I wrote a bot to fetch the information for a thread by going through every page. One thing I learned is that spreadsheets get slow when there is too much data, but it still suffices nonetheless. In theory, the bot gathers enough data to be able to plot how many letter "e"s are posted, but I doubt this is very useful.

Here's a couple plots for this thread:

Posts over time


Posts over the UTC day


Posts over the UTC week (Mon-Sun)


Posts by author


If this bot would benefit you for any topic, I can run it for any specific topic or limited sets of topics. For anything more advanced (e.g., entire boards), I would be glad to send you the source code.

Mt. Gox only relatively recently begun hosting the forums, so I doubt this is the case.

I've been thinking of creating a CPI index for Bitcoin, which would measure inflation without tying it to the dollar. Effectively, bitcoin merchant sites are scanned by bots every period of time, and categorized into categories. As the prices change, the CPI index is calculated. Many merchants will tie their price to the US dollar/Euro/CAD or whatever, while some would use round numbers (1 BTC). This CPI would then be an aggregate of price changes across many currencies proportional to importance while not using any outside currencies directly. (in this way, the CPI would directly be noticed by the "consumer").

The database is complete up to 1760, and should be >95% accurate.

This has happened with Mt. Gox last year (Gox was blamed) as well. The issue is not so much blaming the victim, as blaming the only identificable source of error (try tracking down these hackers...).

(My take on this; note that I don't support ancap.)

When confronted with an issue that is presented in the form "What would ancap do if...", I tend to apply a simple strategy. First, answer the question "What would an American (could be replaced with any) society do if...". In this case, if an oil spill occurs, the cost is shared among many parties:

BP Oil Spill
BP: $37.2 B (some mandated, others willingly for image)
EPA (federal): ~$10 M
Pepsi, Dawn, etc. (commercial donations for image): $5.3 M
WWF, environmental organizations: $4.0 M

Next, simply replace federal funding with "protection agency" or "state" funding. I believe that paints an accurate picture of how the oil spill is funded.

Let a represent the minimum of the inputs,
Let b represent the GCD of the inputs.

For each input, the output is to be as many blocks of a as possible, followed by enough b to complete it.

This method works decently:

Boy, this issue will have the general political direction of this forum split .

1797 / 21000000 = 0.00856%.