Except Bitcoin is not a black box run by someone you don't know who are, using unknown methods which they claim are giving unheard of profits, which they gladly give away to anyone instead of keeping it to themselves. Oh well, you've been warned.

They're even using the same methods as described in the ponzi guide from the infamous EVE guy. The whole thing is obviously run by crazyivan.

Sounds exactly like Pirate's ponzi scheme. Everything works perfectly until it doesn't.

Yes, what about it? Did you read the wiki page?

I guess they'll just keep quiet about it and let the users take the loss.

Until they've figured out what to do about the hacked accounts, I assume.

Putin wants to control everything that goes on. It backfired a bit in this case, but I really doubt that will make Russian politicians more open to letting go of control.

Mark probably realized he hadn't hidden that part of the hoard well enough to get away with it. There's plenty left, though.

Anyone who used MtGox and had transactions that didn't go through remember how long it would take for MtGox to reimburse?

Buffett doesn't borrow money to buy shares so Berkshire Hathaway will be fine even if some of the businesses it owns goes broke.

That's survivorship bias. If you look at the NASDAQ index as a whole it is only the last couple of years that it has almost recovered from the crash in 2000. Even Microsoft was priced about 50% higher when it peaked in 2000 than it is today. Warren Buffet did the smart thing by avoiding what he didn't understand and couldn't evaluate.

Another tip, then: if you hit ctrl-f in the browser and search for trendon or pirate you'll find it on the first or second page in seconds.

I suggest looking before you post. This thread in this forum was updated yesterday: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=159772.20

Use Foxit reader instead of Adobe. They are more security conscious and have disabled the javascript functionality by default for a long time. Pretty much everything from Adobe has had lots of security issues. Why browsers have flash enabled by default for so long is beyond me.

I don't think this case is comparable to Madoff because he was running a fund which claimed to make profits for those who deposited money. The people who withdrew from the fund would get more money than they deposited. MtGox never claimed to give profits on the deposited money, and nobody got more money because they had deposited anything to MtGox. The point of an exchange is to give away one form of value and get the same value back in another form.

Requiring depositors to pay back what they have withdrawn would be like if a bank went broke and anyone who had withdrawn money in the last 3 years would be required to pay it back. Most customers would have lots of deposits (from salary) and lots of withdrawals in 3 years, but that doesn't mean they've profited.

They don't have a choice. Scammers don't care particularly much for rules and often they will use stole credit cards.

But then again, wouldn't using an alias be a better way to throw them off track?

If they thought like that it means they were going to sell them, which would push the price downwards. Their loss translates into a higher bitcoin price even if they don't rebuy.

I wish there was a link that would reset to 5 digits and BTC instead of mBTC. I don't save cookies between sessions and changing it every time is annoying.

The country selector on the places page doesn't work very well. I wanted to find United Kingdom, so I clicked the country list and typed u. That auto selected Uzbekistan, which is definitely not what I wanted. The I clicked it again and scrolled down to U but didn't find it, so I looked for England which wasn't there either. I finally found United Kingdom between Micronesia and Georgia. Alphabetic ordering is a great invention I can very much recommend.

Also, neither btctrip.com nor simplytravelonline.com are listed under the travel tab. For finding hotels simplytravelonline has the best interface I've seen, bar none. The combination of displaying on maps and available filters makes it much more useful than hotels.com and the other more well known sites.

You can never fully control a situation. What happens when someone who knows you have bitcoins enters your house and threatens to kill your wife and children if you don't transfer 1000 BTC immediately? Unless bitcoins disappears this is pretty much bound to happen. People will be killed or seriously injured, meaning those experiencing it will have good reason to believe them. If the money were in a bank it would take time to transfer, and ever afterwards you could go to the police and the transfer could be stopped or traced for a long time. With bitcoins all they have to do is wait about 10 minutes for a confirmation and they're safe.

The problem with insurance is that you have to trust the insurer. In this particular case, why would you trust a company that lies about being insured by Lloyds? Unfortunately their real trustworthiness would be the same if they didn't make that screw up, you just wouldn't know. Still, I think the average person would prefer to leave their coins with some form of bank to make a hostage situation or other forms of crime or personal mistake less likely.