Recovery from what? They aren't even admitting anything. They claim to be hashing.

Never ever ever break a promise to investors. And never ever ever lie to investors.
This is basic economic communication 101. If they break either of these commandments they will permanently damage the faith of investors and the only reason their shares are about IPO price quite frankly is because of faith.

People have faith in Sam Noi. They have faith in everything he says, and on his promises.

If they don't pay dividends like they promised then we could see IPO prices or even below IPO prices. The only people who will believe in them will be Labcoin's team and a few people with very small amounts of shares. Basically it's still worth a gamble with a few thousand shares at IPO price but not worth it if you're buying tens of thousands of shares at the current price.

You're not going to bet $5000-10,000 on Labcoin. $500 maybe is something people will be willing to lose.

It should fall back to IPO prices because there is no proof that the chips even work. I don't think Labcoin is a scam, I just think they are having more deployment difficulties than they expected and probably should have announced delays and problems rather than make promises that they might end up breaking. If they break a promise to investors then a lot of investors will get out and wont be going back.

If you didn't buy at IPO prices you'll be losing money soon. The shares may recover if they pay the dividends they promise but if they do not, that might be the end of the Labcoin experiment.

If there isn't a hashing announcement and update today,  expect the share price to crash stupendously. This might be the make or break day for Labcoin shareholders.

Not cool. Don't play with people's money.


Wait until hashing starts.

Yeah it could be bots too.

People who want to buy a dollar. Not everyone is American or European and that 0.01 means something different in another country.

It's open source so it wont make much of a difference but it does mean an audit would be necessary and a complete rewrite.

I would say they probably have several ways of breaking Bitcoin but it would be top secret and not be used unless there is a war. It's not going to be used on criminals but if we get into a war with another country and that country thinks Bitcoins will be useful the NSA may have a few surprises.

Any time you're dealing with money, you're expected to be responsible. This means you're expected to care about whether the Bitcoin protocol promotes democracy or hurts it for example. It does not mean you're required to care, it just means if you don't care then you'll have a lot less mainstream support than if you do care. People who do care will support other people who care and will get on board but if you take the position that you have no personal or professional responsibilities at all, that isn't going to work out very well for Bitcoin or for its users long term.

For instance many users will say they'll never pay taxes again, they'll exploit anonymity to their own personal benefit without caring what effect it has on the Bitcoin community or on the global community, but those voices are in my opinion in the minority when you look at the potential that Bitcoin has.

Surveillance is what Eve does. Gordon is the government agent who investigates (with a warrant). Alice is you.

Every participant in the Bitcoin network has different responsibilities. My interest is in protecting Alice because Alice represents the majority of us in the community. Alice typically speaking does not want to be caught up in Gordon's dragnets, does not want to assist sex traffickers and others who want to use the Bitcoin network irresponsibly, Alice generally wants to limit risk to herself while interacting with the network. Anonymity increases risk to Alice and now Gordon must question Alice as part of his investigation while before Gordon would have had to question businesses, banks, ISPs. Alice is now in the crosshairs, is considered to be part of the bank and there is a money laundering investigation, so Alice is now put at risk just by using the new anonymity feature. What would you have Alice do here?

Don't get my position wrong, I support the anonymity feature. My position is that we should implement it in a way which limits the risk to Alice, otherwise Alice may become a statistic, a false positive, a scapegoat for Mallory. Mallory is the individual trying to actively launder money, or exploit anonymity for their personal benefit even if it harms the Bitcoin community as a whole.

It is the responsibility of members of a community to regulate themselves and their community. Every community has rules and every community has investigations. If you're saying there should be no rules, then how do you expect Bitcoin to ever grow beyond a small group of hackers who want to launder money or buy drugs with it? If it's expected to grow into a useful currency by the masses, if every user is instantly made into a suspect I don't see how it can happen. The result is that every user is going to have to keep their own records and the community is going to have to either come together and solve these problems or when the problems occur then everyone involved in even the slightest way will be caught up in drag nets. I'm for reducing the risk to Alice (the primary user of the currency). The drag net from Gordon is a risk to Alice but so is being hacked or scammed by Mallory. That means Alice has to protect Alice, as Gordon and Mallory both have agendas which don't benefit Alice and which put Alice at greater risk. Being anonymous does not protect Alice from Gordon or Mallory, it protects Alice from Eve. Eve is the surveillance program which doesn't require a warrant which looks at everyone without any excuse.  Eve is snooping just because she can and the increased anonymity and privacy can protect Alice from Eve. If an investigation begins then anonymity will not protect Alice from Gordon who will either arrest Alice and charge her or question her and look to find an alibi. Alice needs an alibi to protect herself, which means she needs to keep detailed records on her own activities just in case.
I never said anything about ethics in this discussion. I'm talking about risk mitigation, risk profiles, and different use cases.

