I still don't believe these numbers. Who would run this on 0.1%? There surely were timing issues around.

payb.tc, how about a straight answer: what was the interest rate Bitcoinmax had in BS&T?

Also, do we really want that price finding is based on that? It's high compared to pretty much the whole last year, there was no time for the bubble behavior to deflate, and the cause for "stability" is supposed to be some gigantic order?

A rally now would probably not end well. Where is it supposed to go, into another round of speculative madness? Price movement based on price movement is not a good idea. Neither is basing it on announcements of announcements. What I see is a questionable mess, plus multiple possibilities of manipulation. I prefer a defensive stance until there's a clearer view of the situation.

And, as expected, it's the real one. Welcome back, Atlas.

Strange account-wars or not, it's a delight to have people on Bitcointalk who know that "NO U" is not the only way of answering.

The rat comparison only works on short time-scales. If you feed them enough, eventually they adapt and start reproducing again. The same goes for any living creature. The argument is very simple: if there exists any path for genes or memes to forge a group that reproduces endlessly, the first such group will exponentially take over the population until something stops it. Evolution has created proper fingernails and an abstractly re-configuring brain. It is certainly able to make people reproduce, and thus, this will happen until something stops it.



On the monopolies, your argument is correct. However, it works only qualitatively, namely if you assume a financial market of arbitrary size. Reality is not so nice. If a monopoly is so large that the biggest time-scale financial markets can cover is less than the expected amortization time, the investment never happens.

The good news is: your argument means there's no need for state intervention on small scales. The bad: if someone monopolizes something like operating systems or transportation on an entire continent, stepping in should be preferred to waiting for a miracle that might take ages to happen.

There are some things that people just never say aloud. IMO, this is at the heart of the issue. Here's one of them.

Evolution will ensure that humans have (or reacquire) a tendency to multiply in numbers. The current slow-down is temporary at best. This leaves us with two main solutions for selection who gets to live and who doesn't:

• Some organization(s) exert birth control
• The poorest die

Claiming that current societies (with the exception of China) promote anything but the latter is wishful thinking. Prepare for mass deaths on the lower end if the upcoming debt crisis causes disruptions in food prices.



BTW, good to see you posting on this account, Atlas. The conspiracy theories and alt accusations were kinda getting out of hand.

I never cared about Ayn Rand much. Seeing the interview though, it seems she was smart, and good at what she did. However, one of the statements was wrong, and I don't understand why people who otherwise have great analyses keep making that mistake. Monopolies can form without government. Simple example: the largest railway provider gives better terms the more you use their network, e.g. by day-passes. A better, smaller competitor will have unreasonably massive difficulty in establishing itself.

I wonder, is there a name for this type of libertarianism I believe in: very weak state with a massive exception to prevent natural monopolies (local optima)?

Yep... can't see from one frame to the next: was the sell order and the removal of the wall simultaneous?

I agree that it does look like a risky attempt to influence people into buying at higher prices. That enormous bid order just doesn't seem like something a millionaire would do without some sort of reason.

Why would you do this?

While we've had volume of the sort, that order causes... uh... interesting side-effects. What is it with the large-money guys frequently showing such disruptive behavior? Just an attempt of order-book manipulation? Anyone knowing Bitcoin exchanges should know that such orders have worse chances of getting filled than just spreading it out over time.

BTC sellers have sometimes done the same, remember when 300k were sold in mere hours last year? For whatever reason, it always happens at the most absurd times.

Maybe? For "Guaranteed Fully Insured", with explicit lock-ins of none and 8 weeks?

If any of CecilNiosaki's points A or B are true, this is obviously fraud, because it advertised with wrong information. Q.E.D., what do you need a "legal precedent" for? Besides, legal precedent where? On any classical market, investors bring police along when such bullshit comes to light.

Is it really just me who thinks that lying about relevant parts of a contract crosses a line? I'd put scammer tags on all insurances that can't pay, because they fail at the only thing insurances are good for. Totally counter-intuitive contract interpretations are also not okay. If someone says "insured", nobody expects a three-year delay in there. To make it clear: if you let this pass, every contract that doesn't involve a payment time could say "I'll pay in three years" and not get a scammer tag until then. Reasonable? Bad luck, even that doesn't suffice! Because remember, there is a time-frame given in the OP of the Lending thread: an 8-week maximum lock-in, guaranteed fully insured!

This is not a matter of opinion!




How about... A MILLION YEARS!


...

Why am I arguing on this forum. Sanity Points -= 2

Exactly.

We have hundreds of users that would have long been permabanned on normal forums. Why the heck? What's the benefit? They don't deliver any of the good, productive or funny content. Just scams and insults all over the place.

I'm really a fan of laissez-faire. Just not of complete anarchy.



@vite:
Blaming Bitcoin is not the proper way about this though. By giving them money, you funded a part of what these people are doing, and thereby strengthened them within the community. Blaming bystanders after feeding the scammers won't solve the problem. Go track your funds and try find the ones responsible, and at least make sure you're a liability, not an asset, in terms of cost-benefit. Not doing that means asking to be scammed.

Look at Micon. One scammer got him, and maybe he didn't hit that one, but he sure as hell is giving scammers in general a hard time. If more people would stand up and disturb the funky incredible business operations, maybe it would stop being so profitable.

