It will probably be in Hebrew. I don't know what the venue will be like but I'll look at recording possibilities.

It is ~15 guys at Oracle, who I presume are programmers.

I doubt it will be necessary and this talk will be really crammed, every minute counts. I will however pronounce it "peer to peer".

I don't see how the term "address" adds in any way to the confusion, on the contrary. How many times did you hear someone ask, "how can I read Bill Gates' emails? I have the address, bill@microsoft.com [note: probably not his real address]." People understand that an address is something public to which you send things, and that to actually have access you need some form of password. Likewise people don't expect to be able to spend someone's money by knowing his mailing address or bank account number.

In any case, a fool and his money are soon parted and there is no cure to arrogance and recklessness. Someone who buys/accepts bitcoins without making a minimal effort to understand how to use them can't complain for losing them. Publishing a concise "things you must know before using Bitcoin" is one way to help people. Using a different name for addresses is not.

Also, AFAIK this talk is intended to be some sort of "extracurricular education", the goal is not to convince people to go out and buy bitcoins, so the presentation is light in practical usage tips.

I agree, presentations should be tailored to the target audience, which this one was.

On this note it's worth mentioning that there's a video of a talk I gave (in Hebrew) to a more general audience, it's loosely based on this which is also in Hebrew, but has an English translation here.

In Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph, Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir have noted that the first ever transaction of value at least 50,000 BTC, was transaction b9a0961c07ea9a28bdfa950556bd96f71d9ecf6e42d19c08cb2ee331a30d30cb from Nov 8 2010 where 90,000 BTC were sent to address 1BtK4w7yuvtWEqmMJcjW6DqWuqXBWii2ZC. Interestingly, they also found that most future large transactions can be clearly linked to it.

Does anyone have an idea who might be the sender/receiver of this transaction, or what can be done to try to find out?

I figured Mt. Gox would be the most obvious owner, but apparently no link to Mt. Gox was found in the transaction graph. Knightmb also crossed my mind.

Are these just coins owned by an unknown early adopter?

I don't think it's a scam either. But as is known in the traditional world and as we've seen in Bitcoin, scammers also pay out some amount.

I haven't spoken much publicly but for a long time I've been very critical of GLBSE, both with the concept of having it as a centralized service and with how specifically it was run by Nefario. Which is why I'm involved in the colored coins project (plug: I've completed so far 2 chapters on a paper about the subject.)

I'm sure code has nothing to do with it, if his intentions are basically good it's being held up on the legal front.

Are people really willing to wait that long? This isn't rhetorical, if more people agree with your proposal I'd like to hear it. (A lawsuit will also take an undetermined amount of time in the months or years)

A real company would need upwards of $10M of valuation and a battery of lawyers before making an IPO. If something bad happened they'd have the resources and infrastructure to handle it (and I doubt the solution will look anything like collecting shareholder data and paying them directly). GLBSE was supposed to be a more lightweight platform and we all signed up for something which allows more entrepreneurship but is devoid of some of the comfort of the traditional system.

The first step would be to find a lawyer who can look at you with a straight face when explaining the case, and even after that's done I for one can't afford the $$$ (possibly more than the market cap of PureMining) to pay lawyers to work on it. If a class action were to happen I would however support it.

PureMining has two manifestations - this forum thread and http://bitcoinpuremining.com/. Both solicit claims. Someone who bought PureMining bonds without knowing about either of these has quite frankly screwed himself by not having a clue what he's investing in. Likewise if he didn't care enough about his holdings to bother to check these places when the GLBSE problems unfolded.

Sure, you can argue that this is all happening very quickly (in traditional terms) and someone may not be in the loop of what's happening. In a perfect world someone could "buy and forget" and be sure that he would need no further action to take what is his. But this is not a perfect world, you have to draw the line somewhere - I don't like it and I don't think it's right, but it's the least wrong thing we can do with the hand we were dealt.

Keep in mind that unclaimed bonds will be donated one way or another - while it is not ideal to "volunteer" someone to donating, most people could use being a bit more charitable anyway, so this is not a total loss.

I believe this approach is supported by the Halakha. If someone loses something and has given up the search and the hope of finding it, it is considered "Hefker" (abandoned) and can be kept by its finder. This appears to describe people who haven't filed claims for their bonds.

I'm not doing a first come, first served claim system. Any reasonable claim is credited. Of course, as time goes by the claims become inherently less reasonable. In case the claims surpass outstanding bonds, I'll probably scale it down. But the actual situation is that so far the amount of claimed bonds is significantly less than the number outstanding.