So what you're saying is that every Alice user should be prepared to face Gordon and be prepared to go to jail/prison just because they used the software? I'm saying that if you put that much risk on Alice then Alice will not be the primary user and it will never go mainstream. Gordon could destroy the Bitcoin community simply by aggressively investigating and arresting people who use it lawfully but who don't have an alibi. Gordon has every investigative tool necessary to track a suspect and unlike with Eve, Gordon actually has a search warrant. The fact that it's anonymous, that a crime is committed, and that a certain IP address or some piece of evidence is involved, would be enough to get a warrant and investigate Alice. This investigation would result in a false positive, be a complete waste of time, money, resources, but it does not change the fact that it would potentially destroy Alice and disrupt the Bitcoin community if these sorts of investigations became common.

For Bitcoin to grow Alice needs to be able to use Bitcoin and not feel like a criminal, not put herself under risk of investigation, not put herself at risk of being sent to jail. The only way she can minimize her risks is to keep records so that if she is arrested or she does get questioned she will have the answers that Gordon is looking for and can avoid being harassed. It's not about helping or hurting Gordon, it's about protecting Alice.

I'm not saying that at all. Have a look at this video
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000196987&play=1

What I'm saying is that democracy is very important. That Bitcoin is important within the context of promoting democracy and liberating people. Bitcoin can easily be used to erode or destroy democracy by the same forces that use fiat currencies and off-shore banking to do that. Corruption if it's the source of our problems, why would you want Bitcoin to be used that way as a member of the Bitcoin community? I admit this is a political issue so it's quite possible that you don't care about solving the problems of corruption or about building and maintaining democracy, and I can accept differing views. Technology is neutral but every user of Bitcoin is going to use it according to their views.
And don't you see that my concerns are justified? If Bitcoin could be used to empower the interests of oligarchy then Bitcoin will become a lot less popular. I'm not pulling these scenarios out of my ass, I've given them deep thought. Money corrupts the political process and anonymous money corrupts it the most.

The reason money laundering is considered a problem is specifically because it can be used as a process or method of corrupting a democracy. A coin-operated government isn't necessarily an intended consequence but it probably will happen at some point because at this time it's already like that only it's the dollar doing it. Basically Bitcoin will take on the role of cash, but will be far better at everything cash is good at. Cash is good at corrupting politics and corrupting democracies, let's be honest about that. I'm not saying Bitcoin shouldn't become the best cash it can become, but I m saying that as a community the users of Bitcoin who choose to use it for anonymous donations to political campaigns must also think about how easy it would be for billionaires to use Bitcoins anonymously as well. It's something to think about.

Your argument is that Bitcoin is just a technology and that it's politically neutral? I agree. But the users of the currency all have different agendas and are from different demographics even if the technology is neutral.

The users who fit into the Alice category want to run businesses, or spend Bitcoin like they would with cash. The difference is that Bitcoin will be far more anonymous than cash currently is, which can benefit Alice but also Mallory and potentially Gordon. It can benefit Alice because she can buy products with privacy and cannot be ethically or morally judged. It benefits Mallory because she can con, hack or steal someone else's coins and have a lower risk of being caught, it also allows Mallory to launder money or finance terrorism. It benefits Gordon because now he will have a much bigger budget to fight financial crime and a much easier time getting warrants and plenty of people to investigate.

The risks will mainly fall on Alice and that is the problem I have with it.  Alice is the person who will be at the risk of being a false  positive and arrested in a drag net. Alice will be the one at greatest risk for being investigated. Mallory will typically be more skilled than Gordon or Eve and with anonymity will be very difficult to track down but Alice will be the easiest low hanging fruit.

This could become a severe problem in the future. You don't have to understand what I'm saying, go ahead and implement these features and collect the statistics for yourselves. If we find out that most of the people who get arrested are false positives or are innocent or if we find out that some other technology becomes popular because it reduces risk for Alice then you'll see what I mean.


