is monero really anonymous? how can someone know if his coin are sent to someone else? the other can just cheat can't he?

Sorry to spoil it for you, but most people do not have money to afford a 1TB thumb drive nor a 6TB HDD. In my country I rarely see people who have a 1TB HDD or higher (excluding myself). How do you plan to have a wider adoption? Although you never know, we might have 40TB drives we might still be stuck with the current limitations (look at batteries - minor/none improvement for years).
There are other ways to provide untraceable and unlinkable transactions. While ring signatures might bloat the blockchain a bit, they could do for now I guess.

Imagine 2 blockchains processing the same amount of transcations. Now Chain 1 is running with ringsignatures and Chain 2 is not.

Now lets say that every year 500 GB of transaction data gets produced and no blockchain pruning and shrinking is available.
After 1/2/3/4/5 years
Chain 1: 750GB/1.5 TB/2.25TB/3TB/3.75TB
Chain 2: 500GB/1TB/1.5TB/2TB/2.5 TB

And this is under the best case scenario that ringsignatures only produce 50% bigger tx. This number can be higher!

Cryptonite(XCN) most definitely has a private gpu miner. I tried mining with spot instances, even with different vps, hardly anything, not to mention the countless posts of guys using cpu farms and getting none-hardly any coins at all.

Rpietila underestimates the geometric network effects of making the block chain programmable. Imagine if every website had to be a copy of the first one.

This. This is TA.

You say human action isn't quantifiable with patterns on a chart.

You continue in making valid points, but you chose to not address one of my points that was intended to be a direct answer to your concerns. I selected the chess/algorithmic chess example for a reason...

First, we need to distinguish two elements here,
1) statistical evidence that some traders "beat the market" in a way that is unlikely to be the product of pure chance, and
2) determining what is the reason for 1).

I believe 1) can be shown (though your requirement that it needs to be an "algorithmic trading pattern" is not necessary for that - it doesn't matter whatever cognitive process produces the result), and there are enough well known (public) traders outside of btc that provide evidence for 1). I know some economists have tongue in cheek referred to Warren Buffet as a "six sigma event", but that's ultimately just an admission of what a sad field it is they work in: physicists would take such an event as an opportunity to investigate alternative explanations, economists (more precisely: adherents of the EMH) seem to think by labeling something that goes against their predictions an outlier they solve the problem. /rant

Next step, what causes 2), is a lot harder, and your objection is valid of course: just because a trader beats the market significantly and uses TA doesn't prove that TA is the reason for that success. Which brings me back to my chess analogy: The often somewhat fuzzy sounding strategies written over the centuries on chess might seem useless to you, coming from a purely formal position. You will still note that almost all players that are at an extremely high level will use such (non algorithmic) advice in learning and training.

What to conclude? a) their success is due some other factor (and the strategy they learn is a "placebo"), or perhaps b) there is after all some, difficult to measure, effect of those "vague strategies" that gives players (and traders) a competitive edge.

To paraphrase: I think it is entirely plausible that, if implemented purely algorithmically, most TA would produce only barely significant results. That doesn't mean however it cannot work - I find it entirely plausible that TA mainly works by "sharpening" a traders intuition for the effects you mention yourself: market psychology and underlying causes. I would add a few more "fundamental market forces" (momentum, reversion), but in principle this is where we probably agree, if phrased correctly... I don't believe TA is a set of methods that work on its own. It is perhaps a set of tools that help the trader's human mind to read markets better than is usually possible without those tools.

sing it, sister!

i don't argue often, but when i do, it's not against Mr Bulkowski. but hey, if people want to think it's all random, it's all good with me.... whatever.

For example, a falling wedge results in an upward breakout 68% of the time. A descending triangle results in a downward breakout 64% of the time.

I get where you're coming from. "If it works, it should be possible to _show_ that it works." (where "show" means something like "up to current academic publication standards"). Did I get that right?

