Surely multisig is 2-of3? Bitstamp holds one key, bitgo has one, the user has one. Two of these are required to spend the coins. Bitstamp likely clears funds with BitGo either in real time or periodically.

Sorry to nitpick, but I was a bit perplexed by this. How does one have rights not granted by some ruling body? Rights are what subjects have. Freedom is what sovereigns have, in theory of course.

Hi! For credibility, be sure to sign a message containing your username here with the keys to your 2000 BTC and post it here!

The key word here is 'offer'

Hi, where'd you go? You seemed to have stopped your rampage of repetitive trolling for a while!

 Happy New Year!

I don't follow.

The only way you'd get rid of speculators, aside from the above, is by stabilizing the price completely, forever.

freebit13: How do those servers get get the signal to sign transactions?

Then the folks at Bitstamp will  thank their good fortunes, seize the funds and sic the cops on the hacker.

If they open for trading but there's suspicion they're no longer fully solvent, withdrawing BTC will be the fastest exit. BitstampBTC may therefore trade higher than other market's BTC IOUs. 

As I see it, there are three scenarios.

1. Bitstamp is pulling a runner, or has otherwise been fraudulent and can no longer cover it up. See Gox.

2. Bitstamp was hacked.

3. Your scenario, where an error was made and keys were lost. Edit: Possibly the keys might also have been made openly available through a server misconfiguration or such.

If it's a hack, they may or may not have lost funds. They may have been compromised in a way that might in principle expose the hot wallet keys to an intruder, but the intruder didn't or couldn't yet spend the BTC. Or they may have simply been robbed.

If it's #3, the BTC is probably lost. Now, in either scenario, #2 or #3, it makes sense for them to shut the service down. The system is compromised one way or another and can't be trusted to function properly. But Bitstamp remained open for business for some time after their announcement about the keys being compromised was made.

Wouldn't you pull the plug on the exchange immediately, if you knew you'd either been hacked or had been exposed to some kind of systemic flaw that might repeat itself? Why wait?

That wouldn't have helped here. It was Bitstamp's hot wallet that was compromised, the main reason to have a hot wallet is to be able to automate transactions. If 2FA was enabled, they'd either have to manually approve each transaction, which defeats the point of having a hot wallet, or automate that part too, which would negate the benefits of 2FA.

Where is naked shorting being done?

Have they blocked fiat withdrawals?

Wasn't bitstamp the last exchange to dump?

You'd still have the issue of there being some hurdles to overcome before buying BTC to spend it on anything. On one hand, this is a disincentive to use BTC for transactions, on the other it is an incentive to 'hoard', as you put it, if you do prefer to use BTC for some purposes.

That aside, I think we can agree any tradeable asset will see some speculation. Looking at your formula, it occurs to me you might add two variables to account for this. One is the growth rate of the BTC price and another is the average speculator's patience - how long they're willing to wait for profits to reach their targets.  Of course both are unknown and actually somewhat interlinked, so it's no wonder price discovery is a messy business.

So what you're suggesting is we should all have conspired to just hodl until the price is high enough. Then, presumably, we'd all sell, except that would crash the price. So just hodl forever. Never even buy anything with your BTC - the seller might convert the BTC to dirty fiat and crash the price!

It just doesn't work that way. You can't complain that the price is too low now if you're not willing to accept it went way too high before. It's just price discovery.

You're saying the trolls got burned and are bitter? I don't get that impression from most of them at all.

I don't know what the guy's saying, but I'm sure it's just flowing with the milk of human kindness pointless and self-aggrandizing, either directly or through belittling others.

Elwar: That's just paranoid. There's a variation on Hanlon's razor that's at play here: Never attribute to rational behaviour that which can be explained by malice.

Folks like the king of ignores up there have no grand agenda. They just enjoy pissing in other peoples' cereal.