such as " unofficial claim threads" in an attempt to sorta distance himself from scams he pushed but doesn't want to pay for Your criticism of that thread didn't make sense the first time around either. (studiously not mentioned here, obviously)
The Bitdaytrade story was mentioned. As for the claims thread, I asked theymos for a list of threads I had created on September 24. I stashed that list and then built the list of threads mentioned here based on it, removing threads which seemed irrelevant and adding later threads that I recalled. Since the BDT claims thread was started later than that, it was not in theymos' list and it seems highly likely I simply did not recall it at the time. Another possibility is that I recalled it but didn't consider it worth a mention. In either case, for your satisfaction and as a testament to my commitment to try to resolve the BDT issue, I added this thread to the list. Speaking of which, why don't you just start a tumblr or something, Rosenfuckwit?
There are many platforms that can (and may) be used to provide information about myself. But the target audience of this particular writeup (and discussion) is members of the Bitcoin forum, and it's mostly about my activity with Bitcoin in general and in this forum in particular. Also since I spend so much time on this forum I feel more comfortable with its format than with some other platforms. As such it makes sense to have this as a thread on the forum. Consider yourself fed. Now please go away. I have to say, I also found idea of "lets talk about me" thread amusing  Then I don't think you understood the idea. Think of it as an adaptation of the user page/talk page we have on Wikipedia with an emphasis on criticism on the services that I provide. E.g., you've just started a thread with positive feedback about Mtgox. If anyone wanted to provide positive or negative feedback about my services, I believe a dedicated thread is better than a new thread for each instance (and since my services are backed with a personal guarantee rather than shielded with a corporate entity, a personal thread is appropriate). This thread is also a statement that I think more people should have such threads. That said this is a forum thread open to discussion like any other, and I guess discussion on whether such threads are useful is on-topic so we can further debate this. |
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Welcome back.
Personally I don't believe continuing to donate despite not having a Bitcoin option is a sound strategy. I'd be more supportive of collecting pledges with the promise to donate them once they accept Bitcoin.
PS What we have now isn't HIB 4 (we had HIB 6 in October), it's HB for Android 4.
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What did/would you say when approached by recruiters from Moss@d?
Never heard of it and am unable to find any information on it. |
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What is your political view regarding the diplomatic relations of Israel with Iran and Palestine?
I don't have an opinion on this issue. Are you religious or atheist?
I am mostly secular with some religious inclination. What are your origins? Your parents or grandparents migrated to Israel after Second World War or they were already established on the region when the state of Israel was formed?
My parents both migrated from Romania around 1950 when they were young children. |
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Meni,
I appreciate everything your trying to do... and I found my hash so thank you for spending the time going through that I am sure it was a bit of a pain in the butt.
Naelr
It wasn't too bad, once I got the data in a spreadsheet most of the hashing work was automated. (I did the concatenation in Excel, generated some random numbers in Mathematica, and wrote a small C# app to hash each entry.) |
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I think we need to start preparing for the very real possibility that I may not be getting the data from GLBSE. So:
1. If you haven't sent a claim to me yet, now is the time.
2. I propose that if nothing happens within ~2 weeks, I will start paying out accumulated and future coupons according to the information I currently have. Payments for unclaimed bonds will go towards a reserve fund, which will be used either to partially compensate missing bondholders when the data is obtained, or eventually donated to an agreed-upon charity.