Bonds aren't defined by their "business" but by their coupon payments. The contingent fact that I do hedge these bonds with a still-running mining arrangement is irrelevant. Nothing is usual while coupons are not being paid.

While coupons are piled up people are not being paid what they were promised. Also, the longer I wait the greater the chance that the coins will be lost or stolen, which I will have to pay out of pocket.

I'm open to input but in the end you'll do what you think is right, and I'll do mine. To me it is clear that traditional duties may or may not apply; I am not convinced that holding on to funds indefinitely is the one true pretender to the fiduciary duty throne.

The PureMining OP is quite long, and one of the reasons is that I wanted to address several contingencies. I should have spent much more time thinking and writing about those contingency plans; unfortunately, I considered a GLBSE shutdown distant enough to only warrant the following provision:
Strictly speaking, I could do whatever I see fit and still abide by the letter of contract. Of course, not everything would abide by the spirit of the contract; and I believe my proposal best captures the spirit.

If there are several things I hate, one of them is being caught in the crossfire. On one front I have people complaining about issuers doing nothing, and on the other about issuers "doing this claim system thing". You can't please everyone.

Thank you for your concern but I very much doubt someone who didn't bother to file a claim would bother filing a lawsuit. If such a lawsuit would go through there is something very wrong indeed with the world.

Thank you for all the positive comments.

Of course, as with any presentation, much of the content is in what I intend to say orally. I wonder if there will be demand for a document based on the same principles, but more self-contained with more text.

Added a pdf version: https://bitcoil.co.il/Bitcoin_Meni.pdf.

I still think it's funny you refer to something he mentioned in passing after being called on it as "his service".

I agree that bitcoin-otc WoT is powerless against true con artists. But the reason we don't have a proper rating system - not just in Bitcoin, but at all - is that doing such a thing is fundamentally hard. Even the rating system of established markets such as eBay is a joke (and even if you try to fix it in the obvious ways you still don't have something very good). You have to rely on approximations such as ripper234's list, read up on the person in question, and use your own judgement taking into account his total liabilities and the legitimacy of his offer.

You'll notice that ripper234 only mentioned insurance after it was pointed out it was expected of him. I don't think monetization was the purpose of starting this thread, but even if it was - so what? Is it wrong to do business anymore?

I agree though that if in fact monetization was the purpose, it should have been clarified from the start.

As someone who has sold Bitcoin-related sureties and lost from it, I can tell you it's not as profitable as you seem to think.

As stochastic mentioned sureties are hardly a new thing so a priori there's no reason to bash someone just for offering it, any more than if he were to sell, say, apples. One difference is that the insurer himself needs to enjoy a great deal of trust, as if the worst happens he needs to be able and willing to pay up the entire insured amount.

I trust ripper234 and I say he's definitely good for an insurance of, say, 100 BTC - and I'd be willing to offer second-level surety (Oh noes! I offered a service!). But if he were to have a total insurance liability of 10000 BTC I wouldn't recommend insuring with him, wouldn't give 2nd-level insurance, and wouldn't trust him myself with more money. Not yet, anyway.

Search harder.

He has a Facebook account. I have met him several times and can verify that the linked photo is of him. There are also videos online, e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zIbbA8GrL4&playnext=1&list=PLs2y5QtCoQ9q4738Rti3O8AqoJ_DhnNm4&feature=results_video (it's in Hebrew, and due to bad camera positioning he's invisible through most of it).

I cannot say I am 100% certain his real name is Ron Gross, but the sign on the door of his apartment includes the name "Ron", and I have some evidence his last name is Gross (which I will not currently disclose due to privacy concerns)

Of course, if you believe we have a secret agenda you have no reason to listen to us both saying we trust each other. But if you trust one of us you should trust the other - within reason.

How about the volume of his high-quality activity on the forum and bitcoin.stackexchange?

Anyway, shunning him for no apparent reason is your loss.

The thing that many people don't seem to understand (and that I understood but failed to act upon) is that trust isn't a boolean thing. An FT for, say, Jeff Garzik means that if he has no liabilities and is requested to be an escrow for 100 BTC, the chances of a problem are close to 0, and for that the list is useful.

It does not mean that if the person borrows myriads of BTC for a suspicious purpose then the money is safe (the greater the total amount, the more the person has to gain by defaulting, and the crazier the offer, the worse the likelihood ratio for originating in a legitimate purpose). No trust table is enough to justify putting money into that. If someone would do that based on such a table, he'll lose his money somehow anyway, probably in an equal amount - and in this light the table doesn't really do any harm.

