...Bruce Wagner.  He's done.  Didn't seem to have moved the markets that much.  (I guess the OP locked the other thread on this issue.)

Checking SA this morning, they seem now to have their sites set on Mt Gox itself.  I gotta think that if they dig up anything there it will be a magnitude 9.1 w/ tsunami for the markets.  But I'm usually wrong on this stuff.

I did take my unnecessary (BTC) cash out of my exchange to minimize the fallout from any eventualities just now.  It's been my  habit but I'd been slacking on it lately.

I became something of a fan of the SA forum as of today.  A lot of the stuff is quite amusing to me.  Pretty anti-bitcoin, but that does not bother me to much nor does it sway my confidence in Bitcoin...from a system level perspective.

Although the thread of interest 'Bitcoin: Atlas shrugged and got fucked in the butt.' was very active today, the stupid server seems to have become dog slow over the last few hours and now it's time for me to hit the hay.  The situation is kinda like censo...er...moderation but less annoying.

Wolftaur. You did indeed.  In a back-n-forth you and I had about it (at least.)  You were %100 right and I was %100 wrong.  Cost me a few BTC and a very red face.

Bruce fooled the shit out of me.  In fact, thinking back on it, I believe I am the dumb-ass who suggested that he take charge of doling out the remains of the mybitcoin loot.  Thank God nobody listened to me on that one (I hope...I went on vacation for 9 days and didn't really follow things around that time.)

Live and learn.  But can someone please tell me that Bruce was indeed a relatively good con-artist and I am not a _complete_ retard for thinking he was genuine?  Please?  Anyone?

(BTW, I _still_ feel that having a demonstrated chunk of funds going to charity from anonymous members of the Bitcoin community is a damn good idea.  The rest of those in that brainstorming session will have some work to do to wash their hands of The Bruce and convince me that they never were part of the same nets of rats.)

I agree.  I've got a big enough position in BTC at this point that it is in my personal interest in seeing it eventually succeed...in addition to considering the system to be potentially very valuable to 'humanity.'  So, if a fraction of the stuff that SA and friends have dug up is true, I will be officially thankful to this group (who I had never heard of before) whatever their motives.

I cannot help but notice that some investigative work nipped the 'Bitcoin Better Business Bureau headed by an utter clown' thing in the bud.  And against considerable resistance.  I, for one, am willing to put up with a good bit of nonsense and unpleasantness if it means catching some problems early.  If the 'problems' turn out to be false-positives there will be unnecessary damage but it should not be terminal.

It does seem to me that the whole Bitcoin thing is such a hot potato at this point that anyone thinking about setting up shop had better be prepared for the worst.  If they cannot stand the heat, they best stay out of the kitchen.  The heat has already proven valuable as I see it.

---

Come to think of it, everybody should ask themselves 'why am I' and 'why are they' so interested in something like Bitcoin at such an early point in it's life?  There are a lot of possible reasons, and a lot of them might have a less than wholesome smell.  It might be expected that there would be an extra-ordinary amount of scammyness here for that reason.  It's a reality that just needs to be dealt with in whatever ways are effective (as always, IMHO.)

I hope your show will have the following features:

 - Serious guests with serious businesses, or otherwise well informed experts with interesting points of view and opinions.

 - Reasonably short and focused.

 - Tough but fair questions of your guests.

 - Have the decency to your guests to not get distracted and stay focused on the topic which brought them there (I'm thinking about what happened to Keyur on Bruce's show here.)

 - Flexibility to take on ad-hoc topics as the occasion arises if they are highly important to Bitcoing (I'm thinking about the Tradehill guys showing up to explain the Dwolla mis-adventure.)

 - Don't be afraid to have your own opinions and judgments about things as long as they are reasonable and consistent.

Best of luck.  Looking forward to it.

He won't.  He cannot.  That's part of his pathology.  He'll stop when some brain chemical balances shift around and not before.

(That's my read on things at least and I have some sympathy for the guy...I just hope I don't find out in a few weeks that he seems to do extra-ordinarily unseemly things to other people.)

Given the Thailand flap, and remembering the MtGox hack, I have to say that you guys have impeccable timing and/or great fortune.

The conference venue does not hold much interest to me.  I doubt if I personally would go if it were in my area since I am not into that sort of thing, but I have to say that I it *does* seem to me to be in poor taste and ironic given the goals of the recent charity drive brainstorm idea (which seems imho to have gone a bit off track.)

