This is no surprise to anyone who has followed BFL. Since their first gen aSic they have been screwing people over.  Basically the main thrust of it is they take huge amount of pre-orders for products they don't have. Then they spend the pre-order money to actually make the product that they ship at least 6 months late to people, after they made a lot of profit. 

You have to be a fool to order from BFL -- or, you didn't do enough research.

Has anyone run the numbers, I wonder.

It seems like about 8 out of 10 exchanges gets shutdown or hacked, its a real war ground out there.

Havelock shares seems strong right now...did I miss some yet untranslated updates made in a Chinese forum perhaps? Decent amount of buying going on.

Once again, I'm 99% sure that SEC and other agencies do not use gag orders like that. Especially when public funds are involved. If there is a gag order for this kind of thing, the business owner would be able to say that the SEC or whoever was involved, but they would not be able to divulge the details.  There would be NO CASE where a gag order would be given and a proprietor of a business would be allowed to accept deposits from the public with no chance of them getting them back, that would make the gov' agency culpable in the crime of thievery that has happened.

You are only looking at 'secret, can't talk about it gag orders' if an intelligence agency is involved or an undercover criminal investigation is going on, and this is not the case. Even if it is criminal investigation, the FBI or whatever would not give a gag order that would not allow the public to not know they were investigating -- the gag order would only prevent any details of coming out.


Regarding moving forward / progress, perhaps instead of a civil lawsuit it would be more efficacious to press criminal charges here.  As it stands now Ukyo took roughly 8000 bitcoins from the community, in either deposits that should have been protected or safe, or a loan, that he was defaulted on.  The missing money is $5 mill by today's rate.  For him to not comment on what happened, for (I even forget how long it has been now -- ) 3, 4 months, is beyond any reasonable consideration that he should be given.  

Do we know what country he is in?

Not so much for me, anytime soon I think.  For the following reasons:

1) I have a hard time spending bitcoin on most 'normal' things I buy. To me bitcoin is much more precious than funny money fiat so I have the tendency to save the bitcoin and spend the cash.

2) Purchasing stuff online with bitcoin is very convenient for me but I haven't set up any sort of phone wallet or anything so cash would be easier for me to use for smaller purchases.

I'm still surprised Russia annexed it... I didn't think we'd see that sort of blatant annexation going on any more.  I thought they American style (topple legitimate government, seed dissent with covert agencies, install a puppet government to sell everything to IMF) was the new standard that everyone would use.

The civilized thing, IMHO, would have been just for Russia to offer to buy Crimea. Because everyone knows they sure as hell aren't just going to give up the region, it has way too much invested in it and it's a hugely strategic location.

What! No Way! You mean it's ....A.....

Unob'threadia ?

Ya there is something to that, but I don't see that anything can be done.

We are pretty close to a whopping 500 alt coins available for trade on the exchanges. All those potcoins, lottocoins, supercoins, sexcoins, darkcoins, etc etc x 500 have to be taking a decent 'bite' of bitcoin's base value.  But ya, what can anyone do about that, I'm not sure.

I think friedcat will just focus on bitcoin mining. He has enough on his plate with that.

Ya I noticed that as well.  I don't really get why someone would purport to be into bitcoin and be so anti-bitcoin and then join the premier bitcoin forum and then go posting threads bashing bitcoin. Yet I see these threads often, at an increasing amount (I think) in the last 6 months.

After reading some of the Snowden docs it makes me wonder if there is any tax-payer funded naysayers here, because apparently the NSA and CIA do like to do that sort of thing to fracture online communities as discussed in the leaks (reference "How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations"          https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/    )

But it is more likely what ebeliever said.    I know having being scammed a couple of times, the most recently from Jon Montroll which stole over 8000 btc including one of my own, that it can really sour you to the community.

I'd like to give her a deposit .... of double-wrapped glendall purple-headed one-eyed yoghurt-slinger.

The invention of bitcoin is second only to the invention of the world wide web in terms of information technology I have been amazed with in my lifetime.

