Since I've been a Coinbase user, it's seemed to me that they have tracked pretty well with the BTCChina exchange.  It would make some sense as siblings are principles in both adventures.

Looks pretty clear to me that China (as a population situated in an economic sphere)  have taken over at the reigns of the Bitcoin gravy train.

Anyone know how to write 'bitcoin' in simplified Chinese?  I would like to be able to recognize that string.  "二进制数据硬币" ?

 edit:  Playing around with google translate, I like this better: "从二进制数据的一个元素命名的硬币"

If Mt. Gox wants to get my $5k intl wire monkey off their back, they can cancel it and return the number of BTC I sold in order to raise that amount of fiat at the time.  That would be at around $100/BTC iirc.

If Mt Gox autonomously cancels my accepted wire, I'll feel justified in holding them accountable for damages.  Whether I take action or not I don't know.  Depends on if it is practical do to, and if I've got nothing better to do.

Who gives a fuck how long it takes to get money into a bank account?  Only people who are living completely hand-to-mouth as far as I can see.  For my part I would be perfectly happy if it took several weeks as long as it is reliable and predictable.

So far I have made a small experimental sale and a somewhat larger one in the $3k range.  I very much appreciated the unambiguous and easy to find estimates of when the funds would be available.  It was like 4 or 5 days.  In the fist case my money was actually available the next day.  In the second case, the money was available several days before their estimated 'by' date.

You attack me, then accuse me of stalking you?

You have me on your ignore list yet have taken the time to count '36 posts' where I allegedly cause you some poorly defined damage?

What a bozo and a loser you are!  I hope that you can somehow succeed in running a worthwhile company but it's seriously doubtful to say the honest truth.

I think it more likely that the government is planning to play the lower class (now 40M on foodstamps or some crazy thing) against the middle class.

I think that through austerity the government will induce riots and lawlessness.  At the same time, there will be bail-in to siphon the middle class savings to the banks.  Normally the middle class would be livid, but if the middle class relies on the government for protection against the rioting 'untouchables', there will be enough leverage to molify them and keep them (the middle class) under control.  That is the reason for the riot gear: to provide a credible deterrent against threats from the lower classes.

In such an engineering effort it is pretty important to understand the social relationships between individuals.  Most threats of any real consequence will be a result of a group of people.  Being able to nip problems in the bud will involve tracking down a group of co-conspirators.  I think that that is why the focus on drawing up social network graphs as described in one of the many Snowden releases.

Obviously these are just my own conspiracy theories/hypothesis.  I cannot take original credit for it, but I don't think I have yet run across such a thesis described exactly as so.

I wonder if the LAX guy liked Bitcoin?  I wonder if he was represented on this forum?

I'll put the odds at 50% that he had some exposure to Bitcoin, and 5% that he read this forum, and 1% that he has an account here.

Hell, he might even have use BTC to obtain his weapons and ammo I suppose.  I'll place the odds of that at 0.2%

Whatever the case, I'll place high odds that if he had anything to do with Bitcoin it will be loudly reported, and somewhat lesser odds that it will be reported as such even if he did not.

I'll not rule out that the whole event was a fabrication of sorts.  The more I look into the Sandy Hook and Boston marathon stuff, the more fishy a lot of it looks, though it is also the case that a lot of the observations of the 'truther analysts' are very easy to find alternate explanations for and these folks are not very good at identifying them and weighing them fairly.

I think that the generations and the principle of 'regression to the mean' has pretty much nixed that for us old-timers.  We being recognized generally by having Caucasian features.

We have a strong contingent of more recent arrivals however, and this spark can be observed statistically in some of their behaviors.  Work ethic, propensity for education, etc.

After a bail-in, 'missing' depends on one's frame of reference.

A good trick is to appropriate money to leverage efficiently during a devaluation, then give it back eventually.  The victim is ass-raped, but ends up relieved and thankful to the assailant anyway.

Another cool trick is to sit on funds until the creditors vanish for some reason (e.g., lack if interest, death, etc.)

These things can work at both a local and national level.

I believe that it makes sense that people who unite for a particular purpose might wish to create and maintain a unique crypto-currency.  In this manner, the value of the existence of the mechanism of exchange could accrue to the union (using the term generically.)  These unions do not necessarily need to be rooted in geographic space in the same way that nations are currently.

If such a scenario developed, there would still be need for a 'neutral' currency to balance between them.  Bitcoin could fall into this role if it does not pick up baggage that renders it to sub-optimal.

Makes a lot more sense to absorb a crypto-currency which is already well entrenched and has built up credibility and value.  As an open source project, Bitcoin as a system belongs to anyone who is smart enough, capable enough, and rich enough to support the network as a peer...at least these days while there are no jurisdictional constraints effecting it's function.