I'll be giving a talk about Bitcoin to a group of people and have prepared a presentation for the occasion. It turned out not as bad as I intended so I thought I'd share. It's available at https://bitcoil.co.il/Bitcoin_Meni.pptx.

One of the requirements was to explain "how Bitcoin mathematics supports its features" so most of it deals with how transactions work and how the blockchain works.

Update: PDF version - https://bitcoil.co.il/Bitcoin_Meni.pdf.

A greatly expanded version:

https://bitcoil.co.il/Bitcoin%20Haifux.pptx
https://bitcoil.co.il/Bitcoin%20Haifux.pdf

A new presentation about mining: https://bitcoil.co.il/What%20is%20mining.pdf

Well, me for example. I know that friedcat has been accepting claims, maybe others. I don't know who else mentioned charity specifically, but it's the natural thing to do. Others aren't taking claims yet but are working towards resolution in their own ways (e.g., gigavps has lawyers involved).

10 million coins were mined. Half a million is 5%, not half.

PS. I didn't get the coins I had on GLBSE.

Indeed, it has been said that all asset issuers will avoid their obligations, except all those other asset issuers who make a great effort to try to reconstruct asset holder data, and will donate the difference to charity.

My contract said that I pay X to bondholders. The "pay X" part doesn't need GLBSE and will happen without it. The "to bondholders" part relies on data from GLBSE, and in its absence a "least bad" solution needs to be found. Importantly, a solution cannot be chosen objectively if keeping some amount by the asset issuer is even on the table.

How do you think I should proceed? The GLBSE shutdown was completely botched. Data about asset holders is withheld from issuers for no apparent reason. Even something as simple as mailing asset holders with their up-to-date portfolio - which would solve problems such as yours, which is undoubtedly quite common - hasn't been done. The double-payment thing was simply idiotic. Weeks have passed without any communication.

It is not clear that the data will ever be given. Without the data the options are fairly limited, and while we're waiting we get nonsense like this popping up. Referring to what I'm trying to do as "punishing" you is unfair.

Anyway, to answer your question - what you should do is send me an email with as much information as you can (approximate last amount, approximate highest ever held amount, how much do you usually invest into each of these things, whether you tend to hold or frequently trade, etc.)

Don't make things up. As mentioned, even if you really can't recall anything about PureMining in particular, information about your general trading habits are useful. It doesn't need to be 100% accurate.

I'm making some effort to screen potentially fraudulent claims. Unclaimed bonds will go to charity so you can assume your choices are to try to claim or to forfeit to charity. You can also give input about your preferred charities. I had the idea to use some of the excess as bonus to claimants but now I'm not sure it's a good idea.

Alberto's explanations of the situation aren't very convincing, but I'm giving him until early December to come up with some form of payment. I'm also exploring legal, law enforcement and other possibilities for escalating this in case this fails.

Exactly.

p is the probability that a share will be a block. If the global difficulty is D and the share difficulty is the standard 1 then p=1/D. If the share difficulty is d then p=d/D.

I remind everyone to send their claims to my email: glbse at menirosenfeld dot com (if they have not already done so). I still doubt I will get the data from GLBSE, meaning a direct claim could be the only way to get payment.

Also note that as time goes by, it's likely the signal to noise ratio in the claims will worsen, so claims submitted from now on will be subject to more scrutiny, and soon I will stop accepting claims at all.

Since acting by GLBSE data will be by far superior, if available, to direct claims, I will wait some more before making real payments. I might make a test payment soon.

Also, either way it looks like not all outstanding bonds will be claimed. I propose that a bit of the difference will be paid out as a bonus to bondholders, and the rest will be donated to one or several charities. Some possibilities include:

The Singularity Institute
The Bitcoin Foundation

Any other suggestions / opinions on previous suggestions? Smaller noteworthy projects can be considered too.

Oh, I get it now (if the leetspeak was to reduce Googleability, I think it's working). I was never approached by them. I doubt a position will be found there that suits my personality, but I wouldn't rule out anything a priori - all depends on what the position would require from me and how interesting and lucrative it is.


@augustocroppo - You still seem to assume that for every person X and statement Y exactly one of "X believes that Y" and "X believes that not Y" is true, and that "X believes that Y" is the same as "X believes that it is possible that Y". This is simply incorrect and no kind of logic argument can change that.

