$37,584

Greed? Or, to put it more politely, the intense wish to get rich quick.


Very true. But the intensity of the rationalizations kept surprising me. (I don't tend to get emotional when dealing with money.)

Look at this discussion here. Even now, when we know for sure that the pirate ran a Ponzi scheme, somebody is arguing in the direction that it might not have been a Ponzi scheme. Seems rather ridiculous to me, but that is how our buggy brains sometimes work.

Yes, if even those who already know that Pirate ran a Ponzi scheme now try to argue that he could have been legitimate, then you must be right. Somehow this is funny.

It seems that the recent discussion is about whether the pirate, of whom we know that he ran a Ponzi scheme, might have run something else. Isn't that rather pointless?

It seems to me that JoelKatz is perfectly correct. He provided ample proof in the form of traceable citations. I only fear he is wasting his time. It might be more useful to detect the next Ponzi scheme and warn its "investors".

When a country's currency suddenly goes from inflation to deflation, that can cause a devastating economic slowdown, because people just stop buying most products. To be precise, they defer buying all non-essential goods and services.

Moderate long-term deflation or a very slow turn from inflation into deflation would be a different and much less dangerous animal. That may be the future of bitcoin, if it has any.

If it ever does. The actual bitcoin market, in which bitcoins are used to pay for goods and services, is tiny and would currently only warrant a bitcoin price below $10. All the rest is people who buy bitcoins because their price goes up, and the price goes up because they buy bitcoins—the perfect vicious circle, producing a huge price bubble. When this bursts, i.e. when they begin to sell bitcoins because their price goes down, and the price goes down because they sell bitcoins, it will not be a pretty sight.

Unfortunately I am pretty much unable to predict when a price bubble will burst, so at this time I can only sit on the fence and wonder. But I'd be grateful for any ideas on predicting price bubbles.

This is certainly true for hyper-deflation. It is not true for moderate deflation.

One example is the deflation we currently have on computer-based products. The argument that people do not spend their money in a deflation, because the money will be worth more in the future, is simply not true. If people thought that way, they would never buy a computer or a mobile phone, but they do.

Add to that the fact that human life is of limited length, so humans have to spend their money before they die. You cannot always wait for tomorrow.

I still think that the deflationary tendency of bitcoin is damaging, for example because it creates speculative price bubbles. I wish that Satoshi Nakamoto had thought of that and dropped the idea of halving production every four years. I believe bitcoin would have worked better without any halving.

The prediction is for a time span of 6 to 12 months, so far the typical time for the price to settle down after a burst bitcoin price bubble.

So until that time has passed, this thread should still be considered relevant.

As things are, there is no possible way of detecting "lost coins", short of asking every person and every computer in the whole world whether any apparently "lost coins" are his or hers or its.

We would need new and very different rules to determine what a lost coin is, for example, that all bitcoins have to be moved from one account to another at least once every year. Then we could state that a bitcoin that has not been moved in a year is a "lost coin".

Yes, and the banks should welcome bitcoins too.

But, strangely, they do just the opposite. They are currently trying to strangle Mt.Gox (or at least it looks like it to me, but perhaps Mt.Gox ist strangling itself).

I think all optimism of cooperation by any of the old-style financial institutions is misguided. Perhaps there will be minor, temporary successes on that front, but ultimately they will try to kill bitcoin.

I suspected that.

Bitcoin is a competitor to M-Pesa. Why should they cooperate?

Can you still find where they wrote about it? I would be interested in the details.

I don't understand your reply. Did you try Kipochi or didn't you? Have you heard of anybody who did? Who? If not, why did you even bother to reply?

Should your African friends eat bitcoins?

Has anybody here ever seen anybody who did any of that? I believe it when I see it.

Too many startups go bankrupt and disappear with the bitcoins.

Months have passed; so what now? Has anybody ever used Kipochi? Apparently not.

Has anybody tried it? Please report.

A successful trial would be to send bitcoins to a Kipochi wallet, then change them into KSh through M-Pesa.

Alternatively, buy bitcoins from M-Pesa money.

I find it suspicious that nobody is reporting any success here.

They are called control freaks.

Women sometimes have a problem with their partners when they are control freaks. Seems to be a predominantly male phenomenon.

I am a computer programmer, and so I am some kind of control freak by profession, because my professional desire is to control exactly what the computer does. But when it comes to my Nexus phone, I actually enjoy its well-programmed automatisms, like automatically killing programs when they are no longer needed and when the RAM is needed for something new. I always wish for more automatic goodies, rather than for more control. There are already enough things in life that need to be controlled. Consequently, when I write a computer program, I think twice or even more often, before I leave a decision, a setting to the end user. There is also a saying that, if there is a setting, users will set it wrong.

As somebody who knows Android well, some people come to me when they have problems. One of the most frequent set of problems is that many clueless users apparently have an intense desire to switch everthing in their smartphones off. Then they come to me and ask for help.

* My GPS takes very long to get a fix. – The guy has disabled data and probably Wi-Fi as well.

* I cannot get a network. – The guy has manually selected a particular network and forgotten or never realised that he should switch that back to automatic.

* Google Maps does not show my location. – Sure enough, the location services are off.

* My compass does not work. – They guy has stuffed his smartphone into a cover with a magnetic lock. OK, that's a different matter, but it shows how clueless people often are.

Removing a menu item is very valuable, particularly if the menu item is superfluous. Android is for mobile phones, and mobile phones are for everybody, not just for technophiles.

Here are some utterly negative examples from the advanced Wi-Fi settings: "Keep Wi-Fi on during sleep", "Scanning always available", "Avoid poor connections", "Wi-Fi frequency band", and in a sarcastic sense my personal favorite: "Wi-Fi optimization" - "Minimise battery usage when Wi-Fi is on". Next they will probably introduce: "Minimise battery usage when Wi-Fi is off". None of these settings should be there, as the phone can make a much better decision for each of them than any normal phone user. They are outstanding examples of the designed-by-engineers-for-engineers category.

An app should never offer the user any choice that has no significant effect on the result for the ordinary end user.

You have convinced me. Sounds altogether like a good idea to me.

This is certainly true if you encrypt a JPG image, as a cracking program can easily check whether a brute-force result yields a valid JPG file.

It may be much more difficult with just the text of the key, because that looks like gibberish anyway. Even with a relatively short password, many brute-force attempts may yield some similar gibberish, so the cracking program cannot discern the valid key from other wrong results with wrong passwords.

But anyway, the password should not be too short.


Yes, sounds very good to me. I am still not sure how useful it would be in the real world, how many users would actually use it, etc.

I would also tend to offer a passphrase entered by the user, because there are some people who can remember it. That would protect against theft of the paper wallet.

(For example, I have a method of constructing passwords by taking a few letters from the name of the object, like from a domain name or from "Mycelium", and encrypting them mentally, before adding some static salt, which I can remember, because it is always the same. Otherwise my poor memory could never cope with the many passwords I have to remember. But that is another matter.)