Indeed, I wish I had chosen Berkeley; Stanford was nice but too right-wing.

(But I have never smoked, pot or tobacco, if that is what you mean.  I even got laughed at by my colleagues, not long ago, because I could not recognize the smell coming from certain corners of our campus.  )

Price obviously affects total hashpower, but I cannot see how hashpower could influence price.   The number of new coins mined per day is pretty much independent of hashpower (except momentarily, between difficulty adjustments).  While miners desperately wish the BTC price to go up, they have no means to influence it.

My reading of what happened in 2011 is: a new large market (drug users? Thailand?) opened in Apr/2011, and, as it adopted bitcoin, the demand caused the 2011 bubble, pushing the price from ~0.6$ to ~14$ in Jul/2011.  But that market then closed (Thailand banned bitcoin?), and its members gradually sold its coins; so that the price started to drop towards the pre-bubble level (~0.6$).  However, in Nov/2011 -- when the price was still at ~2.2$, or +1.6$ above the floor, but still dropping -- another market opened, and its demand bumped the price to ~6.6$ (a +4.5$ increase).  Meanwhile, the first market continued to shrink; by the end of Feb/2012 its demand had vanished, eliminating the remaining +1.6$ overprice and bringing the price down to 5.0$.  Thus the the second market, alone, was responsible for the overall increase from ~0.6$ in Apr/2011 to ~5.0$ in Mar/2012.

The situation now seems to be indeed similar to that of Nov/2011. The Chinese speculators who were responsible for the Nov/2013 bubble seem to be losing interest and selling their coins, and this loss of demand is driving the price down to the pre-bubble level (~140$).  However, in order to get a recovery similar to that of Nov/2011, one would need a similar cause -- namely, another new market of sufficient size.

Even plastics that are "non-flammable", like PVC and circuit boards, will release flammable gases when thrown into a fire.  Ditto for painted metal. Maybe the fire started in some flammabe material (such as the roof insulation) but was then sustained and amplified by those gases.

He wrote some about his personal affairs a while back.  I don't think we would help him by discussing them here.

Tossing a cupful of shredded steel wool over a computer's motherboard may have a similar effect. 

Thanks.

What is the difference? (Honest question, I do not know much about either).

+1

I have seen "drugs" ruin the lives of several young guys and their families.  "Drugs" meaning, to be explicit, those "friends" who push people into drug addiction, and the drug dealers who then exploit their addiction and push them into crime to support it.

I am all for legalizing pot and decriminalizing drug use.  But still I hope that Shrem, Ulbricht, Benthall, and all otehr people in the drug traffic "industry" will spend a good part of their lives in jail.

I guess (and hope) he has just taken a vacation from bitcoin trading.

I pity the FTC officers who have to read through hundred of pages of adolescent obscenities in this forum to gather the bits of information relevant to their case.

I hope that there is a special medal for that kind of heroic service.  Or perhaps they can claim monetary compensation for mentally unhealthy job conditions. 

You mean, from Kevin Bacon, 23rd Earl of Sandwich, Illinois?

Depends; was 2011 a good year for bacon sandwiches?

No: if it starts with the same genesis block, and is longer, that blockchain is bitcoin, by definition; and the blocks in the other (legitimate) branch are orphan blocks, ignored.


I was explaining why there is a newspaper quote in the genesis block.  It was put there precisely to prevent this problem -- to prove to everybody that no one could have been pre-mining a secret chain before the genesis block was posted.

Quite correct.  Indeed there cannot be monopolies in a free market, by definition of the terms.

The confusion is that libertarians read "free" as "unregulated" (or "laissez-faire"), whereas it means "where suppliers and customers can freely enter the market and choose each other".   Unfortunately, unregulated markets quickly degenerate to monopolies or oligopolies, because the dominant suppliers will use their economic power (including by buying governments) to exclude competition and lock their customers in.

Microsoft is a good example: in the absence or regulations requiring open document format and interoperability, they were able to lock billions of users into their proprietary format.

Spondoolies fire:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=521520.msg9451926#msg9451926

That is what I meant.  By mining in secret before publishing the genesis block, he could later post a longer blockchain and invalidate all transactions up to that point, even those in the second block.

It is equivalent to a 51% attack, but limited to the first few weeks or months.  (An entity with 51% of the total hashrate could pull the same trick starting at any block, since it could grow an alternative blockhain from that block faster than the rest of the network, and then their doctored chain would prevail on the legitimate one.)

Without the headline in the genesis block, the other collaborators would have to trust him -- namely, that he cared more about an experiment (that he just started) than about a pizza.   But the whole point of bitcoin is that one is supposed to trust the system without having to trust any authority, including Satoshi.

Beware: AFAIK, if you are in the US, the IRS wants you to pay income tax on what you mine (or receive from a pool).  I believe the equivalent is true in most other countries.

He posts the genesis block of the secret chain, without the headline, mines a million bitcoins, and spends them all to buy a pizza and a coke.  The pizza parlor waits, say, six confirmations before delivering the pizza.  At that time the chain is N blocks long.  Then he posts the first N+1 blocks of the secret blockchain, according to which his million coins were not paid to the parlor, but just moved to another address of his own.  This chain is adopted by the network, since it is one block longer than the legitimate one.  Now he has a pizza and a coke, and still has all of his million bitcoins; whereas the parlor's address is now  empty.

Yes, I was too late for that, but I could have joined the lose-half-your-life-savings party.  I missed that too, unfortunately. 

"Clearly" to you, perhaps, not at all for me.

The purpose of including a newspaper headline in the genesis block was merely to prove that the block was created on that date, and not earlier. (Otherwise he could have pre-mined a few thousand blocks in advance, in secret, and use them later to steal other people's bitcoins.)

The headline of The Times on that day happened to be about bank bailout.  Did he choose that newspaper and that day on purpose?  I have seen no evidence that he did so.  And that quote seems to be the only "proof" that Satoshi's motivation to develop bitcoin was to rid the world of banks.

(Bitcoin will not get rid of banks or bank bailouts.  Their main business is to lend money that they don't quite have, and people will still want that service, even if money means bitcoin instead of dollars.)