I know I sent you my claim but is it possible for you maybe to post a list of those that have so we know you have our information? Naelr There are a few issues with that, I'll work on a hash-based list either tomorrow or in ~1.5 weeks. In any case I will make a test payment before any real payments, and the sentiment currently seems to be towards not acting on my own records yet. And FWIW I got your claim. Edit: Or today. Here is a list of SHA-256 hashes of "EMAIL ADDRESS AMOUNT" (without quotations). For example if your email is a@b.c, address is 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa and amount is 50 bonds it will be the hash of "a@b.c 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa 50", which is 54ec5b1d82bff5df257a88f1cc38ac1ecea55d8a98fe3bbe191e9375285c5274. In one case I used the forum username rather than email address. For people who have mentioned several numbers in their claim, I used one of the numbers. There are also some dummy hashes to conceal the actual number of claims (disclosing it has privacy and security implications). This list will not be updated frequently. (Removed on Nov 27 2012 as a privacy measure) |
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Ok. We have a total of 79,000 bets resulting in a total profit of -5121 BTC. If we assume the bets are fixed and their results are variable, then the mean profit is 1285 BTC and the variance is 3084000 BTC^2. This means the result is 3.65 sd below the mean.
The probability for a normal random variable to be this low is 0.000132. We need to correct for selection bias; there may be better ways to do it but multiplying by 1000 would be the right ballpark (the effective number of choices for the period to investigate). This means that there would be about 13% chance of getting results this bad somewhere on the graph. This means they indeed have some bad luck, but not so much so to indicate something may be wrong.
1000 seems too big to me. there have been 1.5m bets in total so 20 seems more reasonable than 1000. This has very little to do with the number of bets (in particular you seem to want to use the base-2 log but I see no justification for that. Probabilities are not on the same scale as information bits). It's about how many choices there are to choose the period to analyze. With a very simplistic calculation, you have 180 choices for the start date and about 10 choices for the length, which would come up as 1800. Now you have to correct for the correlations, the fact that we didn't actually go and optimize the worst period, etc. Maybe something like 500 or even less is more appropriate but again this is just a back-of-the-envelope calculation. I agree that it is unusual enough to look into it further. |
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Ok. We have a total of 79,000 bets resulting in a total profit of -5121 BTC. If we assume the bets are fixed and their results are variable, then the mean profit is 1285 BTC and the variance is 3084000 BTC^2. This means the result is 3.65 sd below the mean.
The probability for a normal random variable to be this low is 0.000132. We need to correct for selection bias; there may be better ways to do it but multiplying by 1000 would be the right ballpark (the effective number of choices for the period to investigate). This means that there would be about 13% chance of getting results this bad somewhere on the graph. This means they indeed have some bad luck, but not so much so to indicate something may be wrong.
It just occurred to me that not all the bets are independent events. You can't tell from the data I provided, but it's possible to place multiple bets within a single transaction. All such bets get the same 'magic number'. I don't know what impact that would have on your calculations. If you like, I could add a txid to each bet so you can tell which are grouped with which. It would be a bit more work to take into account grouped bets. But the impact of the fact that those exist is that the variance will be higher, meaning the results are even more plausible. I think it would be fine to try to carry out a more sophisticated statistical test, and/or ask the operators if they know of anything which could cause a problem. But if not that's also fine, the results are within the realm of possibility. |
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It'd be awesome to have the sources (tex or whatever they are).
I'll try to see if they're up to sharing the TeX source. thx for trying. it would indeed be helpful at some pt to see the changes they have acknowledged.
do you think they will update the paper once more? molecular already posted first diff few days ago. I said it once and I'll say it again - molecular posted the minor diff between version 1.5 and 2. He did not post the substantial changes between versions 1 and 1.5.. molecular, you may want to clarify this in your post. |
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...... For reference, I've talked a bit with Nefario but haven't yet received any data, or my own coins.
I think we need to start preparing for the very real possibility that I may not be getting the data from GLBSE...
