Baloney.

Mike has shown probably the highest level grasp of the system and foresight about things then almost anyone to date.  Much beyond Gavin's, for instance.  This dates back to before my interest in the system which happened in mid 2011.

Early on in some thread which was musing about how to destroy Bitcoin, I posited that an effective way might be to grow it and burn it out of it's (happily still) current phase as a distributed system.  Everything tells me that Mike's efforts have been to promote this outcome.  Unfortunately or fortunately depending on one's outlook, this is not going well.  The system is naturally moving to an 'off-chain' form because that is how it remains safe and scalable.  The low and defensible transaction rate remains sufficient to service the load even without 'excessive' fees.

Ultimately people vote with the codebase they choose to run.  At this point I'll be very surprised if a code fork and development team fracture does not happen.

The big questions in my mind are:

 - will the transaction rate be increased enough to block large classes of users from running full nodes in time?

 - what will be the disposition of the Chinese would-be peers?

If I were doing strategy for the Foundation, I'd be actively courting the large players in the Chinese sphere and possibly the government as well.  I'm not, and I'm very hopeful that the Foundation fails.  Thus, I hope that the Chinese operators and users think for themselves and don't necessarily let those who wish to centralized the solution dominate the direction.

This was exactly my biggest concern when the idea of the foundation was initially floated, and I stated it.  Fungus grows in the dark.  As it happened, the level of opacity is far worse than I even dreamed it might be.

In order to protect my own ass I need to understand the way things are progressing and I'm not going to buy a seat at the foundation just to do this because I feel that they are not acting in the best interests of what I'd like to see Bitcoin become.

Actually, this (misconception) points out very clearly why Bitcoin/Gold are on the same side opposite modern day fiat.

Modern day fiat monetary systems are almost all 'debt based'.  The currency is actually created by someone going into debt and extinguished by someone going out of debt through one means or another.  The paradox is that if there were not debt, there would be no money.  This explains, among other things, why pretty much everyone and every corporate and government is in debt.

Bitcoin and PM's (physically held) are not created this way.  They have no 'counter-party'.  Nobody can default and make the holder lose their value.

Say, Phin, what is you status on the Instawallet thing these days?  Last I remembered Boussac was (very childishly) not giving you professional service on the basis of your insulting him or something.  Were you made whole in the end (by your definition of it at least?)

Totalitarian law and draconian punishment is possible, and history is rife with examples, but it's not something that is possible to flip on like a light switch.  Nor is it without it's own whole set of problems.  If you punish to many people, you will be pissing of a much larger portion of society who has a friend or family member who was unfairly treated.  At that point you lose the cooperation of society and losing control is only a matter of time.

The 'powers that be' are, I believe, perfectly capable of making rational and far-sighted policy decisions.  They will typically choose the least bad course of action.  It is a mistake to underestimate one's adversaries, and generally speaking the people who are in positions of power did not get there by being stupid.

The more people I meet, the more it seems to me that humans generally, irrespective of race and/or national origin, have a pretty uniform distribution in terms of their methods of thinking.  There is kind of a 'fat middle' of people who can be pushed into a mushy general orientation by culture and state influenced education, but also a contingent of outliers who are just sort of in-born with characteristics that put them in a certain non-standard frame of reference.

I'd say that American culture generally is better than average at allowing the outliers to be themselves.  In other words, the culture is less constraining and less effective at molding the 'fat middle' contingent than many.

It does seem to me though that a pretty fair percentage of humans do have an ugly side.  There is relatively little concern among our population for the people we kill in the Middle East, for instance.  To some extent a lot of people are simply to pre-occupied, but there are plenty of people here to either just don't care or actually like that we do it.  Some of this has to do with our mainstream media to be sure.

Finally.

BTW, how's that police investigation coming along?

And dija figure out what your take on the unclaimed wallets ended up being?  At the rate Bitcoin is going up it should pay all you guy's salaries for years, eh?

Ironically, I never thought I'd buy another ounce of silver but wishing to re-balance a bit due to increased BTC valuations, I may in fact do just that.  Looks like a screaming deal these days to me (though I liked $4.50 better...)

Please do be a little bit careful about this.  Boussac was eventually DOX'd in spite of the general care Bitcoin-Central took to hide their identities.  Or at least he gave some name for his presentation in San Jose earlier this year.

To the best of my knowledge the operators of Bitstamp have not been identified.  As is the case with ~davout, one of the operators of Bitstamp is has admin capabilities on this board (~hazek) but that is not a guarantee of easy tracking should it come to that, and certainly should not be used as an indication of honesty or integrity.  Sometimes I feel it is the opposite in fact.

