But I watched Immanuel Goob's youtube vid last night and he said BTC would never go down.  How can this be???

One reason I can think of off hand would be so that you can get your money.  Although I am not a lawyer, it would surprise me very much if someone could legally avoid 'complying with regulations' by going out of business.  Even in Bulgaria.

So, B7 has figured out a way to get, in addition to the BTC, either the money which was in the B7 accounts or even better, information of probably even more value.  And probably both for anyone dumb enough not to write this one off to...er...'bad luck' to be diplomatic in my terminology.

I am sure that you are right because your porn is a lot better than the Woolongfinancial stuff.

 - snip - actual joke image.


I took it to be a comment on the reliability of information on the Internets.  And I found it very amusing, but that is possibly because I never developed a man-crush on Steve Jobs and never found any of Apple's wares provoke a tumescence.

Ya, why can't they be good Kochparty Patriobots and act like the big money wants them to act?

At least the mainstream media message about what we should think of these people seems to be getting out broadly.

It's a cheap and easy bet, and because I value some of the capabilities that Bitcoin offers at the present time.

I'll spare you the effort asserting that long-shot wacko conspiracy bets cannot pay off.  That contention has already been invalidated in a tangible way to me.


Capital controls don't necessarily equate the kind of Mad Max world that you are probably imagining.  Most often they are more of a gentle caress, one might say.

Actually I _am_ envisioning a 'Mad Max' world, but it will be at the sub-atomic level where you won't probably notice it so much.


Always happy to help.

An alternate hypothesis is that the value does something along the lines you've outlined, but the system is used for the things it is currently good for.  Like providing support organizations like wikileaks or occuplywallstreet who have fallen out of favor with the large financial institutions and governments (which are increasingly indistinguishable.)  Over this time the system in increasingly analyzed and hardened.  Also, however, over this time the system is also analyzed for zero-day attacks and media prep work is done.

Then one day a big country pulls an Argentina (in the same way B7 pulled a MyBitcoin) and what remains of the middle class find their ATM's no longer work right.  If that happens, and it does not strike me as particularly far-fetched given the difficulty maintaining stability in the 'official' monetary systems these days, it will be very interesting at least and possibly very lucrative to have some BTC squirreled away.  It's worth putting a bet on...to me at least.

Actually it might be kind of nice if a solution existed where a terse log of anomalies associated with businesses which hold other peoples money could be reported.  Perhaps patterns could be spotted if they emerge and users might have some sort of advanced warning.  I'm thinking of a stone simple form based incident report thing which would take only a moment to input info into, and the results could be searched.

Maybe the bitsyn people could pick up on that one.

Ya.  Execute the end-game strategy before the next exchange does so.  Being late on the trigger can cause users to wise up about the stupidity of leaving excess funds in someone else's care.  Or not

On the more hopeful side, I am glad that lowlifes are obtaining some reasonable amount of capital in this manner.  I'm betting that these are the types of people who will release their (and I use 'their' deliberately) BTC in exchange for scooters, rent, blowjobs, etc.

---

As for the funds taken, I looked at the offers history on the bitcoincharts history and it seemed to be around 1600 for the USD one.  Probably some morons had BTC with these guys which were not in play.  Lets say 3000 BTC total.  So after all of whatever effort they put into this thing, they made off with about what a semi-skilled software engineer makes in a few months.  Pretty lame.  At least by not having a big haul they probably didn't piss off anyone too important.

In light of the news, I remembered this:

  http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/hackers/steve-wozniak/

which had me in tears when I first read it.  All of the 'hackers' bios were pretty good (imho), but I liked this one the best.

I'd wish Job's family condolences if I thought they would ever hear them of course (but probably would not include the link.)

It's kind of exactly the thing I imagined would happen when I suggested starting out with a 'campaign' namespace associated with the 'operationbitcoin' project.

Also, of course, there is hardly a more relevant organization to contrast with Bitcoin than the fed.  There is an ASCII Bernanke in the blockchain IIRC after all (although that could be taken as a joke by a supporter of the Federal Reserve system...and a damned amusing one at that.)

I could see a situation evolving where 'block chain zero' becomes something of a 'gold standard' or 'backing store' for as many other currencies as one can dream up.

People with 'block chain zero' coin could support or withdraw their support from these forked currencies as they choose.

And people who use currency can also choose which currency they choose to use.

In this way both the holders and the users of a currency would have a voice in the management of the currency and a general baseline fairness might develop.

This is all highly theoretical and highly nebulous (and highly unlikely).  But this is the 'Bitcoin revolution ideas' thread after all.

It was quite a big deal for me as well from both a technical perspective and a presentation perspective.

I imagine that if some 'Get $$$_RICH_$$$ at the All New Revolutionary Online Casino' advertisement graced the front page I probably would not have bothered.

+1  (after scanning this thread to see if anyone else thought the same thing.)  Seems like a very high percentage of people who understand some of the basic concepts necessary to appreciate the material will have also a good command of the English language since a great deal of technical material is in that form.

