You really said "back your demand for regulation and government nannies to protect your pocketbook". You really said that.

Thanks for the image of a fat, clueless white man bringing his favorite bogeyman along so he can have an opponent with which to show everyone his shadow boxing prowess. Look at 'em jiggle boys, he's a tough one!

There I am testing the monkeys again, we have a winner. I thought only small-brained teenage dipshits would seriously care. Thanks for speaking up for the concerns of older cases of arrested development such as yourself.

Sure, more than once. I was surprised at how remarkably cheap it was to find out just how frail and poorly thought out the operation is, I've spent more on lunch at places where tipping isn't allowed. They are just so cute when they act like big boys, aren't they? Such grown-up little men, all swagger and affectation.

Seriously, I do give them credit for trying to do something, albeit not very well. They certainly wouldn't be the first bucket shop to go under.

You obviously speak from a rich set of metaphors built from a broad life experience. I am awed by your attempt at reasoning. Awed.

Never mind that such an act by a licensed broker-dealer in the U.S. or U.K. could result in shutdown by the relevant regulatory agency. Of course, from the viewpoint of an investor in Bitcoinica it could certainly be construed as a technical act of bankruptcy, which would give them some out.

I don't know what the equivalent legal requirements would be in Singapore, would the operators of Bitcoinica be caned if they couldn't pay off the right officials?

Sigmund Freud could cite you for providing such a clear example on your part of what he termed "projection". Are you a n00b, duhboy, or just born yesterday?

LOL, aren't you just precious? Only small-brained teenage dipshits use the term noob, much less spell it n00b. I suppose I should add a poll choice just for the mentally 12 and under and set. That would be 31337, wouldn't it kiddies?

Given recent events, what do you think lies in store for this brave if perhaps foolhardy effort?

LOL! Another topic that should come with a spit warning. This place is a ton of fun, it reminds me of the old joke about "It looks just like a penis, only smaller."

If I throw in enough bitcoins to the cause, can I have the designation "Luxuriant Queen of the Oily Wiener Boys" and be allowed to judge contests of excessive sebaceous secretion between members? That's how it works, right?

My observation about technical analysis is that sometimes it works so well that the outcomes cannot be anything other than the results of a self fulfilling prophecy. This is nowhere clearer than when one observes price movements near values that conform to various ratios, famously the Golden Mean, long a favorite in all manner of numerological superstitions. Such magic numbers are easily incorporated in the algorithms of trading robots, meatbots included.

Elliot's ideas about patterns of rising and falling sentiment do seem to have some validity when applied to human behavior, but the baroque miasma he built can be used to assert anything at any time, which is a useful property of successful tools of financial advice: Always Have An Explanation, No Matter The Circumstances Or What You May Have Said Previously

Magic is always a big hit with True Believers, the title of Elliot's last work on the subject should tell you everything you need to know about it's appeal: "Nature’s Laws: The Secret of the Universe".

Speaking of the Music Of The Spheres, here's a quote featured in the Wikipedia article "Elliot Wave Principle":

**
Technical analyst David Aronson wrote:

    The Elliott Wave Principle, as popularly practiced, is not a legitimate theory, but a story, and a compelling one that is eloquently told by Robert Prechter. The account is especially persuasive because EWP has the seemingly remarkable ability to fit any segment of market history down to its most minute fluctuations. I contend this is made possible by the method's loosely defined rules and the ability to postulate a large number of nested waves of varying magnitude. This gives the Elliott analyst the same freedom and flexibility that allowed pre-Copernican astronomers to explain all observed planet movements even though their underlying theory of an Earth-centered universe was wrong.
**

IMO, technical analysis has little to do with bitcoin, look at penny stocks if you want to understand the past year or so, bitcoin is a replay of a rigged game that's been around almost as long as the world's oldest confidence scheme, religion.

Oh yeah, never seen anything like it before except when someone rattles their keys to distract an infant. Not too bad a start for a neophyte, you can always score extra shill points by posting something like

"SHORTS ARE GETTING PWNED!"

Interesting. It's just like no one here has ever seen trading in a microcap security manipulated by a large player or two.

Certainly the timing of the recent price moves isn't tied to real world economic influences. Current conditions more resemble the sort of activity one sometimes sees when large portions of world security markets are closed for local holidays and such. Historically forex traders in Japan have been big on such opportunities.