Did you at least get your own coins? No. I had a hunch I shouldn't be keeping too many bitcoins there, so I withdrew most but had about 100 remaining. With the double payment thing I doubt I'll be getting them - just another one in a long list of recent losses I've had. I think we need to start preparing for the very real possibility that I may not be getting the data from GLBSE. So:
Is there any material information that leads you to that conclusion ? Not really, other than the length of time this has dragged on and Nefario not responding to my last mail. Since I'm not making a full buyback currently the damage of making some payments with incomplete data is limited, and as mentioned I'm giving more time until doing even that. But if people prefer that I wait even longer I'm fine with that. |
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I think we need to start preparing for the very real possibility that I may not be getting the data from GLBSE. So:
1. If you haven't sent a claim to me yet, now is the time.
2. I propose that if nothing happens within ~2 weeks, I will start paying out accumulated and future coupons according to the information I currently have. Payments for unclaimed bonds will go towards a reserve fund, which will be used either to partially compensate missing bondholders when the data is obtained, or eventually donated to an agreed-upon charity.
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Ok. We have a total of 79,000 bets resulting in a total profit of -5121 BTC. If we assume the bets are fixed and their results are variable, then the mean profit is 1285 BTC and the variance is 3084000 BTC^2. This means the result is 3.65 sd below the mean.
The probability for a normal random variable to be this low is 0.000132. We need to correct for selection bias; there may be better ways to do it but multiplying by 1000 would be the right ballpark (the effective number of choices for the period to investigate). This means that there would be about 13% chance of getting results this bad somewhere on the graph. This means they indeed have some bad luck, but not so much so to indicate something may be wrong.
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It is indeed important. If we assume the extreme that all bets are either 0 or the max bet, the variance increases 100-fold which means that the result is only about 1.2 sd below the mean. A list of bets can resolve this particular issue.
What fields do you want to see per bet? block number, date, bet type, stake, result, return? Anything else? These should be enough. |
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For each type of bet I calculated the average amount put in, and assumed the actual bets are distributed uniformly from 0 to twice the average.
I don't know how important this is, but I doubt that's at all close to the actual distribution. I would expect tiny bets to be the vast majority of bets placed. I suspect that there are thousands of sub-1 BTC bets, and very few larger bets. I will make a text file available detailing all the bets processed in the last couple of weeks, so that you can make a proper analysis. But first I have to go light some fires and let a little dog out to pee.  It is indeed important. If we assume the extreme that all bets are either 0 or the max bet, the variance increases 100-fold which means that the result is only about 1.2 sd below the mean. A list of bets can resolve this particular issue. Honestly it looks like its in the realm of possibility to me. Compare it to the 11/08 jump.
That's what I think too. I did those calculations in an attempt to demonstrate that this is indeed nothing to worry about (not the best way to do science, but my methodology was simple enough not to be influenced by my prejudice). Which is why I was a bit surprised by my result, but variance in the bet amounts may explain them away. |
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On Nov 4-8 2012 I will be in miluim (military reserve duty) for the annual battalion exercise. I will likely not have internet access through that time; this means Bitcoil will be unavailable and that I will be making no further progress in resolving the GLBSE situation.
