IIRC, Mathew and Atlas had a 'thing' a while ago.  Late night rap sessions about what it's like to have mental problems or some such.  But they had a falling out and broke it off.  My conjecture is that they have similar psychological maladies, but Mathew is at his core a decent person whereas Ortega is a classic sociopathic dirtbag (who just happens to know libertarian philosophy backward and forward...)

Nice.  For a variety of reasons, I don't do 'bets' very much.  Mostly only when I can be sure I will win, and I tend to have a high bar for 'certainty'.  In this case I was pretty sure I would not win because I was pretty sure that there is no way in hell you could come up with the BTC even if you are crazy enough to not welch.  Were I to have decided to bet for some reason I would have studied the OP most carefully and may or may not have spotted your trick.  Since you don't seem like the kind of guy who would be in with pirateat40, and are probably to bright to trust him even if you thought you had info, I was pretty sure that you would be pulling something along these lines.

In my opinion your act was clearly a 'scam' (as much as I appreciate it) and you should wear the 'scammer' tag.  Hopefully with as much grace as bannanula.  I think it would be kinda cool of a staff member of this forum had a scammer tag.  It would demonstrate the open-minded and honest nature of the forum, and would have a legitimate benefit of warning people to be careful when doing business with you.

I prefer 'lezzy fare'.  It's just about as meaningless as 'laissez-faire', and more attention grabbing to normal folk.

$10.  Wow!  Did you get any conditional statements for that kind of green?

To answer your question, though, hopefully one day providers of trinkets such as gold will also be fluent in Bitcoin.  So, you give you programmer (or organ donor or whatever) a code which he can redeem at his local shop.  As long as such establishments are not wrecked by the government sponsored brown-shirts the development of such solutions would be a big step forward for Bitcoin.

MM is an inveterate troll...that's why I like him/her.

Of course hybridization tends to provoke the expression of positive characteristics, among them general intelligence.  Inbreeding is the opposite...it tends to produce racist scum who's populations are not self sustaining.

I missed this, but I've not followed the whole pirate goings-around very closely.  But if the guy controls 20k BTC, that's pretty good...considering he couldn't come up with a single fucking BTC a year ago to pay off someone who did some art work for him.  That earned him a scammer label on this forum, but it was retracted when the general consensus was that he's generally a well meaning soul who likely just suffers some mental issues.

The above is just as I recall things so it should be take with a grain of salt.

That would represent a giant fail for Bitcoin IMHO, though as always I believe that anyone dabbling with Bitcoin should still expect a very real possibility of a 100% loss.  They can reduce this risk by taking profits if they are lucky enough to see them however.  I'll do so if/when we see something around $100/BTC.


I think that Sinclair is on record as expecting a lot more (e.g., "Alf's numbers") in the event of a crisis so I'm taking his new(-ish) $3500 as a status quo growth estimate.  It's less than one more doubling and we've already seen several so it seems eminently possible and something of a yawn to me.

As for silver, the most recent thing I read was some article exploring peak production issues.  With the associated reality that

 - much silver production is a by-product of other industrial metals mining which would be effected by an economic down-turn,
 - silver has it's own industrial uses and is almost irreplaceable for some of these including ones in the energy sector,
 - silver can shape-shift between industrial and monetary uses due to it's history
 - inventory is almost certainly pretty thin and much reclamation has already occurred
 - is way under it's historic gold ratio.

I could see silver going quite ballistic.  Much more than gold (but not as much as Bitcoin which I believe is potentially hugely undervalued at this time.)

I doubt that even a distinctly 'better' system would take over unless Bitcoin itself became thoroughly corrupted and useless though the latter could happen if the idea of crypto-currencies really caught on but the distribution of wealth in Bitcoin-land was such that very few people could obtain and use them.  After all, other crypto-currencies would (or could) have the same major strength insofar as they are kept solid via cryptography so the main thing differentiating Bitcoin from a fork is that users are fickle and this impacts value.  The core team's skill and disposition will probably be the biggest factor in determining if the corruption thing happens.  My current sense is that at this point Bitcoin has the mindshare and distribution to retain command of significant value in most circumstances.  If anything I would expect Bitcoin to 'back' other crypto-currencies as something of a reserve currency.

