Well, I have made reservations for my plane ticket, hotel and car rental (total amount including tax: $614.92 USD) to the Texas Bitcoin Conference March 5-6:

http://texasbitcoinconference.com/

I also sent in an email asking to get included on their speaker list.  We will see what happens, I'll let you all know what they say.

I went to Austin a decade ago on a business trip.  I am looking forward to a drive in the country to the little ghost town of Taylor, TX and a return trip to one of the best BBQ restaurants on Earth:

http://www.louiemuellerbarbecue.com/

Hmmm...guess the only thing left is to tell my wife about all of this when she wakes up...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345619.msg4670054#msg4670054

But note my corrections:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345619.msg4670892#msg4670892

Roger.  If I am selected as a speaker, one thing I want to do for sure is throw two or three boxed Raspberry Pis into the audience during the talk.  

"NXT nodes!  Get your cheap NXT nodes!"

I'm gonna need business cards, lots of cool NXT business cards....

So...her boyfriend showed up, eh?

I would even say energy COST should be the focus.  Current energy costs makes Bitcoin mining marginally profitable at best when you run the numbers, while NXT on a Raspberry Pi runs at 25 nodes for the same power as a 100 W incandescent lightbulb.  

  Years ago I was on a team to launch a space experiment to the Russian Space Station Mir and during my stay in Star City near Moscow I learned to love bliny.  I also learned to fear vodka.  

I belong to the Order of Gentlemen:

http://www.whatistheorder.com/

http://www.jackdaniels.com/whiskey/gentleman-jack?trust=yes&utm_campaign=TOOG&utm_medium=JackDaniels_com&utm_source=TOOG_com

My favorite sipping drink Gentleman Jack is only 80 proof (40% alcohol) - practically lemonade compared to a good Russian vodka!

Thanks for the offer.  I'll rent a car with my airline miles accumulated from previous biz travels and get a cheap hotel, but I would love to have dinner with you if that works out.  I'll be in touch.

I am very gratified by this immediate community response, thank you.   So I am going into full-speed-ahead mode here.  Hell, I'll even cover the 10K NXT from my own stash as my contribution to the cause just so we don't get hung up here.

I propose to get listed as a speaker.  There seems to be a January 31 deadline for this.   I would propose to get in the Technical: Development, Implementation and Infrastructure speaker track.  For a twenty minute talk, you've got to have laser like focus.  My theme would be slide after slide: Bitcoin problem, NXT solution: currency distribution, blockchain bloat, PoW arms race, 51% attack, block confirmation speed (10 min vs 1 minute), transactions per second (1 currently / 7 max for BTC, 10,000 ultimate goal for NXT), etc. etc. etc.

Here's details.

http://texasbitcoinconference.com/images/docs/Speaker%20Letter.pdf

Hey, guys and gals, I would be interested in representing NXT at the Texas Bitcoin Conference on March 5-6.  I am in the American South not very far away (relatively speaking) and just checked, I can get a round trip jet ticket to Austin for under $300 if I book soon.  The conference fee is $275 until the end of January, $325 starting in February.  If the devs/community could back me for $1000 (currently around 10K NXT), I volunteer to cover this.  I will kick in 20% of my annual vacation time from my day job.  I am an aerospace engineer in real life, one thing I know how to do is make concise, organized presentations of  complex topics...

http://texasbitcoinconference.com

He made a public announcement that lasted for weeks where anybody could invest up to 1 Bitcoin to receive a proportional share of the 1 billion coins generated.  73 people did so.  You or I could have done so had we known about it.  As he said himself, he could have gotten a million people in the initial distribution and the other 7 billion people on Earth would claim foul.  

NXT has its challenges to overcome but shame over the initial distribution of currency is not one of them.

Technically, in English that would be "blah", and is typically said three times:  blah, blah blah.

 

I really don't believe you are our thief, salsacz.  You have proven yourself again and again to be an important and valued part of our NXT family.

+1.  
That's how it looks to me, too.  There is something going on here beyond just a heist, and it has been that way for weeks.  Somebody is trying to get brownie points for being clever.  

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/brownie-points.html

Agreed.  And salsacz ain't dumb.

Stolen NXT Now On Bitcoin Blockchain...And Gone!?!

As previously discussed here  ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345619.msg4656340#msg4656340 ), stolen NXT went on the move Jan 21 and Graviton said it was laundered thru Dgex by a "well known and reputable NXT community member".  As radio commentator Paul Harvey used to say, here's "the rest of the story"...