They do bribe people. But not just governments but private sector billionaires and corporations as well. The problem with this is that foreign corporations from say the USA could take over entire political systems in Europe simply by buying up Bitcoins (or mining) and then funding the elections. It probably already happens to a certain extent right now through the CIA and other intelligence agencies anyway. I think these sorts of activities are the activities of Mallory, because it subverts democracy but it's something to at least think about.

I'm not against the technology or the creation of technology. I'm saying the people who create the technology don't seem to give a lot of thought about how it will potentially be used against them in the future. Bitcoin is a beautiful technology which can solve a lot of problems for a lot of people but it's also going to bring unintended consequences as it's neutral and it's only as good as the hands it is in.

Anonymity could be good for Alice, but when it presents risk to Alice then its important we find ways to minimize or mitigate the risk to Alice. Alice is someone who wants to use Bitcoin for it's beneficial uses, to fight corruption rather than to encourage it, to promote democracy, free speech, etc. Mallory on the other hand is against all of these things and could use Bitcoins to suppress free speech, subvert democracy, and encourage corruption.

They'll rely on other tactics but they'll be able to identify at least some of the people involved and from there they will question Alice. If Alice refused to answer the questions then they'll bug computers and rely on surveillance of Alice. None of this will be good for Alice and I don't see how it would reduce the size of the police state. I see it would trigger an arms race between Gordon and Mallory which would put Alice at the greatest risk in most scenarios.

Updated

My theory is that the adoption rate of Bitcoin is based primarily on the risk tolerance of the demographic of Alice users. If Alice users believe Bitcoin is high risk then Alice users will not be quick to adopt it. Your political views (and mine) are not the majority. Your views are more extreme than most, you believe that the private sector can replace governments. This is fine but let's be realistic, you're not who the majority of Bitcoin users will be over the next 5 or 10 years. My views are all about decentralization, civil liberties, and while I don't have views that say we don't need government at all I certainly don't think we need government telling us how to live or in our personal lives. I think the majority of people who will be coming into Bitcoin will be less and less focused on politics and more and more focused on what the risks are. If they view using Bitcoin as more risky than dealing with the banks and Paypal they'll keep using that. It's like how many years has Tor been around, or Freenet, or I2P, or encrypted email, or email mixers? No one uses these technologies because people have decided the risks aren't worth it.

As long as Alice can opt-out or opt-in on a transaction by transaction basis then it can work without significantly decreasing adoption rate to Bitcoin. If it's all in then Alice does not have the ability to mitigate her level of risk in real-time based on the situation. If that is the case then Bitcoin will have a difficult time achieving mainstream adoption which is the exact problem it faces right now.

A simple solution is to set it up so that Alice has maximum control over how much risk she takes. If she can set up her wallet to make purchases to certain businesses with anonymity turned on, and other transactions with anonymity turned off for instance then it will be recognized as a feature to use when its needed.

In this scenario it will be relatively simple for Alice to only use anonymity when she needs to use it which limits the amount of risk she has to accept to be exactly the amount she requires or is willing to take. Every transaction on the Bitcoin network does not have to be anonymous, I don't even think I'd want every single transaction I make to be anonymous but other transactions I would want privacy.

Everyone has a different risk tolerance so I think this is the solution. In my own case there are many situations where I would definitely want privacy turned on, but then in other situations it wouldn't be worth it.

This would reduce the possibility of drag nets or any unintended consequences. Opt-in on a site by site or business by business or transaction by transaction basis.  

PPcoin.

What percentage of the network would 200-300TH be within the estimated 5-6 PH network difficulty? Where are the mathematicians who can tell us what the projected dividends Where do you think the share price will land?

Trying to pump up LTC with this pointless rumor again? It's not going to work this time. MtGox isn't so important anymore. It's coinbase we should be looking at implementing LTC.

It's not my business to know that. I'm not asking for a stasi coin where I know what everyone purchased. Thats not the case I was making. I'm saying if we go anonymous then each of us will have an increased level of responsibility. We will have to keep track of all of our own purchases and when the investigators question us we will have to give them that information. We will have to explain receipt by receipt and in detailed records what we did with our coins. We will basically be required to report our economic activity just as banks are required to do so now because we will essentially be our own personal banks.

