No this case is excluded from my question, as I said.  Most of Madoff's investors were very rich, mostly institutions, and they had multiple investments.  And, as I say, they got or will get 33% of their money back.

I will see tomorrow if I get any BTC, and then I will register, and play, and report my report here!  thank you Mr. Bikini!

You have not made your case though.  Appeals to authority are a cop-out.  Anybody else?

Why would any rational business person employer do such a crazy thing?  The whole purpose of a retirement fund is so that you can dip into it in times of need and/or siphon off the interest and/or play funny accounting games with the money in it?    Certainly the employees retirement is not first on the list.

Indirectly, yes.  I'm a BTC bear but I still am interested in learning more about BTC

Think about the facts:  17 billion USD in actual losses (money paid in, not what people thought they should have based on fake inflated data).  But of this amount between 33% to maybe 50% has been recovered by the trustee in charge of recovery (the numbers are hard to pin down, just recently another couple of billion was thrown in the pot).

Let's pick the lower number, 33%.  So the greedy investors that thought they had a golden goose lost two-thirds of their money.  The ones that knew it was a scam lost all their money, since the trustee took it from them, or is trying to.

Two thirds losses?  That's not that bad.  I've had stocks that completely cratered and I lost 90% of my money.  

Hence the subject title: Madoff's Ponzi scheme was "not that bad" actually.  Kind of like bitcoin:  if you bought at the peak, and sold today, you'd also have a loss but it's not that bad.

Agree?

PS--I'm not talking about the widow who lost all her money and had a heart attack, etc, if such person exists.  I'm talking about the average rich person or organization that got greedy and did not do their due diligence.

True, as evidenced by that pizza that sold for I think one million dollars in peak BTC back in 2011.  Also I don't think it was pump and dump, more like geeks having some fun and it blew up due to first mover advantage.

But the layout looks like your layout?!  Maybe a little different.  Who is selling the skin for these sites?  Everybody seems to be using the same skin?

Mr. Bikini,

I don't have bitcoin, since (long story) I am having a hard time ordering some.

Can you send me some free bitcoins (maybe 0.00025 BTC = 10 cents USD)?

If I like your site, I will say so on this forum.  I have been harsh with you but maybe I am wrong.  Consider it an expense like advertising! 

TonyT

Bitcoin address: 135D1oL8Ud6cCJZaSZ34pU2qrpC81xPQTi

Lol indeed.  The classic con artist gains the trust of his victims by helping them at first...then lowers the boom!  Money gone.  But time will tell.

This is significant.  As I have said, it's inevitable that BTC loses some anonymity in exchange for greater market share. 

Levitt of course is right about what he says below.

TonyT

The Wall Street Journal reported today that consultant Arthur Levitt – who served as SEC chairman from 1993 to 2001 and was actually the longest-serving person in that role – has joined the boards in order to guide the bitcoin firms' approach to financial regulation.

Levitt affirmed he was impressed by the "innovative energy" of the digital currency industry's youthful representatives, but that they remained unaware of the inevitable regulatory issues their companies would face in winning the public's trust.

Are you aware of this scam?  That dicedice.net is a scam?  Now do you see why people are concerned about a new dice site?  I'm not saying you are (yet) a scam, but this is why people are afraid.

TonyT

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=828959.0;topicseen 

Scam: dicedice.net New in Scam Accusations

What happens when the bitcoins are combined with other bitcoins?  You cannot trace them?  I've never heard of that, are you sure?

That's a good point.  Can you imagine the microdroplets being sprayed from an Ebola-sufferer who has the flu?  Worse, since Ebola has "flu like symptoms", they will be masked by somebody who has the actual flu, and this person will be spraying everybody in the office with their body fluids, and nobody will give much concern, thinking it's the 'ordinary flu'.

Now imagine a person who has the flu, Ebola, and HIV, coughing, sneezing, and engaging in risky behavior.  A trifecta!!!  Quarantine anybody?

What is a 'traditional monetarist'?  A follower of Milt Friedman?  To me, Friedman and Keynes were closely joined at the hip, with the former leaning towards a IS–LM model with monetary policy doing the work on shifting IS and the latter leaning towards an AD-AS model with fiscal policy doing the work on shifting AD.

Both models IMO are flawed, as they assume you can move the market.  In practice neither the Fed nor the Treasury have much long term power to move the market.  This btw is heresy amongst professional economists.

See more here on what I am talking about, in case you know very little about economics despite your moniker :-):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IS%E2%80%93LM_model

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AD%E2%80%93AS_model

My view:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_view

In macroeconomics, particularly in the history of economic thought, the Treasury view is the assertion that fiscal policy has no effect on the total amount of economic activity and unemployment, even during times of economic recession. This view was most famously advanced in the 1930s (during the Great Depression) by the staff of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer. The position can be characterized as:[citation needed]

    Any increase in government spending necessarily crowds out an equal amount of private spending or investment, and thus has no net impact on economic activity.

In his 1929 budget speech, Winston Churchill explained, "The orthodox Treasury view ... is that when the Government borrows in the money market it becomes a new competitor with industry and engrosses to itself resources which would otherwise have been employed by private enterprise, and in the process raises the rent of money to all who have need of it." 

Keynesian economists reject this view, and often use the term "Treasury view" when criticizing this and related arguments. The term is sometimes conflated with the related position that fiscal stimulus has negligible impact on economic activity, a view that is not incompatible with mainstream macroeconomic theory.

That was a good bet when the movie The Graduate was filmed, around the 1960s.  Now it's a commodity.

Your cut and paste job seems incomplete.  You still did not answer the question (because perhaps, like me, you're not 100% sure of the answer), and that is:  can you trace bitcoins if they are split up or not? I say you can.  If you claim you cannot, and somehow the blockchain loses that information (as it does for example with DarkCoins), please let me know.  A citation is optional but nice if you have one.

Here's bad news for bitcoin users.  Why would anybody except an anonymous drug lord use BTC when they can use CurrentC and get discounts from loyalty programs?  Think of your female friends:  the ones I know will trade anonymity if they get a discount.

TonyT  

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-27/why-rite-aid-and-cvs-stopped-taking-apple-pay#r=read

That’s not the whole story. Objections to Apple Pay aren’t actually about convenience, reliability, or security—they are about a burgeoning war between a consortium of merchants, led by Walmart (WMT), and the credit card companies. Rite Aid, CVS, Walmart, Best Buy (BBY), and about 50 other retailers have been working on their own mobile payments system, called CurrentC. Unlike Apple Pay, which works in conjunction with Visa (V), MasterCard (MA), and American Express (AXP), CurrentC cuts out the credit card networks altogether. The benefit to the merchants is clear: They would save the swipe fees they now pay to the credit card companies, which average about 2 percent of the cost of transactions.

VIDEO: Apple Pay Meets Rite Aid, CVS Roadblock
CurrentC is also likely to allow merchants to gather data about transactions and offer discounts and loyalty programs. This stands in marked contrast to the anonymity built into Apple Pay, which has drawn concerns even from some merchants that are actively supporting the system.

 

Thanks is seems that you are right, on occasion the US Feds will target individuals using 'structuring' claims, even if the individuals are not drug dealers. 

The babe-ushka becomes a babushka? :-)  There are some fine Slavic babes I have found, but you must speak their language which is hard to learn.  Unless they are gold-diggers then they don't care about language.