For my part, I only do business with outfits that don't try to obscure the identities of their principles.  Currently I patronize Coinbase and Blockchain.info in part because of this.

Man, Peter sound but-hurt.  I almost feel a little sorry for him.

The guy at least gets that 'one Bitcoin' is just a matter of setting a decimal point so he beats about 90% of people, but that's definitely a 'thinnest kid at fat camp' sort of a thing.  He has yet to put a little arithmetic into the problem though.

Yo, Pete:  Try this:

  Fiat: backed by law.
  Gold: backed by physics.
  Bitcoin: backed by mathematics.

Gold and Bitcoin are very similar when compared to fiat.

BTW, it is true that Bitcoin has all kinds of potential failure modes.  Any smart person will have a plan to diversify and stay diversified as we ride.  The trouble is that you clearly have no clue about what any of the failure modes are.  You should shut up about it and watch from the sidelines until you do or you will keep sounding like a jackass...mainly because you are being a jackass.

The general solution to that would probably to to whack the mole so hard that the other moles don't want to play.

I cannot judge the conditions under which such a strategy might be employed and thus the effectiveness of the strategy.  There are way to many potential factors and scenarios.  It is certainly worth tossing into the mix as a potential threat when it comes to long term planning though.  IMHO anyway.

Generally I don't see a big surprise here.  There are people I don't get along with at all but would trust relatively highly in financial matters.  Similarly there are people I get along with well who I would not trust with a $10 bill.  I'm talking about in real life more than in cyberspace of course, but the same basic principle applies even here.

True.  IIRC, the MyBitcoin theft had not gone down by the time I got interested and I believe that was one of the first.

An interesting difference is that I don't think anyone was really buying 'Tom Williams' story even though it was a lot more credible and inventive than what the current crop of scammers bother with.  Now adays a scumbag can write off a theft to an old e-mail account and a lot of people buy it, although I suspect that there is more sock puppetry going on these days.

None of them even take the minimal steps that I do to protect my own stash.  And they are running a business?  In the notably hostile world of Bitcoin?

I'm sorry, but one needs to be a world class simpleton not to suspect that most if not all of these things are straight-up thefts.

That is one complaint I've not had against Mt. Gox.  They've handled everything except my wire quickly.  Even the 'we expect several weeks' lie came quite rapidly.

I also would not expect Mt. Gox to blather about the identity of the 4k BTC customer to jerk-offs on bitcointalk.org.  I would, however, expect them to cooperate with the Australian police quickly and completely.  So TF's non-sense reason for not reporting the crime is even more laughable.  Anyone who believes that is a complete chump, and those who profess to believe it are probably sorry-ass sock puppets.

Peter 'failed loser' Schiff again:

  http://www.cnbc.com/id/101192216

edit:  Oops.  Didn't see the above.  Sorry.  Anyway, one has to wonder if Schiff has lost his customers more with his bets on the Euro or by talking them out of taking a BTC position an order of two of magnitude ago.

I don't know the likelihood, but I would not expect a significant clamp-down on unauthorized currencies absent a crisis in fiat currency frameworks as well.  The latter seems to me to be the most likely inducement for the former as there would be an enormous amount of collateral damage which would be best avoided unless it is the least bad option.

I mention it because to gauge the likely trajectory of Bitcoin (and related efforts) under an attack like this, the disposition of the mainstream monetary framework would probably be playing the largest factor.  And I wouldn't anticipate it being all peaches-n-cream in USD land either.

Your scenario seems plausible.  But quickly people would realize that the value store in the blockchain is safe (if potentially locked) and many smart people would be working overtime to circumvent the attack.  I'm sure the value of BTC and confidence in the system would plummet, but not to anywhere near zero, and the effects would be transient.

In order for the scenario to be more robust and durable, and regime of monitoring and attack would need to be implemented, or emplaced as part of a broader initiative of global network management.  I don't rule this out because there are lots of things which could drive such an effort.  Distributed crypto-currencies are probably a minor (but potentially growing) aspect of the threat mosaic.

Looks to me like the guy is just more comfortable maintaining control of other people's BTC rather than giving the control up to either the rightful owner or anyone else.  I guess he just wants to keep them safe and protected.  I mean even a rightful owner can make mistakes and lose control of their own BTC and that would be bad.  Strateman is a knowledgeable and skilled security professional so it probably makes more sense that he retains control of things.  In his mind.