No. Stale work has no chance of producing a block. Current work has a non-zero chance of producing a big reward.

I don't doubt that you are excellent at novelty detection.


Despite that, you seem to make some very direct claims.


When someone says they are 90% sure of something, they tend to be wrong much more than 10% of the time. A subjective percentage estimate tends to be strongly biased by "gut feeling", which tends not to mean shit in science. I would strongly recommend against using numerical estimates outside of hard science where you have actual numerical data to base such an estimate on. You have one single sample of a magic hand gesture. Your interpretation of this one sample is almost surely biased by the fact that you had already made a conclusion before this additional data became available.


That is hilarious. You have concluded that a particular gesture made by a particular person that you haven't met, that you don't know the mental state of, and that you don't know the motives of, has an exact meaning.


The problem here is that, after all that effort analysing it, I could have easily made the same conclusion without watching the video at all. Of course they did something stupid, their fucking database got leaked. Of course they don't want you to know. Of course they're going to be honest about their business.


Q: Who would keep 100K+ BTC in an online account?
A: Someone who trusts the site and is confident that it is secure.

Q: Who would actually trust Mt Gox, and who is in a position to assess its security?
A: The owner of Mt Gox.

I didn't even watch the video, and I already have a pretty good idea of who owned the account.

My knowledge of statistics is a bit rusty, so I decided to look at the actual blocks. I ran a script to evaluate, from each block, how many blocks were found less than 420 seconds beforehand.

The record was twelve.

There were 358 cases of 6 or more (ie. 7 blocks in under 7 minutes). If we only look at recent blocks (>100000), we still get nine cases of this happening.

No.

I ran some quick numbers. If I'm correctly understanding the distribution, once the first block was found, the chance of finding the next 6 blocks in that time window was something like 0.0000002. However, this possibility has existed every time a block has been found. The chance of this streak happening at least once in 132000 or so blocks is greater than 99.7%. In fact, there is a very high chance that his has happened more than once. If I find the time, I could do an analysis of the whole block chain to see if this has happened before.

Is there an easy way to extract block timestamps from the chain?

The chance of a false positive is too high for it to be useful.

What information is this based on? The current "official" story is that read-only database access was obtained through a side channel.

No further information is needed to explain the observed sales. That is simply the effect of filling every single open buy order.

The deniable wallet is a killer feature for me. Any non-functional advantages of PGP are less important.

The volatility is adequately explained by:

• Bitcoin being new
• (Which leads to) Uncertainty
• New traders
• Delays in getting USD into an exchange

As people start to get bored of trading them for profit, the price will settle.

He doesn't seem to provide a reason to not trust it. I would take the direct statement of fact over his gut feeling.


Truecrypt will do *both*, if you set your .bitcoin directory to inside the container. To backup you simply copy the container. The wallet never touches the drive unencrypted, and there's no need to trust your operating system to do it right (EFS in Windows is breakable).

You can even have a fake wallet with the real wallet in a hidden volume. If the directory structure is the same, no traces will be left on-disk if you use the hidden one or not.

To remain profitable, it just has to be high enough to exceed electricity and depreciation. Right now, that is ~$6 for me. At 2 million it will be only ~$20. In other words, the difficulty/price ratio must be below 100000. Anyone with cheaper electricity than me (a lot of people), or a more efficient setup (more than one graphics card, not an overclocked quad core CPU) can profit on even less.

I don't foresee this to be a problem. Only a limited amount of people can ever own 100 gold bars.

(Offtopic aside) Curious choice of words. "Can impossibly". It makes sense, but in a way quite foreign to a native English speaker. Is this kind of thing common in other languages?


I think I can.


Your problem is that you are obsessed with the idea of being free of envy.

A world without envy would not work well.

For example, a friend of mine envies my new PC (quad core, 6950, ssd, etc). I envy his attractive girlfriend. His envy encourages him to work harder, while my envy encourages me to actually go outside. As a result, we are both more productive/social individuals than if we were indifferent to what others had.

The idea that an early adopter can benefit greatly encourages people to try invent/try/invest in new things, which would otherwise have been ignored.

Envy is the backbone of human development.

No. Please take your conspiracy theories elsewhere.

In other news, if you try to make two posts in one minute, it won't let you. If you try to post again a minute later, it won't let you due to double posting despite the fact that the first post failed.

This actually generates spam, in the newbie forum at least.

CPU mining is not good in general.

You are wrong. When the electrical cost exceeds the bitcoin value, many will stop mining, causing a difficulty drop. The price/difficulty will eventually settle at a point where the average miner breaks even.

FPGA and ASIC miners will be the only ones making a profit.

I tried to run this in a VM to see what it would do, it couldn't even load the main class

Illegal is generally taken to mean a violation of criminal law, which piracy is not.

WTF. It's like this guy hasn't even heard of money.

Protip: "SELL SELL SELL" causes a price crash.