i feel like these kinds of videos are what bring people to bitcoin in the first place

People on the Endless-sphere forum did think that it might be KnightMB because he's located in Franklin and had previously acquired BTC under dubious circumstances.  They posted that in one of their locked forums on 6 September and the raid happened on 14 September. I have no doubt whatsoever that the SS chased down any and all tip-offs they received even if they seemed tenuous at first glance.

This guy had a way of pissing people off.  It's possible that he pissed off someone who just happened to be in possession of a USB drive he'd discarded and they just waited for an opportunity to use it to set him up, but it seems more likely that when this story broke people he'd pissed off previously decided to contact investigators and say "you might want to take a look at this guy, he had 371,000 BTC and now he says he's broke".  Making such a tip-off didn't require people to actually believe that he'd sent the ransom demands - it only required a desire to make his life difficult (which is what the Endless-sphere posters were hoping to do when they talked about reporting him to the IRS).

If a flash drive of mine turned up somewhere, my first thought wouldn't be that someone had gone through my garbage to get it.  It would be either that I'd left it somewhere by accident or that I'd loaded stuff onto it for someone and given it to them.  In order for someone to set KnightMB up with that flashdrive, they had to know of his association with Bitcoins.

I'll give it a shot. But my submission will be of my own idea. I don't think I can get my head/ass wrapped around your suggestions.

~Bruno K~

You don't need to look to Atlas.  The people over on Endless-sphere were extremely pissed off when they discovered he'd acquired the 371,000 BTC and were talking about reporting him to government agencies.  They almost certainly made his former employers aware that they'd been screwed over, too.  It's possible, and perhaps even likely, that people who already had a grudge against KnightMB contacted the SS to suggest him as a likely suspect when news of the Romney tax return thing broke.  

It is possible that someone from this message-board reported him.  Not everyone thought that the way he acquired his 371,000 BTC was "clever".

Yes. And the biggest mistake of joe23 was a fast confession But it was by the rules of the game. In real life if ever facing cops or even NSA is never confess of anything. The evidence can be very limited and indirect anyway. "I don't remember" and "I don't understand" is the best answers to give when questioned.

Well that's the end of that mag.

Totally agree !!  USD are Printed a lot faster than BTC are Generated !  Just this simple fact gives BTC a nice overlook for years to come !

We probably know only partial information. There might be some other stupid mistakes that have led cops to him. Most likely KnightMB is the guy who did this tax return hoax. I feel sorry for him because he made some stupid mistake.

This "silent hack" smells bullshit to me. And considering reward halving incoming, breakout in $15 range is quite possible.

I would say that OP planned on manipulating the market today with a robot or just large reserves, and it's working a little bit.  I'll check back in this thread if it goes above $20.

Most likely he offered collocation or hosting services that is the most difficult to recover after physical attack. Or sold internet access to neighbors.

If he is talking about Schutzstaffel then the date might be from mid 1930-ties to first half of 1940-ties 
There is much to do for security against such enemy as US government. UPS and encrypted connection to server in distant country is only few of things to be done right.For plumber it would be easy to buy new tools and such and start working again. For someone working in IT the time needed to recover after attack from cops can take months even if all equipment is bought new right after the attack. It is no surprise he is asking for donations.

Though I agree with the rest of your argument, I don't agree with this statement. If we're talking riskiness (on a scale of 1 [least] to 5 [more] risk), then I'd scale it like this:
CPU - 1
GPU - 1
FPGA - 4
ASIC - 5

The reasoning behind this is because CPUs and GPUs can easily be used for other things besides mining. It was [is] super easy to just set up some software and mine with whatever current hardware you have in your system. Even if you invested quite a bit into GPUs specifically for mining, you can still quickly and easily resell the hardware when you're done with it because it serves secondary purposes.

In Brazil, the salary does not follow the real(and $Real) inflation in the past 20 years. So you need to work more and more (overtime) to buy the same things .
You acquisition power is going to the hole.

The country is growing up only by the credit and debit.
To buy a car/house/motorcycle/mountain bike/blender/steamer/pan you need credit card to parcel.
The house prices soared, something like 300%+ due to gov credit in 4 years.
Everyone is smiling.

But inflation/taxes is eating us alive and no one is seeing.

Assume a bowl of water with exactly 15 units of water in it.  You have a spoon (or ladle) removing 1 unit of water from the edge of the bowl. You scoop this water from as close to your right hand side of the bowl as possible.  Then you pour it out into the same bowl as close to your left hand side as possible.  How many times will you be able to perform this action before all the water piles up on the left hand side?  The problem you have is that the water continues to move over time filling in the area where you scooped it from other nearby areas and moving outward from where you dumped it to other nearby areas. So the right hand side of the bowl can continue to pay the left hand side indefinitely as much interest as needed.