Ah that is wise.

Regarding the blockchain size, it is a problem for sure. But something that can be fixed. For now though, it is pretty big deal for many folks to want to have their own private wallet and have to download a 20gb blockchain.  But it is not a technically insurmountable problem.  I would imagine the blockchain would lend itself to be easily and effectively compressed.

That sure would be dumb.

I have lit money on fire before, it was somewhat fun.

But inhaling money.....bad idea.  That would be probably toxic to your health in at least 10 different bad ways.

Asteroid mining is more likely to happen in space than in Earth. They don't plan on crashing asteroids into the Earth and collecting the resources that way 

It is much more likely they will have space-miners process and extract the ores in space, then transport the refined ores to Earth in shuttles, or via space elevator.

Diamonds would be  next to useless thing to mine. It is much easier to make them on Earth, which we can do, with present technology. The reason why manufactured diamonds are not sold as jewellery is purely do to with marketing and business and monopolies.... man-made diamonds are superior to mined diamonds.

There will be rare elements that could also kick gold of off its pedestal. But I think people are overlooking a big thing: which is, it will be very, very expensive to mine and transport the asteriod ores, which means that it will gradually lower prices  -- the market will not be suddenly flooded with cheap gold. That would not even benefit the mining companies so that would not happen (as is similar to the case with diamonds).

As for substitute scarce metals, I've never read up on the common elements of asteriods, but would imagine that rhodium, platinum, and iridium and osmium would be quite valuable.

If we get to the point technology where mining asteroids and returning the metals is no big thing, and we can make much of what we want from 3d printers, then either a) we will have an overlord class with supreme wealth taking what they want, and most humans will be a slave class to them, with no need or ability to purchase ores      b) we will have radically different non-scarcity based economic system where the situation will be so different that fiat will likely not be exchanged for metals. imho, of course

Stability is a good thing, it helps bitcoin as a currency protocol.

No more Gox helps.

The larger and more popular bitcoin gets also means the less likely big price swings will happen just due to the size of the market cap.

It's not that we have too many alt coins. It is that we have too many useless alt coins.

We have almost 500 released coins now, it is crazy. But there have been some good ones. Like POS coins were mentioned, I really like Hobonickels, the upcoming wallet is awesome. But I'm really sick of all the copy-pasta coins that took someone a weekend to make. I don't know why people buy into Sexcoin and Potcoin and Lottocoin and all the 100's of stupid coins, but I never understood why Doge coin blew up either.

You can't stop people from making dumb coins but I sure wish they would collapse sooner that later. It has gotten to the point where you can't even follow coin development anymore because of all crap, unless you want to spend 4 hours a day going through the muck to find the diamond.

Please don't make another coin. There is almost about 500 now.

Too many. Coins. 

Unless you have a really different idea please don't make it.

Unfortunately I don't have the money for legal options, I'm quite poor.

Jon Montroll will get what is coming to him, I do not forget.  I also don't even care about money much, but just on principle, I can not let someone steal from me and get away without with experiencing repercussions. They might even be a long time coming but he has something coming for him. I don't live in the U.S but I have a great memory.

Besides taking it upon myself to try to wake people up around here to smell the coffee (that they have been taken advantage of), there is not much publicly more I can suggest. I just hope the bigger bag holders take him to the courts or press criminal charges, and then instead of Jon Montroll's bullshit, we can actually hear how (or why) the community lost over 5 million dollars of BTC entrusted to him, and instead of living comfortably off of stolen funds, Jon could try out poverty, such as he brought to his customers.  This vampire really fucked over a lot of people and justice should find him.  

Has someone analyzed the numbers? Off the top of my head it would seem that more than 75% of exchanges either get shut down, hacked, or have their accounts stolen by the administrators themselves.

Decentralized exchanges seem the only way forward I think.  Doesn't work to have decentralized currency on centralized exchanges.

THat's great to see but lower bets are needed. The minimum bet is 1000 hbn which is over 0.1 btc which seems pretty high for a min bet (to me anyways).