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Why would it cost anything at all?
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Heh. You mean like Blackwater in Iraq? I suppose that the meaning of 'civil liberties' could eventually be managed down to a point where it is OK to randomly shoot at cars for the fun of it and run down people who are close enough to the street that it is doable without swerving to much.
Blackwater was given the legal right to use force by a government which paid and protected it in exchange for that force. |
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Only guilty people fear the law.
I will bet you that everyone involved in this fiasco has at least arguably broken at least one law. Heck, the average American commits three felonies a day, and nobody is really sure how to run a Bitcoin exchange 100% legally. |
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As in they were allowed to "look at the books" and the deal was just waiting for final agreement between parties? Doesn't sound like it. That is correct. I believe the negotiations were tanked by the last theft which left insufficient resources to make 100% restitution and the deal just couldn't work any other way. Though it's also possible that due diligence would have revealed some reason the deal could not have worked, such as Bitcoinica's assets and obligations not being as represented. At this point, I'll leave it for those involved to say more if they wish to. |
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Deals confirmed by extremely reliable 3rd parties with access to Bitcoinica's actual financial status?
I'm not sure what you mean by "confirmed". The offers were made and I know of no reason those deals would not have worked out. It is possible that Bitcoinica's actual financial status was nothing like it was believed to be, in which case the deals would likely not have worked out. That would require everyone at Bitcoinica to have been lying, which though possible, doesn't seem particularly likely to me. zhou, i personally believe you are innocent. You really need to "lawyer up and STFU" This assumes that Zhou is more concerned about possible criminal charges or the like than he is concerned about his reputation in the industry. I think he's more concerned about the latter, and that's part of the reason I also think the Bitcoinica situation is more or less as reported. Everyone involved intends to have a future once they get past this mess. |
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Bitcoinica really should have been wound up by a NZ receivership as soon as it was found to be unable to repay 100% of deposits.
There were deals on the table that would have resulted in 100% return of deposits up until the latest hack. There might even still be, though it seems much less likely now. |
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There are a lot of topics with personal insults in recent posts here. It seems to me that Bitcoin community is moving in a wrong direction. It's considered to be normal to insult other members, these offenders don't bear responsibility and continue to do such things again and again. I vote to ban such people. If admins/moderators don't do this, then whole forum will become a big piece of shit.
Can you point to a few examples? It's hard to know what you consider a "personal insult" that would, if repeated, justify a ban. |
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What makes you think Private companies won't commit the same violations to civil liberties?
Two things: 1) They can't immunize their employees from retaliation the way a State can. The employees of a private company are fully personally responsible for their actions. Private companies have no right or ability to insulate their employees from the consequences of their actions. 2) When not socially accepted, the use of force is generally a losing proposition because all of civilized society will rebel against it. It's not like the company can keep secret their identity. The rest of society will refuse to do business with them, boycott their customers, and so on. (Unless the majority wants to go back to having a government, in which case, no system can stop a majority of force from forcing its way on everyone else.) |
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I believe bitcoinica ran within its liquid means initially but as soon as they changed their service to include interest rates to encourage to actually leave BTC and USD on bitcoinica which would enable them to remain more liquid while pulling out more profit than they should.
At that point any bank run would crush bitcoinica and this is why I believe it all turned into one big scam before a bankrun could occur that would 100% confirm that liquidity of funds didnt actually exist and so would have marked Zhou Tong immediately as a scammer thus its much more convenient to have a bunch of failures to happen which would direct liquidity problems away from bitcoinica and only directed to so-called hacks occurring due to outragious security issues.
Basicly, they needed interest holders to keep BTC/USD on bitcoinica in order to fullfill their obligations to actual traders withdrawals.
The only problem with this theory is that everyone would have to have been in on it. If Bitcoinica had obligations that exceeded its assets, there would have been nothing for Zhou to sell to the consultancy. So every person involved in Bitcoinica before and after ownership transferred would have to have been in on the scam. |
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True story. Luckily with bitcoin we have a rich sponsor. It's the large user base who constantly negotiate the price  Exactly. It's hard for a lot of people to believe that this is what's really going on because it's inconsistent with their worldview. They won't believe that the world is changing until their noses get rubbed in it. |
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Many pools do not require a password. If a malignant individual mines on someone else's account, they could possibly get them into trouble.
