Even being known as an anti-ponzi fanatic, I don't quite see how this is a scam.

What exactly is Mavrodi claiming that distinguishes this from gambling? He seems to be sprinkling jealousy triggers over his site, but that's not fraudulent in itself, is it? Yes, there is some pretty crazy stuff on the site, but still, read this quote:


And another, REALLY standing out


I don't think Mavrodi will have a hard time sleeping at night if he takes money from people who project their greed onto this kind of thing. This is NOT the same as a typical, criminal Ponzi. At first glance, I'm not quite sure why it should be categorized as a scam instead of gambling.

I'm having difficulties making sense of the final trading days and last balance; especially, I want to be sure that outstanding transactions at the time of Gox's default are included in my claim.

I'd like to see the reasoning behind the final balance shown, preferably an official transaction log for my account, so that I can verify it against my own data and older logs. What happened to any outstanding transfers? Were they merged back into the final balance? If so, when?

It's not reasonable to expect users to download their histories every day. Now, if there is anything unclear in the logs we've saved, we have nothing to compare to. The hide-and-seek on important details doesn't making me feel any better about this.

The first line reads like an insult to a lot of people's friends. I'd trust my friends more than anyone or -thing I don't know as well, including but not limited to corporations.

I think it's important to formalize trust. Just because there exists some complicated transaction using firends' trust, few would execute it by hand. If ZeroReserve manages to simplify this process enough, it becomes preferable to trusting an ominous entity that tends to eat your funds in one big bite -- like Gox and the numerous other failed exchanges.

Banking -- the trade with IOUs -- is actually quite efficient. It mostly fails on the wrong places piling up trust. If trust becomes more explicit and less reliant on magic entities doing magic things with trust they implicitly get, it's a great approach.

It's been a while since the Decker and Wattenhofer paper.

What is the current excuse as to where the coins are?

I haven't heard an explanation that is even remotely plausible. But I must admit I'm not perfectly up to date. What is the official explanation? If none has been published by now, isn't that a rather straight admission of guilt by Karpelès and co?

I haven't received such an e-mail.

Whatever "in sequence" means, they are sending them either slowly or selectively.

An unsigned IRC log by the "Forum Führer" of the "Free Section" "Shooting the Shit".

Thank you for clarifying where we get information today.

Account locked for no reason. Support doesn't answer.

I'd love to reduce my risk. I don't recall dealing with Bitinstant or any other problematic site. But my chances of getting level 2 verified in this mess are dim. I can blindly send verification docs without a request, but without any info from support they might reject or ignore them or whatever.

I guess if this continues into next week, OP's prediction will come true, and Gox will be buried in lawsuits -- in the hope that there's enough left to claim.

I did similar trades when the spread became large, but only for a portion of my money.

I'm interested in any details from either plan; just trying to figure out options.

Exactly what I'm thinking too. There may be weird factors like an overly huge amount of BTC locked in at Gox, but unless a bored FBI employee is selling there for the giggles I can't make sense of why someone would do this. My best guess is irrational panic.

@Topic: Gox price will jump to at least 105% of BTC-E, whatever that is at the time. Gox fiat withdrawals are still borderline defunct, while BTC-E is pretty much unregulated and therefore the best indicator for true market price. Withdrawal tricks from Gox -- SEPA and JPY arb, expedited withdrawal -- usually cost around 5%. Price may go higher if these are congested.

If regulation hadn't forced people to keep their fiat on there forever this wouldn't be such a mess.

It's quite credible that the 6-month lockdown on wires was caused by banks who don't dare transfer any serious amount. The software issue now is probably minor in comparison, but in combination the two created huge chaos.

While Gox screwing up is an the issue, for all we know regulation still did the larger part. The reason Gox got hit harder was supposedly Silk Road money sitting there, which also sounds credible to me.

"Regulation" really just means blocking everything for hardly any benefit. In the end it doesn't recover lost funds either.

You can optimize the rules of an economy to favor honesty though.

But that would require intelligent and cooperative people who write the laws... good luck with that. That's where pretty much any "better society/economy/politics" plan fails.

How would one possibly set it up? Dictators go mad, democracies turn politics into show-business, and I can't think of any other method that would qualify. Once you're done with a superior plan on paper, there's nothing useful you can do with it. Decorate a wall maybe.

Supporting honesty is as easy as punishing deceit. If people punish the dishonest -- and those who assist in dishonesty or refrain from punishing it -- there's little choice except being honest or getting punished. IMO, punishing the breaking of contracts is sufficient, given reasonable arbitrators on the contracts' meanings.

I just saw a Mycelium wallet misbehave heavily: a transaction was shown as sending only the fee, not the rest. However, on the block chain, it was sent. Mycelium balance was then out of sync with the block chain.

Didn't happen on my device, so I don't have more details right now. But naturally I'm suspecting mutated transactions to be involved.

The OP is correct but missing one detail.

