Well fuck-o-rolan, how many times is ~vess going to 'step down'?  IIRC he 'stepped down' a year ago during the Coinlab/Mt.Gox fiasco.  Down from 'executive director' to 'chairman of the board.'

Looks to me like ~vess IS the Bitcoin Foundation.  He was there from day one and I expect he'll be there until the end.  I also don't expect him to cough up the $5M in Gox funds that Coinlab appropriated so Mt. Gox creditors will probably be eating that to.  And I certainly don't expect that he/tBF is going to give Mt Gox back the 5000 BTC they put in to get the Bitcoin Foundation started.  OTOH, it would be good PR so if tBF has got money coming out their ears, or if ~vess stands to lose the $5M to the Feds anyway, maybe the Gox victims will see a little of it.  Not holding my breath for that one though.

Perhaps this?

https://maps.google.com/?ll=0.353054,6.722868&spn=0.002154,0.002277&t=h&z=19

Actually, the spot on that map seems to be the intersection of the equator and prime meridian.  Might be some satellite downlink or just the default value if some IP mappings are unknown or better left unsaid.

Funny thing about Bitcoiners and Fox News watchers is that they both seem to have a thing for trannies.  The latter were all hot and bothered for Ann 'the man' Coulter back in the day.  Go figure.

+1.  Much worse.  I can live without the modest wire they owe me else I would not have requested it.  My ID docs, OTOH, spell a lifetime of hassles.  I have only ever sent high quality identity dox to Mt. Gox.  I they are used by any criminal I'll know exactly where they came from.

I'd estimated that after the 2011 Mt. Gox problems and all the money they should have been raking in, they would have had some professional architects and coders on staff and the data would be a little bit safe (though the support contractors would still have some access to it.)  I'll take some responsibility for mis-estimating here, but only so much.  If my dox are lost/sold, I'm coming for that fat cock sucker.  I've had the patience to HODL BTC for years, and I'll have the patience to see that Karpeles suffers for much longer than that.  And the resources to boot, especially if we see at least one more price run-up.

Um...Vessenes is the Chairman of the Board of the Bitcoin Foundation.  He supposedly 'resigned' or something 3 quarters ago, but it looks to me like he just changed the title from 'executive director' to 'chairman of the board'.

For those who are new, note that Coinlab (which was had/has Vessenes as CEO) pocketed $5M of Mt. Gox's money (read 'yours' if Mt. Gox owes you USD.)  He also sued Mt. Gox for $75M.  Mt. Gox counter-sued to get the $5M back.

Karpeles did NOT visit the U.S. around the time this was all going down which was also around the time of the San Jose conference in which Vessenes figured prominently.  Hardly a surprise (though fraudsters all the way up to Josh Zerlan made a showing!)

I mention these little things because 'neglect' on the part of the Bitcoin Foundation is probably not a good description of their involvement.  I'll wager than when the final story is written we'll find that the Bitcoin Foundation had probably more to do with the failure of Mt. Gox than any other entity with the possible exception of the U.S. government.  I think it most likely that they worked cooperatively in this project though.

Watching*

(*) which I feel at liberty to do being one of the VERY early people to call the Bitcoin Foundation out when fuckin near everyone else was all ga-ga over it...

One of these days I should make a shift toward less talking and more doing.  I guess I'm out of energy in my old age and am doing OK in this crypto thing anyway.  Shrug.

'Hope' has proven time and time again to be a poor strategy to actually accomplish things.

That said, I'm not planning to actually do anything significant related to Bitcoin except to perhaps move my lips a little.  As far as I'm concerned taint/validation/licensing/registration/declaration/[red|black]listing, or whatever one wishes to call it is very probably a done deal, and mostly what is left for those of us who don't like it is to 'move on'.  That is not to say that there is not more money to be made with Bitcoin.  Probably quite a bit more since the reason taint is so likely is that a lot of people see it as the way forward.  Especially the VC types who happen to have shit-loads of money to pump in.  I've got clean coins and I'll certainly hold my nose and register the if it means fiat in my pocket when I want it.

I expect taint to be the cancer that renders Bitcoin useless and eventually worthless (relative to other solutions) but I also expect it to take some time.  This wave has (hopefully) still got a long way to go and I'm in no hurry to hop off of it prematurely.

Well, no shit.  Welcome to the future of Bitcoin.