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What this thread is aboutThis is a thread where I (and possibly others) talk about myself. Given my level of activity in this forum I believe creating such a thread is justified. It can serve a variety of purposes: 1. Informing people I have a business dealing with about my track record, reputation and commitment to Bitcoin. 2. Informing people who may seek my advice about my skills and experience. 3. Satisfying the curiosity of anyone who is interested in knowing more about me. 4. Posting updates about myself that could be relevant to people with a stake in my various projects. 5. Giving customers/partners a place to report any misconduct on my part (and, through lack of such reports, demonstrate my trustworthiness to those who would come here to look). A bit about me, personallyI was born in 1984 in Haifa, Israel, and have since moved to Hadera and then to Tel Aviv. I served in the IDF as an artillery battalion's telecommunications platoon sergeant, and then proceeded to complete an M.Sc. in mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science, doing a machine learning thesis under the supervision of Boaz Nadler. After that (in 2009) I started working as the head of research of the internet startup SimilarWeb, a position from which I started to phase out once I've heard about Bitcoin. Some of my online profiles include: http://www.facebook.com/meni.rosenfeldhttp://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=99439111http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Meni_RosenfeldI am fairly selective about connecting on social networks, so most of my connections would be people I know in person and which could give a reference. I first heard about Bitcoin in March 2011 from this LessWrong post talking about SIAI (now MIRI) accepting Bitcoin donations. I have since become increasingly more involved with it, and starting August 2011 I have focused entirely on Bitcoin endeavors. Bitcoin, Israel and myselfMy largest area of activity is with the promotion of Bitcoin in Israel. I currently serve as the chairman of the Israeli Bitcoin Association. In April 2011 I have started a test run of Bitcoil ( thread), a service for exchanging bitcoins for ILS in Israel, and it was officially launched in August 2011. For two years it has been the best method for people in Israel to buy or sell small to medium amounts of bitcoins, with many satisfied customers and demand reaching millions of ILS per month in early 2013. Unfortunately, the service is currently unavailable due to opposition by Israeli banks. I am the founder and organizer of the Israel Bitcoin Meetup Group, hosting regular events almost weekly. These have evolved from 3 people meeting at a cafe to lecture-filled events with 180 attendees, as well as two full-blown conferences (one local and one international, and counting). I am a co-founder and the main content contributor of the content site http://www.bitcoin.org.il/, and an admin of the Facebook page and IRC channel. I have written Hebrew translations of bitcoin-qt and of Satoshi's whitepaper. I'm giving talks and interviews to any interested parties, including Oracle, Payoneer, the Haifa Linux Club and the channel 10 program "Layla Calcali". Mining pool reward methodsIn March 2011 I have developed the geometric method, the first non-PPS hopping-proof reward method. It is the basis for the double geometric method (DGM) which I developed in August 2011. DGM greatly expands the range of options offered by the geometric method on the reward method triangle (making it practical to have low variance for both the miners and the pool operator), and currently enjoys some popularity with the mining pools. In July 2011 I started working on the comprehensive guide to the subject, Analysis of Bitcoin Pooled Mining Reward Systems ( thread), and finished in November 2011. I have also written a summary of the results. GLBSEDespite its many deficiencies, GLBSE was a very powerful platform while it lasted, and it is unfortunate what happened to it. I have made several issues on GLBSE: PureMining: My first (and most successful) issue, and the first perpetual deterministic mining bond. The idea was devised when I was looking for a way to harness economies of scale in purchasing BFL FPGA equipment, and followed the issues that could arise to their logical conclusion. While many are still confused about the concept, I believe and hope it marks the way for how most mining investments and hedging will work in the future. A total of 15566 bonds worth 1 MH/s each we issued. After the GLBSE shutdown, payment has proceeded for a while with a static list, until I bought the bonds back according to their contract. Anti-Pirate: At a time when pirateat40's Bitcoin Savings and Trust was gaining popularity, and a rising trend was pass-throughs for investment, I offered the opposite - a way to short his operation. It was a perpetual asset designed so that the profit from it is exactly (up to fee and time value of money) the negative of an equivalent investment with Pirate, so that if one believed investment in Pirate is lossy, investment in Anti-Pirate would be profitable. For whatever reason, not a single bond was bought. ABSORB: After