Don't be the guy who joined, tipped coins to destructive forces, and then left again. Contemplate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative if you think it's a good stance to do that.

This is missing the point of vouching for someone. That person fucks up and vanishes, remaining shit spreads to supporters. That's how social networks and webs of trust work.

Now, I'm not talking about "he's decent" or "so far, dealing with him was good" type of posts. The statement "It's not a Ponzi" needs a very good explanation now.

And yes, AFAIK there's no proof these 10k BTC ever existed. It makes zero sense from the start: be so sure about it, but start pass-throughs long before digging up a 10k investment?

I could hardly care less about the scammer tag though. Trust isn't created by the mighty forum admins, they seem to let about anything pass on here. But look at the people who do real business. Most of them don't touch the funny bond markets with a ten foot pole, and often enough give their opinions on people involved in it.

Well, 5 turned out to be super stable and then turned into a huge rally. But okay, maybe I should've said "a lot of people believe the price cannot drop".

Sounds similar to "permanently high plateau," which has the exact same ring to it.

Well, can't claim to know the future. Let's see how it turns out.

Asking a lot? That's an understatement.

payb.tc withdraw: http://blockchain.info/address/19kEo3qmuUdAQb1Q7VZhRwahw5v3NSZCeW?filter=2
payb.tc deposit: http://blockchain.info/address/1FmC6gUV1tkT7HHmQzo3NwtgZs3WGSz4Rd?filter=2

Why would he try to shed light on this event, or change anything about the outcome? This is a feeder fund, with a real balance of >+3k when it started (he had already withdrawn more than deposited) and <-83k when it ended. It appears it got 7.7% interest, meaning he gained 0.8% weekly on a massively inflated paper balance.

This guy probably holds profits, and the chaos of Bitcoinmax accounts hides the tracks for the last months. Oh yes, you guys are asking a lot.

If I may take a guess, you're on your own. I see no way to obtain credible accounting unless you have it already. Heck, any of you, try to prove you're a Bitcoinmax customer and not a sock-puppet of payb.tc or who-knows-whom! How can anyone tell who is who and who should own what here, when there's no trustworthy party involved?

Also, who is that payb.tc account even?

Looking at the poll, I think I found another indicator that it's gonna crash.

Market where a vast majority believes it can only go up? Yeaaa, not so healthy.

Quoting some posts to sum up the analysis others were so kind to make:




The way to confirm this as a joke would be a signed message of a trusted person. The message would confirm the timing of a signed message by Matthew N. Wright that he is not to be paid in case he should win. It seems such a message does not exist.

Ending this with fancy con talk is worse than admitting to be a scammer.

One cheap and easy way is to announce payments shortly before they are broadcast for confirmation. Even if it's just a forum PM, an admin can confirm it if things go really bad.

Unsigned EMail, however, should be rather useless. What would stop anyone from just making it up?

For all the reasonable jurisdictions I know of, contracts can involve all kinds of things. Might as well wager to perform a funny dance or something, you still have to do it if you lose. If a law does not punish breaking such contracts, the law is wrong.

I know a lot of the people would have paid Matthew if Pirate had miraculously conjured up coins. While I didn't believe that was possible, some people did, so from their perspective, Matthew broke contracts and fed the community misinformation. That constitutes a criminal. He probably bets on nobody coming to SK to sue him, or that an online forum and IRC network might not officially suffice as evidence.

Good to see he is no longer on the staff of the Bitcoin Magazine or on the list of speakers for London.

First and foremost, maths and statistics. But the interesting question is what to apply them on.

I believe it's best to first apply them to myself: figure out how good my own predictions are, and make sure I'm ready to face my own mistakes. No point in getting cornered for maximum short-term profit. For the actual predictions, I use a combination of simplified models, psychological ideas, and historic comparisons, all fed by whatever indicators I can get a hold of: news, forum stats, various forms of trading volume, ...

The difficult part for me is calibrating a model after I have some rough idea. What's the scale, growth, sentiment of Bitcoin? And I have to cope with horribly foggy indicators. I'm not really versed in history, so I have to look for past events that hold similarities. This can be within Bitcoin for short-term things, or old stuff like the DJIA around 1930 to understand what happened in the big 2011 Bitcoin bubble.

Don't take this too seriously, I'm still a noob. I'm not even done "calibrating" myself, don't know how many mistakes I do on average. So this post could be one.

Wooow, that's really lucky. I didn't know bad connections can be good for something.

That's not how you use it. This ain't Ebay, there is no "global highest rating". You have to check out *who* rated people highly, and it needs more time to let trusted users make a reputation.

It's trivial to spam 50 small accounts and have them all rate someone 10. Is the resulting 500-rating worth anything? Not really. But the WoT displays much more than that, and this is very useful and should become even more useful with time. Gribble also has a feature to find out how people you trust rated someone.

No, nanotube says he currently has no access to his offline wallet. Give him some time, I doubt he'd dump the WoT over 10k BTC.

I'm more worried about _matthew_'s (Matthew's?) payment though. The bet with hgmichna does not run up to the 9th, but ended with nanotube's decision on this bet. Now, does he not have access to 250 BTC, or is he not paying "just because"? Both those explanations don't sound very reassuring given that he has a lot of bets timing out soon.