Actually, as long as individuals can trade amongst themselves it will be difficult to control.  But as soon as tainting (a-la coin validation) is ready and fully rolled in, people who transact in an opaque manner, or without the proper licensing as though Bitcoin were cash can be controlled (by simply tainting the coins associated with such transactions.)


News flash:  What cypherdoc likes or does not like has just about exactly zero impact on that will happen.

Anyone who had their 'life savings' in Mt. Gox either didn't have more than they cannot earn it back by flipping burgers for a month or two, or they are so stupid that they were likely to lose it anyway before long even if Mt. Gox had never existed.

They were also paying out according to some reports.

If Mt. Gox were under orders to maintain business operations in a somewhat normal manner then it is not cut-n-dried that they would be defined as criminals.  Either in a court of law, or by a reasonable definition of the term IMHO.  I'm still reserving judgement on a specific label for Karpeles until more facts are in.  But I've pretty much ruled out defining Karpeles as whatever Ladar Levison is.

Here is what the exchanges can do to discourage naked shorting:  They can keep folding and losing everyone's BTC.  In this way people will eventually be trained to not retain a significant BTC balance under the care of the exchange.

In order to naked short, one needs to give someone something they don't have (and the other person needs to accept it.)  This is relatively easy with stocks since the DTCC looks the other way and the receiver only sees what their brokerage account shows on the UI (that is, phantom shares.)  BTC is different in that I don't have to rely on the broker's UI.  I can rely on my own wallet as a source of truth.  Of course if I'm using my exchange account as a bank account, all bets are off.

In order to more effectively play the 'we are so generous in shouldering the burden of running this free service for the benefit of the community' card,  it would be handy to Mesrrs Boussac et-al if people would forget that his group took possession of a large mass of BTC from Jan who developed Instawallet.  This in spite of the fact that one of their own in-house developments was a service which did the same thing.  ('Not saying anything...just saying...')  One way or another, it was a sure bet that a great number of BTC in this BTC hoard that Jan gave/sold them would never be claimed since the people who put them there had abandoned them.

Of course in order to identify the unclaimed BTC which were free for the taking, Instawallet itself would have to have a little hicup and be forced to shut down.  Miracle of miracles, it seems that that happened.  And at an opportune time to on the top of the 2013 $250 peak.

I never sent any BTC to Instawallet after Paymium/Bitcoin-Central/whatever took possession of the pot.  I did get paranoid and drew down about half of my holdings (which had increased in value from about $100 to about $5,000 in increased valuations) before the little problem.  My losses were returned to me promptly with the first round of payouts.

Bull.  There are a great number of facts.  For instance, it's a stone cold fact that Mark claimed he could not talk about what was happening for about a year now.  This does not prove that he was under a gag order, but it, like thousands of other known facts, can be applied toward strengthening or weakening a number of varying hypothesis...or can by people who are not lazy and/or stupid.

Another thing that is a fact is that Mt. Gox closed their web site and people cannot log in.  Certain of the hypothesis I've been entertaining predicted this.  I got all my records from them a long time ago for this reason.

You are, I believe, confused between a 'fact' and a 'synthesis'.  That is, a pre-canned complete series of answers about what is going on.  Lacking the latter should NOT constitute some sort of a barrier which precludes other deductive analysis.

Again, someone who lacks the analytical abilities or comfort level in doing this kind of work may be better off just sitting at idle to see what comes up.  That's fine, but it doesn't mean that everyone should.  In this case, those who can do analysis might very well walk away with the money from those who cannot in their pockets.  That's how the world works unfortunately.  Case in point is that I took my BTC out of Mt. Gox back in August 2013.  I took a calculated risk on a wire as I closed down with them, but only what I could easily afford to lose, and also because it provided a toe-hold for future potential projects.

I'll take that as a 'no'.

Ordinarily I would have trouble believing that a principle in a business would be so out-of-touch that he would not know the status of a nearly $1M claim.  In Boussac's case, maybe.

Dude!  When one is doing good analysis, one is not looking for things to be true.  One is looking for evidence (ideally irrefutable) of things being false.  This allows one to strike off hypotheses which don't fit.  Sagan would be ashamed of you if he were still among the living I'm sure.

It would be handy as hell for, say, the government to have a situation where nobody even dares to think that the mic on their phone might be able to be remotely activated because that is a 'government conspiracy theory.'  The shame of it is that very many otherwise very bright people fall into this trap and remain ignorant of and unprepared for a great many things.

