Based on the totality of the evidence, I am now firmly convinced that JRO was a victim and did not intentionally scam anybody. He may have made some bad decisions that seems obviously wrong in retrospect.

This does not mean that he is not financially responsible for losses people suffered. It may well be that he lost other people's money and is responsible for reimbursing investors. I don't know enough about the details of the asset agreements to comment on that.

You know what makes today different from every other day? Today, you *realized* you had been a douchebag.

I agree. This is why it's important the community develop ASICs.

Say Bitcoin was an existential threat to the NSA or the Federal reserve. They could easily invest $50,000,000 in ASICs and make Bitcoins worthless. It's possible the community might find some defense of this, but it's far from a sure thing. However, if the community is using ASICs, a huge advantage a well-funded adversary would have goes away.

If people just buy and sell Bitcoins among each other, that's a zero sum game. If someone does that manipulation at a loss (which is what you're suggesting, they have to keep selling even as the price drops way below what they paid) that means they're making every other Bitcoin investor on average richer. It wouldn't be much of an "attack" to make Bitcoin investing a sure thing any idiot could profit at.

I can't tell you what method McDonald's actually uses, but they could simply be truly random. McDonald's has to "cross off" each code as it's used to stop the same code from being used more than once. So there's really no reason not to just put each code in a database since you pretty much have to do that anyway.

The hard part to comprehend is that no matter how long you wait, unless you get a confirmation, you don't get any closer to a confirmation. If you wait ten minutes and get no confirmation, it still takes on average 10 more minutes to get a confirmation. And, to get even weirder, at any point in time, the average time between the previous confirmation and the next confirmation is twenty minutes!

One way I try to explain it to people is this: Imagine there's a confirmation, then a second confirmation, and then we go twenty minutes until the third confirmation. Like this:

confirmation - split second - confirmation - 20 minutes - confirmation

Clearly, the average time between confirmations is very close to 10 minutes. The average of 20 and 0 is 10. Yet if you pick any time interval but that tiny split second, the time between the previous confirmation and the next confirmation is 20 minutes.

Poisson processes make my head hurt.

Imagine there are two buses. One has two passengers and one has twenty passengers. How many passengers per bus on average? If you ask the drivers, they'll agree the average is 11. If you ask the passengers, they'll agree the average is 18.3 or so.

Yes, that's that. And his position seems to be that once he has given out the claim codes, his responsibility has ended. So that's that.

There's a real liability for duplicate or conflicting claims, a liability Goat never agreed to accept that Nefario unilaterally imposed. Goat has no contact mechanism to set up a claim window (to weed out duplicate claims) and no working relationship with Nefario or GLBSE to work out conflicting claims.

We'll see if that's GLBSE's position.

GLBSE: Will you make a public statement that you will run the claim code system, at least to resolve disputes, and assume the liability for duplicate or conflicting claims?

I'm glad we have such large areas of agreement. But:

You didn't answer my key point. That scheme only works if Goat can rely on Nefario to resolve the discrepancy. That is, this works only if GLBSE accepts the liability and responsibility for managing the claim process, at least if any problems arise. From all appearances, GLBSE's position is that now that they've issued the claim codes, they have no further obligation to operate the claim process. (Indeed, that was your position, wasn't it?)

I presume he means Goat's attempt to get Nefario a scammer tag and most likely private events associated with that. For example, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Goat threatened to pursue getting Nefario a scammer tag before that to try to extort a better settlement on the fake GLBSE stock from Nefario. However, it really does seem to me that Nefario failed to consider the collateral damage to GLBSE customers when he responded by delisting all of Goat's assets immediately and implementing a claim code scheme that appears to have been hastily contrived by a dim third grader.

Don't confuse distributing child pornography with being a pedophile. Those are two very different things.

Pedophilia is an interest in prepubescent children. Not all nudity is pornography. Not everyone who looks underage is underage. And 18 isn't the age of consent everywhere.

I'm not going to search the site for child pornography, but I will say that a lot of things people think are child pornography are actually not illegal. However, my personal experience has been that people who got their start in the seemier side of the Internet porn industry, even if totally legal, generally are not the kind of people who tend to do the right thing when it matters.

I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but if you separate the shariah finance rules from the goofy justifications you often hear for them based on primitive economic myths, they're actually not bad. The prohibition against earning or paying interest gets the most attention and is pretty silly if applied universally to a modern, industrial economy. But it's better than the way most Americans manage their personal finances (and you can pretty easily get around it).

I have never encountered other beings or aliens, but I did hear the season finale of Ghost Hunters will be the episode where they finally find definitive proof of the existence of the paranormal.

I agree that Goat did a lot to escalate this situation, but from what is publicly known, it really looks like the real escalation was Nefario's decision to immediately delist all of Goat's assets. Because this had a serious harmful effect on GLBSE's customers, Nefario should not have done this without an extremely good reason, and no such reason is known.

Ideally, Nefario should have just let Goat bloviate in the forums for awhile. He would have prevailed on the scam accusation regarding his offer, as he in fact did. Nefario would have looked like the mature adult and Goat would have looked like he usually does. And that would have been that. GLBSE would have protected its customers' interests in their assets.

If the decision had to be that Goat was such a great risk that GLBSE did not want to list his assets anymore, which is GLBSE's right to decide, that could have been handled *way* better. Suspending trading, removing all pending orders, try to work with Goat on a redemption scheme, possibly allow trading for a limited period of time (with a click-through warning) for those who don't like the terms of the redemption scheme, and so on.

