Oh, go ahead and leave the copied entries... chances are we will all be right. Senbon will be able to see who gave the answers first, and you will be able to bask in gaining knowledge without even trying. Cribbing from a Certified Genius_(TM) is a perfectly acceptable way to get an education.

As a tie breaker- let's have an essay question... Senbon should pick one of the answers and have the contestants provide a defense of why the answer is correct, citing historical references. Or make them distill kerosene.

Q1. From the Qur'an, Ebla
Q2. No
Q3. Currently under dispute, either 3 grams or 2.975 grams, depending on which origin is used.
Q4. Galen of Pergamon (Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus)
Q5. University of Al-Karaouine or Al-Qarawiyyin oringinally founded as a mosque by Fatima al-Fihria
Q6. 365
Q7. Jacques Cousteau
Q8. Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī was considered such by Renaissance Europe, although he who was influenced by the teaching of Diophantus (considered the Father of Algebra)
Q9. Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi first wrote about it, first distilled by Abraham Gesner
Q10. C. Both
Q11. Fire
Q12. Jabir Ibn Hayyan
Q13. Yemen
Q14. If a Believer unknowingly or in error, without intention, consumes pork, there is no sin in the act.
Q15. Two Angels from the second Surah of the Qur'an,
Q16. The Dead Sea

Thank you for the public notice. I presume that motion 71 (which was not identified) does not pertain to any of the LIF family of funds?

And thus far, with the exception of LIF.B, I do think you have been doing a good job. I would have preferred that B be maintained and folded into A without the precipitous drop in price. Although I note you had the integrity to announce it openly, unlike the litany of shady operators who close up shop, or massively change direction on a whim.

Ain't hostile... they drove the FUD short bus over here and started broadcasting fear and loathing about a non-issue, non-event load of silliness, when they really could have spent the time far more usefully fixing their own business. Ah, but why deliver on your incessant promises, ridiculous statements, and deluded ego-maniacal boasts when you can try and create an "Issue" to deflect attention from your own shortcomings.

We just pointed to the simple minded folks, and reminded them that they forgot to fact-check, think or reason anything out before giving birth to their little FUD-baby.

+1.

At least some of the great unwashed masses out here appreciate what you are doing. When the story is done being told, then, and only then, can we use your observations to inform our opinions and actions. Thanks for the time you have put in for the benefit of many.

Google Cablesaurus, the miner's one-stop shop for all things techy useful and "damn, why didn't I think of that!"

+1 on the Ode, the Day, and the community of good people who have followed in his footstep(or is it electrons?)

Oh my! Moving from the sidewalks to criminal trespass on private property. Yup, that's just so going to get the message across to the 1%.

I seriously hope that WalMart puts up "Posted: Trespassers will be shot!" Signs so they can legally clear their property of any infestation of vermin. And screwing around with the ports? Another brilliant move. What happens at the ports? Import and export of goods from other countries. And which department of government in the US is responsible for security at the connection nodes to other countries? But wait, before you answer, which department also has access to the military to "protect movement" and "prevent terrorism"?

Gosh, think mom and dad will be able to post bail when your sorry stinky occupying ass gets busted for terrorist actions against the commerce of the United States? Bet it's more than the limit on their Amex card. Think anybody with a brain will shed a tear when some occupier gets beat down trying to interfere with the free transit of goods in an area controlled by the Teamsters union? For the first time in my life I might actually applaud a union thug.

Here's a better idea... why not try to occupy Fukashima? You would be doing the world a favor, and probably get a lot more favorable media.

^ Well if Fiddy Bitcent shows up ready to bust a cap in your mofo ass, then we will know he has taken your sage advice.

He probably got grounded by his mother for displaying his ego to too many strangers. No supper tonight and no internet young man.

Ouch! Western Union???

Steer very clear of that on anything that you are doing to promote bitcoin. Western Union screams scam, thanks to the enterprising lads in Nigeria at the internet cafes, who use it as their preferred remittance source for ill-gotten gains. Even mentioning WU will create all kinds of negative press both with users (the more savvy greens, and all of the blues) and with media and the authorities.

Please don't add the taint of a criminal facilitator to this world, it is exactly the kind of message we need to avoid.

