Unless the FBI has hacked into your computer, six months earlier, and the wallet software that you installed on your offline computer is a doctored version that picks keys from a predefined list.  Or unless you are kidnapped by gangsters who offer you a more convincing deal.  Or unless the police shows you what a Brazilian prison looks like.

I wouuld rather think that he paid below market, say 570$/BTC.  If he had paid more than market, he surely would have said so, in order to bolster confidence and help push the price up.

EDIT and the same holds for the other bidders -- if any of them had bid above market (but less than Draper, of course), he surely would have said so.

I wonder if he has seen a 1h bitcoin price chart yet. 

It seems that this community views anonymity as a sacred right, and discovering the real identity of ("doxxing") of someone as a mortal sin.  Sorry, I don't buy that.

While it may be OK for people to use pseudonyms, it is also OK for people to blow them.  In any significant personal interaction each party has the right to know the identity of the other.  In commercial business, in particular, it is foolish to make a deal without knowing the other party's real name and photo, and the address where the police can be sent to; and without checking his professional history and legal record.  That applies not only to the principals of companies, but also to key employees.  The "right to dox" also applies to anyone who accuses or insults someone.   

In particular, I think it is quite appropriate for BFL clients to try to uncover the identity of the "SLoK" who managed the BFL forum (under a deal that has not been clarified) and may hold assets that should be surrendered to the receiver.

That's the point, people interested in the BFL case were tired of reading posts with zero useful information.  This thread is to discuss what belongs there (or in other threads that may be created for subtopics, I don't know).  No one has to read this thread.  I myself am glad that the issue is being discussed, but I won't be paying much attention to this thread.

This thread is to discuss what kind of stuff is admissible in the other thread, and other thread policy issues.  That is why it is in the "Meta" section of the forum.  Substantive posts and factual material about the BFL case should go the other thread.

It could mean that they are going trade their fund shares using OKCoin's software and/or servers.

Sorry to repeat this, but the rally from ~370$ to ~450$ starting Nov/12 must have been caused by this rumor being interpreted by everybody as "the fund will start trading bitcoin on OKCoin".  The timing matches, and the rally was clearly pulled by OKCoin.  The crash over the next two days, then, must have been caused by lack of confirmation of that rumor; comments on reddit and here became skeptical.  Perhaps Chinese traders got some clarification or denial by OKCoin, I don't know.  Anyway it seems that the rumor is not quite dead yet, which may explain the ups and downs since then.

It was "This is gentlemen", a mangle of "This is it, gentlemen!"

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=855789.40

What OKCoin's tech guy actually said:


Note that the source did not say "trading bitcoin" or "on our bitcoin exchange".

There has been no confirmation of clarification from OKCoin after that interview, in spite of many articles claiming that "OKCoin confirms..."

Shouldn't the discussion about moderation be in some "meta" trhead? 

Come on folks, if everybody keeps holding his clever post for page 10000, we will never get to page 10000.

Read the announcement: Ross agreed to the sale.

Well, this time things will probably be different, given the experience of the previous auction.  Unless the price has another surge, like that of May 20 -- June 10, I expect that there will be much less demand, and the auction may close well below market.

However, we may never know the closing price, perhaps not even the identity of the buyer(s).  This time the USMS says upfront that they will not release that information to the public.  AFAIK, the FOIA request that was submitted after the previous action (by @BurtW?) has not been answered yet.

My understanding of that phrase is that the hedge fund is going to use OKCoin's software and/or servers to trade the fund's own shares, noot bitcoin.  I recall OKCoin boasting of their previous experience with financial IT and of the quality of their platform, many months ago.

You are late. That rumor came out just before the rally of a few days ago, and got everybody excited.  It was most likely the cause of the rally.  (Recall that OKCoin was leading then.) The rally fizzled presumably because the rumor was NOT confirmed in the following days.

Apparently the rumor still hasn't died completely.  That may explain why the price did not return completely to the pre-rally levels.

But there may be more rumors coming, who knows.

That is the original rumour. In spite of the "confirmed" title, it (and every other news piece like it that I have seen) is entirely based on that phrase spoken by the OKCoin tech guy in that interview.  Note that he did not say that the fund invested in bitcoin or was going to trade bitcoin, and said "on our platform" rather than "at our exchange". 

I suppose you are joking, but... That rumor was probably responsible for the recent peak.  But it could mean something else, and I haven't seen any confirmation/clarification yet.

 

But the volume of bitcoin transactions in the future may be orders of magnitude larger than the total amount of bitcoin in circulation; not just because of reuse of the same coins, but also by the emission of visrtual bitcoins by entities liek coinbase.  E.g., if you send dollars to Coinbase to pay a hotel bill in euros in another country, they may use bitcoins but do not need to (just as banks do not need to transport dollar bills overseas to do the same service).

All that helps, but the main reason that turns people off bitcoin seems to be the absence of backing assets and dividends.

Big (and small) investors do not like to spend their money buying nothings, even if they are assured that no one can steal those nothings from them (well, except hackers and the FBI), and are told that last year some Chinese amateur speculators were willing to pay 1200$ each for them.