Not that bitcoin has much in common with forex either. The bitcoin market is simply too tiny for principles of market behavior to be applied. To understand bitcoin trading, the best real world analogs are to be found in the perennially cheesy and fraudulent world of penny stocks.

So, in the spirit of the inane prattle and overblown hyperbole that is traditional in the world of pennies, let us turn to the standard phrasebook. I'll start but I'll leave a few just in case anyone else has any personal favorites they would like to add.

1. Time to back up the truck!
2. The train is leaving the station, better get on board now!
3. BUY BUY BUY BUY!
4. Anyone can see that this is a 1-D-10-T sub-wavelet formation marked by a Fibonacci target reversal pattern with bird entrail confirmations. It's time to BUY BUY BUY BUY!
5. This rocket is headed for the moon!
6. If God had not meant for them to be shorn, he would not have made them sheep.

Whoops, the last one is for internal use only 

Feel free to add your own, there are plenty of examples to be found on this forum.

Facebook? Really? Perhaps you should offer a discount based on how much personal information a customer compromises when they visit.

That's some funny stuff man, I'll continue the story:

And then Pollyanna resumed schtupping herself with Aunt Polly's rolling pin. "What a wonderful way to start the new year" she thought, "Soon I will have enough bitcoins for a shiny new Trojan Twister, and won't the cookies be so much better for that?".

It took me more than a few seconds to remember where I had seen something resembling this before. Btrieve.

Following your example, in Btrieve A and A' each were each a map of used database pages within a file with a single flag indicating which was current. An internal commit operation would toggle which map was the current consistent database image. An update to A involved making a changed copy of a page that would be part of A' until the commit point occurred. No page-by-page recovery comparison was required in the event of a crash/halt as effectively A' would simply appear to have never existed after a crash.

File systems that reorder write operations to optimize disk operation speed could hose this scheme. Even use of "raw" disk isn't foolproof as reordering of operations could occur at the disk driver level if, for example, elevator seek was implemented there. This property only gets worse as storage gets bigger and more complex. Once one gets into things like EMC storage units where thousands of disks and hundreds of controllers are active, determinacy of order of operations is pretty much not assured. Not too long ago uninterrupted power was a hard requirement for EMC storage, the vendor wouldn't even support configurations that didn't have it.

Is corruption of wallet databases a frequent issue? I've never had it happen, that's why I ask.

Yeah, just like Flooz. I'd better fire up WordStar and take note of that 

As the night gets later and the party get staler, be not the last one out the door 

How very nice. A bunch of 19th century chuckleheads trying to bring back a glorious past that never actually existed is exactly what we don't need. It's really a shame we opted for the slow-and-natural approach of having these white devils gradually destroy themselves when we really should have been sterilizing them two generations ago 

Perhaps so.

I had a close one with almost buying a property in an area where homeowners had steadfastly refused to get on municipal services for two or three decades. One of the effects of this was a sewage disposal problem ( everyone had septic tanks or were retrofitted with "mound systems" after their tanks failed to keep up ) that affected an area of many square miles due to inadequate absorption of water by the ground, there was an impermeable limestone shelf underground that extended for anywhere from 20 to 100 miles in all directions. Once enough homes were operating, raw sewage was literally percolating out of the ground in low lying areas, and the homes already constructed were unsalable except to out-of-towners like myself who didn't know how fubar the area was. I was fortunate to find out about the issue two weeks before closing and was able to unwind the deal based on material non-disclosure by a realtor. At least the legal fees it cost me were far less than the size of the bag I would have been holding.

So, like everything else, it depends. Off the grid living may not scale well nor may it be as independent as claimed.

Thanks for the smile, please share it. Maybe you and this guy oughta leg wrestle and put it on YouTube 

Heck, I'd throw a few bitcoins to see that, this could go big, maybe even Pay-Per-View big 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54390.msg649199#msg649199

Fair enough. Here at the Church of Whatever Amuses Right Now, Bitcoinica is still the most interesting game in Bitcoinsville. Of course that can change in a New York minute. A few years ago Etrade jerked my chain the wrong way when I was stuck with a captive account there, later on it was with great pleasure I eventually took them out for a nice little drive in the country and buried the relationship in an unmarked grave, but not before I checked for harvestable gold teeth