Thats what I thought it might be actually. One scenario that I did confirm the bug with was if someone initiated a download, and then another person initiates the same torrent before the first had completed. In that case, the server would just serve up the unfinished files when it sees the md5 in the database. I'll do some more debugging and see if I can get to the bottom of it.  

Damn. I thought I had it fixed. Can you PM me with the status link of the torrent you were downloading? I'm trying to find some kind of common denominator between the torrents that this is happening with.

ROFL! You don't have the power to enforce anything, so just stop with the threats and righteous indignation will you?
What are you going to do if shakaru refuses? Blow some more hot air? Terrifying!

Your money will be returned solely at the discretion of shakaru. And you are giving him less and less reason to do so. He has zero obligation to refund you anything after you charged back prior transactions with him which were completely unrelated to this transaction. You are a foul mouthed ignoramus who needs to learn some respect, and I hope you get tossed out of this forum for good. A scammer label would be far too lenient.

Shakaru, I hope you don't send a single penny back to this asshat. If you feel bad keeping the difference, then donate it to charity (maybe goat's orphan fund) or to the forum as compensation for all the hassle astana is causing for the moderators. That would be a sufficient punishment for him. A squeeze on his wallet will be the only thing that he will care about. To me, this would seem perfectly justifiable.

And amount sold = amount bought + fees. Obviously, there are two parties on the end of every trade. But there is a big difference between a bid and an ask order, as the price is affected differently /stating the obvious.

MtGoxLive shows about 10,000 btc volume at the peak, and about 18,500 at the trough, so the sell was almost equal in magnitude to the buy as far as I can tell.

And I think it was the toothfairy who sold immediately after.

I could state the logic behind my opinion, but why should I give you the advantage of my analysis?
Oh yeah, because it might become a self fulfilling prophecy if enough people believe it. Fair enough...



As you can see on the chart, we have had an RSI of over 70 for the past 6 days, with 32 days of positive divergence on the MCAD, and we are currently trading along the top range of the bollinger band. We hit a resistance of $4.5, bounced off it, and have had very weak buying activity since then. Also, you can see a hanging man doji on the candlestick chart 3 days ago. If the price closes below this doji, it is a strong signal to suggest the end of the rally.

In addition, I have been recording a historic market depth log, and the past few days have seen an increase in the ask side of the order book, associated with a significant drop in aggregate demand to the tune of about $150,000. The total demand on MtGox right now is $699,684. The total on the ask side is 202,637 btc. If all of the money on the bid side rushed into the ask side, the average price of a bitcoin would be $3.45, which is 50c below what we are currently trading at.

Since the start of the rally, about 200,000 new coins have been mined yet the total supply on mtgox has been diverging away from the relative total bitcoin supply. We should soon see a correction in this divergence when this month's newly mined bitcoins hit the markets, and this will be associated with a sharp drop in the price.

My opinions are not based on 'feelings' but real data.

Almost all of the posts in this subforum are propaganda. However, despite the likely bias of the OP, I tend to agree with his analysis. I think we will probably be seeing $3.20 again very soon, with further falls to about $2.60 over the next week or two. I don't think it will go much further than that. I liquidated some of my own holding earlier today, and am tentatively considering moving into fiat in the short term.

From another thread:


What caused the about turn in your forecast?

This whole thread has been a massive circle jerk for the bulls, full of vainglorious boasting and childish berating of Nagle. Proudhon then weighs in with a very subdued bearish opinion and you jump right down his throat with vicious personal attacks? That was not a justified response. It seems like what he is saying might be stirring up some cognitive dissonance. Maybe you should re-evaluate your position and stop venting your frustration on others. What exactly is it that you had hoped he would learn? To keep his trap shut?

While I might not agree with proudhon in the long term, I think he has more than enough justification for his outlook, and he is entitled to his opinion just like you. 6 months of sliding is a very strong trend, and it can not be disproven by a single datapoint. It is foolish to think otherwise. This might be the early stages of a market reversal, however that is anything but certain right now. Surely you must realize how easy it is for someone with a large enough holding to manipulate this market to create false signals in the charts and technical indicators?

These uncertainties should not be dismissed so casually. I am not even nearly convinced yet. I have been long since 2.2 and didn't sell at 4.5, but I now find myself hovering tentatively over the sell button more and more as the days pass.

My advice to you would be to just forget about trading on margin - for the moment at least.

You don't know what P/L means, what the spread is, or the difference between a sell or ask order. These things are really _really_ basic. Knowing what they are is the absolute minimum requirement before you even log into bitcoinica, let alone place any live orders. And you will need to know a LOT more than this if you intend not to lose the entirety of your investment.