^ Ah good point. I was going to say "masses" but I couldn't picture real-douche and his 12 apostle sock-puppets constituting a single mass, unfortunately I carried the misplaced plural into my comment. I also substituted "meade" for "made" thinking that a tasty medieval adult beverage was more fun to think about than real-douche actually trying to craft something.

Except maybe finger painting. He and his ilk would probably be pretty talented at finger painting.

Blah, blah, blah, MY COIN IS SAFE AND THE BEST, blah, blah, blah...

Hey, CH and all your equally offensive trollish sock-puppets? Nobody gives a damn about your thoughts or fears or public safety announcements. Really, what you have to say, and your heartfelt concern for our best interests doesn't matter a single goddamn to anyone on this board other than those same sycophantic brown nosers who adore you in your own world. Take your concern, your horseshit, your noise and your predilection for self-aggrandizement back over to your little warped fantasy world and leave the grown-ups alone. You are an irritating little bitch who makes way too much noise.

You are as lame at FUD as you are at coding and promoting your shortbus-coin. Which is to say utterly and completely.

Flipper- welcome to the Dark Side. Here you will find that skepticism and healthy doubt still have a place in the community of men, and open debate still remains as the hallmark of honest discourse. You remain a complete tool for having been rs's little mouthpiece, but at least you are now a tool that I can communicate with without laughing my ass off at your blindness. In time you will drop off the shame of your toolishness and rejoin civilized society.

And on a slight tangent... did you notice how every single post that real-douche meade was a complete vindication of what Flip stated? Censorship? Yup. Banned? Yup again, although it was only collateral damage when he was banning someone else (as if the dossiers were next to each other and his electronic chainsaw cut too wide of a swath!). Editing post? Sure enough, Captain Super Coder to the rescue, when you say something that isn't in full praise of his Remarkable Assholishness, then your posts will be changed. Delusions of Godhood? Dead on the money- "secession plan in place" (sic) he thinks he is so important that he wants to Anoint the Next Anointed One. But his utter lack of intelligence comes shining through once again-

se·ces·sion   [si-sesh-uhn] noun
1.  an act or instance of seceding.
2. ( often initial capital letter ) U.S. History . the withdrawal from the Union of 11 Southern states in the period 1860–61, which brought on the Civil War.
3. ( usually initial capital letter ) Fine Arts . a style of art in Germany and Austria concurrent with and related to Art Nouveau.

Trusting that he was not referring to shortbus-coin as an fork of the Art Nouveau blockchain, I wonder if the big word he was looking for was actually...

suc·ces·sion  [suhk-sesh-uhn] noun
1. the coming of one person or thing after another in order, sequence, or in the course of events: many troubles in succession.
2. a number of persons or things following one another in order or sequence.
3. the right, act, or process, by which one person succeeds  to the office, rank, estate, or the like, of another.
4. the order or line of those entitled to succeed  one another.
5. the descent or transmission of a throne, dignity, estate, or the like. Sound familiar?

I wonder if the successor gets to wear the same tiara and carry the Holy Staff of Scam when he parades through the adoring throngs?

Well, btcbtc113, I didn't try to make them tangents. You sounded concerned that there was a nebulous force at work pulling strings at Gox based on data from Dwolla. I am trying to say that the deposit history for the account at Dwolla that is Gox would just be one sound in all the noise of their daily transactions. It would be as useful to a Dwolla employee as a manipulative tool as knowing how much went into the Blaine's Farm and Fleet account to predict the cost of horse feed in Wisconsin, or electric fence wire in Iowa. Gox is one of many thousands of merchants using Dwolla as one of many sources for clearing their transactions, in the case of Dwolla, specifically for those Gox customers that want to transact in US$. So it would possibly give them a view of what the US$ traders on Gox, who use Dwolla are doing, but I can't accept that this level of information could ever be useful for any meaningful manipulation.

There are too many other Gox customers that trade in Euros, Yen, Rubles, Rupees, and Zlotys to make knowing the American dollar slice of pie that is coming exclusively from Dwolla useful. Not to mention other exchanges, dark trading, alt-coins, and off-market transactions. You just can't get enough information from one source to control one exchange.

I believe that there is manipulation going on, and I suspect that the good folk at Gox know damn good and well where it is coming from. They don't need outside sources to give them that info.

And in the interest of disclosure, I do not trade on Gox, I have only used their services to convert a couple of times and those amounts were laughably small.