If one is not willing to entertain all manners of hypotheses, then by logic they will always be clueless unless the truth happens to be among the reduced set of things they already feel is fit to consider.  More often than not the truth is something which does not occur to one so it gets no attention in the process of contemplation.  This retards the analysis process and ends up getting people get blind-sided and thus run over.

In this case the null hypothesis is that the government knew all about Bitcoin and knew that it was being used to support Wikileaks and do an end-run around the control mechanisms put in place for fiat, and yet took no concrete action to deal with the issues presented by Mt. Gox.  If one thinks about it a little, that's pretty absurd.  (I know...it's 'badthink' or something to consider the government could be involved, but I could not help myself...maybe you have better self-control.)  Anyway, this is by no means evidence that the government had a hand in freezing Mt. Gox controlled BTC, but it is all the reason in the world to consider it as a viable hypothesis.

I don't think you are seeing things right.  At this point Bitcoin is a giant ship under full steam provided by well marketed misconceptions and a shit-load of VC money.  Just like any large moving mass it won't change direction easily.  Someone who has BTC and is nimble and observant may be in line for a big pay-day.  (I've recently been taking a cash advance just in case I'm wrong though )

Here's an idea.  How about if you focus on improving your business skills so you don't have so many haters?

With a handful of exceptions everyone who 'hates on you' does so for completely understandable and rational reasons.  If you deal with your own problems in a productive way by making some improvements that would probably work out better for everyone.

A hypothesis along these lines strikes me as being as strong as any.  I, however, think it most likely that the Coinlab deal was supposed to result in the historic customer activity data landing in the Fed's laps and the retribution for this not happening took place immediately afterwards and was highly effective.  Thus, Mt. Gox has been acting as a honey-pot since the beginning of 2013 rather than the end.  And the Feds have all the data that Mt. Gox kept which is probably a lot.

It seems very unlikely to me that the cold funds were stolen in an ordinary manner since there is no way Karpeles is that stupid and careless, and pretty much inconceivable that they were drained in anything but trivial amounts by the malleability issues.

I'de put the hypothesis tree as so:

 - Mark has lost control of the BTC through extortion
   - by criminals
   - by state actors

 - Mark has lost control through very sophisticated zero-day means (e.g., hardware backdoors.)  This would imply state level action.

 - Mark has control of the coins but is floating a story of some vague theft story to avoid giving up control.

 - Mark has ceded control to a friendly entity do stage a theft for similar reasons.

 - Mark thinks he can get away with simply stealing the BTC and the theft is staged or bogus.

An interesting (and bothersome) thing about having law enforcement work in a covert and secret manner is that it short-circuites all of the traditional justice systems of the U.S.  If information or actions (e.g., stealing/appropriating the BTC) is carried out in a covert manner than it becomes very cumbersome to act on it in public without giving away the methods.

I would not rule out that Mark and the U.S. authorities are working hand-in-glove to invent a story of theft as a means of diverting attention and analysis of the methods that the authorities are employing as they relate to Bitcoin.  For the whole year Marks assertion that he simply cannot talk about certain fairly basic things has been highly awkward.  It literally screams 'gag order.'

===

Edit:  One more perfectly viable hypothesis which I forgot to mention:

  - Mark did in fact simply lose access to some cold wallet keys.

I say this because it is actually damn difficult to come up with a scheme which limits loss due to extortion.  I've put many hours into figuring out how to mitigate this threat, and I control nowhere near the BTC that Mark does so his threat surface here is much larger.  Not only that, but a scheme which is subject to loss of keys has the utility of providing a level of plausible deniability which can go a long way towards helping solve certain kinds of problems.

When I took a cursory look at Bitstamp, there was no indication of any actual people on the 'about us' page, and they seemed to operate in several jurisdictions and had a cloaked domain.

They also changed their methods to allow unverified user to send in BTC but not to retrieve BTC back out.  They didn't even send an e-mail warning but rather communicated this by a little fine print on their facebook account or some such.

As far as I am concerned KYC is much more critical when it comes to the parties who are holding value for others.  Namely the principles of a financial services business.  I only rarely, and under duress, take on risk of doing business with those who don't comply with this theme.  Whether Bitstamp has mended their ways by now I don't know.  I've no need to do business with them at this point so I've not looked in a while.

And I would be very reluctant to do business with anyone who changed had a history of holding a user's BTC hostage in exchange for high quality identity documents.  If anything smells like a rat it's a this aspect of their operations.