...at you (and about a thousand other miners) not understanding supply and demand?

Price causes difficulty, not the other way around.
Regardless of whether miners sell or hang on to their coins, it's equivalent to them simply buying the coins into existence "at cost". The feedback loop is such that basically:
P causes C + W
where:
P = whatever the price happens to be, because of Demand which has nothing to do with miners.
C = mining cost.
W = minimum wage they're willing to tolerate in order to keep mining.

Let's start with the easy stuff. What might an evil manipulator try in order to destroy Bitcoin?

This part has been covered many times. To recap: Bitcoin is very powerful as an idea, it's smart, and it's backed by a diverse community. Therefore an organised strategy might try to cover all of those angles:

• the smartness: technical hacks, ddos, etc.
• the idea: e.g.: use a TV show such as "The Good Wife" to subtly portray Bitcoin and its founders as a bad idea, and do it in a way that will be imperceptible to most nerdy fanbois. Get some Wall Street and media guys to "pump and dump" and show the world that Bitcoin is all hype and no substance. Get bloggers/journos to write scathing articles about Bitcoin to reduce morale.
• the community: plant some (destructive) trolls in the on-line forums who work hard to create division and block progress.
• Be flexible. If one technique clearly doesn't work, try something else.

OTOH why assume malice?
Possible evidence of non-malicious manipulation: ECB's November 2012 report on "electronic currencies". It's obvious the report was really aimed at Bitcoin but they threw in an extra currency to make it seem more general. I interpreted the report's conclusions as generally embracing Bitcoin rather than opposing it. The main thing that puzzled me was the purpose of the report. Was it a threat to someone? A warning to governments or banks or something like that? No, I think it was a careful action disguised as "meh, just a publication by one of our juniors". But what for? The report was obviously prepared and held unpublished for many months in advance, so they didn't do it lightly. I think they wanted to seed some viral growth.

Similarly, forum members in the US seem perpetually worried that their authorities might decide to "clamp down" on Bitcoin. I keep waiting for the bad news... and waiting... and waiting... Then I look at the statistics and find that US dollar-denominated exchanges are the busiest, and that a large percentage of users are based in the US. Maybe one of their agencies has flagged Bitcoin as an asset and is telling the others "do not touch this"? Maybe their strategists want to secretly 'nurse' Bitcoin on home soil, and they're hoping for some future advantage over other nations?

There is some massive behind-the-scenes activity going on with the world's major currencies. One would have to be wilfully blind not to see the debasement and gradual revaluations. While I can't see senior executive/managerial types of people having much technical creativity, I can imagine them Googling and finding Bitcoin, and pasting it into the "X goes here" part of their grand plan.

What happened after the Bitcoin bubble of 2011?

I heard that during the upwards 'rocket' phase, zero-fee transactions were accepted just as fast as fee-paying transactions because a) miners didn't give a shit and b) there was so little real commerce going on that block space was practically infinite.

OK, fair point.
Even with infinite block space, miners can still charge for the service of including transactions.

Take a snapshot of "waiting transactions", and let's say there's 100s of fresh, 'normal' transactions priced from (just pulling numbers out of the air) 0.000001BTC to 0.2BTC.
On top of that let's say there's 5000 'free' transactions on the waiting list. For simplicity, let's say that special transactions with some kind of secondary fee are already covered in the normal group.

Desired situation:
A group of the largest miners continuously work hard to keep Bitcoin stable with some central banking theory. They set and continuously adjust minimum fees. This affects the flow rate of transactions in the BTC ecosystem. If there's a price shock -- some major sell-off or buy-up, or some other currency crashes, the idea is that they can always react to dampen that shock. After all, they're rich in Bitcoin so the incentive is strong.

Bad situation caused by overly abundant block space:
A relatively small miner (e.g.: <1%) decides to play by a different set of rules. E.g.: when they get blocks, they accept ALL transactions. This has a disproportionate effect on price and inflation (many people figure "for the normal fee I'd rather use XYZ-coin because it's cheaper, but because free transactions get through within 2 days anyway, I've got some extra business to do!") So basically you get a small miner potentially ruining, or even sabotaging the hard work that the large miners put in to stabilise.

So you get a sort-of "two speed economy". The large responsible miners only have control over fast ~<1 day phenomena like flash crashes and such-like. However, the slow trends are completely out of control with small miners having disproportionately more influence. OTOH maybe it's not such a bad thing. Thoughts?

Alternative idea:

Just let Bitcoin saturate to whatever maximum size it can sustain.

Eventually the fees could get so high that people are forced to shop around for cheaper alt-coins. This would challenge the popular perception that Bitcoin is resistant against inflation. It's not -- any "Alternative Coin" that steps into the same niche (pseudonymous Internet money...) inflates the overall "currency soup".

This would ruin some people's idea of using bitcoins as "hard money" for their retirement savings.
On the other hand, some day soon we may be faced with transactions that cost the same or more than competing bank rates. After all, Bitcoin is so awesome, pseudonymous and everything -- why shouldn't the miners be able to charge a premium? Oh that's right. Open source software promotes competition. While pissed off at inflation, at least people will be happy that transaction fees stay cheap.

Due to popular demand from incredulous mainstream Beliebers, I'm starting this thread so we can put our minds together and uncover the TRUTH behind the mysterious technology that was cleverly disguised as a meteorite.

I'll go first. Key points:
It was clearly an ICBM.
~30km/s seems a bit fast for a plausible re-entry speed, but it's the Russians so it seems legit.
10 kiloton estimated explosive force seems way off the mark for conventional explosives unless they somehow fired a 10 thousand tonne warhead. I'm sure someone would have noticed a rocket the size of the Great Pyramid lifting off, so it couldn't have been conventional explosives. This leaves a couple of other options like fuel-air and nuclear.

