Trading while drunk is OK, if you lose money no one needs to know about it. 

Posting while drunk, on the other hand, is a terrible idea.  Everybody will forget all your briliant posts but remember that one forever.   Trust me. 

A day trader who mocks his colleagues who lost money at trading is like a fisherman who shoos away the fish that try to nibble at his bait.  He did not quite grasp the idea yet.

I have been browsing this "wallet"
http://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/0bc85b2f9c9fb397
that includes the now-famous 1QAHVy address
http://www.walletexplorer.com/address/1QAHVyRzkmD4j1pU5W89htZ3c6D6E7iWDs
believed to belong to BFL.  

This is a summary of that wallet's history, posted here just for reference.

The wallet started to be used on 2012-07-08, and within that month it received three lump inputs adding to  ~14 kBTC

After those initial inputs, it kept receiving numrous inputs of exactly 100 BTC every few days (block rewards?).  Occasionaly there were outputs of various larger amounts, e.g. -10 kBTC on 2012-10-26.  At that time the price was about 12 USD/BTC, so that output would be ~120 k USD.

This pattern (almost-regular round deposits by 100 BTC or low multiples thereof, occasional outputs of variable amounts) continued for more than a year, until about 2013-10-11.  On that day there was another lump input by +7675 BTC.  At that time the price was ~125 USD/BTC, so that input was ~1 M USD.

That input (plus a 1 satoshi input on the next day) brought the wallet to its peak contents, 57637.08300001 BTC, worth ~ 7.3 M USD  at the time.

Then there followed a more chaotic series of inpts and outputs, mostly the latter, mostly for few thousands BTC each.  Most of the outputs went to addresses believed to be part of the BitPay.com input wallet.  Curiously there is one input from the putative BitPay.com wallet, of +1390.5652.  

Those "chaotic" transactions removed 16667.40939999 BTC net from the wallet.  The cashed amount is not trivial to estimate, since the price was changing extremely fast at the time.  Guessing an average of 300 USD/BTC, the cash-out during that month would be ~5 M USD.

The "chaotic" transactions stopped abruptly on 2013-11-13.  At that point the wallet still contained ~40.9 kBTC, worth ~15 M USD at today's  prices.

Between 2013-11-13 and 2014-06-13 the wallet was untouched, except for  some spam dust inputs, and a few small outputs and inputs of tens of BTC each, which removed about 200 BTC net. By the latter date there were still ~40.7 kBTC in the wallet.

From 2014-06-13 to 2014-09-17 there were again several outputs of thousands of BTC each.  Recall that the USMS auction was announced on 2014-06-12, causing the price to suddenly drop ~50 USD.  On 2014-06-13, 800 BTC (~480 k USD) were sent to the Bitpay wallet.  Another 1700 BTC were sent to BiTpay on 2014-07-15, well after the auction was over, when the price still was ~620 USD/BTC.   Monst of the outputs went to other unidentified wallets.

In all, the chaotic transactions from 2014-06-13 to 2014-09-17 removed from that wallet about 16.5 kBTC (~ 8.2 M USD, guessing the mean price as 500).

Recall than on 2014-09-19 the FTC raided BFL and ordered a freeze on all their assets. At that time the wallet still had ~24.3 kBTC (~9 M USD). There was no further action on that wallet from that date to 2014-11-06.

On 2014-11-06, in the block that was mined on 22:42:31 UTC (the end of afternoon in central US), someone removed 0.001 BTC from the wallet.   Starting one hour later, a sequence of transactions spanning about three hours cleared out the wallet, leaving a balance of exactly zero.

The outputs that cleared the wallet on 11-06  had widely varying amounts, and were further split and re-split several times, apparently by hand.  That apparent attempt at tumbling may have stopped soon thereafter.

Keep in mind that the "wallets" in the site http://www.walletexplorer.com/ are clusters of address that appear to be associated by evidence found in the blockchain itself.  As I understand, if two addresses are inputs to the same transaction, that site assumes that they belong to the same wallet.  Note that this method is only partially correct: a set of addresses that are actually in the same real wallet may be split into many clusters by that that heuristic.

Edit: clarified "previous day" -> 2014-06-12, "that day" -> 2014-06-13.