Now the economy can be manipulated and individuals can suffer from that manipulation.  If all the areas near the right hand side of the bowl decided that they weren't going to give that side of the bowl any more water (essentially building a wall to prevent water flowing into that area), then eventually the right hand side would run out.  If the left hand side were to start hoarding and refuse to allow water to flow out (building another wall on the left hand side) then the left hand side would end up with more than most areas that are still participating in the economy.  But unless the left hand side is willing to spend some of that water into the economy of the bowl, it isn't going to be very useful to them.  An area in a bowl of water doesn't need to participate in the economy of the bowl to survive, but we humans generally need to participate in the economy around us for survival.

The way that Bitcoin deals with the situation of removing currency from the economy is to naturally end up using a smaller amount if bitcoin for the same type of transaction (delfation).  In the water bowl example, all of the participants end up using spoons that shrink over time getting smaller and smaller, so that they are moving ever smaller amounts of water in any given transaction.  This deals with both lost wallets (water spilled out of the bowl), and hoarding.

+1 http://brainwallet.org, paste the text in the passphrase field and it will generate a bitcoin address, then post it here so someone can time-stamp it with some coins.

#> sha256sum text.file
c23479892e2139b7cfec3f9cd517b32e14240c4b2b77465d94e958563169bee7  text.file

Bah.  I smell bullshit.

Send me a private message with your theory, or write your theory and SHA-256 hash it, then when your theory is fulfilled you'll post the text and instructions to hash it and verify the authenticity.

This is the Bitcoin Chart from bitcoincharts.com. I'm going to spend some time in this Episode to talk about Bitcoin seignorage but before we get to that I wanna do some technical analysis on the chart.

This is the lifetime chart of Bitcoin. You can see we started off at infinitesimal.. one cent or so and the runup to 30 plus, so that is a 3000-fold gain. It's still a spectacular gain, we're still at a thousand plus gain on the Bitcoin, so that's a very very large gain for the early adopters.

Now the question is going to become very important: how much accumulation and distribution has gone on since the early adopters came on and I think you'll see when we look down below it's actually been quite a bit.

The first indicator we have below here is the Volume. You can see this volume spike here [points to mid-November 2011 spike] of nearly 400,000 Bitcoins; that's going to be the equivalent of 4 Million Dollars at current prices or roughly a quarter of the market cap - I'm not sure what it is, the total is going to be 21 million, I think we're about halfway there. So neraly half the market cap turned over, and not nearly as much turned over when we had this big smack-down [points to 2011 crash] from the 32 price all the way down to the 2.50 dollars.

So there's a lot of volume that has come in, I will call this "accumulation". This is new buyers and a diversified base of new buyers coming in. The same sort of thing is happening recently.

Now you can see that on the next indicator: This is the "Accumulation Distribution Index". So you can see that this downtrend here [points to post-bubble downtrend], very very long downtrend from 32 down to 3, a good 90% decline in the price was accompanied by this decline [points to same timeframe on Acc/Dist Index indicator] in Accumulation and Distribution. So there was a large distribution at this point and then began the Accumulation with this gigantic buy spike [points to the 400K spike again].

Now what's interesting about this now is that you can see here at about May or so [points to May 2012 on Acc/dist index], actually June, we had a breakout in new highs in Accumulation. That did not at all correspond with a breakout into new prices [points to only slight increase in May/June 2012 on price chart], you can see new price highs were far far from them at around 6 or so with the accumulation breaking out.

So what does that mean, you can see we're kind of levelling off here [points to July through now on Acc/Dist indicator] at a very very high level of accumulation. It can mean a couple of things. The first thing is that the distribution of the base of the people who are accumulating Bitcoin is becoming much much broader and that may very well be the case. Or it can be the case as some have speculated and we will see that when we look at the story from teodesian that perhaps bitcoin has been infiltrated and it is being sold off on a slow rate. Now I've contended for a long time that if the Bitcoin is hacked, then the price will collapse to zero. That's not necessarily the case if it were hacked by a very very intelligent group of people. They could dilute the price over a period of time as the base grows. So this anomaly could be pointing to that. If this anomaly does not resolve itself either in a large crash in this chart [points to Acc/Dist chart] or a very large breakout in this chart [point to price chart] then tedesians theory may be true.

we are not seeing a price rise, we are seeing a rolling over here. But the last chart is very important and that's going to be the MACD and you can see we're actually negative and turn positive [points to current time on MACD indicator]. So this is going to be the first time since about this time here [point to price chart at mid February 2012] around 5 when we've crossed from negative into positive [points to MACD]. So if all this holds and if the bitcoin story is true and if Teodesian is wrong and the Bitcoin isn't the "hologram of a cryptocurrency" but is actually a true cryptocurrency then we will expect to see fairly soon a breakout into this price and a rise above 15 dollars.

And we'll talk to you next time.

BitHard

or

HardBits