@vrhax:  Interesting stuff.  Thanks for it.  Couple of comments/questions.

I'm a big fan of providing good feedback, but I can also see an argument for being a little circumspect with information about why, exactly, a flag was triggered.  This of course because it would be useful information for someone who is genuinely guilty of attempted fraud to adjust their methods.  How is this normally dealt with?  Is there a sort of a financial industry standard?

I suggest that it might be difficult to pick an all around number for false positives because some environments have a higher incidence of fraud and generally more persons who are proficient at it.  Bitcoin is likely one of these.  I could see it being the case that a system which got, say, 5% false positives might let an excessive number of false negatives through.  Thoughts?

For the week I've been watching Coinbase (which corresponds to the time I've been a customer) it seems to me that they've been closes to BTCChina.

My first sale and somewhat experimental sale fell in a nice mid zone, but my later and non-trivial one came out closer to Bitstump.  sadface.

It would be a real shame mostly because it does not have to be.

If an attacker who was a threat to a large majority of stakeholders somehow managed to pull off a 51%, all that would have to happen is that the system would freeze for a while while the situation is dealt with.  Nobody holding value would lose anything except for perhaps a few unfortunate souls who had a transaction underway during the final block.

I think that a majority of users could understand and be fairly calm about such a think if they were prepared for what could and could not come of a superior resource based attack (or carrier protocol attack which seems to me more likely.)  If people went into a mass panic because they were not prepared then the fallout could be orders of magnitude worse.

Damn good idea actually.  I gotta wonder if it is not to late for one or both of them already though.

I would expect that by the time what you mention becomes a problem (if ever) some sort of a plugable proof-of-work mechanism would be developed.

Long before that I would expect the makeup of the true peers in the ecosystem to shift in a variety of ways.  This group will define how Bitcoin actually works.  If consensus on how proof-of-work (or more generally 'ledger locking' for lack of a better term) cannot be reached, I'd expect the solution to fragment (fork) with almost all fragments retaining the existing blockchain as a source of truth for value.  If this happens I would expect that most of the fragments would dry up and blow away.  Perhaps all but one.

The really big question in my mind how big the pool of potential peers will be when this 'blow-up' happens (if it happens.)  That would be a function of the transaction rate (and it's summation over time.)

FIFY

(I'm joking.  I don't think Paymium would hold unnecessarily or sell the docs.  Or even that they would get hacked and lose data...again...  But one never knows.  It's possible, and musing about such things often leads to a delightful engagement with my new found Francophone friends.)

Fair point.  The best way to explore that would be to identify if it is systemic.  Hard to do without a random sample of user's providing data though.  Alas.

Sounds nice, but you are both probably somewhat wrong.  The U.S. continues to effectively enforce certain constraints on the intelligence apparatus which they need to work around.  And there are a fair number of lawmakers and other members of the government who are not on-board with complete totalitarianism.

We are under an altered legal state since 9/11 and, like the debt ceiling, it gets extended (by executive order in this case) as needed and is likely to continue to do so forever.  But this state is not sufficient to provide complete flexibility in operations.  It is possible (and I think likely) that further declarations will be made which will open up new flexibility in terms of internal population management, and prudent engineering would be to set up to exploit these flexibilities if called upon to do so.  That is probably why the NSA conducted an long running 'experiment' to see if they could track all almost all persons whereabouts at almost all times using the commercial communications networks.

Whether these barges in question are at all related to various experiments that various leaderships would like to perform is a fair avenue to explore.  If the barges even exist at all, that is, and I've yet to even look into that.

Thx for the pointer.  I actually have been following it.

It remains unclear in my mind exactly what types of things can trigger a cancellation, and I would dearly like to know.

It is a completely valid hypothesis that cancellations are nothing more than a stop-loss on Coinbase trades gone sour, but the argument against it is that it would make little sense for an outfit which is well capitalized to ruin their reputation for a few peanuts on a 10BTC trade.

A hypothesis which strikes me as more likely is that Coinbase relies on various triggers and flags which are generated 'upstream' in the bowels of the USD financial services system.  This is a much more interesting area to me generally and is why I am keen to discover any reliable information about these cancellations that I can.

It occurred to me the other day when I was talking to someone about it that it is quite possible that Karpeles is simply not a person with a lot of potential for handling various kinds of loads.  He might simply be swamped and confused and floundering about quite a bit.  That would explain some of the observations that various people have made.

My basic assumption was that Mark was a clever and capable guy since he landed at the top of a fairly powerful organization.  But when one thinks about it, when he obtained Mt. Gox from the original creator it was nothing near what it later became.  People from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of capabilities could have decided that a fantasy card trading outfit who adapted their software to deal with a new and tiny crypto-currency was worth obtaining.  Especially if they had some spare cash kicking around or for some reason to need to move some which is why a lot of the early adopters probably got into things.