Well no offense but I pray you are just making up crap (or repeating crap others have said).  The highest priority should be getting to a point where user funds can be returned (BTC & EUR).  Period.  No time should be spent rushing an alpha version of a new trading enigne.  Open the site with all trading disabled, allow users to make withdraw requests and process those as quickly as possible.  In the future if he wants to release a new version of the site, users can redeposit if they wish. 

Bitcoin is "Bitcon's silver".

If LTC prospers it will be on its own merits and not because Bitcoin needs a silver.

Simpler theory the operator was an idiot with two masive flaws:
a) a fault trading engine allowed users to steal funds.
b) when his business account got shutdown he started moving millions of euros through his personal bank account.

Neither of those have particularly unexpected outcomes.

No trading has been halted.  The crazy 20% per hour moves were due to MtGox lag.*  No real lag today so much less movement. 

* Not I am not predicting that price can't fall or rise just pointing out the directionless volatility always spiked when MtGox became untradable.  A sharp move downward followed by an equally sharp move upward. 

Once again I think you need to read SLOWER.  I said I DONT think we will see 50% gain by the end of the week.  To prove it I am willing to sell him 150 BTC calls.  Those calls would expire worthless IF BTC DOESN'T RISE to more than $150 by the end of the week.  I would profit under that scenario and lose (potentially massively) if BTC DID rise above $150 by the end of the week.

Exactly.  It isn't in MTgox interest for Bitcoin to become more decentralized so those looking for solution from upon Mount Gox are going to be disapointed.  Hopefully MtGox improves their systems but to be honest have you seen their trade volume in the last three days.  It is a record, even with the shutdowns and free trade period, cash is pouring into their coffers.  Why would they be in a rush to change things.  Panic = volume.  Volume = profits.   

This.  Not sure if the statement was intentional or just really bad writing but it should be changed.  Even if MtGox is speculating on the exchange rate internally it has nothing to do with the press release and they shouldn't be providing advice to (potential) clients.

OK can we stop paying bullshit detective for a second.

1) I have far less Bitcoins than you think.   Whatever number you think, cut it in half and then drop a zero and you likely are closer.  Starting Tangible Cryptography was capital intensive.  Fiat funds are pathetically slow it takes a massive amount of working capital to get anything done.  Hell our company even Borrows Bitcoins because it makes sense to borrow then to keep the kind of capital we need locked up in BTC. I kept a small holding as a hedge in case my company fails and Bitcoin succeeds but I am no early adopter just someone who sees real value in Bitcoin and put the relatively modest amount of coins I mined to work as capital to expand the Bitcoin "ecosystem".  

2) I got no problem with RESEARCHING the early history of Bitcoin but honestly that is not what you are doing it. Posting "Satoshi has 1M BTC" written as a statement of fact and then looking for items which support it, is intellectually dishonest. Do some real research and then propose the findings.  The "fact" in your OP is obviously wrong.  Multiple people have shown they mined the first year ... Period.  So even if Satoshi "only" has 900K BTC (which I doubt) you OP is still blatantly false.  The fact that you keep the headline in light of the increasing absurdity of it shows how dedicated to the "truth" you really are.

3) I never said that Satoshi was poor so can we put away the strawmen and red herrings.  Please?   I indicated multiple times that is it is highly likely "he" mined the entire year and contributed some significant fraction of the hashing power (just not 100% of it).  Using the v0.1 client a high end PC in 2009 would be about 80KH/s.  The average hashrate for the first year was roughly 4.402 MH/s (34272*2^32) / (387*24*60*60) = 4.402 MH/s so that puts the number of PC at ~50.  Of course the earlier part of the year was significantly lower and there were significant variations in block rate.

4) Now maybe Satoshi did have 100 PCs and adjusted the number running to make the hashrate appear dynamic and hide his true involvement in this purely academical (at the time) project for almost a year, but even that can't explain away the first hand reports of early non Satoshi miners (inducing Hal Finney who is the earliest known solver of a block beyond the genesis block and receiver of the first non mining transaction).

