Yesterday there was a suggestion to get miners to blacklist the stolen coins. It is plausible Bitfinex might want to try and make this happen. It's possible some miners lost funds in Bitfinex also which may make this more attractive.

The hacker should have a couple of choices to prevent this from happening. They could either negotiate with bitfinex to keep say 10% of the coins or they can thwart blacklisting by getting the coins into circulation.

This will involve an initial haircut of 25% (30kbtc). Use a percentage of it to pay varying moderate/small amounts of approx 0.1 BTC to many of the most active addresses in Bitcoin to protect against reorg by getting them linked into transactions. Spend about 100 BTC on this.

Then they should create a series of nLockTimed transactions that pay 6 BTC in fees every 4 blocks for the next year for a total of 10000 BTC in fees. These transactions should pay large amounts (e.g. 50 BTC) to randomly selected active users from major Bitcoin forums spread out across the transactions.

This incentivizes the users to fight any blacklisting attempts and the hacker can pay themselves in the same chain of transactions.

I'm sorry for the losses of everyone involved and it's unfortunate to see two companies likely go down with this (BitGo & BitFinex) but it is essential that Bitcoin fungibility be preserved.

Any attempt to damage it needs to be thwarted.  

[Don Wilson]

First 27,000 in March:

http://www.coindesk.com/secretive-mining-firm-revealed-as-possible-us-marshals-auction-winner/

DRW Trading is the giant proprietary trading fund headquartered in Chicago. Its chief executive Don Wilson co-founded the bitcoin firm Digital Assets Holdings last year, which announced Wall Street star Blythe Masters as its chief executive yesterday.

Another 26,000 today?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3s511y/auction_coins_are_moving/



Accumulation continues. Did you buy your seat yet?

Greetings gentlemen, ladies!

I was graced by the hands of our most cherished admin, theymos, with a ticket to attend this weekend's event.

In exchange I was asked, and politely obliged, to maybe make it an opportunity for the forum to have a window on the coming days and provide a way for me to share your opinions, questions or concerns, if given the chance. I will of course be posting during the presentations and also be chatting on the irc channel http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=bitcoin-workshops

To be clear I am not your PR person. I will not address any non-relevant or misguided questions. Yes, this will be completely arbitrary. Here is the schedule for the event.

https://scalingbitcoin.org/montreal2015/#schedule

If you believe you have it in you to formulate a cogent and rational question pertinent to the content of the presentations I might consider doing my best to put it forward.

Please be specific and note the technical tone. Any political gossip will be ignored. Yes I will censor you if you cannot behave.

To Gavin & Mike : resignation letters can be handed to the reception desk.

Time to call Bitcoin XT what it is: the biggest fail in altcoin history

Throughout the last year we have been inundated with use cases focused on "blockchain 2.0" technologies. The decentralized ledger being such a powerful idea, it is expectable that people would come up with such an overwhelming number of different use cases.

This, I believe, has lead to a distraction from the true and original value proposition of Bitcoin : a better form of money.

This phenomenon is easily observable. It has in fact become arguably the primary talking point of Bitcoin in the mainstream :

"The blockchain is the real innovation"

"Bitcoin is more than just money"

"bitcoin is cool, but Bitcoin is the real deal"

If you haven't watched this video yet, I cannot recommend it enough : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lqqNU3fQs#t=850

First, Wences provides a remarkably insightful run down of the history of money and exactly what it represents in our society.

Then, from 13:00 on, he presents his opinion about the 3 stages of growth of Bitcoin.

This is what I want to focus on because I find his account to be one of the most credible and honest explanation of the dynamics at stake in Bitcoin's growth.

Bottom line is : little to no one is buying Bitcoin to use as a currency. Bitcoin's store of value attributes is the reason we have gotten to where we are and it will remain, for awhile, the use case that will drive Bitcoin forward.  

For this reason, it is disingenuous to point to Bitcoin's "inability" to catch on as a currency as a reason for its failure.

His analogy to email, while not particularly novel is very much correct. When only a couple of millions of people had access to email, it seemed far fetched to expect everyone to use it a method of communication. It remained far more convenient to use the phone or regular snail mail. It is only when everyone in your network had email did it become a prevalent method of communication.

"I think that something the Bitcoin community has to be honest about, at least amongst ourselves is what Bitcoin is about today and what we would like it to be. Sometimes we make it look like it's about things we want it to be in the future. The truth is when we look at the volume of people buying the "stock" of Bitcoin and the flow of people buying their first bitcoin. It's mostly about buying & holding. It's totally fine, it's a decent use case. It's not a two-sided market : for me to buy & hold it doesn't require a counterparty to accept Bitcoin. I simply have to agree to a price that someone is selling. It has been working for 3 years and I think we can depend on that. It's not some theory, some hypothesis, it's working and it can keep working"

Bitcoin will continue to grow organically with the help of its network effect and its value as a speculative store of value. Let's not put the cart before the horse people. Keep your eyes on the prize