Hodling lurker reporting for duty! Earliest I'd consider selling a bit is around the next halving. I come here for the news on the latest shenanigans.

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I know nothing about nothing but here it goes:


Kurgman's position isn't 'party hard on a credit card, let our kids pay for it'. It's a pragmatic observation that if you drastically slash spending in a sluggish economy to balance the budget, you'll inevitably tank the economy and thus also reduce tax income - leaving you with a deficit again plus a nasty recession. And a ginormous debt that we already have that our kids will inherit minus any means to ever pay it down.


Economy is not a zero sum game. Government doesn't (just) spend money on hookers and blow, it educates the next generations of our workforce, builds crucial infrastructure, funds early (commercially unviable) r&d that will power the economy that our kids will work in. That's not wasteful spending that our kids will have to pay for, it's a crucial investment in their future.


Now I believe that the economy is a ridiculously complex, recursive system that we just can't model. Both Keynesians and Austrians latched onto different bits that kind of make sense but neither can guarantee what's going to happen 10 years from now. Interestingly I think there's little disagreement about the effects of 'real' austerity - the death spiral of the current system. From what I can tell, that's kind of the goal of many austrolibertarians - they want to rebuild from there on their (somewhat idealistic) principles. Growing up on the wrong side of the iron curtain has left me deeply suspicious of idealists .


TLDR: we appear to be on course to economic Armageddon
Austrians: nuke it now and start over with gold!
Keynesians: poke it like we always did but harder! If that doesn't work, it'll nuke itself

I suggest the untainted conference organizers publicly sever all ties with the Bitcoinica trio as soon as possible. This is only going to get worse.

How about not abandoning ship and sticking with the claims process? Sadly it sounds like fucking off at the first sign of trouble is your MO.

Here, I fixed it for you: they buy the site, get hacked left and right, abandon their customers and now this Lawsuit, crazy.


Epic indeed. I've said goodbye to my 50btc but I would like to see some justice. Now if only the police would get interested in Zhou's little thieving scheme, the Bitcoinica story would go straight to r/justiceporn

Perhaps the speakers should be contacted by someone reputable and informed that the organizers are crooks...

JeffK, I like the cut of your jib. However a more apt metaphor to OPs point would be: last year I watched my neighbor recklessly play with a chainsaw and hack his leg off. The upside? I know not to play with a chainsaw recklessly (and I'm now sleeping with my neighbor's wife)!

Hey fox, can you watch these chickens for me? Thanks!

Hey Zhou, does this ring any bells?

• kid hacks together a flaky leveraged trading platform
• everyone on HN tells him to pack it up now before lots of people lose lots of money, he doesn't listen
• site is losing money, the kid is in way over his head
• kid keeps losses secret, perhaps covers with his own money hoping he can make it work
• foolish buyer appears - the kid happily dumps the mess he's made
• no longer feeling responsible, he trivially fakes a hack (those annoying forum critics were predicting it so let them have it!) and sets himself up with a nice stash of bitcoins
• kid's attempt to just walk away fail as new owners start questioning the lack of promised profits
• time for another hack (it worked so well the first time!) but this time the goal is getting rid of the database that most likely contradicted lies told to the new owner
• the poor suckers left holding the bag flail around trying to figure out who to give the remaining money
• emboldened by prior success, the kid sees yet another opportunity to loot the steaming rubble of his handiwork
• this time he gets careless and gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar, concocts a story less believable than the plot of Prometheus

Enough with the lies. I am sympathetic to the story of an ambitious kid who got in too deep and can't figure a way out but a window for claiming this story is rapidly closing. If you stick with your current course you are embracing your new identity of a boldfaced liar and a thief.

You probably still believe you can fix this and come out relatively unscathed but you are deluding yourself. It's time to tell the truth - all of it. It will free you and trust me - the consequences won't be anywhere near as severe as the alternative.

That may well be true, I was only disagreeing with your second point.


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=90327.msg1048502#msg1048502

I'd say that someone with rumored 250k of BTC and god knows how many USD in the market is very much relevant to the price of Bitcoin...

I keep thinking this would make a great movie, telling the story from the POV of the major players. And you won't know for sure who really did it even when the end credits roll - just like in real life.

Zhou, can I get the rest of my 50 BTC back now?

What you don't realize is that Bitcoin has been created and sponsored by Illumicorp all along. It's quite obviously the official NWO currency.

I know, I'm Illumicorp Grand Wizzard!

Instead of imitating the look of USD notes and putting pictures of random scientists and silly slogans of the 'in ${whatever} we trust' variety, I would really like to see a design that reflects some of Bitcoin's fundamental building blocks.

For example:

• shapes derived from elliptical curves that the ECDSA algorithm is based on
• watermark based on the bit patterns of the individual iterations of the SHA1 function (160 bits go through 80 steps which could be visualized as 160x80 bitmap)
• prime numbers!
• some reference to Bitcoin script - it's kind of key to the system yet many people are not even aware it exists
• express the peer to peer nature of the network
• symbolic representation of the block chain

I'm not knocking the existing designs but I do feel we could go for a little bit more depth and really revel in the mathematical roots of Bitcoin .

Though in this case it's hardly 'hacking' - the information needed to gain access to the account was publicly available .

I'm truly sorry for Roger - he's one of the good guys in this community. Let's hope that the remaining Bitcoinica funds don't slip through their fingers before they can at least partially compensate him.

And Zhou sold that trust to the highest bidder. At least his mortgage is paid off!

Each new act of this farce reaches previously unimaginable levels of fail.

Bravo, I feel like I'm almost getting my money's worth of cringeworthy entertainment.

<continue baseless speculation>
They 'invested' all the moneys in Pirate's fund and now that the price has gone up the Pirate has disappeared with their coins!
Alien abduction
Zhou is really Bruce Wagner


Disclaimer: I have lost 50btc to Zhou's incompetence...

That's pretty much the end of this thread.

My corollary to RM's insight: If the second fear wins out, cognitive dissonance makes it important to convince ourselves that we've made the right decision. That cognitive dissonance can make us react in what seems like a weirdly-cult like manner to anti-Bitcoin arguments.

Conclusion: don't buy into Bitcoins because you're scared that you might miss out. Do it because the idea is revolutionary!