Even if true. 

"The announcement occurred when the ability to send wire transfers to Mt. Gox had ended on Friday.  Perfect timing for maximum damage over the weekend."

Either Pirate is the worlds largest largest idiot and so badly blundered the announcement in such a way that 35% of the purchasing power of his investors funds was annihilated before he even began repayment .... or it was intentional.

Oh and idiots tend not to acquire a sum of 500K BTC.

Exactly.

Ponzi, no ponzi it is a large portion of the float. 

Now if you are right and they have long since been sold you can buy with confidence at this price and profit from the fear.  The market is going to be in fear mode for the next week.  Fear that Pirate will tank the market (to repay his investors with devalued coins) and fear that many of his investors will sell BTC the split second they get coins because they only had coins because it was the only way into this HYIP.

In a week or two either those fears will be founded or unfounded and the market will settle down.

A 51% attack wouldn't manifest itself as a increasing in hashing power.  The attacker will be hashing an alternate chain.  So either the attacker was previously hashing the main chain in which case you would see a massive drop in hashing power or the attacker was never contributing to the main chain in which case there would be no change in hashing power.

Actually it is Bitcoin3, 50% better than the non-existent Bitcoin2.  Seriously where do people get this nonsense from?

Hmm.  after you posted I check again and it went away.  Weird.  This has happened in the past too. 

Because the Satoshi client likely SHOULDN'T be used by most users.  As Bitcoin continues to grow and diversify the reference client will increasingly only be used by miners, merchants, service providers, and hardcore (technically capable) users.   Trying to make it light and friendly is counter productive.   The bitcoind portion of the reference client is used by our company (and many others).  The reference client needs to be stable, secure, and provide an example for other implementations.  We should be encouraging DIVERSITY in clients not trying to create the single "uber client"  which is everything to all users.  

While it isn't my call I think three things probably need to happen over time:
1) The reference client needs to stop being called "the bitcoin client".  I use the term Satoshi client or reference client in everyday language.  The developers using the term Bitcoin client creates an implied sense that this is THE CLIENT and increasingly it is the worst choice for new casual users.

2) The satoshi client should be given less prominence on bitcoin.org.  All clients should be considered peers.  The bitcoin.org website should deal with the protocol and provide access to all clients on an equal basis.  Maybe management of bitcoin.org should be handled by someone who isn't involved in the development of the Satoshi client.

3) It would also be useful if the Satoshi client was refactored into three independent components:

* the library (which could be used by other developers to build alternative clients without rebuilding the low end code).  This would prevent a lot of reinventing the wheel and keep various clients on the same core codebase.  A change to the library could be easily integrated into new version of alternative clients. 

* the node - providing high level abstraction of the non-wallet portions of the client.  Has no concept of wallets, user interface, etc.   It receives commands from client(s) and communicates with the network.  Runs as a daemon or windows service 24/7 in the background.  (Note: electrum server is essentially a non-reference implementation of "the node").

* the client/GUI - communicates with a node (either locally or remotely) to facilitate the actions of the user.  Has no direct connection to the bitcoin network instead it sends command to "the node".

Currently the reference client is all three major components tightly integrated together which makes extending it very difficult.  If other developers do extend it for custom implementations it becomes a continually challenge to keep that fork compatible with changes made to the satoshi client codebase.   Tight integration between these major components stifles alternatives and results in a lot of "reinventing the wheel".

Anyone else getting "IP temporarily blocked due to too many requests" on blockchain.info?

I only manually use the site and then only a couple times an hour at post so the block has to be a mistake.
Just wondering if this happens to anyone else?

This forum isn't Bitcoin, just like the Satoshi client isn't Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is larger than that. The current user base of Bitcoin is relatively small, in time it will grow and fragment.   Much like for a very long time almost all users used the Satoshi client and now an increasing percentage use alternatives,  as Bitcoin grows it will diversify.  The is not "internet forum" yet millions of people user the internet. 

I like to remind people Bitcoin is in beta.  The people who can't look beyond the viewpoint of individuals (who aren't Bitcoin) to see the potential of Bitcoin likely shouldn't be using Bitcoin ...  at this point in time.  Nothing lost.   In 10-20 years, you will have people using the Bitcoin platform (either directly or indirectly) who have never mined anything, have no understanding of cryptography, never used the Satoshi client, and don't even know bitcointalk.org exists.  

sron has to be the scammer with the lowest ROI ever.

12 hours and still begging to fractional bitcoins.   Hell if worked 12 hours at McDonalds even with taxes and exchange fees he probably would have at least 4 or 5 BTC by now.

No.

At 11.50 your order executes and becomes a market order.  Market orders enter the queue in the order they are received.  That puts your "sell 100 BTC @ market" order in the queue behind the unexecuted portion of the manipulators sell order plus any stop-losses higher than yours plus anyone who manually panic sold ahead of you. 

So while your order may execute at $11.50 the manipulator gets to sell @ $11.50 and $11.00 and $10.99 until his entire massive sell order is exhausted.  Then the sell orders of everyone who had a higher stop and manually put in panic orders execute.  All those are at market so they are eating away at the bid side of the market.  The $10.99 bids get matched, then the $10.80, the $8.00, the $7.50, the $6.00. 