I admit that is better than the way things are now where everything we purchase with a credit card is automatically known to the whole world. They know what books we read, what movies we watch, and more without having to have a warrant or any reason to know it. No one is supporting their ability to snoop on us without a warrant.

At the same time it was also made clear to me that Bitcoin is not private enough. I'm in agreement that Bitcoin needs greater privacy protection. The question is how do we do it in a smart way. Do it in the wrong way and the whole experiment could fall apart. In my opinion the right way is we have anonymous purchases but also an pseudo-anonymous way to report our purchases if there is an investigation.

Imagine there is an incident and you want to be pro-active to separate yourself from the child trafficking incident? The way to do this would be to upload pseudo-anonymously your transaction details complete with notes on what you purchased to the investigator and digitally sign it. This would rule you out immediately.

The only concern I have about it is minimizing the risk of false positives and of people getting sucked into incidents in dragnets. The investigators have a job to do, we want privacy. I don't see why we have can't both win.

The solution I offer: We must regulate ourselves and be at least as responsible as traditional banks are now. This would mean we will have to keep track of whatever records/pseudo-identities necessary to help in whatever investigation. Just as ISP's are now required to keep records, and banks are required to keep records, if we each become our own ISP through a meshnet and we each become our own bank through peer to peer Bitcoin it actually means with this increase in freedom we will also have an increased responsibility. It's an unavoidable consequence of growing up as a new technology. Our transaction logs right now aren't very detailed, but in the future it will probably be a situation where every single Bitcoin transaction you make produces a detailed digital receipt which gets encrypted and emailed to your email address. Right now if you conduct transactions on Wallet A and then delete the wallet then all those transactions from that pseudo-identity are lost? No they are stored on the public ledger but what is lost is your connection to it.

Then you do transactions from wallet B and wallet C, and lets say you actually save transaction details here? Well then you have all the various off-chain transactions and websites with built in wallets, ultimately its messy.

At some point pressure will build to create a unified pseudo-identity management system where a user creates a persistent pseudo-anon master wallet identity and all the additional extra pseudo-identities are branched from that similar to the master password in Mozilla. Then the user could basically sign in once with the master identity and select any of the different pseudo-identities with their own wallets as a completely different identity. It does not change the fact that if something goes wrong they will have to own the master identity and all the pseudo-identities branched from it. The investigators looking for a specific wallet address could rule them out quick.

I don't see any other way it could play out.

Okay here is a potential attack which is enabled by anonymity in the Bitcoin network.

Let's say I'm a government agency and I decide to exploit the fact that Bitcoin allows anonymous transactions. What I could do is covertly corrupt and take over entire countries utilizing anonymous transactions. I could initiate a covert operation where my government prints unlimited amounts of fiat currency, then it's agents go and buy Bitcoins and then these agents can now bribe any politician anywhere in the world.  For sake of argument let's say the currency is the dollar and the agency is the CIA.

What is to stop that agency from playing Santa and bribing anyone and everyone with unlimited ability to buy Bitcoins or mine them? In this case being anonymous would allow for copious amounts of political corruption and opulence at the expense of democracy itself.

Now for a less conspiracy based attack, how about we look at Satoshi Nakamoto himself? A private citizen who has a million Bitcoins? If we make the network anonymous what is to stop him from taking over entire countries politically? He would essentially gain almost Jesus like power over countries where he would be able to bribe any politician, any private citizen, with anonymous payments into their Bitcoin wallets.

In a pseudo-anonymous world we would know at least that someone we suspect to be Satoshi Nakamoto or affiliated with the early blocks are spending coins and we would know what amounts and other little details so that we could limit corruption via transparency. How can we limit corruption in a world where the 1% can spend anonymously?

Despite the myth and rumor, cash is not anonymous. You cannot get cash from an ATM without being on camera. You cannot accept cash from another person without them potentially finding out your identity or seeing your face. If you send cash to a politician in the mail your finger prints and other evidence will be left behind. Bitcoin is different because if it becomes anonymous then any billionaire in the 1% could decide to buy a state political system and systematically bribe politicians with anonymous Bitcoin rewards and there would be no way to counter this except with a fork.

