This is unlikely to end well. In addition, there's a good chance of both:

• This actually being a scam and the coins liquidized at some arbitrary point in the future
• An angry investor taking the head of the one responsible

Unless, of course, they have a backing insurance that will cover this? That's the way this is normally done, since the insurance people would probably take the job of investigating and thus securing against theft, while paying those who otherwise have been screwed by the exchange.

Okay... any official statement on this?

Was any fake money withdrawn? Where does the nonsense come from? Or is this just a successful troll raid timed with an unlikely buy order of around 20k BTC?

I don't see any of the insane spikes people claim to have come by.

To be honest, my 20 BTC bounty hasn't been paid yet. Couldn't get around testing those apps yet, and I often see reviews with coins disappearing.

If this works out, I guess I should pay half of it to the main BitcoinJ developer, he really made this possible.

Then... mh, I'll try the Bitcoin Wallet app. The other one practically admitted sending my wallet to Google unencrypted -- I don't know whether to call it theft or a bad joke.


Any experiences with the Wallet app? Has anyone lost coins using it, or faced any other problems? I'll fool around with it a bit as soon as I find some time for it.

I don't want to pay bounty to a program that just leaks or steals the coins in the end, so I'm taking my time watching first.

This makes no sense. TX fee price is determined by the most efficient miners -- all prices will cascade down if one appears that offers fees smaller than any other. Unless you assume all miners equally efficient, the more efficient ones can charge lower TX fees and thus drive the less efficient out CONTINUOUSLY. The process will repeat every time difficulty adapts. All miners reaching equal efficiency in a competitive environment doesn't seem likely either.

I need not go into your other points. An argument with one point broken is broken. I am tired of this, I again see no model coupling attacker size to network size and thus difficulty. The "argument", apart from being false, would apply to any network size. That does not seem reasonable at all.

Please, read a little more carefully before claiming things I can show false in one paragraph and absurd in one statement.

Because every time it has been actually discussed, the result was Bitcoin security NOT functioning properly after minting, and NO consensus on a choice of block size limit being in place. One cannot reduce a two-variable problem (difficulty, fees) to a one-variable problem (fees) without any explanation as to why this can be done.

Neglect block size limit, and see what you get. All but the cheapest miners will be pushed out of the market, reducing difficulty, which in turn creates competition among the cheapest miners. It's a Tragedy of the Commons, with only the non-profit miners remaining in the end, and difficulty converging to zero.

I have had discussions in lengthy threads about it, and the bottom line was fairly clear. People arguing that current Bitcoin protocol would work don't even have a model they agree on! Some want to remove limits, some don't, some think cartels will do the job, some just neglect the Tragedy of the Commons... and each argument showed significant flaws. The only model that really gets backing has difficulty not only de-coupled from possible attacker size, but also converging to very low values unless limits on transactions push fees to arbitrary numbers.

See the following thread for the discussion, or the linked post in which I tried to summarize models. It's a mess, but if you take some time to think about it, it becomes clear that there is something wrong.

Thread on difficulty equilibrium after minting:
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=6284.0

Post in which I try to show that people who don't see a problem hardly ever agree on a model:
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=6284.msg111735#msg111735


The only thing that looks promising is the block message rule 13: "Reject if timestamp is after the median time of the last 11 blocks", as this could be used to prevent chain splitting after a certain amount of time. But I think things should be formal and proven secure, not just happen to make difficulties for an attacker.

Those Bitcoiners are all speculators. They don't want to sell, and if they sell, they want to wait out any possible rally before they do.

Illiquid market, I guess.

++

It really helps to have a statement at hand one is skeptical about. I can provide one if you want; even though I like Bitcoin I'm a skeptic of sorts.

There is just soooo much wrong with the confirmation system. Why is the confirmation timescale so coarse? Why are we using a difficulty changing function that might oscillate? Was it necessary to make the minting cuts so extremely harsh? Why is the system lacking any mechanism to create a reasonable difficulty equilibrium after minting? Why is there no formal plan to use Web of Trust features to augment security without wasting power? Has anyone proven there will be enough incentive to store the block chain in the future? What block size limit can a user expect in the future?

I'm fairly convinced by now that the answer is simple: Bitcoin is a quick-and-dirty design. It is a horrible mess. This is an issue. Should the programmers just walk away, most likely it won't be just the price that drops. The system itself could cease to function. Difficulty too low? Attacker can DoS it. Block chain too large? Nodes become enormous. Block size limit too low? Transaction fees become absurd.

It's not finished. The protocol is incomplete; we all rely on it being somehow worked out in the future. And, seriously: it's 2011. Bitcoin transactions are SLOW.



Everyone's talking as if skeptics must be dollar-lovers or something. I totally want a p2p credit system! I always wanted one. But face the facts, Bitcoin isn't perfect. Instead of solving the issues, everybody is discussing the price chart. That makes me value it lower, because I care for the long-term development -- and most of the current mania is not helping with that.

You figured out why chartism doesn't work. Now just try to explain that to all the guys staring at the charts babbling about reading the future out of it.

Speculating on a small market with running costs is a zero-sum game at best. Choosing the time or time-span to act is part of it. We've seen times at which patience was the right choice, but similarly often, we've seen the impatient profit most. It shouldn't be possible to make a general rule for speculators. If everybody follows it, those acting ahead of them will be the big winners.