Bitcoinica shut down, I and others were looking for a way to control our BTC position. ABSORB was an attempt to use GLBSE's trading functionality to emulate BTC/USD margin trading. It worked as a prediction market for which of two exchange rates, high and low, would be achieved first. This allowed placing a leveraged bet on increase or decrease of the exchange rate, with a calculable equivalent effect on the position. The first (and only) series was concluded with a 400 BTC payout. POLY: An improved attempt to emulate margin trading, POLY worked by having a face value calculated as a power function of the current BTC/USD exchange rate. It allowed easier control of the position with a persistent asset. The bonds were eventually bought back for a total of 560 BTC. The uglyThrough life’s bad times we appreciate the good. I unfortunately agreed to help one Alberto Armandi to raise funds for Bitdaytrade, a margin trading platform he was working on, through the BDT bonds on GLBSE. It didn't work out so well. The story is not over yet, but due to either malice or incompetence of Alberto, he now has a debt of about 10K BTC which he seems unable or unwilling to repay. I have learnt important lessons from the experience about both human nature and my own limitations. MiscellaneousI devised one proposal for a Proof of Stake system, and led the effort to get DOSBox to accept Bitcoin donations. I am now collaborating in the development of colored coins, and I have helped Adi Shamir with his research on the Bitcoin transaction graph. I have written an analysis of hashrate-based double-spending. In my blog http://fieryspinningsword.com/ I write about a variety of things, mostly related directly or indirectly to Bitcoin. People from the forum I've metIf you've been to any of the conferences in New York (2011), Prague (2011), London (2012), San Jose (2013), Amsterdam (2013) or Amsterdam (May 2014), you probably saw me. In particular I recall talking with bearbones, jared@bitmunchies, MemoryDealers, matsh, btcx, Bruce Wagner, BitPay Business Solutions, Steve, jed, Stefan Thomas, Littleshop, nanotube, Jered Kenna (TradeHill), Gavin Andresen, coblee; FreeTrade, worldly, Pieter Wuille, slush, molecular, genjix, lonelyminer (Peter Šurda), Goonie; Inaba, ribuck, garyrowe, Vladimir, Mihai Alisie, Vandroiy, Nefario, jgarzik, jim618, mintymark, shtylman, Mike Hearn, Andrew Miller, kangasbros; aantonop, evoorhees, Yago, retep, etotheipi, enmaku, Yankee (BitInstant), maaku, JoelKatz, eMansipater, edd, Luke-Jr, gmaxwell, Rassah, crazy_rabbit, fellowtraveler, casascius; gigavps, adam3us and Vitalik Buterin. Additionally, I have met in Israel ripper234, iddo, eyal, Andrew Vorobyov, Eli, gilgil, yoniassia, WiW and yona. Bitcoin online communitiesI am very active in the Bitcoin forum; my post count is evidence of that, but by itself it shows no indication of the quality of the posts. My posts can be sampled by picking pages randomly and reading the first post in each. (Reading through the posts in one page is not a proper sampling method; I could be having a good or bad day.) I also have accounts on bitcoin.stackexchange, the Bitcoin wiki and the bitcoin-otc WoT. Some of the threads I've started on the forum are: Pledge for DOSBox donations (96 BTC sent)Geometric method: New cheat-proof mining pool scoring methodA short note about variance and pool payoutsBitcoil - Exchange bitcoins for ILSDo we want oblivious mining pool shares?Mining pool reward math FAQNodeBank - Concept for a p2p banking networkAnalysis of Bitcoin Pooled Mining Reward SystemsDouble geometric method: Hopping-proof, low-variance reward systemPPLNSIsrael Bitcoin Meetup GroupUsing mixing transactions to improve anonymityThe mining pool reward method triangleOutsourcing vanity address generation[GLBSE] PureMining: Infinite-term, deterministic mining bondIntroduction to Bitcoin - from bitcoin.org.ilIsrael Bitcoin community homepageBitcoin-qt unwanted translations[GLBSE] (discontinued) Anti-Pirate: Bonds for negative BTCST investmentsMine in multiple pools to reduce variance[IDEA] Casascius physical BitringsI've finally figured out BFL's name and logoWhy you should care about minersDynamic block frequencyRollover transaction feesOutput upkeep costs[GLBSE] ABSORB - Emulating BTC/USD margin trading[WTB] [FILLED] 1000 BTC Contract for difference (I'm taking the short position)[GLBSE] POLY - Persistent BTC/USD margin trading emulationTrustless, instant, off-the-chain Bitcoin payments[GLBSE] BDT - 3% weekly interest bond, backed by BitdaytradeBitcoin icon on TV (City of London)Unofficial attendance list - Bitcoin London 2012Unofficial Bitdaytrade deposit claims threadHow to determine common ownership of addresses? (Inspired by Shamir's paper)How