Let me make a countering case. I suggested the analogy before in some other thread, so apologies for the repetition:

Imgagine you're a computer scientist in the 1970s. You implemented a computer chess algorithm on the fastest then-available machine, nothing more complicated than alpha-beta pruning (or variations of it). You still fail to beat a competent human GM. Consistently.

So, you ask the GM how he plays chess. He'll throw an entire library of opening theory (or endgame theory, or whatever) at you. You read it, and will quickly realize that this completely unimplementable. Worthless, from your perspective. Yet, still, that GM beats your machine nearly every single time.

End of analogy. In my opinion, TA as she is practiced by the more competent traders in here, is as much of an art as it is a science (thanks to sgbett for that phrasing). It's difficult (though not impossible) to show that it produces statistically significant results. And even then, what is tested is only a tiny subset of what traders actually use for the TA: the purely algorithmic part, while in reality the algorithmic methods go hand in hand with intuition/human-optimized pattern recognition/etc. (like in the chess analogy above).

It really runs down to the following question, in my opinion: do you only accept knowledge and results that are produced by the full rigor of academic methodology, or do you allow for "conditional knowledge"... insights that appear reasonable to you, that you have personal annecdotal evidence for, and that you hope can eventually be proven to be correct in a more formal way.

Myself, I follow the latter approach: I believe I have tentative evidence that TA (as I practice it) works well enough, but I don't expect to be able to show beyond a doubt that it does work, because (as you already pointed out) the system underlying it is too complex (and not well enough understood yet) to formalize it to the point where the question can really be answered once and for all. Until then, I will continue using those methods, with tight risk control in place to avoid catastrophic failure should the methods "stop working" for me.

you don't think :



that's a problem

and the fact it means effective price control because a tiny fraction of people are producing it all?

and then because of that huge run up of centralization - if the price stagnates lower giving multiple opportunties for multiple 51% attacks with no checkpoint, a long distribution and a fixed number. 

^^^^

none of that is of any concern to you?

My arguement here is that a conspiracy that the whole left ideology and all socialism was created by the government and wealthy elite so that the rich remains rich and the poor remains poor and middle class trapped in debt slavery and financial trap.

because while any tax is raised, the poor is excluded, the 1% rich is less affected and the it is the middle class and upper middle class entrapped in financial slavery which suffers great and left to pursue day jobs and discourages innovation and entrepreneurship, who if given financial opportunity will be a direct threat to the 1% who spoil the free market with their crony capitalism.They destroy any competition and become monopoly.

All these makes the ultra rich more rich, poor poor and middle class trapped..

What about Zerocash / coin anonymity These are supposed to be totally anonymous. wont they be untraceable when they go live?

People don't forget that the new deadline for filing your claim to gox assets is end of May 2015 and not November 2014

On the subject of claims, I was just reading all over the net that the tokyo police did confirm the illegal removal of only 27000 coins from mtgox.
They also confirmed that they will be investigating what happened to the other 600000 or so.

According to one site, the tokyo police were hinting of the possibility of recovering 544000 coins. Well whatever the outcome is, I for one find it rather strange that 650000 coins could have been illegally removed without management catching on that theft was taking place, unless they did not need to worry because no theft was actually taking place on such a large scale.

Should the police manage to recover a substantial amount of coins, I wonder what the outcome would be if creditors settle for a deal before it is recovered. I'm sure we all would like to see any further coins that are thereafter recovered, be returned to gox's creditors.

What would the price of each coin be if it is recovered? Guess Satoshi knows

Lets wait and see

5. exchanges are now having $10k FIAT deposit limits. this means the days of rich investors throwing 10's to hundreds of thousands at an exchange are over. thank you AML policies.

darkcoin works too with semi-decentralized automatic mixing

I think he means the mass surveillance program which includes data from millions of web-trackers, social networks including facebook, email services, phone conversations, instant messengers, google searches and the list goes on. All of this data is collected and accessible by employees of the NSA and private contractors without a warrant, both private and public information. To be anonymous these days you need to take extreme precautions, because there is money to be made in stalingrad surveillance systems