I think your best option is to trade directly on the exchanges until you have more experience and have an adequate understanding about the risks you are taking when you trade on margin. A good place to start learning is at investopedia.com. They have a lot of great articles on a broad range of topics.

It might seem easy to learn and get good at margin trading, but trust me.... it really isn't. Despite how it may appear, what with all the rationalization that goes on in these forums, those who have been successful at it have just been lucky that their trades went in the same direction as the trades made by the bitcoin elites. And even when you do make the right calls, you can still end up losing money due to the volatility of the market and thus the spreads on bitcoinica.

Also, another requirement to be successful at this is a huge wad of capital! In the real world markets, you might as well throw your money into the wind if you trade on margin with less than $10,000 starting capital. You need a very large buffer behind you if you hope to be able to withstand the short term fluctuations in the market and not get liquidated by sharks. Unless of course you intend to use a short term trading strategy, which will all but guarantee that you end up getting wiped out sooner or later no matter how good of a trader you are. You might aswell set your money alight, at least that way you will get some value from the heat it produces!

There are people who have been doing this for a long time with many thousands of coins/dollars, and people with degrees in economics, mathematics, statistics and other 'ics and 'ologys, who still end up losing huge chunks of money trading on margin. The vast majority of people who try it will lose more than they ever win.

It really is no better than 'investing' your money on the roulette table. But at least with roulette, you are playing a fair game of chance. You can't gain any advantage by playing with more money than everyone else. You can't move that wheel with your dollars, no matter how many you care to throw at it. And the people you play with do not spread misinformation to further their own underhanded motives.

Earnings report for November 16th - December 16th:

Monthly Earnings: 31.33339 btc
Total Dividend: 9.400017 btc
Dividend/Share: 0.03133339 btc

Monthly Investor ROI: 15.7%
Total ROI after 3 months: 34.9%

Total Users: 126 (this month: +59)
Total Downloads: 726 (this month: 319)

I am currently waiting for the transfer to GLBSE to be confirmed, after which I will make this months payment. Thanks to all the investors and to all the users of this service for their continued support.

The fight continues...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc&NR

 

LOL!
Why didn't you both do the smart thing and wait until closer to the deadline before entering your guesses?
The rules were clearly stated from the outset - the thread will be locked at 7pm PST.

And we're back to basically where we started again.
The market seems to be constantly getting better and better at smoothing out short term fluctuations.
At least speculators are useful for something...  

SSL certificates are expensive. I could create a self-signed certificate that would allow encrypted connections, but it would throw up trust warnings to end-users and may scare them off. Also, the download speed would be reduced somewhat if you were downloading via https, and it would put a greater load on the server - especially if several people were downloading via SSL simultaneously. So the short answer is no, but the long answer is maybe in the future, when the service has more capital behind it and is able to afford a more powerful server and a legit ssl certificate.

SSL would be a fantastic addition to the service though, I do agree. It would take care of the last and final weak link in the chain - the ISPs. But what is currently on offer is still a lot better than downloading torrents from public trackers yourself via the bittorrent protocol. Because as already discussed, ISP's do not actually do any of the legwork themselves. It is the rights groups who collect this information, not the ISP. As long as they are out of the picture, that is about 99.5% of the job done.


ISP's in germany restricting nameserver choice is scary. I suppose there might be a rational argument for doing it. It could be to prevent malicious 3rd party alterations to your local nameserver settings by certain viruses etc that would redirect you to their own clone site after entering the url of a sensitive website (such as online banking) or something along those lines. I suppose that would be the rationale they are using to defend it, but at the same time, I do not like it one bit.

And the worst part is that it is being done in such an underhanded and sneaky way, meaning that people can not object fairly to the change. If it was truly for the benefit of the end-user, then they would trumpet it as a new security feature not hide it under the carpet. Most regular users would have no idea of the potential privacy implications anyway. Have they released any kind of press statement? Probably not, I would imagine that it is all there in the TOC that we all so frequently skim over.

The waters do seem a little more choppy than usual alright.

We could go and create a bitcoinica competitor, as was mentioned already a few posts back, but the reasonable thing to do first is to try and persuade zhou. And that is what I am doing right now. Failing that, other options can be considered.

I trust Zhou too, and think he has done an absolutely fantastic job on bitcoinica and have told him as much in private (and in public). Some people here seem to think that I have a vendetta against him and this is totally false. I have a lot of respect for Zhou. But the point that I am trying to get across is that trust, and personal guarantees, are just not enough to put my mind at ease with regards to the moral hazard issue, even from a guy as upstanding as Zhoutong. Because after all, when it comes to moral hazard, even the most respectable and trustworthy people sometimes fall victim.