The word "believe" is pretty fuzzy and the accurate concept we need to consider is subjective probability. For every person X and statement Y, X has a given probability p assigned for Y, even if he does not explicitly quantify it. We generally understand "X believes that Y" to mean "X assigns a high probability to Y", let's say >0.9. So if 0.1<p<0.9 then X believes neither Y nor not Y; and if 0<p<0.1, then X believes not Y but still believes Y is possible.

Let's simplify the Santa Claus example by agreeing that "a Santa Claus" means "a person wearing red clothes living in the north pole". Consider the following discussion:

Q: Do you believe that a Santa Claus exists?
A: No, in fact I believe that a Santa Claus does not exist.
Q: Is it possible that a Santa Claus exists?
A: Yes.
Q: Why?
A: It is not that cold in the north pole, someone could live there if he wanted, and red clothes are easy to come by.
Q: If so, why do you believe no Santa Claus exists?
A: Because I don't see any reason why someone would want to go live in the north pole. Hence, it is unlikely anyone actually did that.

The answerer very consistently holds both the belief that a Santa Claus could exist (in the modal sense) and that no Santa Claus exists (as a contingent fact).

The same thing can happen with any other statement - I could believe it will rain tomorrow (since the forecaster said so) and that it is possible it will not rain tomorrow (since there certainly are sunny days, and the forecaster doesn't always get it right), etc. There is nothing special about statements asserting the existence of something; those have a subjective probability like any other statement, and one could give any kind of evidence or argument to establish his subjective probability.

Your set notation is still messed up. B ≠ D means that B and D are unequal (there is an element in one which is not in the other; there could still be an element common to both), not that they are disjoint (have no common element).

I know the dictionary definitions and explicitly addressed the case that you are sticking to them. But the words have connotations beyond the dictionary definitions.

I don't understand your argument or its notation. "Believing that X could be true" is not the same as "Believing that X is true and not knowing how to prove it".

Which goes back to Graham's point - you seem to be wanting me to "pick a side" instead of treating it like any other statement that one can be uncertain about.

No, not everyone are qualified to express opinions on everything. Politics is one area where this observation is often forgotten. See http://paulgraham.com/identity.html and the somewhat related http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/.

On the contrary, if you didn't choose to disregard my response you'd see it reveals quite a bit about my character. I am not interested in politics. I don't read/watch the news. When people start a heated argument about the latest politics thingy I don't have my own piece of mind I make sure everyone knows, I sit it out hoping the conversation will shift to something I can contribute to. As far as your specific question "regarding the diplomatic relations of Israel with Iran and Palestine", I have very little factual knowledge, not enough to verbally express an opinion, let alone one that is robust to new knowledge. I can't recall much of what I knew or thought because this is not meaningful enough for me to be encoded in memory. Contrary to what you seem to think, the response in my mind to your question wasn't "I believe that X Y Z! But I'm not telling." It's more like reaching into my mind to find something relevant to say and getting only a blank.

Sure, if I wanted I guess I could read up on some history and recent developments, analyze the facts and figure out what I think of them. But I have no interest in doing that.

Maybe if you asked some leading questions this would become an aided recall task which is easier.

I have answered your questions to the best of my ability, you are the one who chose to assume I am hiding something. If you want a more detailed response ask a more focused question.

Read again. You are not dictating how I should think, you are saying what I think, e.g. "You have an opinion as everyone else", "You are or you not are."

Religion is about more than a given set of beliefs, there is a strong cultural component. One may respect and be attracted to the culture and tradition regardless of the truth value of the associated beliefs.

If beliefs are all that you are interested in, it is rarely a good idea to be absolutely certain in something of any complexity. A Bayesian assigns a subjective probability p to the truth of any statement. If the statement is "the beliefs associated with religion X are generally true", then theism would be p~1, atheism would be p~0, and any 0<p<1 would be a middle point between theism and atheism.

As for me, I don't find the beliefs underlying Judaism to be likely true, but I don't rule out the possibility.


It was not supposed to be "a site". It was supposed to be a trading platform which needs reserves to be able to hedge its position. The BDT bonds thread detailed some other planned expenses. I actually think $70K (what it was worth at the time) is too little to do such a service properly. It was still much more than should have been trusted with someone without more solid credentials, though.

I don't see the connection.

For some things I have sufficient qualification and interest to form an opinion. For others, not. What you asked about is of some importance but also sufficiently complex that any attempt to opinionate for the sake of opinionating will be almost pure noise.

This is not how it works.


I see no point continuing this line of inquiry as it has devolved into trying to tell me what I think.