I don't know if I understood the latest posts right, but:

Suppose that, in his private netwoek, the attacker has tricked the Monero protocol to lower the difficulty to 1/2 of what would be appropriate for his hashpower.  So he is capable of generating blocks with 30 sec mean gap, instead of 60 sec.

However, if the attacker finds a solution after t seconds, instead of posting it right away, he keeps mining for another t seconds. Then, among all solutions that he found, he posts the one with the smallest hash.

That way, the private blockchain still has 1 block every 60 seconds on average, so the protocol will not raise the difficulty.  However, the complemented hashes will be higher than normal on average.  So, the alternate blockchain, while just as long as the legitimate one, will probably have a greater "weight".

Would this attack (or a variation thereof) work?

Mainstream media is struggling to make ends meet, and resorted to prostitution.  Even respected newspapers liek the NYT are now publishing "native advertising" -- paid advertising that looks like news.

The title of this thread is incorrect, the company is spelled "Tibanne" or "Tibane" depending on the context (without the second "i").

This is ancient history not related to current events: a plot of the prices on some of the main exchanges during the time when the price at MtGOX was substantially above the average:


[ click on image for full-size version ]

Here is the data file for that plot, if anyone wishes to play with it.

There are bigger ones:
http://virtualmining.com/secret-bitcoin-mine-chinese-facility-uses-boiling-liquid-to-cool-massive-computers-that-generate-bitcoins-photos/
(That is an old one, though.)

AFAIK thse large installations are still profitable, even with today's prices.  But the increase in total hashrate means less coins for the outfits that were already mining.

Most likely, the police will not go public until they (a) identify the criminal, try to arrest him, and are ready to file charges; or (b) decide that they cannot solve the case, and archive it.

Think of how long it took for the FBI to come open on their investigation of Charlie Shrem and Ross Ulbricht. 

Beware: that chart is buggy, the last data point is often garbage.  And there is no one at blockchain.info to fix it, apparently.

Do you have the need to know?

Much simpler: the Chinese speculators, who lifted the price last November from ~120 to ~1200,  are becoming disenchanted with bitcoin (which, for them, is only good for speculation), selling all they have for whatever price they can, and leaving the market.

And now some large holders in the West are surely having second thoughts, and doing the same -- discreetly, while telling everybody to hold.

Thanks for the exmaple, but: If the 50'000 BTC were sitting in one address (and one utxo), wouldn't there be a 49'000 BTC change-back output too on that transaction?  Would that output be excluded from the BDD? What if the change-back went to a different address?

And those who can't do either scan internet forums looking for some miraculous way to get rich without working.

It is not personal and I am not trying to convey 'intelligence'.  I am a professor of computer science, I lectured occasionally on Computers&Society.  I started looking into bitcoin because it was computer thing, and it is my job to be at least interested in computer things.  If that 'academic' bothers you, well, sorry.

I do not have financial or political interest; what should I put then? (And I am an academic after all.)

Miclael Goldstein listed many types of bitcoin scammers:
Everyone's a Scammer
But he forgot the worst one: the guy who tells everybody to buy and hold, while he quietly sells.

EDIT: By the way, did the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute ask for S.N.'s permission to use his pseudonym?

I see that the article recommends a couple of "good" exchanges where you can send your bitcoins to, after taking them out of the "evil" ones.  Yeah.

For example, suppose we substituted "rock" for "buffalo" in the above sentence; what would we learn from that experiment?

OKCoin below 2000 (1975 and falling)

To check whether a phrase is grammatical one should replace a word by another with same gramatical category, and if it continues to make no sense at all then one knows for sure that the answer is, "what the hell am I doing?"

If the Sunlot guys succeed in buying the remaining 200'000 BTC and the name of MtGOX for 1 BTC, I would not be surprised if they hire Mark to run the new exchange.  (Their PR guy on this forum did not answer when I asked whether they would "pardon" Mark, like they already "pardoned" Gay-Bouchery and McCaleb even before any investigation.)

As I noted before,

(1) the BTC volume Vex transferred to/from the exchanges is almost certainly a very small fraction of the total transaction output volume Vtot in the blockchain  (600'000 BTC/day now).  Therefore, even if Vex includes a few thousand old coins per day, it will hardly affect the plot of bitcoin-days destroyed (2 to 25 million BTC-day per day).

(2) For the "bitcoin-days destroyed" formula, the age of the coin is when it was last moved, not when it was bought.  So if someone bought 10'000 coins in 2010, moved 2'000 of them to a hot wallet two months ago, and sent these to an exchange today,  there would be a lot bitcoin-days destroyed two months ago, but only 120'000 today, which will not show in the graph.

By the way, I didn't see an aswer to my question about the change-back outputs: are they excluded when the "bitcoin-days destroyed" is computed?

(I also don't know the guys how blockchain.info identify the change-back outputs to produce theEstimated Transaction Volume chart.  I tried asking in their "help" thread, but it seems that the person who created the charts was eaten by an alien giant ameboid blob, and they haven't noticed his disappearance yet.)