Ultimately I think anonymity seems to be more a reaction to government overreach but not a long term solution to government corruption. If you put in anonymity then the corruption may become more hidden, and governments wont lose any power. Governments will be able to finally get involved in manipulating the Bitcoin economy and network. They'll be able to do it covertly with operatives, but there is nothing to stop a government from doing this.

For that reason I think more thought on the philosophical level should go into how to implement anonymity in a way which it cannot easily be exploited by the bad guys or have unintended consequences. If corruption is why our governments are bad, enabling it is only going to make it worse. I think for myself what I want is the ability to buy something privately and not have what I buy be known, but I don't necessarily need my transactions hidden. Anyone can know my pseudonym spent X amount of Bitcoins, just so long as they don't know what I spent it on.

If people want to know what I spent it on they'll have to ask personally. That is private information. Secret is a different matter because then I wouldn't even be able to tell you. So how do we set things up so that if I wanted to help fight against corruption or clear myself in an investigation I can do so while also maintaining my anonymity? I think pseudo-anonymity would allow me to do it easiest because I could digitally sign my receipts detailing what I purchased and it could be released in the future to clear myself of any wrongdoing.

I think as long as the user has the ability to be pseudo-anonymous while also having the ability to do record keeping, then if there is an incident then Alice has detailed records of all her transactions and what she purchased which she can give to Gordon to prove her innocence. If she does not have this information then she cannot prove her innocence to Gordon and that is an existential danger to Alice. I'm interested in lowering the risk to Alice (who represents the user who is using Bitcoin for legitimate purposes). I don't want to help Mallory or Eve.



When we design these technologies we should look at use cases. In my thinking the user worth protecting in my use case models is Alice. Alice is the user who wants to use these technologies for legitimate purposes, who wants her privacy to buy books without Eve or Mallory knowing everything she buys without a warrant.

Gordan (the government agent) wants to investigate Mallory (the malicious user). if he has a warrant he should be able to go to Alice and get information from Alice to reconstruct the events. He will want to know what she purchased, when, what Bitcoin addresses she owns, etc. The addition of anonymity on the network puts an additional burden on Alice to keep records of everything she purchases. It also will make it much more likely that she'll be contacted by Gordon as part of an investigation.

The solution I offer is to make detailed record keeping easy and simple. These records should be good enough that if investigators do have a warrant that you can show that you're not a threat. This is necessary to protect Alice by lowering her risk of being falsely accused and it helps save Gordon time because he wont have to worry about as many false positives.

Mallory and Eve are the problem characters. Eve wants to wiretap everyone without a warrant or reason and just snoop around. Mallory wants to hack everyone or use the Bitcoin network for malicious purposes such as pursuit of political power, as part of a crime network, or perhaps a government plot or conspiracy.

Alice justs wants to be able to buy books and not have everyone know what book she's buying and when. If there is a warrant Alice is willing to provide the information to clear herself and prove she's not involved with terrorism. The point here is that any design has to make it easy for the user to deal with different plausible scenarios. The default user is Alice, but Mallory or Gordon could also be users of the Bitcoin network.

The idea I have is to empower Alice to collect and store her own digital fingerprint and digital trail. This trail could be useful if she's ever questioned by Gordon. It should have as much or as little detail as deemed necessary to legally clear herself and the amount of detail in the records should be set by Alice but it is clear to me that there can be no invisible transactions in a secure system.

The transactions have to be recorded somewhere by someone. It does not have to be recorded by Eve though. So when you take transactions off the public ledger, in my opinion you must record transactions on a private ledger of your own. This means Alice can have anonymous transactions, but she's going to have to keep detailed records of account of each of these transactions, because someday she's may have to explain those transactions. The assumption people have is that Alice will be able to have anonymous transactions without any added responsibility, that is very unlikely. In my opinion it means more responsibility on Alice.

It's going to reach a point eventually where if Alice cannot explain every transaction by providing her private ledger to Gordon during the investigation, that she could be jailed. As a result it may become just as important to backup your transactions and digital details as it is to backup your wallet. Right now it's all handled by Bitcoin itself so no one is forced to religiously record every transaction they make.

Has to be done though. What is there to hide when moving that kind of money?

5000 Bitcoins is not a whale. 10,000 Bitcoins is a whale.

Wrong. The smart people will buy AM as LC goes up x10.  This way they get their profit and then into AM where prices should be temporarily low.

ActM has no future. You heard it from me.