If a company keeps increasing its profits and/or capital assets, it woudl make sense for its shares to continually go up in price.  People would still trade them, since they will have different and changing expectations about how much its value will increase in the future.

And any involvement was ages ago, and before his involvement in that civil lawsuit.  Agreed, it would only impress casual readers of his bio...

Connections to military and/or intelligence agencies, true or false, are very handy for a scammer.  Even judges and federal law enforcement agencies will think twice before leaning too hard on the person, or making charges against him.  It would be frustrating to invest a lot of work in building a case, only to get a phone call from "higher up" demanding that the case be dropped the interest of national security.

Can't you see that I was only joking?

Are you folks aware that you must check whether your questions were already asked, before you post them here?

BTC Feed, 2014-11-29
How a Rogue Tor node hijacked Blockchain.info accounts
http://www.btcfeed.net/news/rogue-tor-node-hijacked-blockchain-info-accounts/

It was not me who claimed that the SEC has prohibited SMBIT to liquidate (buy back) their client shares, but did not prohibit them to sell more shares.  If that claim were true, then SMBIT would be a Roach Motel type of fund, like MtGOX in its final days.  That claim is much worse for SMBIT's public image than what I fantasized above.  I even questioned the person who posted that claim, and I still cannot quite believe it.  Would you please ask him whether he knows those words?

I insist: SMBIT has the right to keep their procedures and situation secret, but then the public has the right to consider all the possible wrong things that they may be doing.  That is the smart thing to do before entering any business.  The word for it is "prudence".

EDIT: by the way: in the beginning, SMBIT had promised that, by the end of 2014, they would set up an open market where clients could trade SMBIT shares among themselves, presumably even during the initial 6-month lock-in period.  Any word from them about that promise?

A trading firm doing HFT is quite different from a fund seeking to set up an exchange where his titles can be traded.  Not only is the software completely different in purpose and scale, but the goals are too.  For HFT the most important thing is original algorithms that can outsmart the competitors.  For an exchange, the most important is reliability, speed, support for thousands of clients, etc.  HFT software can be developed quickly from scratch and put  to work with minimal testing; exchange software must be developed with care and extensively tested before being put in operation with real clients, because the stakes are much higher.

OKCoin got at least 10 million $ of venture capital, and must be making lots more money from arbitrage, withdrawal fees, interest on leverage trades, etc..  Apart from a few dozen customer support people, it does not have much to spend it on except servers and software development.  They have bragged about their previous experience with TI for banking.  They have the highest volume of any exchange, an order o magnitude more than "Western" exchanges; and, in my recollection, they have had few or no downtimes, bugs, or security breaches.  So their platform is certainly good enough for trading more traditional instruments of a smallish fund.  Why would such a fund spend months to develop their own trading platform, if they can buy one that is ready and well-tested?

Why would a hedge fund decide to play with bitcoin at this point in time?  I could understand if it wanted to buy Argentinian Pesos as a hedge against the inflation of Venezuelan Bolivares -- but bitcoin?  In 2013 the Fortress group (worth a lot more than 3 G€) had invested in bitcoin, which gave then their only red entry in their 2014 Q1 report.  They promptly and quietly swapped their bitcoin with Pantera, not for shares of their fund (PBP) but for equity in the company that manages the fund -- which, like SecondMarket, will make a profit even of the BTC price goes to zero. 

If the fund wanted to trade in bitcoin, why would it enter in advance negotiations with OKCoin?  It could just open an account, deposit how much money it wanted to, and start trading, increasing its exposure gradually. In fact it should open accounts in a some other exchanges, for increased liquidity and better prices.  If it wanted bitcoins as an asset for its instruments, it could also buy off-exchange.

Here is the sentence that started the rumor:


Read carefully that sentence.  It does not mention Bitcoin. It does not mention Litecoin, which its heavily traded at OKCoin, too.  Somehow bitcoiners read that sentence to mean "the fund will trade bitcoin on our exchange".  Why bitcoin and not litecoin?  Answer: because it was wishful parsing -- they read what they wanted it to say, not what it actually said. 