Was it a Fuel-Air bomb?
This seems far more efficient than carrying chemicals where the necessary oxygen is already present. How about a solid shell of magnesium? I was wondering whether it might contain metallic powder inside but why bother when at such high speeds the whole thing could become an aerosol. I'm not sure about magnesium's high-speed behaviour, but I hear that tungsten and uranium are pretty good. Presumably they went for a staballoy with optimised shattering properties for the job: high surface area, while maintaining enough solidity to pass by and release as much energy as possible from the ambient oxygen and nitrogen.

Was it nuclear?
Atmospheric testing over a place like Chelybinsk seems like the perfect smokescreen (pun intended). According to some reputable YT videos, the place practically glows in the dark anyway so who would notice a few extra milli-Rad? And don't give me that BS about detecting traces of radio-isotopes in the atmosphere. Everyone's instruments are already gummed up and malfunctioning with wet Fukushima Dai-ichi dust.

What about the "moving spotlight" effect? Or the glowing embers coming out the other end of the fireball?
Some of the YT videos clearly show the shadows of cars and buildings smoothly rolling across the terrain, like a time-lapse video of a sun dial. I'm just not convinced that a nuke could be made to give such a reliable point-source of light. And you certainly wouldn't get anything solid coming out the other end.

Conclusion: the so-called "meteorite" was really a fuel-air kinetic penetrator, likely consisting of a secret blend of heavy metals in an inefficient "roundish" shape. How did I do?

Are you sure that all those antiquated concepts of open, close, daily high, and daily low are even relevant for a system that runs 24h continuously?

According to barchart.com

Which sounds very nice except that when there's no such thing as "a daily trading period" -- trading is spread across multiple time zones. Cherry-picking open/close times to fit a formula is going to give you aliasing errors.

Fourier transform with a (shaped) sliding window.
Plot an array of frequency spectra, which evolves over time (just like those "graphic equaliser" gimmicks).

Any reduction in output at a certain frequency would show that price oscillations have reduced at that particular frequency. Then you just say that a reduction in output at all frequencies signifies an overall reduction in volatility.

The only thing that comes to mind for trying it out with minimal effort is somehow importing the all-time exchange rate data into an audio program like Audacity and manipulating it in there.

Now that is impressive! Were they actually warned or told later that a warning had been sent out?

"Governments will love Bitcoin and stuff."

"But how?"

"This has been discussed many times."


WTF?! Then why start a thread if you don't want to actually discuss the OP topic?

Hmm,

a) In John Barlow's defence, he mostly just sounded conservative. Just like I no longer watch the prices and specs of the latest computer gear unless my old stuff breaks, and I don't care about MP3 players (Wow! Ipods with 20GB 2" hard drives ) or Iphone 5 or Windows 8, it seems understandable that despite Bitcoin's awesomeness most people just won't pay attention until reality catches up with them.

b) he's probably a bit scared of retaliation if he openly promotes Bitcoin too much.

c) Duh, he saw Bitcoin as competition to his product. Well done to Max and Stacy for helping him to regain his honesty!

Lol. Is there any evidence that consciousness exists inside the brain? Or at all? Can it be amputated or distilled or somehow weighed? What is it?

http://youtu.be/iDbyYGrswtg
 


Yeah yeah... 'consciousness' is basically a special word that scientists often use when they're trying to say "in order to appease the Church, I'm going to reject the empirical evidence of my senses, I'm going to reject Solipsism (and the heresy of equating the mind with God), and I'm going to tirelessly search for consciousness inside the Holodeck/Matrix"

Maths gurus: how slowly would 89GH have to switch in and out of the network for it to be visible above the hash-rate noise floor?

I wanna see glitches on bitcoincharts or it didn't happen!

Remember the ECB's report on "electronic currencies" blatantly about Bitcoin late last year? It was a nice write-up, around 60 pages if I recall correctly. But what was the purpose of it? Why publish it on the Internet for everyone to see, rather than send some memos to the higher-ups? If they're worried about the banks and governments, and Bitcoin poses a legitimate threat, wouldn't that make it a pretty sensitive topic? I'm becoming more and more convinced that the report wasn't so much a warning about Bitcoin, but rather: an attack move. It was the purposeful act of informing as many people as possible about Bitcoin, and letting them know that the ECB is taking it seriously. And by claiming that it falls within their domain of responsibilities, in a round-about way the ECB is actually backing Bitcoin.

Not yet, but I've been thinking about getting round to it sometime.

Thanks! I'm still thinking about the Halting problem and the rejection of Physicalism, though. My reasoning might have been a bit weak -- some counterarguments:
-our human 'OS' has evolved to get so many interrupts from our chaotic environment that we never get stuck on anything for too long.
-we are creatures of habit and we do get stuck in loops. It's just that we don't care, or we just can't see them from the inside.
- (I read on someone's blog but lost the link) even if we had a 'magic' interrupt/reset circuit, it would create paradoxical possibilities and we would still need additional tiers to break free.

So my back-up argument is: qualia We somehow feel all those feelings, smell various smells, see what we see, hear what we hear, taste what we taste, and so on, even though none of those things exist outside of our minds. Our complete inability to objectively communicate any of those things hints at a non-physical basis for them.

Nice!
So a few decent philosophical ideas managed to slip past the censors.

You equate God with man? Heresy! Burn him!

Meh. They're just worried that Foxconn might stop outsourcing their "Apple management" branch to the US.