But as was recently noted, maybe it could be turned into an advertising opportunity

I see no particular harm in the translation effort as long as the translations are pretty good, but it does seem to me that the efforts might be more productively applied in other directions.  If the translated paper got distributed widely it might be interesting enough to suck in some young people and induce them to further their studies generally I suppose.  Some of the way over my head stuff I ran across as a kid ended up being valuable to me in general ways that I could not have predicted.

Your strawman, not mine.



The point is rather a tired one, but these things are actually better served by hard currency.



I actually am a little bit 'self-righteous' here.  Because the network is supported by the participants (or plebes), I believe that they will ultimately hold the trump card and thus be able to enforce a measure of fairness on the capital holders (if the system or something like it goes.)  I'd be interested to find out if my thought patterns would remain the same if someday I'm a capital holder in such a system.  And I consider it to be a very low order probability that this will ever occur.  IOW, I expect to lose any money I put into Bitcoin if I've not given it away first.

Appreciated.

I was a little bit bummed that there seemed to be no specific mention of trentzb:

 - managing the donations and doing a pretty detailed outline of them.
 - doing the QR code generation work which I believe ended up being used (?)
 - having a good deal of participation in design work and ideas.

I apologize if the lack of mention was per trentzb's wishes (or if the mapping between usernames on this forum is inaccurate in my mind.)

Huh?  If intrepid Smeagols (like me) didn't control more than a few BTC they would somehow pour down on communities in some afternoon rain shower?  Your statement makes no sense that I can see.  Anyone who wants BTC has to go to an exchange no matter what the exchange rate (unless CPU mining is rammed back into the system, and even then you get to distribute, what, 7200 BTC per day...for a while...among everyone?)  That, or have a desired item or skill that they can sell and be canny enough to avoid being ripped off by the Bitcoin community where shysters are, in my opinion, over-represented at this time.


I'd be happy to spend BTC instead of USD.  The trouble is that last time I tried most of the merchants seemed to think that they could capitalize on people's desire to 'support the community' and gouge the shit out of customers.

Some niches that USD covers badly are savings due to devaluation, and anonymous funding...particularly of organizations which are out of favor by the powers that be.  I use BTC for both.  Sue me (or better yet, offer something I want for a semi-competitive price.)

$5/BTC is amazingly low in my opinion give the currency base, the population of earth, the troubles with most of our currencies, the apparent robustness of the Bitcoin solution, and the likelihood that there will be at least some uses for BTC as long as the network remains in tact.  Happy days as far as I am concerned.  I'm not even sure that Bitcoin's primary usefulness is in exchange for trinkets.  I'll wait for a while before coming to a conclusion about that.

One last brainstorming thought I just had (when I should be working...)

It should be possible under a 'just-in-time' hand-out funding scheme, to create a wallet for each _donor_.  The donor could then decide if they liked the way the campaign was progressing and add to or withdraw their funding autonomously and quickly.

The system forming up in my mind is to have enough flexibility that there could be quite a variation in the way different campaigns are operated.  It could also be used for a range of promotional things as well.

---

The single most important thing to me is that as many people as possible are introduced to Bitcoin, and in such a way that they do not end up getting burnt.  That is to say, they at least have exposure to info they need to protect themselves.

The second most important thing to me is that any system I am involved with does not collect data on users or at the very least, is very transparent to users about what info is being collected and how it is being used (e.g., the IP address from where the user came.)

Let me just add that in any dev work I might do on such a system I would expect to keep it in a form which could fairly easily be operated by anyone.  That is to say, the org structure and server implementation would be conducive to dropping it onto a machine, hooking it up to a domain name, and going.  And it would be open source of course.

Managing doner pool wallet(s) would be better done on a different machine with some sort of a limited API for communications, but I think that the necessary operations which the 'server system' would need of the 'banking system' would be pretty minor so it should be relatively easy to harden.

In my little prototype thingy, I had a set of little files of the form:

  ows-pr1.dat
  ows-pr2.dat
  ...

These files contain simply a set of 'hashes' (though the form I choose was two-random-word sets instead of random chars.)  These, along with possibly a binary (with source) which produced .ps or .pdf files would be given out to volunteers who wanted to print and distributed hand-outs.  (A variation would be that the central server generates the hand-outs to print, but it does not matter much.)

I anticipated these files being generated by a main system mainly to avoid hash collisions, but also to track somewhat what the use rate of different distributions would be.  Part of the reason for doing so would be to detect and limit fraud.  That is, if some genius distributor got the idea of cashing in all the handouts himself it could probably be noticed and dealt with.

But it is the case that it would be quite trivial to accept donations to be assigned only to a specific -pr{n}.dat, and I see not good reason why that could not be an option.  Or just have a whole different campaign and let the interested party do his/her own 'campaign page' for it (and have a distributor list of their own if they want.)