I'm actually kinda hoping for a world where different organizations issue their own crypto-currencies backed at least in part by user-support for various things which the organization 'stands for'.  So, for instance, I choose to use a currency issued by my local community because I like the community and wish to support it, and because a good deal of my spending is done locally.  I might also use 'EFF' currency because I like the work they do.  If I want something which someone is selling in a currency I don't normally use, I'll go to an exchange.  But this is all something of a dream-world to me and I don't really think it'll go down that way.

For all the carrying on about how convenient Bitcoin is and how illiquid gold is, I was able to use Krugerrands to solve a cash flow issue with a little planning and part of a day of visiting a couple of institutions.  I also did not need to provide someone who individually and as a group has a severely hampered record of data security with all of the info a hacker could dream of wanting in order to steal my identity.  I think I let my coin dealer transcribe some info from my DL was all it took.

I'm hanging onto my BTC until such a day as it is commonplace to do Bitcoin transactions face to face, though they are useful today for charitable giving and for purchasing certain services.  The exchanges are for buying BTC...until such time as they require more info than I want to entrust with them for doing so.

The important number for me is when, if ever, Bitcoin will become something I don't wish to support due to it's impact on the various societies around the world...as is the case today for the USD for instance.  I suspect that that could happen within the period of time when I will be needing to be actively shifting my assets around.  That is to say, within roughly the next quarter century or so.  Of course if a weakness in the system rears it's head than that day could come sooner.

I'm glad that we PM bulls were able to help save you from such a precarious financial position.  You can thank us later

It does not make sense for anyone to send any BTC anywhere.  The perp has no particular reason to do anything except what might strike his/her/their fancy no matter who send what BTC where.  That is unless he/she/they had more goodies and wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of paying him/her/them off as a setup for the next go around.  If so, though, they should have signed the note, and I didn't notice that in the pastebin.

On a tangent, it sounds like Romney saved a LOT more than a messily million $$ by cheating on his taxes all these years.  If he's dumb enough to trust a criminal I would think that the thousand large would be well worth the lesson vis-a-vis whom to entrust with one's data.  (Not, say, PWC )

Although it did for me to some extent, I cannot imagine that the effect is more than negligible given the size of the respective markets.  In my case I continued to accumulate physical PM's with only a short break to take the Bitcoin position I wanted to have.

As we've discussed previously, the opposite is not true and a tiny shift to Bitcoin from PM positions (or their growth) could have a massive impact on Bitcoin.  That, among other things, is why I hold a certain amount of hope for 'jackpot' returns on my Bitcoin speculation.  The longer Bitcoin proves itself as a solid solution, the more possible this becomes.

I personally do not believe that Bitcoin would sustain more than a tiny fraction of the world's exchange traffic and survive in anything like the form we know today.  OTOH, if it is seen as something of a reserve currency itself, and/or if intervention from authorities limits utilization in exchange form, I feel that it could have a decently long and very bright life expectancy.

That must be because everyone is expecting the world's financial systems to switch to Bitcoin I guess and gold is a forgotten relic (which just happens to keep doubling in lock step with the crumbling of other financial systems...)

Certain of us are looking forward to an official description of the rules so as to lend strength to various interpretations, and understand more precisely which requirements are likely mandatory to solve what problems, and which seem to be more along the lines of general information harvesting from a user-base who's balls are in an opportune orientation for squeezing.

Of course Mt. Gox (or any other service provider) does not have any requirement to be open with this information and/or their interpretation of it.  But, OTOH, customers are under no obligation to be customers...or customers fitting into a particular service category...either.  As I mentioned earlier, simply attempting to stop being a customer of Paypal brought the requirements down from 'onerous and extensive' to 'trivial'.

