I don't see how any person could have honestly believed that Zhou had consented to having that information released. Either Zhou didn't know the information or he knew it. In the former case, he can't have consented to releasing it (except very explicitly, which we know never happened). In the latter case, you'd have to believe he was dumb enough to consent to the release of information he knew would make him look guilty in the manner most likely to make him look as guilty as possible.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that your accusation referred to me. What I meant was that people too freely throw around that accusation, so much so that I've received it from both sides of an issue for making the same argument. (I reworded the beginning of that post a little bit to make that clearer.)

The usual flippant atheist response to this question is "Is not collecting stamps a hobby?"

Being an atheist just means you don't believe in a deity of any kind. It doesn't require any particular positive belief. There are no customs, traditions, or practices that are part of atheism or shared by atheists generally as part of their being atheists.

Some people do argue that large numbers of atheists have common views and that this makes atheism a religion. For example, many atheists have the affirmative belief that no god exists. Many believe in moral systems such as pragmatism or humanism. Many believe that beliefs must be justified by logic and reason and that faith is not an acceptable justification for belief.

However, nobody has explained how this can constitute a religion without making pretty much everything a religion. People who play golf tend to share a belief that golfing is enjoyable. They share the custom and practice of playing golf. They meet at golf courses on weekends. Is golfing a religion? What about vegetarians? Many of them share a belief that it is morally wrong to eat meat. They have customs and practices, shared beliefs, and so on. Is vegetarianism a religion? What about believing in the importance of regular exercise?

Still, I don't think this is something to argue over. We know what atheism is. Why does it matter what we label it? Whether or not you consider atheism a religion, it is clearly fundamentally different from religions like Christianity and Islam. It still is what it is. Even if atheism was fairly categorized as a religion, that wouldn't make "atheists are religious too" a sensible response to atheist's rejection of major religions, their arguments would still be precisely the same.

While I agree there are a few people here who look like they might be paid shills or sock puppets, I would strongly caution against saying anyone is "clearly" a paid shill. There is a lot of room for honest disagreement and it's all too easy to think that people who don't share our views must be unreasonable, biased, or worse.

For example, I've been accused of being a paid shill a few times. I've never been paid for shilling anything. I've even had cases where I tried to be as fair as possible to both sides and in exchange, I was accused of being a paid shill by *both* sides. (Which would have been a pretty sweet deal if I could have gotten it. If anyone would like to pay me to shill something, I'm absolutely open to reasonable offers. Now's a really good time -- my jet ski needs new RAVE valves.)

http://www.volokh.com/posts/1169515991.shtml

And, by the way, I would hope that even the people being the most critical of you would agree that you were most likely trying to do what you thought was right, even if they disagree with your decision. I don't think anyone believes you were intentionally trying to trigger a witch hunt.

Your argument is essentially that it's misleading to say something is "100% insured" when it's possible for people to lose money even if the terms of the insurance are met. I see both sides of this issue. Usually "100% insured" does mean you can't lose money, but there are certainly other cases where "100% insured" doesn't mean that, particularly ones where you "overpay" for the item that's insured.

I think those bonds are just overpriced, not misrepresented. You simply wouldn't sell any of those bonds. But surely they're worth more than .001 BTC.

Yes, it is. You borrow some bitcoins at slightly above market and pay them back as soon as possible.

Exactly. So what's his profit model now?

No, it makes sense to do the deals even if that means you need to borrow. But also, it makes no sense to borrow if you don't need to -- unless you have no intention of paying back. With your model, he'd have no need to borrow. Thus, either he doesn't make sense or he doesn't intend to pay back.

It absolutely does make sense to buy back debt which yields less because buying back that debt in no way affects his profit margins. It is comically absurd to argue that his business volume is limited by his capital.

That can be done much simpler ways. For example, you can literally separate the key bits in half. You can also generate a random sequence the same length as the key, and store that along with the key XORed with that.

Any scheme that doesn't involve storing the private key on a single device has this property.

Is any operator of any Bitcoin exchange willing to adopt this argument?

Will any of you agree with this statement: "If we suspect you've committed a crime, and you've discussed that issue publicly, our exchange reserves the right to release your account and transaction information to the public on that same forum, to further that discussion and investigation."

Somehow I don't think that there's a financial organization of any kind, exchange, bank, wallet service, or the like, that will publicly agree with that statement. You might want to think about *why* that is. (Hint: That's not what their customers expect, and have a right to expect.)

None of that is even remotely comparable to an organization that provides financial services releasing a named customer's transaction information to the public, in violation of their own privacy policy and in the absence of any government investigation, where the obviously foreseeable result of that release is that the customer will be publicly suspected of having committed a significant criminal offense. "Everybody steals paperclips from the office" is not a rational response to accusations of murder. They are *that* different.

It's no harder to generate the initial pair yourself as it is to validate that it is correct. If you don't validate it, and it turns out to be defective in any way, your money is forever lost.

Frankly, this seems silly to me. What advantage do you get from splitting the key in this way?

