC miners would have no way to detect that the string y is a GNC hook before confirming it.

Other variants are possible.  For example, y can be SHAⁿ(B), where n is (say) 2 trillion.  Then anyone with a 1 GH/s machine could recognize y as the hash of B in ~30 minutes; but no one could do it in much less than that time.  Even if the BTC miners were to run the check in parallel with block mining, it would delay the first confirmation of a trasaction by 20 minutes, and would force them to waste a significant amount of mining work.

Try to imagine yourself in his position -- guilty of either deliberate fraud, or of abysmal incompetence and shameless lies to cover it up.  His behavior is quite expected.

What matters is transactions that take coins *out* of the address.  Is there any such transaction that has two or more inputs (one of them being that address)?

OK, ignore the "disastrous performance" if you will.  There is still the fees, failed promises, and (apparently) having to watch the share value drop without being able to take the money out.  Now, remind me, what were the advantages of buying fund shares instead of buying bitcoins directly?

By "that" you mean the GNC coin, or a way to protect BTC from having its network stolen via merged mining?

As fas as I can see, such a "bitcoin killer" coin would not need to invent anything, correct?

I saw that, and I still can't see why someone would do it.

http://www.walletexplorer.com/

These "wallets" are guessed automatically by that website, by watching for transactions with two or more input addresses and clustering those addresses together, assuming that they must belong to the same person or company.

The cluster of addresses labeled "MtGOXAndOthers" is the old MtGOX wallets plus many addresses belonging to MtGOX clients who used MtGOX's "import wallet" feature, plus many addresses belonging to people who used CoinJoin, plus maybe other addresses of people who did similarly weird things with them.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my stupid questions.  If I can abuse once more of your patience, please consider this scenario:

  Someone, not connected to Blockstream or any other bitcoin entity, creates a new altcoin GreatNewCoin (GNC).

  GNC is basically a clone of bitcoin, with SHA PoW, block rewards etc.

  GNC has a few advantages over BTC, say 10x faster block rate; but is also endorsed by Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Justin Bieber, and the Dalai Lama.

  GNC can be merge-mined with BTC, and occasionally inserts hashes into the BTC blockchain to make itself "secured by the bitcoin blockchain". Still, GNC is not explicitly supported by the bitcoin protocol, and there is no expliciit "transfer" of BTC to it.

  Most bitcoin miners will merge-mine GNC too, since they may win the 50 GNC block reward as well as the 25 BTC reward, without extra work.  Thus GNC, from the start, has the same network hashpower as BTC.

  Various people set up exchanges between BTC, GNC, and national currencies.  People also trade GNC over-the-counter, person-to-person, etc.   BitPay adds GNC as a payment option for all their affiliated merchants.  These ventures do have no explicit support in the GNC (or BTC) protocol and network.

  GNC price rises from 0.10$ to 1$.  Some smart BTC holders sell their BTC for dollars or GNC.  Some dumb GNC holders sell their GNC for dollars of BTC.  The price of GNC keeps rising, while that of BTC starts to drop.

  One Monday at 06:30 am, the market suddenly gets the idea that GNC is going to supersede BTC.  BTC holders rush to sell BTC and buy GNC.  In a few hours, the price of GNC rallies to 1000$, while that of BTC crashes to near zero.

  At 11:30 am, the Winkles wake up to discover that their 200'000 BTC are now worth 2 kopeks and a Somalian shilling.

  Since the BTC rewards and fees are now worthless, most miners stop mining BTC and keep mining GNC only.  Only a few persist, for sentimental reasons. The BTC block rate drops to near zero for months, until the difficulty gets readjusted.

  Then someone, not connected to Blockstream, GNC, or any other bitcoin entity, creates a new altcoin SuperShibaCoin (SSC)....

Summary: doesn't merged mining provide a path for an altcoin to steal bitcoin's network power and market cap, with little investment,  even without any change to the BTC protocol and without any special mechanism to "transfer" BTC to it?

Could some sidechains innovation provide suitable incentives to miners that would prevent this risk?

Given the rumors that investors cannot liquidate even after the 6-month lock-in period (see previous posts), the disastrous performance of the fund this year, and the continuing lack of the long-overdue open market for their shares,  I really do not see why someone would invest in this fund.

Indeed, those rumors must be true, because otherwise investors should be liquidating in droves.

Thanks, but I am only trying to warn the Wise Man of the bug.   Is he on vacation or something?

The time between consecutive posts has an exponential probability distribution, so how long should we wait before concluding  that it has stopped?

Ha ha, if you think so, then answer this: was the elevator going up or down?

I don't think so.  I understand that the police concluded that the BTC were in MtGOX's possession, but someone familiar with the system took them and ...

IIRC he owned four companies: the holding company Tibanne, MtGOX, a bitcoin Café (never opened) and a 3D graphics company (dead apparently).  MtGOX lent significant sums of money to these companies and perhaps to Mark personally.  MtGOX also had no employees, they hired services from Tibanne who hired the employees.   legally, only MtGOX went bankrupt.  After the bankruptcy, Tibanne requested payment for the pending bills of services rendered to MtGOX, and the request was granted.  On the other hand, the bankruptcy trustee is trying to recover those loans, but Mark is resisting.   All this is in the trustee reports available at www.mtgox.com.

EDIT: Tibanne also had a trading account at MtGOX with a fat balance.  I wonder if Mark and other MtGOX managers and staff had accounts there.  (Ethics? Is that a coffee brand? Never heard of it.)