Lets say all the market orders before you drive the price down to $4.82.  Your order is finally at the top of the queue.  You "sell 100 BTC @ market" order executes and you get $4.82 per BTC.  Maybe that is the bottom.  Maybe there are other stopped sales which drive it down to $3.00 or $2.00 but eventually all the stops are executed. 


So how happy would you be if BTC was $13.00 and you had an $11.50 stop loss.  So manipulator with 200K coins drove the price down to $4.82 where you sold your coins and seconds (not weeks or months but seconds later) the price was back at $13.00.  Now flip it around.  If you could with minimal risk makes 20% profit in a day off fools setting stop losses would you?  If you wouldn't do you honestly think nobody on the planet would?

Stealing is a crime.  Period.  Most countries don't define what can or can't be stolen.  


If you steal a potato it is a crime.  If you steal a beanie baby it is a crime.  If you seal a sack of aluminum cans heading to the recycling center it is a crime.

Please point out a statute that lists by item which can be stolen without it being a crime.   

The law doesn't work that way, it never has.  Imagine how stupid it would be if the the law did work that way.  
"Buddy I got a gun; give me your cellphone.  No not your wallet.  You think I am stupid?   I am not going down for robbery.  Just the cellphone.  Stealing a cellphone isn't a crime (yet)".

Maybe he already did.  Last time I heard countries without extradition treaties are part of the intertubes.  Some of them even have nice beaches

The reward is halved (technically right shifted) every 210,000 blocks. The date is based on an estimate of when we hit 210,000 blocks.  A large increase in hash power will temporarily increase the rate of block generation so that it is faster than one block per ten minutes and any period where block generation rate is faster than one per ten minutes will move the date forward.  However the network adjusts difficulty every 2016 blocks so even increasing the global hashrate by a factor of 3x would only cause a small change in the date.  A couple hundred blocks would be hashed much faster and then the network difficulty would adjust and despite having 4x the hashing power block generation would be back to roughly one per ten minutes.  The closer we get to the date the less any potential hashrate increase (or decrease) will affect the date.  

At this point you could say Dec 4 +/- 1 week with a high level of confidence.  

Why is the OP asking for it?  Others have asked for it in the past.  IIRC MtGox rep said they would consider it.  I figure eventually if enough people ask for it (bad idea or not) they will give people what they "want".

Why does MtGox allow you to have an account with huge amounts of USD & BTC with no 2 factor authentication and a weak password?  
Seems like a bad idea but obviously people "want" the ability to create accounts and load them with insane amounts of money very poorly protected.

Would 400K Bitcoins be worth disappearing?

It wouldn't involve hacking.

Sell @ market 90,000 BTC.  Blam your stop loss along with hundreds of other orders involving thousands of BTC execute.  The manipulator waits till selling pressure abates, buy back 90K BTC at the bottom and pockets the difference.  Bitcoin doesn't yet have the market depth and breadth to avoid manipulation like that.  Normally someone trying to cause a panic sell has to hope people are watching and fearful enough to join in and create selling pressure.  With stop losses they simply have to press a button.

Eventually MtGox will offer it and a couple weeks later there will be a rant thread from all the noobs  with stop losses who got raped in a 2 second flash crash.

No and if they did (strangely lots of people "wan't" it) you wouldn't want it the first time a manipulator simply sold to force all the stop-losses to execute. 
The chart would look like a straight vertical down and straight vertical up.  You probably wouldn't even notice except your coins would be gone and at the worst possible price.

Mandatory fees on low priority tx likely would be lowered to be ~1 cent IF Bitcoin rose > $100 (just as they were when BTC rose above $20) .  

Still please point out to me where online you can spend $1 and pay less than 5 cents in fees?   Even at 5 cents per transaction bitcoin is cheaper than any digital payment platform on the planet.

So IF mandatory fee wasn't lower
AND
Bticoin rose to >$100
AND
user was unwilling to wait for a high priority transaction
AND
the mandatory fees on low priority tx weren't lowered
AND
the user wanted to spend only $1
AND
no off blockchain solution for micro tx existed
....
Bitcoin would still be the cheapest solution.  

BTW "cash" isn't free ask any successful business that deal in cash. Between the deposit fees, disbursement fees, shrinkage (employee theft), armored car service, risk of robbery/loss, and counterfeits cash isn't free.  Even if it was free it still can't be used online.

No it won't you just have utterly unrealistic expectations of a transaction system.  There is a real cost for processing transaction.  Currently the subsidy hides a lot of that but in time the true cost will need to be borne by the participants.  Switching to a different coin doesn't magic that away.

You seem to think if in some hypothetical future if the avg bitcoin transaction costs a penny it is the death blow to Bitcoin.   Compared to what?   Noting else even comes close.  Even centralized payment networks have significantly higher costs.  Dwolla?  $0.25.  CC/PP? $0.30 + 3%  Moneybookers? 1% Liberty Reserve? 2% ACH? ~$0.15  Hell mailing a check costs ~$0.50.  MPesa 1% to 3% (min ~$0.05).


Bitcoin was never going to be free.  Never.  Satoshi paper talks about low cost transactions and Bitcoin can deliver on that.
Free* is just something you made up in your mind and the economics don't support it, they never have and they never will.




* also includes fees so negligibly small as to essentially be free as even billions couldn't support the network.

Would be the perfect zero risk arbitrage.  Free coins as it were.