First of all, my apologies for Graviton for rushing into print using the juicy shock-value phrase "well known and reputable NXT community member".   Graviton didn't know I was going to do that, and I should not have.  As graviton later wrote to me, "I don't want to make it look like I'm suspecting or even setting up XYZ by assuming the identity instantly so strong as it looked like. My position is neutral - the wording about the thief being a prominent community member was wrongly chosen in haste, not anticipated for public distribution."  So...I'm sorry, Graviton.  

A forensic investigation should deal solely with facts and purge emotion as much as possible.  I fell short of that standard.

So here are the facts as gathered by Graviton on Dgex use in laundering the stolen NXT:

******** BEGIN GRAVITON PM TO OPTICALC, RICKYJAMES AND SALSACZ ***********************

I do not expect a reply from the NXT thief any more after 30+ hours have passed from my contact, so here is the data I have available. I trust you make of it what you can, if anything;

Account number: 9550
Account established: Jan 19th
IP Address: 188.132.251.194 (did not change)
Account holder email: salsacz@outlook.com (is delivered to, but does not reply - not surprisingly)
Deposited 284634 NXT from 2647797480528736696 on Jan 19th
Quick sold everything after deposit confirmed 2014-01-20 09:23 to 2014-01-20 09:34
Withdrew through instant cashout when it came available 2014-01-20 11:37 to 2014-01-20 12:22 in 7 payments (max system limit 3 BTC at once) to bitcoin address 13BDBCHyd916pTAyAXK4hYyjViqSzCuRcH
---
I hope the information helps you some forward, although you were probably expecting more than this.

The content of this message is ok for public release.

Regards,
Graviton

******** END GRAVITON PM TO OPTICALC, RICKYJAMES AND SALSACZ ***********************

So, do I believe Salsacz distributed Trojan clients weeks ago and opened up a new Dgex account in his own name to launder stolen NXT?  No, I do not.  Way too obvious.

I believe this is a setup or frame job, a last twist-of-the-knife joke by somebody who is a reader of this forum.  So in that sense, it is still an inside job.

I've checked a few other things and I'm pretty much at a dead end.  

Epic Thomas has not been on Bitcointalk since Jan 16, so if he's watching all of this and laughing, he's not using his old username.  Somehow I don't think he's that smart.  So I personally don't think this is EpicThomas any more than I think it is Salsacz.

There are a few interesting things I've learned about 188.132.251.194.  It's in Turkey, but it seems to be owned by a Czech company called Mars Global Datacenter Services located at Probrezni 118, Prauge, Czech Republic.  This is where you would have to go for the  server logs to determine who was behind the Turkish proxy on the day of the Dgex withdrawal...

It's curious to me that the computer used in the heist is owned by a company in the same city/country as the suspect it fingers.  Even moreso that they would try to frame a white-hat with experience in catching hackers who has dealt with thousands of cheaters ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345619.msg4322484#msg4322484 ).  

My own personal opinion is that Salsacz has done WAY too much for the NXT community to rob others of their NXT.  However, the way things sometimes work is that somebody around him could have seen Salsacz's enthusiasm for NXT and hatched a plot of their own.  But that is just rank speculation on my part, I will never know.

So much for the getaway vehicle's license plate number.  On to following the money.

Bitcoin address 13BDBCHyd916pTAyAXK4hYyjViqSzCuRcH is registered at Blockchain.info, which is one of the biggest online Bitcoin wallets.  So the stolen NXT has been laundered into BTC, and here it sits, all $17,371.76 of it:

https://blockchain.info/address/13BDBCHyd916pTAyAXK4hYyjViqSzCuRcH

So I wrote Blockchain.info an email:

************ BEGIN RICKYJAMES EMAIL TO BLOCKCHAIN.INFO ***************

My name is Ricky X and I am a resident of X, X, USA. My
 cell phone number is X.

I have been investigating the theft of large numbers of NXT coins through
 use of a Trojan software package that was used by at least five users. On
 Jan 20 the thief finally laundered the money through dgex.com to the
 following Blockchain.info address:


https://blockchain.info/address/13BDBCHyd916pTAyAXK4hYyjViqSzCuRcH

I formally request that you freeze all funds this account until you can
 examine my chain of evidence and verify that I am telling you the truth.
 Once you have done so, I ask that you release to me the email address and
 cell number of the owner of this account.