5) As many have pointed out it is unlike Satoshi was a single person.  So the idea there is a single $100M winner is dubious.  When you remove the effect of other Satoshi miners the "satoshi share" is much smaller.  If you then divide that among multiple participants it is likely the initial adopters have tens of thousands of coins and could sell them for millions.  Say "Satoshi" mined half the coins, and Satoshi is 10 people, and a third of them have been sold.  Oh noes each creator has ~80,000 BTC.  BTC which is worthless unless the economy continue to expand.  I don't lay awake fearing what the creators will do with their wealth.  If they wanted to dump it they had plenty of opportunity especially last week.  Note: before this gets misquoted I am not saying each creator has 80,000 BTC but it is just as plausible as the $100M headline number.

6) Why hasn't a large portion of those first year coins sold?  The most likely answer is many saw it as an academic project and the coins were lost forever.  With multiple bubbles and bust and recent media attention it is highly likely that any miner from the difficulty 1 period has been reminded of Bitcoin and exactly how much their small hoard is worth.  The fact that despite the bubbles there has been no move would indicate either they are true believers (these coins will be worth $B someday) or they just don't have access to the keys anymore.  It happens.

How many blocks did Satoshi solve?  I don't know.  The sad thing is someone doing some genuine research would actually be pretty interesting.  I do know your claim that Satoshi solved all blocks for the first year is blatantly false.  The fact that you cling to it despite facts to the contrary shows you aren't the one which will do genuine research anymore than the Enquirer is looking to genuine reporting.

I will sell you 1 week $150 calls.  What would you like to purchase and name your price.   

I think this "yeah we will only see a 50% return in a week not a day" "downplay" has just got to stop.  Hell if Bitcoin hit $150 by the end of the year it would still make it the best performing currency in the world.

$100 median +/- 10%.  It is Sunday, Goxlag seems to be reduced, and honestly I think most traders are looking for a break.  Monday on the other hand

Well that is the thing it DOESN'T address any problem.  Period.  For it to complement Bitcoin a significant number of nodes would need to run full nodes of BOTH chains.  For things like multi-chain clients with currency conversion to exist it would require an exchange for example to run full nodes of both chains to handle deposits, conversions, and withdraws.  

So that brings up two issues:
a) If exchange X can run full nodes of Chain A & Chain B then there is no bandwidth savings over running a full node on Chain A (having 2x the tx volume).
b) If Bitcoin is limited to y tps then to scale to 1000x that would require not just chain A & chain B but chains A .... ZZZ.  

BTW I am not saying Bitcoin will be the end all of crypto-currencies or that a system of complimenting Bitcoin by offlloading smaller lower value transactions can't exist I am just pointing out that the idea of parallel identical chains provides absolutely no added utility.  Bytecoin was simply a joke, nothing more.  It will be destroyed by ASICs or get pump and dumped and end up in the crypto scrapbin like other clones.

The worst possibility would everyone in groupthink fashion turning another exchange into MtGox 2.0.  I would love a scenario where instead of one dominant exchange you see a dozen or so well run exchanges with no exchange having more than 30% of trade volume.  Exchanges could even setup reserve accounts on other exchanges which would allow order book sharing.  This would provide a level of arbitrage and boost liquidity of both exchanges.  

Personally I have been impressed with bitfloor and bitstamp lately. 

Yeah lets see if Bitcoin can acheive the popularity of say PayPal before talking about new world reverse currency.  Honestly nobody has any idea of how popular Bitcoin will become over the next couple years and I have long believed Bitcoin (like most revolutionary technologies) is on a decade plus timeline to mass adoption.

BTW FedWire system transfers ~$600T (not a typo) annually and has a tx rate of ... ~7tps.  It is certainly possible in one of many scenarios Bitcoin evolves to become a store of value currency backing an entire next generation of crypto-currencies optimized for speed and low resource usage.  It is also possible the block limit will be raised in some fashion as miners realize that long term profitability would come from keeping the resource scarce but not too scarce.  Moon dust is far more scarce than Gold but Gold is a more useful currency.  Another possibility is some next generation currency which is more efficient with critical resources* replaces Bitcoin as the primary crypto-currency.   None of those require a bitcoin clone though.



