QED.  There is no way to change the established rules of the blockchain without making a hard fork.  Absolutely no way.  You may, with the cooperation of the miners, introduce extra rules.  The new rules must be allowed by the existing rules.

You obviously lack basic undrstanding of how Bitcoin works.  The rules of bitcoin and the blockchain are set forever.  You can do minor restrictions, but that requires the support by a majority of all the miners out there voting by their hashrate.  The only supreme ruler of bitcoin is the blockchain, and the miners can support extra restrictions to the original set of rules if they want to.

Everyone who was a part of that operation should have known better.  It can't come as a surprise to *anyone* that the legality of BS&T was dubious at best.  Since the beginning.  If you are a part of an illegal operation, you should be prepared for the consequences, and don't expect to keep any "profit".

Contradicts itself, don't you think? I assume this is some kind of joke. To me it looks like a vague generic text about people, not Bitcoin.

Didn't the subprime mortgage crisis teach people anything?

Quite a few..  Any further estimate?

First of all: wallet.dat is a file, not a directory.  You would want -wallfile not -walldir.  Just do it yourself if you think it is so easy.  The rest of us just move wallet.dat to where we want it and symlink.  Because it is even easier, works for any file, and is probably the reason why nobody can be bothered to write any code for it in the client.

7200 brand new coins are generated every day by mining.  A little more, since difficulty is increasing.  1600 is only 20% of that.

He sold long ago and over time.  Not difficult at all in this market.  It was never 500k BTC, which would include interest, it was much less.  His personal spending habits were commented on back in May when the amount of new coins coming in still exceeded the amount of interest paid out:

PS&T has less than 400,000 (based on interest payments).  And no, the coins will not be freed.  The coins, or what he had left, were sold seconds after the announcement, and will have to be bought back before he can release them.

This, along with the announcement, triggered a landslide.  Or you may call it a bubble burst.  Which is fortunate for Pirate, bacause he can now buy back the coins at half price, and have a chance to pay back what he owes.  If he makes it, he will profit thousands of BTC in bets against his own default.

Very clever, and not what anyone expected.

Some of the coins may be sold again when released by Pirate, but not that much I think.  Pirate may hope for it, and pay out at a slow pace to get cheap coins from old customers selling in panic.

This is very simple.

1. A bubble was forming.  This should be evident to everyone.

2. Pirate is already low on coins, and got problems with his liquidity.  He decides to pull a last stunt to be able to pay back what he owns.

3. Pirate announces the end of his famous fund, and sells all he's still got.  He knows this will make the bubble burst.  And it does.

4. Pirate buys the coins he needs to pay back everyone.

5. The price stabilize on a higher level than before the bubble started rising.  Some of the coins from Pirate will be sold on the market.  On the other hand Pirate has stopped playing with them.

Pirate is heavy in on bets against his own default.  Thousands of BTC.  Not defaulting and cashing in those bets may be his best option.

This is 100% pure ox manure.  The Bitcoin network is exactly 0 FLOPS.  Zero floating point operations are involved.

Do not compare integer operations with floating point operations.  It is two different worlds.

I think it is unfortunate to implement this without implementing a way to ignore asocial blocks as well.  If a new block arrive and only include a very small percentage of the waiting priority transactions, this is in effect a DOS attack against Bitcoin.  We all remember the 0-tx miner from earlier this year.  I don't want to build on those blocks until I have to.
I think this should have come as the first patch.  There are several policies around already, and no way for the clients to know.  This patch could make the situation worse.

Another option I would hope to see was tiers of different cost, a combination of -blockprioritysize and -mintxfee.  E.g. first 25k for high priority 0-fee tx, next 25k for at least 0.0001 fee, next 25k for 0.0005 fee, next for 0.001 fee, etc.  Large fee transactions will get included by making the block larger, not by squeezing out the smaller fee transactions which have waited for a long time already.

Please shut up, if you don't have anything new to add.  This verbatim quoting without even trimming down to the parts you think are important and  telling us why, is just 100% annoying to everyone trying to follow this thread.  Delete or get ignored.  (I see you have quite a lot of ignores already.)

I see three possibilities here:

• Zhou Thong created the second MtGox account himself, and were in breach of MtGox ToS by owning two accounts without prior permission.
• The attacker also had access to Zhou Tong's MtGox account and got the funds from there himself.  Zhou Thong didn't notice.
• The attacker bought a Redeemable code or BTC directly from Zhou Thong, and transferred it directly to this account.

To me the first option is most likely.

From MtGox ToS:
If Zhou Tong indeed did own this account without express permission, MtGox shall have to suspend all Zhou Thong's accounts.  If it wasn't his account, he need to explain how the funds got transferred there from his account.

If this isn't criminal negligence, then nothing is.  Seriously!  At least disallow withdrawal and API key creation without a Yubikey.

This has bugged me as well.  Until this episode I had the impression that Rackspace was a serious hosting provider.  Not some garage with a couple of racks on UPS and a fat ADSL line.  A serious hosting provider keep multiple backups of customer data off-site, because losing a lot of customer data due to some catastrophic event means losing their business.  Unlinking it from a web page just makes the data a bit more inconvenient to get to.  Impossible for the customer, but in no way impossible for Rackspace.  The data may be older than current, but I find it hard to believe that off-site backups were instantly deleted along with the servers.  Backup systems just aren't built for easy deletion.

Perhaps someone from Bitoinica can comment on how they have worked with Rackspace to rescue data?

Except this one.  How do you make 7% a week legally?  You don't even have to answer, since he even claimed himself the operation "may be illegal in his country" or something similar.  (For the illiterate: This is illegal everywhere, no doubt about that, so I'm not going to reveal any specifics.) There can't be any doubt about the [il]legality.  The only remaining question is exactly how it is done.  And you don't need to know all the details, not even to get someone convicted.

There were at least a hundred different threads "the other day", and no, I didn't see it.  The only hint I have is "Trendon Shavers", and the only "Trendon Shavers" I could find related to pirateat40 has a warrant listed on him here:

http://www.co.midland.tx.us/da/hotcheckwarrants/list/

I have no idea if this is the same person or not.
What is "the OP"?  Not announcing your identity is not necessarily bad.  It depends on the conditions.  You may be anonymous at your AA meetings.  If you hand your money over to some person on the Internet without even knowing who she is or what she is doing with them, you should have your brain checked for signs of life.

On the first version of the web page for his laundering^Wtrading system where he promised a high weekly interest to people who deposited there.  It was under "Why don't you reveal your real identity" or similar.  He has smartened up a tiny bit since then, and left it out in later versions.  I don't know what excuse he has got this week for not revealing his identity.