I actually doubt that this is the case at this time, and it sounds to me like speculation (particularly as anyone who knew what they were talking about would not be flapping their gums on this board.)  An academic who cracks Blowfish, for instance, and particularly in a practical way would be about as famous as they wish to be.  I doubt that anyone in the NSA puts their pants on much differently than anyone anyone in the top levels of academia, and they probably have limited control over the info that gets out (which could well be why the MD5 work surfaced in China.)

Other way around, sorta, but I did not say it clearly.

I'm saying that if I am going bring something of value (cash, gold, etc) to meet face to face with someone who is so concerned about anonymity they won't use something like Mt. Gox or Tradehill, it is very possible that I am meeting with a criminal.  That is a risk that I'm going to need to deal with in various ways so it will have to be worth my while and I'll want a discount over what I could get coin for on an exchange.

Operation Acquire Bitcoin And Screw Bear Shorts

Overview:

This is a system for a small group of people (as in 4 or 5) to
achieve two simultanious goals.

  1) Acquire BTC for long duration holding.  The author hopes
  that eventually such a possition can be put to use in
  furthering the goals of the Bitcoin project if they are indeed
  benevolent.

  2) Give bear shorts another thing to worry about and an
  occasional haircut if it can help facilitate #1.

*Note:  This system would be useful to any group who wanted to
join forces to manipulate markets.  I offer the idea in this
form (and forum) because I sense that it would be diffcult
to find more than two 'bear shorts' who would cooperate on a
project without exploiting it for personal gain and thus ruining
the effect.

Participation:

The low number is choosen because it is difficult to agree on
things and get things done with a higher number of people.
Although the described system seeks to limit these, there are
significant risks and trust relationships which need to work,
and that is exponentially difficult with more people involved.

The low number of participants indicates a relatively high
degree of capitalization.

One member of the group is elected as the 'trader'.  This person
will need to be very knowledgeable about trading and have his/her
finger on the pulse of the market.  I'll call this participant
the 'server' which happens to also represent a piece of software
under his/her control.

The remaining participants would be what I will call 'clients'.

Stack:

The 'server's job is to 'play' the markets accourding to a
strategy which will ultimatly achieve the desired goals of
the project.  The software he runs will have the ability to
understand the resources available for trading and execute
trades with coordination and precision.

A client keeps his own account and changes the amount of capital
involved at his descression.  The trades are made _by the client_
from his current capital pool, but at the direction of the
'server'.

Periodic meetings are held to communicate broad strategies and
expectations.  This will give the clients some level of compfort
as they watch their trades occur, and the server can understand
better the kinds of resources he can expect as well.

The IP and port upon which the server listens could shift
at will, though it would need to be communicated to the
participants of course.  This could provide some way to mitigate
against DDOS if somehow the addy in use was leaked.  Downtime
should not impact the system greatly if it were to occur.

Protocol:

The client pings the server once per unit time (5 min, 1 min,
whatever) with a unique, per-hit, URI.  Part of the URI is
a random hash which is generated from a key issued to that
particular client (think two-factor auth.)  In this way the server
can have confidence which client he is talking to, and that the
client is legit.  Various algorithms can also detect and respond
to fraudulent use as well.

A message would include information about the current funding
pool which the operator of the client has set.  In this way, the
server can understand the resources at it's disposal and the
client can make real-time djustments to the funding as well.

Occasionally the server will provoke a trade as a response
to the URI hit.  In this case, it would be an instruction to
execute a certain trade at a certain time in the future.  Say,
thirty seconds past the minute, and a follow-up one 32 seconds
past the minute.

I would anticipate that sophisticated trades would involve
both a high degree of coriography, and also a desire to do
different things with different clients in case things are being
monitored.  I believe that the system I've described could
implement this.

Risk:

The biggest risk is that the server could execute some really
bad trades and the clients end up with loss.  Accruing a large
loss would take some time, so attentive clients could mitigate
the damage by withdrawing support.  Some strategies might entail
a period of loss, but they could be communicated as describe
above, and disproportionate outcomes as a result of deliberate
mis-syncs between clients could be settled at that time.

Another risk is that participants would set up their own
side-bets taking advantage of the knowledge gleened from being a
member of the group.  I suspect that if a gentelmans agreement
about this was not sufficient, then such abuse would become
apperent over time should it deter the success of the system
generally.

I doubt that any exchange who is big enough to pay their expenses will be able to operate under the kind of anonymity that would be desirable to a lot of us.

My projection is that when anonymity is required, fiat<->btc will be occurring on a face-to-face basis and at a significant discount over the exchange rates.  And I doubt that it will be long before that is considered to be a criminal activity if it is not already.

Seems that you mistakenly posted on the public forum rather than PM'ing him then.  Not an uncommon mistake for noobs.

I don't see much point in being terribly specific, but those are good guesses

I care about 'how many' coins I have mostly as a percentage of the currency base.  Bitcoin, like gold and unlike fiat, makes that math very simple.

As for my interest in making money, I see the most ideal outcome being one where holders of the currency in the 'Satoshi' block-chain would be lucky to make a dime because the actual benefit of using currency is distributed to the users and that the Satoshi block-chain merely facilitates this.

A second possible outcome could be that Bitcoin is an ideal way to exploit people and I get stupidly wealthy off my speculation.

The most likely outcome is that the Bitcoin is rendered unusable for any combination of reasons (or was indeed born that way) and I lose everything.


I don't.  I don't really see the usefulness of the Satoshi block chain as a replacement for our current fiat systems at this time as they are working fine and have a much more well developed supporting infrastructure (though I could imagine that changing rapidly at some point in the future.)  So, speculation in it's various forms plays a huge role in keeping Bitcoin alive and QA'd and developing.