* A ledger based crypto-currency which prevents tx which are unlikely to be spent again (through fee structure), encourages low cost UXTO reduction, and periodically trims the tail of the blockchain (i.e. super blocks with much higher difficulty) could possibly scale to much higher limits than what it possible with Bitcoin.

Where do you get the idea that tx bandwidth is a major limitation?  Most miners use pools, certain those bandwidth limited do.

100 tps (roughly 2x PayPal) * 400 bytes (average tx size) = 40 KBps.  Yeah not GB/s or TB/s but KB/s.  Now a miner will need to receive tx and send out the block and send to multiple peers but with the raw tx flow being 40 Kbps even a 10 Mbps connection provides sufficient headroom.  Bandwidth for tx was never a critical resource.  ByteCoin solves absolutely nothing.  Under your scenario ByteCoin would work in conjunction with another chain so any full node is likely going to need to be a full node on both chains meaning bandwidth requirements equal the sum of tx flows on both chains.

Yes everything indicates the Polish bank was in the company name but it doesn't matter when he switched or why.  When his company bank account got shut down he should have stopped accepting deposits.  Period.  By using his personal account to accept funds in the company name he pierced the corporate veil. Hopefully this is a lesson to those getting started in business.

As bad as things got for bitcoin24 if he stopped trading when he realized a flaw in his trading engine and stopped accepting deposits when his bank account had gotten frozen the issue would be far less severe right now.  By continuing to operate with an engine that allowed double payments and rerouting massive flows of cash into his personal bank account he made a bad situation much worse.  Now it is unlikely everything will be resolved quickly and without cost.  Any cost and losses are going to fall on him personally so I hope he is independently wealthy. 

Well the good news for creditors that makes his LTD worthless.  A court would find him personally liable for all losses and damages.  Then again who knows if he has any funds.  Hopefully his "lawyer" has informed him of complete personal liability (as in can lose everything he owns, personal assets, car, house, cash in bank, etc) and thus he is motivated to provide some transparency on what happens and what depositors can expect.

Really?

bitcoinica - lost funds - still in liquidation/lawsuit - deposits haven't seen a cent.
Crypto-X-Change - losts funds - operators AWOL - depositors haven't seen a cent.
bitfloor - lost funds - still operating - making slow repayment of lost funds (~3% so far IIRC)

Um because they are an exchange not a broker.  They aren't paid for nor qualified to give financial advice.  Remember when facebook stock had horrible technical issues on NASDAQ its opening day.  NASDAQ fixed the issues (paid some fines and settled a lawsuit IIRC) and announced the fix.  They said nothing about the decline of facebook is over an now it is ready for higher prices.  They fixed the issue, operated a clean, transparent market, and allows the MARKET not the EXCHANGE to determine the price.

One of the related stories indicated they acquired their coins last summer (2012).  BTW at worst that means they paid $15 a coin and are looking at a solid gain.

You claim to be searching with facts but you open with a FUD headline as if it is proven fact.  You have absolutely no facts to support your claim that Satoshi (single person or group) mined all blocks for first year.  Your OP lacks even incorrect facts to support that claim.  The thread is full of numerous ACTUAL facts which contradict that claim ... however your goal now is to look for facts to support the claim you have already made and ignore the ones which contradict it.

I mean I showed you how your hashrate analysis was inaccurate and it took all of about 5 minutes ... 5 minutes of actually looking at the data not coming up with a bogus headline and then trying to shoehorn some facts to fit it.

Its fud, and crap science.  Searching for facts is one thing.  Search for facts AND THEN come up with a conclusion.   You jumped to a bogus, senasational headline and now are scrambling to back it.  I stand by my assertion ... it is sad.  It is sad because you obviously have significant intellect.  You know it is stupid and you know if a peer handed you the "proof" of the OP and passed it off as fact you would smack them just as hard.

PS I never suggested Satoshi didn't mine block 1.  Personally I think he probably did maybe even a significant fraction of the first 2016 as hashing power during that period of time was much lower then subsequent blocks.