The "weekend dip" thing also has become a pure psycho-game. Everybody knows about it, fluctuations in volume should dwarf it, and it's generally not much of a model. The herd believes it though, so just before and after weekends, we sometimes see strange extra movement.

I really like what you said about people implying "if you don't buy now you will miss the train forever". I think this was integral to what happened with Bitcoin price. People literally panicked that they would miss out on their chance to get a hold of Bitcoins. The upward rallies always happened in such a frenzy, even the latest ones, it's hard to imagine that people were thinking calmly at the time.

Das wird erst ein Problem, wenn die Difficulty niedrig genug ist, um einer einzelnen Organisation zu ermöglichen, Rechenleistung in Größenordnung des Bitcoin-Netzes zu haben. Das könnte später passieren, wenn das Minting, also die Menge der neu erstellten Coins, keinen so großen Faktor mehr spielt und ein zu hohes Block Size Limit eingestellt ist.

Meiner Ansicht nach wird es später zusätzlich zurSicherheit durch "Proof of Work" (Rechenleistung) Sicherheit durch ein "Web of Trust" geben. (Bekannte, vertrauenswürdige Nodes bilden ein weltweites Netz.) Diese Kombination wäre geradezu unmöglich zu brechen; eine einzige ehrliche Verbindung würde ausreichen, um den Angegriffenen mit Nachdruck zu warnen.

Jup. Alle reden, als wäre der Hack schuld an dem Preissturz; der größte Preissturz war aber VOR dem Hack!

Ich mag dieses Blabla nicht. Und auch nicht, dass sich alles um den Wechselkurs dreht. Wenn's mal crashed, dann tun alle so, als ob Bitcoin selbst deshalb irgendwie schlechter wäre -- ist doch total banane, ob man jetzt 10 oder 200 coins für'n Mainboard zahlt!

I'm still betting on a classical bust phase, so I think we'll get more sawtooth waves, trending down at a medium pace while decreasing in jump height with exp dampening of the spikes over the next 3-5 weeks. So I guessed $10, but with a large variance on it -- not just of the guess, I also don't think it'll be smoothed out in a week only, so I think we might still have spikes by then. The forecast this thread asks for is so short-term, it's likely we'll be in another sawtooth at the very time it aims at.

Which leaves us at "it's usually pointless to try short-term price expectation value forecasts".

I expected this to happen so trained myself to always keep in mind whether typing in the upper or lower box.

Consider yourself lucky you weren't typing a large catch order. Imagine someone wanting to type "Buy 8000 BTC if price falls to 8" and actually inputting "Sell 8000 BTC limit 8".

This is a major interface flaw of Mt. Gox. I consider it so dangerous that I warn people I execute trades for that the mistake might happen to me one day. Even though I know of it, when speedily inputting orders on a small screen, the mistake is just very likely. In the end, Mt. Gox is ghetto, we all know that. Be happy as long as they figure out why their trading engine displays impossible spikes.

That's miners only.

Speculator profit withdraws into fiat should take more than that, and then there are exchange fees. All three are a value outflow that has to be considered.

lol wtf

And there I was telling people to do arbitrage there. I can't extract USD from tradehill with decent fees, gah!

Free money on the street, let's see who's the first to pick it up.

Man... I've had four-digit sums stuck in the SEPA pay-out for longer, but it arrived eventually. You're correct to be annoyed, but if anyone with money transfer issues speaks of theft after one week, we'll all go nuts.

>1 week is a reason to get annoyed, yes. I also don't like the idea that they might back-date the EUR exchange to their liking. But in your case, there's no such exchange involved -- the dollars are still worth roughly the same three days later.

Yes, we frown on the sloppiness of Mt. Gox, but it's not yet time to call it theft.

I don't think all miners sell. But at current volumes, yes, they play a role. Remember that official volume can be much lower than money influx! Coins and dollars are often traded multiple times.

A more important question is the USD influx though. Fluctuations in that have a much larger effect than miners can do.

The largest factor, however, is probably BTC hoarders. If just a fraction of these sell, both miners and buyers look like dwarfs. This is the reason I wouldn't predict things necessarily remaining "steady". Volatility and especially possible price hikes are what motivates people to hold quite some value in BTC. Should they for some reason cease to expect much buying power incoming, price could face a very sudden drop. Similarly, if they do see more buying, they might not sell, creating a positive feedback loop once again: with rising prices, there is no fear causing sales, and buyers see immediate profits.

That model makes things look fairly unstable to me. The slow decline might actually be the best way out, since it reduces the potential size of sudden price drops.

I don't think they're worth all too much if half the internet is in range of EMP blasts. Otherwise, just have an encrypted backup on a server elsewhere.

Anyways, try not to live where there's a high chance of a nuclear war.

Herp Derp

I say it's a dude who wants to make fun of anti-discrimination people. It's not like you can possibly prove me wrong.

The petition states "we pledge that we will NOT deliver your details to any Third Party what so ever other than your First Name, Surname, Email Address and Country of residence."

Erm. My email to third party is a massive no-go. Also, the wording is close to fraud. They might as well have written "we will disclose everything except your IP address to a third party."