Or a replacement will rise up and take market share away from Gox. The best vote we have is with our economy. Move it elsewhere if they do not adjust.

No, I don't believe that people with access to aggregate data cannot legally trade in bitcoins. The question would be in how they accessed that aggregate data. It would presume that they are somehow monitoring individual accounts (all of us) sending payments to and from a certain account (Mt. Gox) and somehow able to determine whether that flow of money is for active trading, or being used for some other purchase. It would also mean that they did this out of the multitude of transactions that they manage every hour without involving the parties involved in the to and fro with Mt. Gox.

By the same token, somebody with access to the block-chain (again, all of us) if they wanted to, could theoretically track a specific transaction that an individual user made with a merchant (let's say through Silk Road for example!) and follow that amount through the block-chain until it showed up for conversion to fiat so that merchant could procure additional merchandise to sell to like-minded consumers. Knowing that there is a demand for illicit product X in city Y would allow that merchant to unfairly raise the prices on his dime bags, and make it more expensive for dime bag consumer Z to purchase said dime bag.

Again- Dwolla is a clearinghouse for transactions to and from a huge variety of buyers, sellers, merchants and markets. They do not have a direct connection to Mt. Gox per se, they accept deposits and withdrawals from Mt. Gox and tens of thousands of other customers, the vast majority of whom have absolutely nothing to do with bitcoin. If you really want a fascinating study of tracking your dollars, you would be far better off at www.wheresgeorge.com

My bad... https://www.veridiancu.org/. So not even a bank, but rather a credit union, the depression era, Wobblies-like, anti-bank collectivist movement. These folks have to hold a coffee-klatch to decide of Peggy-Sue is going to get that $500 student loan to go to Local State U. (I know because I am a board member for a credit union.) They couldn't organize a manipulation of a crypto-based currency if it came with printed instructions in 12 languages, a demonstration video, and helpful English speaking tech support.

To be fair- I'll tackle both of these too...

1) No. I cannot imagine a bank, or a subsidiary of any bank in the US being willing to violate banking law by giving out stats on one particular account or set of accounts without having a pretty damn ironclad warrant for the information. And if they did, the people whose accounts were compromised by releasing this information would have really impressive grounds for a lawsuit.

2) Perhaps. That would mean some of the folks who work for a limited set of roles for a bank in Iowa, are willing to commit a crime by tracking individual transactions for their own personal gain, have accounts on Mt. Gox, and are able to see into the intentions of their customers who deposit and withdraw money from their accounts, sometimes for transactions on Mt. Gox, other times to buy other things, sometimes just to pull cash out of their account to go buy a cheeseburger, or to pay off a loan on a new combine for their farm in Hardin, IA. If they are that clairvoyant, they are going to kick our asses at this speculation game anyway, so I don't worry about it. But it could happen, sure.

2a) Find an alternate conspiracy. Is Mt. Gox actually a front for the CIA? Tracking all of this money that is being used for international narcotics trade, and using it to launder the money that they are funneling to Quebecois separatists who will fund the revolution to liberate Canada, and turn it into the Northern border states of the US? Is it actually a sneaky plot by the Fed to find all of the people in the world that dont like fiat currency so they can round us all up and send us to re-education camps? Think about it... BTC = Bernacke Takes Control? Could "Satoshi" just be a cover name for a dark cabal of Keynsian madmen who want to take every last bitcoin from us? Wondering minds want to know.

Never said that Gox had anything to brag about. Under current banking laws, securities laws, money laundering laws, usury laws and quite possibly anti-racketeering laws in much of the civilized world, including Japan, Mt. Gox is not dancing, but jumping up and down with ankle weights on the razor's edge.

In fact pretty much everything that we do around here with bitcoins is quasi-legal somewhere, from our tax avoiding profit making mining enterprises, to our completely unregulated stock exchange, to the gift card buyers and sellers who transfer funds that are proscribed in certain countries. Toss in our infants terrible Silk Road and WikiLeaks as the early adopter poster children, and you have a wonderful cesspool of shady dealings, slightly mangled laws, and wanna-be gangsters all over the place.

Having Gox put restrictions on Bitcoinica is a lot like a mugger asking you for two pieces of ID to go with the cash he is stealing from you...