EDIT: addition:  I might add that Paypal allowed me to withdraw all of my funds to my linked bank account.  I simply could not add money until our issues were worked out.  I thought this fair as it allowed me to remain whole financially without divulging information which I preferred reamin secure (to my standards.)  Whether I would have had to provide the scanned photo-ID before terminating my zero-balance account I don't know since we didn't get that far.  Locking all of the funds would have been an entirely different matter.  I would consider it theft and would have taken whatever action I thought appropriate.  I don't know what pressures Tradehill was experiencing near the end, but I do know that they mailed me a check for the balance in my account (around $1500 iirc) without any requirement on my part to provide additional information over and above what I had needed when I built the balance in the first place (which I did exclusively through wire transfers.)

Good advice on the preference for p2p.  Person-2-Persons is what I prefer when it can be arranged, and that's probably the way I'll try to liquidate much of my Bitcoin, again if/when I choose to do so.

The photo-ID thing is pretty weird and I don't like it.  Next it will be DNA samples I suspect.  That the US state department was instructing their personal to obtain DNA samples of foreign dignitaries is actually pretty interesting.  A risky move which I suspect would not be undertaken without significant expectation of a specific use for the data.

  http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/11/u-s-chases-foreign-leaders-dna-wikileaks-shows/

But back to Paypal, in spite of their spiel about the government is requiring blah, blah, blah, in the end they let me pass by speaking 13 numbers into a phone.  So it seems to me that Paypal, at least, is going above and beyond the minimum requirements on the part of the US government.  The extra data they are collecting must be of some value I guess, or maybe they are just being proactive.  One wonders exactly what the minimum requirements Mt. Gox needs to meet are and if they are gathering extra data as a target of opportunity.

As a person who trusts more funds with you through Instawallet than is normally my nature, I have a keen interest in how you handle the various affairs that you are involved in.  I was hoping for a more detailed response on this one.

Separately, I'm sorry to see the Mt. Gox is fucking with you.  It's not crystal clear if 'not legit' is defined as something which Mt. Gox can use as an excuse to take your money or what, but I am interested on an academic level.  I had already planned on exploring alternates if/when I decide to cash out (of Bitcoin) in a significant way, but this goes some distance toward solidifying my plans.

As a vague aside, I got my issues worked out with Paypal so I'm probably going to go back to using them as usual...the memory of what they did to Wikilieaks becoming dim and easier to palate...  Paypal wanted my SSN card, proof of residence, and a photo ID.  The latter is a no-go since I don't trust them not to sell it to the highest bidder (esp, the NSA) or have if ripped by hackers..and to trust Paypal's security engineering significantly more than Mt. Gox's.  Anyway, as usual, Paypal's site would not let me do what I wanted to do so I called.  The lady took my DOB and SSN over the phone and said that everything is now cool.

As a data-point, I've got no idea what 'Magic' is.  I think maybe something like Dungeons & Dragons (which I never understood or tried to) but with more toys?  Maybe things would be different if I were not primarily a county hick.  OTOH, I am doing well to know whether a given team plays pro football or pro baseball, so it's possible that I'm just not wired for games.

BBS's and the internet were not the same, though naturally BBS operators were some of the first to provide something of a gateway to the Internet.  One of the providers (perhaps Comupserve?) was reluctant to allow users out of their domain so I quit them and went with a shell provider.  http had only recently come on the scene and was no 'big' like gopher.  Some company (Tymenet or some such) allowed free phone access after hours for some reason so upgraded my 300 baud modem to a 2400 baud (C64 computer) and I was never happier.

As I mentioned, I practically lived on the usenet for a decade.  I could hardly imagine life without it at one point.  But my utilization tapered off and I don't think I've subscribed to any nntp feed for at least several years.  alt.politics.misc was my thing back in the day as I recall.