It is a totally wild guess, so the details can be fudged as needed...

In that theory, the cooperating Chinese exchange collected billions of yuans of deposits from thousands of Chinese citizens.  Those yuan were kept in the exchange's bank account.  In Dec/2013, the PBoC forced the banks to close that account, presumably freezing the funds to prevent them being sent to Japan.  (*That* would probably have violated the capital export laws.)

So, indeed, by this theory Mark would be owed billions of yuan by the Chinese exchange; but the exchange no longer has that money, specifically.  ANd the coins were bought by thousands of Chinese with their real hard-earned yuan, so the exchange cannot take those coins back, either.

If kowledge is power, could we replace all the nuclear plants by huge libraries?

Bitcoin does not evade capital controls.

What the central banks hate is citizens giving the national currency to foreign banks in exchange for foreign currency.  But if a Chinese citizen buys BTC with yuan at Huobi, then sells those BTC for dollars at Bitstamp, the yuan do not leave China.   The net result is that the Chinese got dollars from some American trader, in exchange for "worthless" bitcoins.  That is good for China and bad for the US.  

If those bitcoins were mined in China, that is basically China exporting yet another product made in China.

If those bitcoins are part of the loads that were imported from the West in Nov/2013, then the export trade above would be reversing the loss due to those previous imports.  Depending on the average price that was paid at the time, it may still mean a profit for China's foreign trade balance.

My pet theory for the collapse of MtGOX is that Mark himself bought bitcoins from his customers with non-existing dollars, and sold them at some Chinese exchange, hoping to be able to bring the money out of China at a later date.  But the Dec/2013 decree blocked that transfer...  EDIT: In that case, the trade above would be China selling to Westerners the bitcoins that Mark stole from his clients, and the Chinese government stole from him...

Thanks.  Indeed, I misread the article.

Still, Powell is good friend of Ver, who was a very good friend of Karpelès; and Powell had his hands in the system, which was later hacked in ways unknown ...

By the way, wasn't Ver one of MtGOX's most successful traders, according to the leaked database?

Since the thread has became chaotic, why not bring it back?

Too much eggnog?

If I am one, and the Pope is one, does that mean that the Pope and I are one?

Has BCI given any explanation about what went wrong with the humanware?  Did the programmer violate any internal protocols by updating the patch without checking it? What are they doing to prevent similar problems in the future?

You can watch the traffic through the BitPay wallet on this website:
http://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/BitPay.com?page=30
That wallets continuously receives ~1000 small inputs every day, and now and then sends out batches of a dozen small outputs. (Could these be merchants who want to get some bitcoin? Or customer refunds?).  Once in a while, when the wallet's balance has grown enough, BitPay sends a large round amount elsewhere, often to Bitstamp.  Here is one such transaction:
2014-12-18 13:11:07
http://www.walletexplorer.com/txid/ed981090f3efc585036ba2206335799640baaa6b4ac1846a3189731549649018
Sent 2000 BTC (exact) to Bitstamp's input wallet
Sent a crumb of ~0.1 BTC to some other address (probably a new address in Bitpay's wallet, not yet identified as such).

Claims that a small number of persons or companies, perhaps only one, is responsible for 25% of the traffic in the blockchain:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8781447
The percentage has recently increased from 15% to 25%
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8781447

The guy(s) make a small payment from address A to address B and send the change to a new address C, sometimes 1000--2000 times in a single day.  Therefore those payments are not recognized as "popular sites" by the blockchain.info charting software, and maybe the change-back output is not recognized as such either.

Could those chains be gambling sites paying out the wins?

Most of those coins were in this wallet
http://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/058e4152cc0f2abc
which got many hundred-BTC transfers from the Bitstamp.net input wallet.
Perhaps it is Bitstamp's cold wallet, and they are just rearranging the furniture?

Well, here is some work for you:
http://www.ofnumbers.com/2014/12/19/are-there-changes-in-the-volume-of-retail-transactions-through-bitpay-this-past-year/

Yes. I did not invent them, I read them somewhere.  The complications of tax reporting, for example, have been widely discussed in this forum.


No idea. Assuming the ratio of 1 bitcoiner for every 10'000 humans in the world, perhaps 13?  But MS employees probably can read price charts, so I would not bet on that.


In that academic (ahem) paper, the authors point out an alleged flaw of the protocol, and propose a solution for it.  Which has not been adopted by the bitcoin developers, AFAIK.  (I don't have an opinion on whether the flaw is real or the solution would work.)

Inflation is just a kind of tax that governments may use to pay for whatever they do.  It is paid diffusely by everyone who holds money (or unadjusted bank accounts and contracts) for any length of time.

Like any other tax, it may support good things, or be wasted, or be used for very nasty things. It may be a rather stupid tax, maybe less fair than other kinds of tax.  But it is not radically more evil than any other tax.  Even Satoshi decided to use inflation tax to support the miners, until usage grows enough for tx fees to take over. 

Some countries, at some times, choose to abuse inflation tax.  However, looking at historic inflation of a currency is as pointless as looking at historical prices of bitcoin.  So what, if the dollar lost 95% of its purchasing value since 1920?  Unless you grand-grandpa robbed a bank and buried the banknotes in his ranch, you will not be affected by that number.  What matters to you is the inflation between the time you get your paycheck and the time you spend it, or invest it in an inflation-resistant asset like real estate or stocks.

I have lived most of my life in a country with excessive inflation.  I lost count of how many times they had to strike 3 zeros from the currency to keep the numbers manageable.  It was bad, and no one wants that to happen again; but people adapted, and survived, and even prospered in spite of that. 

The goal should not be to get rid of inflation, but (like for any other tax) to keep it as low as possible, and make sure that its revenue is well spent, for the benefit of the people who paid it, directly or indirectly.

If they were willing to accept bitcoins, why would they need Bitpay's help?

Accepting payment in bitcoins makes bookkeeping much more complicated.  BTC is not legal tender, not even a foreign currency; so bitcoin payments would have to be considered barter, and bitcoin holdings would have to recorded as investment, not cash, for auditing purposes.  For tax reporting, they would have to list each separate payment with the BTC price at the time of payment, as well as any conversion to USD.

That's too much trouble for the expected amount of purchases that they expect to get that way.  That is one reason why established companies that "accept bitcoin" do so only through bitcoin payment processors.


Riiight... and soon Bill Gates will convert his fortune to bitcoin too...

Thanks for the understanding.  And I don't buy software from Microsoft either. 

It is not, it is accepting dollars through Bitpay (not Coinbase as I said, sorry). 
http://www.coindesk.com/microsoft-adds-bitcoin-payments-xbox-games-mobile-content/
Bitpay's name is shown in small letters on the payment page, but it is there --
converting the bitcoins to dollars, which is what Microsoft gets.

No need to ask.  They want dollars, and will not accept bitcoin.  If you want to pay with bitcoin, you must open an account at Coinbase, sell your coins to Coinbase, and tell Coinbase to send the dollars to Microsoft. 

Yes.  When he created his "SLok" account, he was not aware that, only a few days earlier, another EMC customer had created a blockchain address ending with those same four letters, by sheer coincidence.

Low to mid-30's characters in an address. Not 59.
[/quote]

I meant each character can be 0-9, A-Z, a-z, minus 3 that look too much like 0 or 1 -- that is 10+26+26-3 = 59.