The thing is, this whole thing is much easier to do without using any lenders (except perhaps for the first few transactions). Just keep your profits in Bitcoins, pay off the lenders, and then keep all the profits.

Also, there's no evidence that the constant, large Bitcoin transactions necessary for this to work (from A to B in your example) are actually happening. And it makes sense that they wouldn't be happening. There's advantages to dealing with Bitcoins, but not enough to justify a 10% cost on the buy side followed by selling on an exchange and withdrawing fiat to buy more Bitcoins.

This is really just a variation on "Pirate is so rich he can afford to borrow at a huge loss even in the absence of a business reason for doing so".

I knew from my original "order of magnitude" sanity check that it had to be less than 1,000% but just couldn't find my error. I went over all the calculations several times, but not that last conversion to percentages. It seems so obvious now that you point it out. Thanks.

Did you watch the video? One of the techniques used several times was to assure the convert that all they had to do was believe a small set of things (none of which had anything to do with being a good person) and they were *assured* entry in heaven.

Ask a typical Christian if the Bible is the revealed word of a living God who holds their eternal salvation in his hands and they'll say "yes". Then ask them if they've ever read the whole thing or bothered to understand what each section was saying. Their religious beliefs have no real effect on their behavior.

Perhaps without religion, people would have found the right reasons to be better people. And no one would have to get nailed to anything. (Perhaps not. My point is simply that it's easy to see the advantages of the actual and easy to not see the advantages of the potential. For example, NASA frequently talks about the technological advances they are responsible for. But who knows what advances the money spent on NASA would have brought if spent elsewhere.)

Also, I think religion is still a horrible evil, even if it did make 90% of people act better (which I do not accept), because of the people who fight and kill for religion. Think about a really good doctor, say one so much better than most other doctors that he saves an extra 20 people per year. However, he does ask in exchange that he be permitted to murder 1 patient per year. So, this doctor will save 19 lives per year. However, he does murder one random person, who otherwise would have lived. Maybe you're enough of a pragmatist that you'd reluctantly hold your nose and hire this doctor. But I don't think you would argue that he's perfectly entitled and morally justified in killing one person, given that he saves 20.

You can't make up for the bad with good that way.

Do you believe that it is reasonable to believe something, and act on it as if it were true, with no proof? If so, how should people decide which things they'll believe without proof and act on? Say I decide to believe (and act on the belief), without proof or evidence, that god thinks you should be killed. Is there any reason I shouldn't do that? I mean, there's so little proof either way, so can I just pick one side? Are you on neither side of my "god thinks you should be killed" argument?

And don't think these aren't the stakes -- there are people hijacking planes and flying them into buildings, or strapping bombs to themselves and running into crowds of children, because they think god wants them to.

You get .055BTC per bond. At 1.6BTC per bond, that .055BTC buys you .034375 bonds. So if you start a week with one bond in value, you end a week with the value of 1.034375 bonds. There are 52 weeks in a year, and 1.034375^52 = 5.8. So in a year, you go from 1 units to 5.8 units, an increase of 4.8 units. That means the interest rate is 4,800%480%.

I agree. You're betting that there won't be a default (or cessation of operations, or huge interest rate reduction) before the interest you've accumulated equals the premium that you paid. Depending on how you calculate it, that's between 12 and 20 weeks.

I don't think that's true. I think he was tricked into thinking that. I'm pretty sure if you ask him his views on the treatment of women or the relationship between religion and government, Jihad, the pope, and so on, you'll find his views are much more like those of Christians than Moslems. He was tricked into thinking that that big difference between Muslims and Christians is whether they believe Jesus is God or sent by God. That's like saying the difference between Americans and British people is whether the flag has stars on it or a big X on it.

I'm an atheist. But I agree with this assessment. The guy was just someone easy to manipulate who just became convinced that there wasn't much difference between Islam and Christianity. He seemed to only be trying on Christianity anyway and was ready for a switch. I bet I could have gotten him to stop believing in God in about the same amount of time by using comparable techniques.

What's it supposed to show anyway? That some people don't really care what religion they belong to as long as they belong?

You can only add something to the end. And you have to add the original padding first. So if you have SHA256(M), where M is the original message, you can compute SHA256(M+P+A) where M is the original message, P is the original padding (which is a function of the length of M) and A is what you want to add onto the message.

A simple fix for this is to use SHA256(SHA256(M)) instead of SHA256(M). Now the hash you are revealing is the hash of a fixed-length message, making length-extension attacks impossible. You would need to know the secret to invert the last hash.

Everyone loves 1,000% interest.

I guess it's a matter of definition. "Hoarding" is kind of a useless, loaded term anyway. It implies that deferring consumption somehow deprives other people of something when in fact it does precisely the opposite. It's based on the myth that consumption drives the economy when the truth is that production drive it. A hoarder still produces, otherwise they would have no way to acquire the thing they are hoarding. A hoarder simply doesn't consume, which just leaves more for everyone else.