Nobody was held in higher regard on Wall Street than Bernard Madoff and Richard Fuld, and look how that turned out.

What is to say that in the future, Zhou is not forced between a rock and a hard place from which he has no alternative but to do the thing that he gave such ardent assurances that he wouldn't? His guarantees and assurances that this will never happen are just too tentative. When it comes to other people's money, something more than simple promises is required.

You might be right in believing that at least part of the reason why I am speaking so loudly on this topic is due to my own self interest. I want to be able to use bitcoinica, but I have no interest whatsoever in using the platform in it's current form. It's just too risky. And I am not just talking about the risks associated with margin trading.

The onus is squarely on the shoulders of Zhoutong to come up with SOMETHING to ease the minds of those who invest money with him. I am simply applying the required pressure to motivate him to do so. Thankfully, Zhou has already promised to publish some numbers. I am not trying to say that I know what it is that is required. I requested transparency from bitcoinica, but was told that this is impossible for the most important data, the data we need to ensure the financial health of the platform. So if this is not possible, Zhou is going to have to innovate and come up with some other means of letting us all know in quantitative terms that it is safe to invest with bitcoinica. I have full confidence that he will be able to do this.

I want the bitcoin economy to be developed properly, safely and as openly and transparently as is possible. Since this new financial system we are building is in it's early days and the economy itself is basically free from any regulation whatsoever, we have to do the job of the regulators ourselves and be extremely cautious when it comes to issues like this. It is of vital importance that that we use as much forethought as possible to prevent any future problems that may shake the trust we are collectively building in this infrastructure. I don't want to see the efforts of so many people in this community dashed on the rocks by those who refuse to listen to reason.

Hmm. This has happened a few times now I think. I've been looking through the code to find any potential causes and I'm stumped. The only thing I can think of is if the torrent has a strange character in the name. That might do it. Can you PM me the link to the torrent you guys were downloading so I can investigate further? I hope your sister (or sister in law?) was not turned off too much by the experience.


I think molecular handled your question well. I think I might have to hire him as my PR guy!

I'll explain it again anyway. Rights groups snoop on the torrent swarm (network of nodes sharing the file) for files that they are protecting the intellectual property rights of. They record the IP addresses of those seeding the file as well as lots of other information in evidence. They probably use customized torrent clients specifically designed for this purpose.

They do not have access to your ISP records however, so therefore are not privy to the things that you download via http. The vast majority of ISP's do not monitor your downloads, because the cost of sifting through every file downloaded by their clients to determine what is legal and what is not legal would be too great. Also there may be significant privacy issues in doing that, so it is a legally murky practice, and any evidence produced may be questionable in a court of law.

Http downloads are much much safer from a privacy perspective than torrents because only you, the server you are downloading from and your ISP know what packets are coming down the line to you. If you use torrents, due to the public nature of the technology, every node in the swarm can see exactly what you are doing, your IP address, how much of the file you have, and how fast you are uploading and downloading. All the IP rights groups have to do is sit permanently in the swarm and observe everyone who connects, obtain your identity from your ISP using your IP address and very soon after, you receive a letter from the MPAA or RIAA threatening you with legal action or hefty fines and your ISP may follow suit and disconnect your service.

I'm not saying we should tax bitcoinica. I was pointing out that the definition you posted from wikipedia does not support your argument. Of course, a particular nation does not collect tax from corporations operating outside the state. However, they would have to declare this information to the relevant authority in their respective location.

What do you mean any other reason to open their books? Have you even read my posts, or are you simply arguing for the sake of argument?
I won't be baited by your diversionary tactics. Go back and read the thread more thoroughly.


I see. It's difficult, so I guess we should just forget about trying to do anything about it then.

Thankfully this 'pragmatic' view of yours was not shared by people like Satoshi Nakamoto, Rick Falkvinge, Julian Assange and the folks involved with the Global Occupy Movement, to name but a few people who were determined not to accept the status quo because it was too hard to do anything about it.


You don't seem to understand. Yes they are free to release as little as they want, but only if we let them get away with it!

You are right, they are currently a monopoly, and the only way to deal with a monopoly is to stop using their services until they are willing to cooperate with the wishes of the market participants. They are not providing such a 'vital' service to the community that ceasing giving them your coin will negatively affect the bitcoin economy.

I realize that I seem to be the only voice actively calling for transparency, but surely there must be a majority of people who understand the risk posed by bitcoinica in it's current form. I hope I am not wasting my breath and have gotten through to at least a few of the more savvy traders.