More importantly, I have a very negative taste about 'all the important people' escaping the '13 year olds' here on the forum and decamping for some cloistered set of private mailing lists.   For one, I don't see _that_ much problem here (though this is the first 'social' thing I've participated in since cutting my teeth in alt.politics a decade and a half ago.)  I see plenty of people with valuable contributions and ideas here still and the more immature of us are still good for a laugh from time to time.

I hope that Tradehill will continue to take a minimal interest in posting at least Tradehill related news on this old forum.

Daaaaamn...no wonder this thread has 9 pages!  I'd been ignoring it as dis-interesting since finding out that 'Pattaya' was a place in Thailand and the OP didn't give me any clues about why it was even on the board.

Yet another in the string of bad news for Bitcoin.  Maybe this issue will get that $/BTC ratio down some more and I can my order buy order in.

---

I've come to the philosophy that in fact Bitcoin is actually not terribly useful at the present time because indeed the USD still work quite well as money to buy things.  That leads me to the thought that the best thing for Bitcoin at this time is to really wring the system out with incident after incident of bad news and misfortune.  If it holds up from a system level after these attacks, that will say a lot (to me at least.)

...but maybe I've just got some fox/grapes thing going.  Who knows.

Gold and Bitcoin are, to me, a really good match and have some real potential to have a symbiotic relationship.  When I first got seriously interested in Bitcoin I was shocked and surprised at the level of animosity in the PM community toward Bitcoin.  And also their simple lack of interest.  I guess the former stems in part from a misguided suspicion of competition.

I see Bitcoin as a really good way to work around the difficulties associated with PM's being a physical.  I would like to eventually be able to have Gold disappear in one continent and pop up in another.  When I quit my day job it might be a system that I work on...being unimpressed with the current escrow frameworks.

I wish you luck and encouragement in your efforts here Bitrebel.  I suspect that the Alex Jones show is among the more fertile fields to till in sparking interest in Bitcoin.  I hope Max Keiser (and Stacy) will continue their work on the subject and some of the regulars on these types of shows will pick up on it.  Like that whats-his-name 'end is near' NY guy...um...Gerald Cilantro or whatever.

Opps.  Lemme re-phrase.  I suspect that Bruce himself may in fact agree with you.

But again, I think that a great deal of trust in either the motives or competence of a party willing to run such an effort is not an essential need.  Some sort of 'parity bit' scheme for access to the private key could be arranged if it really bothered people (though the questing then comes up about who sets that up I guess...)

Both Bruce and the memory guy still seem to me to be among the top candidates for such a 'cherity' endeavor both because they have shown some interest in it specifically, and because, respectively, they have been in for a long-ish time and are early adopters among early adopters.

I would not be surprised if Bruce himself did not agree with you.  But...

Running a charity aggregation deal should, I think, be quite possible to do in a very transparent way which would satisfy the chronically suspicious folks (like me.)

I also would not expect that it would take a huge investment in time relative to many other endeavors.

I envision an address where people could verify that their donations are being appropriately deposited.  Also, publication of a series of mails being sent to potential charities and the responses sent back.  Probably a discussion thread also.  I cannot honestly say that I have ever coordinated such a thing so I am probably underestimating the effort.

I would hope that the funds in the address(es) could be drawn down at a reasonable frequency to limit losses, and if nobody in the community can figure out how to keep a secret key secret after all that we've been through in the last few months...well...we may as well kiss Bitcoin goodbye as a viable system anyway.

I was in a hurry to go hiking when I read this post and made a donation.  I am disappointed looking at block explorer just now.  At the very least I can say with a straight face that _I_ use Bitcoin primarily for charity, and that is good enough for me.

But I did do some thinking/re-thinking on my day out.  Also read some other people's perspectives on this thread.

I do believe that it would be a big win in a number of ways if there were a decent sized chunk of the economy which was going to charity.  This would give the opportunity to bring it up in response to people who point out the negatives (Silk Road, laundering, etc.)  Also, of course, at least some charities are in need of support and can/will do good things with it.

I would be uncomfortable coercing charities to accept Bitcoin, or even forcing them to put much energy into it.  Those that do may just be more interested in profit than their cause.