Please let me know a direct email address to your security department and a
 ticket number for this request and I will provide further details
 immediately. Thanks for your help in investigating this theft.

-Ricky J. X

************ END RICKYJAMES EMAIL TO BLOCKCHAIN.INFO ***************

to which I got this response...


************ BEGIN BLOCKCHAIN.INFO EMAIL TO RICKYJAMES ***************

Ricky, Blockchain.info only deals in bitcoin, and no other altcoin. We also don't have any access to the funds in a user's wallet. This is due to the way our wallets work. A user controls his or her passwords and private keys, and Blockchain.info only stores the encrypted backups. We don't even know what public address are in a wallet, and a user doesn't even need to provide any type of personal information to setup a wallet. Sorry to hear of this, but Blockchain.info is unable to do any type of freeze on an account, especially since a user could easily import those private keys into any other wallet service available.

Mandrik | Blockchain.info Support


************ END BLOCKCHAIN.INFO EMAIL TO RICKYJAMES***************

As an aside, I never heard back from Bter.com.

So I am out of ideas and I think it is the end of the line for me.  I gave it my best shot.

As salsacz has noted, ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345619.msg4649481#msg4649481 ) I still haven't caught 1 thief or thief's Bitcointalk account or didn't find any new theft except of those who were found by others.  

That's kinda like Yoda's "Do or do not, there is no try".

Sigh, sometimes the bad guys win.  

A loss for us all, and a lesson to start from this point and do everything we can to strengthen NXT security, especially for new users that don't check SHA-256 of a client file or make a password longer than 11 characters.

+1000.  


...saved this passphrase somewhere...ON PAPER.

And a checkbox that they did a SHA-256 file check.
  
And a strong warning about keyloggers.

NXT is so security critical that we have GOT to do some serious handholding / education for new users during the initial client setup!!!

Sure.  My wife's cat activates me with a paw swipe to the cheek in the dark at 2AM to go open a fresh can of cat food, so I am always on call to be activated when needed.

If I'm gonna be an official Terminator, I'd better go get some Oakley Gargoyle sunglasses.  



Fortunately (or not, I'm dating myself here in more ways than one), I can already read scrolling 6502 assembly language...

What's crazy are people thinking a computer file whose name has the phrase "coin" in it is worth roughly the same as a physical one ounce gold coin.  

Both are just symbols for a tradable item that only has the value people assign them.  And psychologically people will always assign a gold "coin" to have more value than any "XYZ" crypto-coin.  A gold coin will still be spendable in the apocalypse after the electricity goes off.

Assigning a high value to gold is as old as human civilization - and a very crazy idea in itself.  You dig it out of a one hole in the ground (a mine) only to put it right back into a second hole in the ground (a vault), only this hole has guys with guns around it and people who claim to "own" little parts of what's inside the second hole.

I will really enjoy watching the NXT community voting on how to implement parts 2 and 3 of a plan they know nothing about.  That is going to be quite a spectacular show.

Good luck on your future projects, CfB.

I actually think that having 80 times the coin supply of BTC is one of the reasons NXT will succeed.  

Bitcoin is effectively in competition with gold as a non-fiat store of value.  The price of gold defines the upper limit of what Bitcoin can hit, and that's currently around $1200 per coin/ounce.  Bitcoin won't go above that price because if people have $1200, they would rather trade it for a one ounce gold coin they can hold in their hand and not a computer file.

There's around 20,000 metric tons of privately held bullion gold that is traded to set the gold price.  In round numbers, that's worth around 1000 billion dollars.  So with its market cap of 12 billion dollars, the total value of Bitcoin is currently just over 1% of the total value of bullion gold.

If a Bitcoin is worth the same as a one ounce gold coin, and there are 100 tradable bullion gold coins in the world for every Bitcoin, then you could argue that there is room for 99 other cryptocoins that would also be worth the same as the unmatched 99 gold coins that will never be matched by Bitcoin with its finite supply.  

I think the current volume of NXT coins could and ultimately will provide that match at 1 NXT = 1 BTC = 1 gold coin.  The number of BTC and NXT coins together roughly match the available number of tradable one-ounce gold coins.

And this could happen a lot faster than four years.  Bitcoin has blazed the trail to put cryptocoins in the public mindset.  NXT doesn't need to spend years introducing the concept of cryptocoins to people who have no clue what those are.  Instead, there is a large market for NXT right now at its introduction.