Apart from meatballs, can you understand Latvian as well?

Bah. Just the same old routine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bull-Leaping_Fresco

Did you know that the English name "God" comes from the generic word for "Pagan deity" in some Germanic language?

We can be sure, of course, that no one on their staff bought bitcoins on Friday and sold them on Sunday evening.

If customer deposits were insured by FDIC against Coinbase mishaps and misdeed, they would say so on their site.  What they say instead is that their bank account is insured against failure of the bank.  

Moreover I have been told that, in order to get "passthrough" insurance by the FDIC, the company must inform the bank about the balances of each client.  (Can anyone confirm this?) This reporting seems quite impractical for an exchange that will make thousands of trades per hour, 24/7.

As for BTC balances, the site says tha only their "hot wallet" is insured against theft, embezzlement, and other losses.  The site also says that they will keep less than 10% of the clients' BTC funds in the hot wallet.

Add to that the claims of "first in the US", and "licensed in NY and CA".  Coinbase seems to think that marketing is more important than trust, and that misunderstandings like the above are good for business.  To me, they spell immaturity non-trustworthiness.

Perhaps because a dog thinks its owner is God?

Considering the scale at right, it is not that scary.  Not in bitcoin terms, at least.

Can God conceive a question that not even Him can answer with a question?

Do you believe I am your God?

You are asking us to anger the Gods by breaking this most sacred tradition?

Well, true. My father went bankrupt in the 1970s after being swindled by his business partner, and two weks ago I caught two students cheating at their final exam.  And plenty of other cases in between.  Including a dozen cases that I found out when I was department chair, both by contractors and by my esteemed colleagues...  

But then, anyone who has led an average life must have run into dozens of scammers too...


That would have been true if bitcoin had remained a technical experiment run by nerds, as it was in 2009, with a few thousand dollars of "market cap".  But since it has been redefined as an asset that will "surely" be worth tens of thousands of dollars per unit (as many still claim), it now does have an intrinsic scam.

If the price eventually goes to zero (or to the same level as in 2009), it will have been just like a penny stock scam:  those who bought early and got out in time will have made money at the expense of those who were left holding the bag.

But even if it "goes to the moon", the current holders of bitcoin would be able to take hundreds of billions of wealth from the society without ever having done anything in return.  I don't know whether that has a name, but it could be called the "private money scam".  Namely, someone issues some money-like thing without any backing, keeps a large fraction of it for himself, and tries to have others accept it as currency.   Once enough merchants accept it, he uses his stash to buy caviar and Lamborghinis.  That is what governments do when they print money to cover their costs, and that is why governments usually stamp out private money.


Well, I don't see how bitcoin could have made any difference to my house financing case, or most of other cases of fraud and damages.

Bitcon will not make banks unnecessary.  People will still use banks to borrow money and finance enterprises.  Moreover, implicit in the hype/hope surrounding the COIN ETF is the realization that most people would rather entrust their bitcoins to an insured bank-like custodian than worry 24/7 about being hacked or tricked out of them.

Very few of the fraud cases that I can think of were caused by opacity about ownership of money.  In my house financing case, all the accounting was fully known to all parties, and not in question. The dispute was about whether certain adjustments to the balance due that the banks made in the 1980s were legal or not; and the only imortant thing that we did not know was that our lawyer was criminally incompetent and/or negligent.

Even in cases that involved doctoring books (such as the Enron collapse), I doubt whether bitcoin would have avoided the fraud: the criminals would probably find a way around it.  The transparent blockchain did not prevent the disappearance of 600+ kBTC from MtGOX.  It does not tell us whether the other exchanges are honest, whether the bitcoin funds are solvent, whether BitPay is really processing a million dollars of sales per day...

Technical people and generalized "geeks" often make the mistake of believing that the right technology can fix social or political problems, like corruption, crime, misery, fraud... In reality, the culprits for those problems quickly learn how to work around the technical solution, or even use it to their advantage.  

For example, in 1996 the Brazilian government pushed for, and got, electronic voting for all elections in the country.  The excuse was the well-known occurrence of voting fraud and voter coercion made possible by the paper ballots and closed-doors manual counting.  It was hoped that the all-digital system would put the votes beyond the reach of fraudsters and corrupt local Election Board officials.  But these merely switched to other tricks that the voting machine did not guard against.  Worse, the all-digital design created an even greater risk of global fraud by software. Namely, a malicious programmer within the system could steal 5-10% of the votes in all voting stations in a county, state, or the whole country, in total "safety".

Bitcoin is another good example of that fallacy.  Bitcoiners hoped that it would be the solution to credit card fraud, bank "censorship", stocks and currency manipulation, government abuse... But in fact it did not solve any of those ills; on the contrary, it has attracted all sorts of scammers and criminals, and police agencies seem to love it.  Exaggerated claims about bitcoin being "disruptive" and "changing the world" only make me (and millions others) more skeptical about its future.

Social and political problems can be solved only by social and political means -- by keeping close watch on the government, demanding transaprency, engaging in political campaigns, voting for good policies, etc..

I don't follow the reasoning... I would say that my close encounters with the Amway epidemics in the 1990s, and watching the TelexFree epidemics quite recently, have more to do with it.  And 40+ years of witnessing a long string of wonderful technological projects and ideas that flopped...

The firm was called something like "São Paulo Homeowners Association"  and had branches all over the state; but, after the fact, we learned the local offices in each city were actually franchises.  The Campinas office was particularly inept, dishonest, and badly staffed (we were not their only victims). 


There may be, I don't know.  I have the impression that Brazilian courts are not as prone to award fat injury damages to common folk as the US courts.

I tried googling for such thing, and the first hit was actually a lawyer and a judge in a small town who conspired to create a "lawsuit factory".  You wanted to harm someone, somewhere? You only had to hire that lawyer; he would bring some bogus charges against the victim in that city's court, and the judge would approve it.   Some 600 such cases were tried before the higher authorities noticed...

Not really, they were specialized in *that* particular kind of lawsuit, based on that same earlier court decision.  As I said, the decision was very clear and should have applied to all such cases (hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of home purchases financed by banks); but each victim had to sue separately.  (If you think that the US or European legal system is rotten, you should try ours...)

Indeed...   

Too long a story to tell in full... But we sued a bank about the terms of financing of our house. It was to be a routine lawsuit; the courts had already ruled long time ago that all banks had made the same mistake, but each victim still had to sue them separately.  We hired a lawyer firm that did nothing but such lawsuits.  But when the hearing was finally scheduled, a couple of years later, the lawyer did not warn us, did not show up in court, and we lost by WO. 

So we sued the lawyer for damages,  and his fault was so blatant that we won easily.  But then our second lawyer convinced us to appeal because we were not awarded full damages.  We are still waiting for the appeal to be scheduled...

Aren't you the author of the previous post?

I don't have much experience with the law, but I did sue my lawyer a few years ago, and won. 

Oops, looks like I should set up my virtual mint in Slovenia or Bulgaria....

Considering the width of the window frames in the office photos, it should be the steel-gray building with the wavy wall, right?