All echoes of that rumor in bitcoin media and forums were entirely based on that sentence, padded with a page or two of wild speculation.  In spite of headlines that said "OKCoin confirms...", no confirmation came from OKCoin.  That rumor started the rally, and OKCoin was clearly leading it.  A couple of days later, since there was no confirmation, many people on reddit and forums started doubting it.  The pessimism must have spread among traders, since the price crashed to almost the same level it had before the rally.  (There is still a lingering effect; apparently there are still some traders who believe in the "trade bitcoin" reading.) 

If the "trade bitcoin" reading was correct, why didn't OKCoin give at least an indirect hint to the market (like "we cannot talk about that topic, but the future of bitcoin is now incredibly bullish"), to keep the rally going?

Surely we can all agree that the sentence is ambiguous: it does not clearly say that the fund will use OKCoin's platform to trade their instruments, but does not say that it will trade bitcoin either.  So, you keep your reading, I'll keep mine.

Just checking, I understand that this is the transaction by which HashTrade allegedly paid 1 M$ to BFL through BitPay, correct?

http://www.walletexplorer.com/txid/1b6ea350c094071412df1f801651263fd65ffa0b89ad6c8626ceeca8755f50bc

2013-10-21 22:20:08

inputs:
1QAHVyRzkmD4j1pU5W89htZ3c6D6E7iWDs   5550.0000 BTC
1MU25nz6fKPz45mVUaBeZWj3kQJDWYx94t     13.1016 BTC

outputs:
16fus1FKurpDmPtEZLGbg7vRYtH2TEFbYf (BitPay.com) 5562.3540 BTC
1LPgSTDrNDQ2yysXAnAWGNZgDUWYNFHskL [9419b5ba0c]    0.7476 BTC

Closing BTC price on 2013-10-21 (Bitstamp): ~180$
Dollar value of the BitPay.com output: ~1.00 M$

I found a Reuter's article of 2013-10-31 about the payment, 10 days after the date above.

That claim may be exaggerated or a hoax, but the wallet site Blockchain.info (not the bitcoin blockchain!) is under some stress, it seems:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2npw4p/blockchaininfo_has_an_onion_url_now_or_is_this_a/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2npu1p/blockchaninfo_herding_users_on_to_rogue_tor_nodes/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2npmyr/security_flaw_do_not_use_blockchaininfo_api_when/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2npil2/blockchaininfo_has_deliberately_hijacked_all_tor/

'Tis nobler to spread Fear, Uncertainy and Doubt than Sales Hype and Tripe.

Not quite... I just pointed out that the fatal sentence could also be interpreted as "the fund will use our software and/or servers", rather than "the fund will trade bitcoin at our exchange". 

However, since there was no further confirmation of the "will trade bitcoin" interpretation, and the price collapsed right away, I think that the alternative interpretation is now quite likely.

We don't know really, we are just guessing, based on the observation that the recent buys are much larger than usual, they come after a period of stagnation, they started with no obvious external cause,  they are almost the same size in USD (but less so in BTC), and the size in USD is a round number (2.5  M$), within the errors of the estimates.

If there were many clients buying shares, why would they all start buying at the same time, considering that the price does not give any clear signs of recovery?  Why would their buys add up to ~2.5 M$ every week, four weeks in a row?

It is of course possible that there are no clients buying shares, and SMBIT just decided to but BTC anyway, using their dollar reserves.

Here is another wild theory: the SEC found that they were doing something wrong, ordered them to suspend selling and liquidating shares, and required a change in their procedures -- that forced them to buy a lot more BTC than they had bought so far.  So they are buying as far as they can, that being 2.5 M$ every week.  (Yeah, it is total fantasy; but since SMBIT is so opaque, they can't complain if people start making wild theories...)

7. Were any of those coins mined on equipment that had been already paid for by customers?

Well, I dumped only 3% today, and you saw what happened.  But my holdings have gone up 300'000% year-to-date, in BTC *and* in USD. 

Thanks for reminding me of why I started looking into bitcoin.

Oh, OK. Please ignore the post and put all your bitcoins in a blockchain.info wallet, with their default security.

You should smoke while filling your gas tank, because Chernobyl was much worse than any gasoline fire.