In a world where finance isn't regulated to death, you don't need Bitcoin. Just pick a bank and use it to convert commodities into whatever asset you need to pay with, or vice versa. Bitcoin's only real use is to combat red tape. Without this, it's easily beaten by many other systems, for example a payment processor plus gold exchanges.

That's not to say Bitcoin is a bad idea. It may or may not be a decent weapon against man-made idiocy; time will tell.

And once there isn't, chances are no unaugmented human will have a say in what happens next. Their productivity would be so low in comparison that they can't even revolt efficiently.

History is not a useful comparison as the past elites weren't that much smarter than their followers. True higher intelligence is an insurmountable opponent. Numbers usually don't play a role when facing a sufficient gap in knowledge and technology.

A well-educated human is valued at hundreds of uneducated humans today, at almost any task, civil or military. I have no idea what an intelligent entity with a brain/processing hardware of the size of a skyscraper would be valued at. It might be able to stop any and all attackers just by talking to them after reverse-engineering their thought patterns, or by creating a virus that kills them, or by manipulating some of them to fight the rest, or by altering society to depend on it, or any of millions of other methods.

Bottom line: we have little idea what happens if machines surpass humans in general mental tasks. It's quite possible that the first one undergoes an intelligence explosion and seals the fate of the solar system or more. If that happens, I just hope the person who programs it chooses the goals wisely.

Pirateat40 is a classical psychopath. He made up things all day without a second thought; then, he took extra risks and losses to make a show of himself.

Matthew "only" went nuts, scamming for no profit whatsoever. But maybe he believed he had a chance of getting rich? Hard to tell in retrospect. A lot of the things he did weren't very sane.

Goat here just looks for profit under the assumption that his moral stance is irrelevant anyway. It's like your usual corrupt politics; not exactly clean but not a good target for white nights either. While I don't approve of this, it's certainly been efficient in its own way.

Empathy, morals, and psychopathy are only loosely connected. A psychopath enjoys playing with the emotions and trust of others, while a person with less sociable morals just doesn't value other peoples' feelings as much. A lack of empathy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for either.

Psychopathy is a difference in thinking. Psychopaths know exactly what they do and take pride in it, to the point that they show it off. If someone is rationalizing what he did, he's probably not a psychopath. Matthew even tried to apologize; that doesn't fit the image of a psychopath very well.

Are you implying that Gox is systematically delaying Bitcoin withdrawals?

That would be an intentional delay, as there are no technical limitations (except for rare cold storage visits) for broadcasting transactions immediately.

(I just ordered a BTC withdrawal and indeed I'm not seeing the transaction yet.)

Interestingly, this happens almost indefinitely. Under ideal conditions, neglecting block limits, difficulty drops arbitrarily low. The transaction fee is therefore determined by the block limits and the amount of transactions. Sadly, it's not self-regulating in the sense that the minting of new Bitcoins is now.

I kicked off a discussion about this back in 2011 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6284.0). By now, the common answers are that either block limits will remain or the block chain will be secured by insurance companies that stockpile mining equipment and aid the older branch in case of a fork.

In the latter case, look at the bright side: less wasted electricity and less problems with difficulty oscillations.

Heh. Look who was debating in that thread, it's a who's who of Bitcoin now. I was only on a single Bitcoin conference and met a lot of these guys, heard of their products or projects, there's the devs and admins... now who wants to say the topic is boring and simple?

Prices hardly ever just go straight down. It doesn't work like that.

It's called a bust. Look at gold in the last two years -- it got on a down-trend at some point, but was just moving randomly for quite a while after an initial crash. From an all-out, giant speculation mania, it usually takes a year or two. The Nikkei took a decade of repeatedly swinging about but ultimately dropping.

If this is going bust, it'll be a slow and painful process.

It's a political question. In principle, the USD can collapse in value but still remain in existence.

Maybe the big governments will file for bankruptcy, as Greece did. That may somewhat put a lid on inflation. Possibly they won't be able to manage it and start inflating crazily. Then, the question is how many people cope with it and how many start using more stable currencies or commodities.

I guess the end of the USD will be at least a good bit after it has lost most of its current value. Therefore, the exact date isn't all that important when determining how many dollars to hold on the long run.

Whoever it is likely wouldn't sell his methods for less than, at the very best, half a million dollars. That's probably very conservative.

I wouldn't know who it is. Of those talking about speculation, everyone made mistakes at some point, but there were a few exceptionally effective people. If there was someone on that level who did not have major misses, that person is certainly rich now.

That's the problem with the best analysts, they have no reason to share what they think so we can't even know whether they exist. But I have the impression that a few of the TA guys might have hit gold with the Bitcoin market, there's just so many newbies and hobbyists around. Maybe someone managed to model that and make a killing.

You might want to check Goomboo's Journal. AFAIK he doesn't disclose exactly what he does at any given time, but the way he demonstrated how to make huge profits off Bitcoin using a primitive method was really surprising.