I think that what may work better is to have some responsible party collect donations on behalf of 'interested parties in the Bitcoin community', transfer them into state currency, and donate as they see fit.  Requesting a simple note from the recipient thanking said 'interested parties in the Bitcoin community' for the donation would not be to much to ask.  Hopefully a tally could, one day, add up to a sum which would impress Joe Sixpack who has otherwise never heard of Bitcoin or only hears the line that it is the 'terrorist' or 'druggy' internets money.

There are some variations on the theme.

 * Maybe 'bins' that people could donate to so that they are more comfortable that their donations would be more likely to go to a purpose they agree with.

 * Maybe the tax advantages of charitable donations could be leveraged.  Off-hand, my thought on that would be that it could go to startups to help them not to need to gouge us poor would-be buyers so much.  But that is a huge can of worms.

It also could very well be the case that there are simply _not_ enough people in the Bitcoin economy at this time who are of a mindset or have the means to think much about charity.  Or that the economy is not big enough to be able to realistically expect a decent chunk of funds for charity.  If either of these things is the case, I hope it will not always be so.

This really is a terrific idea from a bunch of perspectives and is a win/win/win to me.  So I just did a trail donation.

 - supports good efforts

 - supports bitcoin

 - supports people coordinating efforts (*)

* I don't give a damn about tax write-offs personally and am willing to eat tax losses as a cost of doing business in a $$-centric world (but I am deeply sorry about the Pakistani villagers I am murdering by remote control )  If any organization has the get-up-and-go and the general decency to coordinate such an effort, they have my expressed permission to claim any tax write-off they can get after converting the BTC I donated to state-sponsored currencies.

If one is trying to generate a relationship graph, one could still be fairly accurate to assume that you did not 'just give it away for no reason at all.'

If, however, it became fairly commonplace for people pass chunks of BTC around in wallets (or more generally, pass private keys), then there is a fair chance that the BTC next became visible under control of someone who had no direct link.  A fair enough chance to throw some real uncertainty into a relationship graph at least.

For people like myself who are overly paranoid about individual relationship tracking and do not trust centralize authorities (like on-line wallet services and exchanges) to have the will or ability to resist state sponsored police activities, methods of transferring private keys are of some interest.

Uggg...bad news.  If the MSM guys are focusing in on Bitcoin again and being negative about it, it probably means that their handlers are planning to move in

Before the Dot.com crash I had no money and didn't pay any attention to this financial reporting.  After that, and observing their behavior in that world, I managed to do pretty well by doing the opposite of what these guys were pumping and diving into the things they were negative about (esp gold.)

No real action required.  Just wait for the alternatives to Bitcoin to go poof.  Bitcoin is not in the 'race to the bottom' which pretty much all fiat currencies are involved in.  So it (and gold and silver) should have a pretty strong long term outlook.  That's my bet...or one of my bets at least.

I have some real questions about whether I even want BTC to go 'up in value' (at this time.)  I would hope to see the maximum distribution.  More and more people are becoming aware of Bitcoin, and if the price is low, the smart ones can snap up more.  At some point, if not already, big money may be Hoovering up everything which turns up for sale I fear.  So there is to my way of thinking a golden time when the price is low to maximize the distribution.  I just don't pretend to know what that time window and price window is.

Amusing is in the eye of the beholder, I guess, and I thought it was funny.  An element of truth is a great way to make something funny, and their analysis of this situation certainly had plenty of that IMO.

I've watched the free stuff from TYT for some time now.  I will bet 1 BTC (or $100 whichever is less and with the first person who takes me up on it only) that if/when TYT does a story about bitcoin, and if Cenk is leading it, it will be generally positive.

One more qualifier to my bet:  My position assumes that if/when such a story is done, Bitcoin has not become mostly an effective tool for the minority to exploit the majority, or an escape vehicle for those who gained wealth via their current corrupt practices (and I see both of these as a very distinct possibilities as the end-game for Bitcoin.)

TYT did an amusing story on this one:

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheYoungTurks#p/search/0/T0Ty9jFRtOw

It's been working well for me all day (to my surprise.)  Thankfully.  It's been an interesting day and I would have been fairly miffed had I been locked out or had my trades gone unattended to.

Good number.  I put in my giant buy order for a few cents North of that (a few days ago.)  I doubt that it will get that low though.  I'm guessing I will pussy out and buy in well North of that.  We'll see.