to determine dormant coins? (Inspired by Shamir's paper)Short presentation about Bitcoin (technical focus)Salient block countdown timerHow to detect the change output?The Jewish holidays threadAnalysis of hashrate-based double-spendingGetting Wikipedia to accept Bitcoin donations - Community pledgeSome presentations about BitcoinMulti-PPSMeni's Blog - Fiery Spinning SwordBitcoin Israel Think TankBitcoin in Israeli prime time TV - "The Magazine", November 2013Israel Bitcoin Conference October 19-20, 2014Crypto for the Masses - Israeli Bitcoin documentary filmO Bitcoinis - That's the first line of a poem I've writtenPolitical viewsI am not a libertarian, and I find many of the views expressed by people in the Bitcoin community to range from silly to appalling. A few words about trustOne goal of this thread is to carry across the idea that I stake my real identity on everything that I do; I only have one of those and thus my reputation is of the utmost importance to me. This doesn't mean that I will now start asking to be trusted with large sums of money, or that you should comply if I do. The trick which allowed me to honor every obligation I've made is that I never promised more than I am able to keep. When taking new liabilities one needs to understand the risks of what he is offering and limit his exposure to allow a wide margin of error, even at the cost of missed profit opportunities; and counterparties need to make sure the person is so diligent. Personally I don't intend to enter liabilities of more than a few thousand BTC any time soon, and even that only if it is for a very good reason. Edit: Oh, the good times when the thought of thousands of BTC in liabilities was on the table I do however now have faithfully completed obligations up to the $700K range on my track record, and the reputation I've built in ~3 years is worth at least that. Assets and liabilitiesA complete breakdown of assets is more personal than I am comfortable sharing at this point. I will simply state that I currently have no liabilities.
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I did a few hasty calculations, with lots of assumptions and room for errors along the way, but:
I took your table for Oct 29 stats and subtracted from it the Oct 20 stats, to get the stats for the period in question.
For each type of bet I calculated the average amount put in, and assumed the actual bets are distributed uniformly from 0 to twice the average.
From this I calculated the mean and variance of the profit from each type, summed over all types and compared it to the actual total profit.
I got a result which is 12.5 standard deviations below the mean (and we're talking about an approximately normal distribution).
Now, of course picking the most suspicious-looking 9-day period among half a year of statistics would skew the results. But still it would only be reasonable to get maybe 4 or 5 sd difference. 12.5 is just too much, and warrants further investigation.
Again, I could be wrong about the whole thing but at least it indicates someone needs to do a more careful analysis. A better analysis can be obtained with a table of the individual bets.
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I mean, this would at least work for decentralized alt-coin exchanges, right? Ignoring the spite factor at least. The reason you can't do a decentralized exchange with cash is because cash has limitations that cryptocurrencies don't and that is why there is any appeal/value to cryptocurrencies in the first place.
I had an idea about a way to reduce malicious traders who don't hold up their end of the deal out of spite. One side agrees to be party 0 and the other side agrees to be party 1, this is entirely arbitrary and could be done automatically. Each side could generate a random number, and encrypt it. The they exchange the encrypted numbers. Then they exchange keys to decrypt each other's number. If the sum of both numbers is even, party 0 is the first to send his key to decrypt the k wallet. If the sum of both numbers is odd, party 1 is the first to send his key.
Unless I made a mistake somewhere, this means that malicious spite traders would be unable to spite 50% of the time, otherwise both parties would lose. It seems like this would at least reduce the occurrence of spite trades by 50%.
Trading across chains is a solved problem. The trick is to build the transaction so that one party, with the very act of redeeming his coins, publishes the information needed for the other party to do so. And if I'm not mistaken, one party can't lose its coins due to the other party losing the key, since in this case it falls back to a previous tx version. |
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