This seems like a pretty unlikely scenario from a practical standpoint. Most likely, you'd just wind up helping them because unless you actually mine a block, you are indistinguishable from a legitimate miner. Someone would have to dedicate huge amounts of hashing power to do this, and the most likely outcome is that they would just enrich the person they are trying to get in trouble. However, it is definitely worth thinking about. |
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quote "For such a system to work, it needs a 'rich' sponsor." one of the common first 5 minute misconceptions is that the money ought to be issues by a single authority. I don't think they get the point that the money is actually issued in a decentralized fashion. How can they - didn't exist before... (except gold digging ) Actually though, a decentralized system has an even greater need for a rich sponsor. Say I want to create a new centralized currency, JoelBux, and I want them to be 1-to-1 to the dollar. If I issue them all myself, I sell them for $1 each. Then I offer to buy them back for $1 each. The only way someone can have a JoelBuck is if they bought it from me for $1. So when I have to buy them back, I've already got the funds to do it. I need to be rich, but I don't sponsor anything because I don't lose any money. Now say I want to create a new decentralized currency, JoelCoin, and I want them to be 1-to-1 to the dollar. To keep the price up, I have to offer to buy JoelCoins for a dollar each. But since they're issued in a decentralized fashion, people can acquire JoelCoins without paying me any money and I might need to spend more and more money and accumulate more and more JoelCoins. As soon as I stop, JoelCoins drop in value (because there's no real JoelCoin economy) and I'm stuck with a ton of them. Of course, if JoelCoins do take off in value and there's a thriving JoelCoin economy, I'm no longer "stuck" with a ton of them, I make a fortune. |
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Now, couldn't a smart withholding attack check to see if the block already exists in the block chain, and only then send it up to the pool server? Yes, but nobody's that smart yet. I suppose you could hold back releasing the block to the Bitcoin network for 30 secs while you wait for all your workers to prove themselves, but you risk another miner finding a block in the mean time. I think you could withhold for just 4 seconds and still get a pretty good idea. This would incur about a .7% chance of losing the block, with an expected cost of about $3. |
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He's not going to get a lawyer... what would he say?
"Uh, I stole a shitload of money and spent it, now they found out it was me and they want it back. Help me."??
You think that's something unusual for a person to say to a lawyer? |
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They honestly seem to believe that the only reason Bitcoins have a greater than miniscule value is that someone keeps buying them up at a loss.
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Come on, you can't say it's a "bitcoin bug" the fact that so many "bitcoin-banks" have failed. It is really unfortunate and even tragic to some, but it is not a "bug".
It's not a "bitcoin bug" in the sense that it's a bug in bitcoin itself. It's a "bitcoin bug" in the sense that it's a defect in the ecosystem. Most people, even professionals, don't really know how to secure critical private data. Even Sony lost lots of its private data once. Is it really such a surprise that small companies, however motivated they are, fail in something that big companies with tons of money to spend in security have also failed? No, it's not. And the fact that using Bitcoins requires me to do something that's incredibly difficult to do right is a serious problem. With fiat currency, banks are insured. If it's stolen, I can call the police and they at least understand the issue. |
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It just sucks that the Bitcoin world is so screwed up you basically have to stuff your money in your mattress That's actually a feature, not a bug. Don't trust the bank, keep your money with you "You don't have to X" is a feature. "You can't X" is a bug. Plus, an equally serious adoption problem is that it is *very* hard to properly create and manage a secure wallet. |
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There's no good reason to keep a high % of your BTC in exchanges anyway. I used to have some BTC in exchanges to make payments directly in a convenient manner, but currently I have 0 BTC and 0 FIAT in exchanges. I strongly recommend this approach to everybody, it saved my backside from Bitcoinica's fiasco and from the potential bankruptcy of a certain exchange. It just sucks that the Bitcoin world is so screwed up you basically have to stuff your money in your mattress. This is one of the major obstacles to adoption. |
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This could be just business grow. And it is actually less grow than the exchange rate increase over the few weeks. Pirate works in USD not BTC, so when the price did rise from $5 to $8, his working potential did rise from say $2.5M to $4M, a hefty 60% in little more than a month. If he was able to use this for business grow, then something as "little" as 28% a month should be no problem. An keep in mind that he makes most likely more than 10% a monthweek and compounding, now calculate his actual revenue. Let's say Pirate has deposits of 250,000 Bitcoins. If he works in USD, then at $5, he has been paid $1.25 million. Now, the price goes up to $8. So he now owes his depositors $2 million. Every time the price of Bitcoins goes up, Pirate has a loss. What I think you're missing is that all of his "working potential" is debt, so when it goes up, he just owes other people more. |
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Misdirection? Its facts that I am trying to make you aware of. Facts that have nothing to do with anything. If we're talking about whether someone ran a red light, pointing out that there are murderers and rapists is pure misdirection. If you disagree with those facts then do state what new information you have because apparently thats not being shared with the world. I don't "disagree" with them, but that doesn't matter, since they're irrelevant misdirection. |
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