Well, the other purpose is to fix this problem for good. For example, asset contracts should include an explanation of what happens if an asset is delisted. GLBSE should have a policy that reserves immediate delisting for only the very most severe cases. The contours of GLBSE's obligation to protect its customers' ownership interests should be more precisely defined. GLBSE could emerge from this stronger.

The problem is that this is a risk GLBSE unilaterally imposed on Goat and nobody has yet figured it out.

How would this work? Say someone presents a claim code to Goat that isn't on his list. If that person makes a scammer accusation and GLBSE doesn't say anything publicly, what happens? Is GLBSE obligated to help Goat resolve the issue? If not, then you are asking Goat to take a huge risk.

If that really is the issue, then that shouldn't be an issue. I agree.

I cannot heed your advice. If I am incorrect, I can't just let myself stay that way. My devotion to truth and honesty will not allow it. I'm not trolling. I genuinely and honestly believe everything I've said.

And, in fact, in a few places where you have shown that I'm incorrect, I've abandoned those claims or acknowledged that you are correct. I can dig out the quotes if you don't believe me. If you feel like you nailed me on something and I just moved onto something else, you're probably right. There's not much point in focusing on something we agree on. I'll try to make a greater effort in the future to leave something you said that I agree with in and respond, "I agree" or something like that, rather than just cutting it because I agree with it.

If I'm wrong or ignorant, why would I just want to move on and stay that way? Are you saying I'm not capable of understanding these complex concepts?

When people disagree with you, particularly passionately, it is very easy to assume bad faith on their part. After all, you're pretty sure you're right. And your arguments seem convincing to you. I can tell you from many years of experience, people who conclude that others are paid shills or arguing in bad faith are almost always wrong. (The other people may be idiots, but even that's not the same thing.)

You don't want a currency to be constant. The inflation or deflation rate of a currency balances immediate consumption (investment) against deferred consumption (saving). Inflation encourages immediate consumption and investment. Deflation encourages deferred consumption and savings. This needs to float based on market conditions, not be artificially fixed. In a healthy economy with a free market, a currency with a fixed value will just be out-competed by currencies that gradually deflate. (Why would I hold a currency that decreases in value if I don't have to?)

It meets the legal requirements to be considered a promise. Nefario intended people to rely on his offer -- his specific intent was to fix the problem that people had paid money for a worthless asset by increasing the asset's value. As for it being retracted, you can't retract a promise after someone does what is required to gain its benefit.

But that's really a secondary issue now. As I understand it, Nefario has offered to compensate Goat for the damages he suffered as a result of Nefario's breach. Goat's not entitled to lost unearned profits. Nefario can't keep his promise as he doesn't have the authority to issue GLBSE shares, so all he can do is compensate for the damage he caused. I don't believe for one second Nefario made this offer maliciously or to try to trick anyone. He was trying to do the right thing and just didn't do it very well. (Goat wants to keep his "GLBSE" shares, but Nefario is under no obligation to give Goat his preferred resolution, and I completely understand why that would be something GLBSE would not want.)

However, what he did after that ...

This is everything that's wrong with the community. "I know X is right, but I did Y, and I made some money that time." (I'm not blaming you specifically at all -- it really is the whole community. Somehow, we all know better but we all do worse. And I don't know how we can fix it.)

Nice backpedaling. But among other things you said "... then I laugh my ass off at your stupidity in investing in something that was clearly and publicly proclaimed to have no value."

This means you sold something that you knew had no value to someone who you had to know must have believed that they had a value -- that's a pretty scummy thing to do in my opinion. Surely as soon as you were aware that something you were offering for sale was fundamentally defective, you had an obligation to ensure it wasn't sold to someone who wasn't similarly aware.

It also means that you think relying on Nefario to keep his word is "stupidity".

On an unrelated note, I basically agree with coinft's point in the post just above this one. Nefario caused an unjustified breach of GLBSE's obligation to preserve the value of listed assets for GLBSE's customers, robbing them of the value of that listing. I believe he totally failed to consider the impact on those customers and was narrowly focused solely on his disagreement with Goat. His attempts to blame Goat for the harm his actions caused his customers bothers me a lot.

So let this be a warning to all GLBSE customers -- if GLBSE decides to delist any asset you hold, they believe they have no further obligation to track the ownership of that asset. And they are the only entity that *ever* had any such obligation. So if they delist, nobody has any obligation to track your ownership of the asset, unless the asset contract says otherwise.

Sorry, when did Goat agree to redeem the equivalent of bearer bonds? Bearer bonds have higher risks than listed securities, and I don't believe Goat ever contracted to assume that risk. GLBSE isn't assuming it, right?

Who gave GLBSE the authority to turn Goat's listed security into the functional equivalent of a bearer bond?

Yeah, that's a big problem. But I'm not convinced it makes it impossible. You have the same problem with all GLBSE listings-- without collateral consequences (civil lawsuits, criminal charges) all kinds of stock manipulation are almost impossible to avoid. Yet people invest/gamble on GLBSE and until recently, it seemed to at least mostly work okay.

The same reason he doesn't kill apostates or become a suicide bomber. If someone genuinely believes that god wants them to kill you, should they do it?