Yes.

Totally.  I've currently have several fold more BTC than I ever expected to obtain because I did not expect the price to drop this low.

It is also the case that many alternates to Bitcoin are also not ones that I consider a bastion of stability.  I try to keep my holdings of USD low as long for ethical reasons associated with the actions of the US on the world stage, and I don't have infinite trust in the stability of any fiat currency in these times.  I'm not about to have a lot of paper investments 'protected' the the SEC or the justice department generally who I consider to be blatantly colluding with criminals in the financial sector.  And my 'portfolio' is already heavy in some of the alternatives that I feel to be more sound than a lot of 'mainstream' investments.

I've publicly hoped for a drop in the price of BTC for some time now since it will allow anyone who is interested to obtain a noticeable faction of the entire currency base, and am fairly delighted that it came to be.  I will start to become uncomfortable about the viability of the Bitcoin network at some point as utilization, mining effort, etc, continue to fall off.  So I would like to see some sort of a floor be put in.

I'm betting that it's a big world with a lot of problems.  Even if Bitcoin is recognized as just as a very short term transit medium, I theorize that it could have a significant value.  So, my motives are profit driven to be sure.  I theorize about an outside possibility of use which is more benevolent in nature, but it's to long a shot to worry about.

But anyway, someone in your situation (not interested in amassing a sizable position for whatever reason) is obviously not a candidate for participation in a manipulation scheme such as I'm thinking of.


These are my assumptions as well, but I am not a lawyer.


I don't think I would have any significant ethical problems damaging the 'free market' in this way at this time, or giving people who wish to short sell one more thing to worry about.

I got to musing about things a bit while driving around today.  If one wishes to end the (proverbial) day sitting on a pile of a commodity, it seems that one has a lot more flexibility than someone who wants to maximize $$$ no matter whether they are short of long...even if one really believes that bacon will save the world, twenty truckloads of pork bellies rotting in one's back yard it not a very desirable outcome.  A bunch of representation in the block chain may or may not be desirable in the end, but it's worth a chance to me.

I wonder if it would not be possible for a small group of reasonably well capitalized people with a common end-goal to cooperate in order to achieve two things:

 - maximize their accumulation of BTC.

 - give short sellers a painful and swollen rectal area.

and indeed, to use each of these objectives in support of the other.

I don't think that it would be illegal in the Bitcoin-land at these wild early days, but would be happy to entertain alternate theories on this.  Unethical?  Probably.  Cruel?  ya.  Effective?  Dunno.  Good for Bitcoin generally?  maybe, maybe not.  Risky?  Probably.  Fun?  I would suspect so.

Hope so.  I got short on funds and decided I still have a taste for BTC on Friday, but Tradehill went from taking less than 6 hours to more than one day to deposit wires.   (I hope they don't decide to simply pocket the funds, but it's a chance one has to take in this game.)  Anyway, I'm in for another chunk if it goes below $2 (I suspect), so I would be delighted to see one more significant down-leg.

I trust that you are going to avoid taking a stool at the poker table until you obtain a good understanding of 'from where the money comes'.

The battle is joined...the secret weapon is leverage.  Operation Barbosa (and an R and a few other letters left out.)

Yes, but have not studied them (or palm reading for that matter.)  But it is quite true that I am thinking of someone's Elliot-wave chart (yours?) when I tapped that out.

I'm hopeful of my 'maybe' projection of the $1.nn prices and just re-loaded in case because, barring network exploits, I would likely choose to do another round of accumulation if we were so lucky.  If not, I've got enough BTC hoarded away to be happy, and will burn up the funds on short duration donations and purchases if someone is selling something I happen to want.  I don't like my funds sitting in someone else's bank account, but the risk is a cost of doing business I guess.  If Tradehill would have followed through with their statement to the effect of more transparent books, I'd have wired them more money.

Looks like it's over.  Wrong timing and wrong scale is my take.  Cleaned out a handful of wet-behind-the-ears starters maybe, but only big enough to instill a bit of caution into the majority of potential victims.

Now maybe we'll head down deep into the $1.nn's, and wait for the next go-around (and hopefully the last one in this phase.)

Right.  Sorry about that.  New image?  Much better, although you look a little depressed.  Is that the dog-poop-girl train?

Gee, thanks for the head-up Mr. Matthew N. Obvious.

An under-capitalized day-trader gets reamed.  Yawn.

I started accumulating around the time that Mt. Gox was down, and in a relatively hurried manner because I was concerned that it would become harder to do for regulatory reasons, and also was worried about the price going up.  I've been wrong about both, and am obviously deeply in the red.  Nobody should feel the least bit of sympathy for me since I was fully aware of the risk and even the developers warned strongly of the possibility when they mentioned it at all.  If anything people should be snickering at my condition and that is perfectly fine with me.  If anyone loses money going the other way, you can bet I'll be doing so.

The 'Obamacare' thing is a work of art of which any fascist would be proud.  The government forcing people into the private and completely parasitic insurance industry in such a way that the industry no longer has to take a loss on those who actually need it, and they have no effective limit on costs either.  And the drug companies are left completely free to run the racket they bought under Bush-II.

The whole system preserves the basic principle of re-distribution of wealth.  You see, over the course of a lifetime a certain fraction of Americans actually can accumulate something worth taking.  When they are sick which, conveniently enough, often turns out to be near the end of their life, they are vulnerable to extortion so they will happily part with a great number of assets.  Retaining the unbelievable cost of drugs and 'treatments' facilitates this.  Thanks for nothing, Obama.