Would be nice to see a simple graph of BTC volume in an address over time. Bonus points for showing a clever way to see size of transactions in over time as well. The latter, aggregated actually shows the total volume as well. Simple shading inversion of a few decimals (such as for time slice N transaction 1 rgb=grey, transaction 2 rgb=white, 3=grey, etc)

i made no claims about who satoshi IS and this thread is not about that.


The admiration for Satoshi not putting everything in their hands is still relevant. It was only 2 months ago that bitcoin.net and bitcoins.org changed hands. Either Satoshi himself or his anonymous friend that handled the change knew what they were doing.

Absolutely legit. And I admire that he didn't choose to put it all in The Bitcoin Foundation's hand. I'm just trying to understand how the transfer could happen without Satoshi or at least someone having his login credentials at anonymousspeech.com.

The whois registration of bitcoin[.net][s.org] remained "locked" until Theymos took ownership Nov 2013. (Signup for a trial domaintools account to confirm all of this.) Contrast this with Bitcoin.org which changed from "locked" in May 2011 so that it could be transferred to Sirius. The transfer post-Satoshi pre-Theymos to the "anonymous" owner would have to have happened on Dec 27 2010. Why? Transfer internally between Anonymousspeech accounts would require at least extending the renewal period by one year. The last time those domains had years added was on Dec 27 2010, when the max 5 years were added. So this would have to have been the date that Satoshi handed off to the anonymous owner. It's possible that he did this in 2010 and then took his ride to the space shuttle mid 2011 to never be heard from again. But its also possible he is still alive and made the transfer himself just a couple months ago.

This isn't so much about figuring out who Satoshi is as it is to showing he IS alive.

It is known that Sirius was given ownership of bitcoin.org but I did not see any mention of bitcoin.net and bitcoins.org. It is possible that when Satoshi handed over bitcoin.org to Sirius he also handed over bitcoin.net and bitcoins.org as well. However, bitcoin.org whois shows it moved Registrar and to a Finish ownership of some sort in 2011. Bitcoin.net and bitcoins.org did not follow the same path. They sat at Anonymousspeech until a couple months ago. This implies that if Satoshi passed ownership of those domains to Sirius along with bitcoin.org in 2011, Sirius continued to keep those domains at Anonymousspeech, paying the higher markup fee charged by that registrar, while moving bitcoin.org to his own registrar. Further, to do this Sirius would have needed to bother with setting up at Anonymousspeech OR satoshi would have given Sirius his own username and password to continue with the registration renewals at this registrar. The latter is *highly* unlikely as Satoshi used an email address provided by the same registrar for anonymous mail (vistomail.com is a webmail service of Anonymousspeech) that was likely tied to the same login.

I make the assumption as they were registered on the same day as bitcoin.org, with the same registrar.

Here is a search for domains with owner "anonymousspeach" (the original registrar for bitcoins.org) and "bitcoin" in the domain name. Note those registered on 2008-08-18.

On November 3rd and 5th 2013 the ownership of Bitcoin.net and Bitcoins.org changed hands. These are two domains that were registered at the same day as Bitcoin.org with the same anonymous registration service. They changed ownership to Michael Marquardt (aka Theymos) hands.

Bitcoin.net prior whois, current whois

Bitcoins.org prior and current whois match but cannot find a public/free services to show the changes.

These domains appear to have remained "parked" in a manner commonly used by the registrar, up until the ownership changed hands. This means that the DNS did not change hands (historical record indicates the same). All of this indicates that the change of ownership required the original owner use their login credentials at the registrar to initiate the transfer. So either Satoshi handled this himself in November 2013 or he provided the account details to someone before he left his mortal coil.

Adjust lastTimeIn to only account transactions >1BTC. Some of the richer address have "donations"/advertisements that random people send to them to post a message in hopes others checking out the richer address will see. For example

• 1933phfhK3ZgFQNLGSDXvqCn32k2buXY8a - 2012-11-15 (lastIn >=1BTC)
• 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF - 2011-03-01
• 1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbhx - 2013-04-09

I agree. What p2p does very well is reputation systems. but these are not enough in themselves to provide similar levels of trust that a regulated exchange with AML/KYM'ed users can provide. I would be up for a network that combines a p2p network exchange with reputation that has optional physical anchoring. Where one builds their reputation through successful virtual transactions while also having the option of using physical gatherings to share notarised ID/papers.

I also agree with everyone that the problems I am experiencing are due to FIAT, not Bitcoin. But this problem is here to stay. If anything, it should solidify that argument that governments have nothing to fear. Their monopoly on finance is safe, for the most part.

No, there aren't. I checked. It'd be nice if one could sort localbitcoins listings by volume limits. Instead I checked major cities and everything is too low. Sure, if I contact them directly perhaps they will tell me that they have higher limits than they list. But on the surface, for $50k localbitcoins will not work.

And I agree, Bitcoin is still in its infancy and the issue of FIAT exchange will improve.

Indeed true. Sadly the investment wont wait for the regulators to get their act together.

And then what, how does he get that BTC to the share holders whom are probably expecting FIAT? In the answer to that we are back at square one: solving the huge latency and burden when wanting to go from BTC to FIAT.

got it. analogies are bad in general. i only meant that you response that the issue was myself or family member were denominating things in FIAT was the source of my problem with transfer/exchange delays... is true, but sadly because I live in a FIAT world I can't remove that problem for now.

For what amounts have you had success with bitstamp?

your analogy is true but i'd propose another. I agree one day bitcoin could be great for FIAT transfer even at values greater than $1k but I'm bothered that at this stage people run around saying its great for this when at the moment its not. It would be like people in the early very 1990's saying "look you can buy anything online!" when in fact at that time there was next to nothing. So, I'm bothered that the statement is way to early and misleading to those looking for exactly the feature some claim is so widespread.

As a side note: this issue illustrates pretty clearly why alternative coins will be at a constant disadvantage. 3 of 193 countries have easy bank/money <> bitcoin services. As that increases it embeds this currency even more. As has been stated elsewhere (Quora CEO: Do other crypto-currencies have a chance or is Bitcoin too far ahead?) unless an alt currency provides seriously strong features over bitcoin (ahem, better anonymity??) then the infrastructure of bitcoin will be near impossible to compete with. The headache of BTC users trying to live in a FIAT world and depending on various tools and regulations to allow this is a huge advantage that is growing.

The location for exchange in the EU and US are both major cities with populations >1m. In both cities the localbitcoin.com limits are too low and would likely require a couple weeks to disperse and then acquire $50k worth. I've also used local exchanges and yes they are great. Just not enough volume for larger quantities.

I agree BTC is amazing when transferring and using only BTC. It's just not a realistic outlook though for day to day life and wont be for many years to come. So much so that if someone says "bitcoin is great for money transfer" I consider this misleading. Should be "bitcoin is great for bitcoin transactions". It will be years before someone can say the former without a disclaimer

Then I would also request people not use arguments that require a purely bitcoin world where all of a business or persons costs are denominated in this. It makes only as much sense as the tulip comparison I used as a response to it

In the 17th centry tulips were also a great way to transfer wealth as well. For the foreseeable future most will need BTC>FIAT exchange.


True but this just illustrates that the road to solving the issue of larger transfers is dependent on regulation. I believe it can be augmented also by unregulated but better p2p exchange. The Fidor Bank plan is exactly the thing that turned a great open p2p exchange into a highly regulated and thereby highly limited one (to german citizens only) that I mentioned: bitcoin.de. To be clear, I'm not apposed to this but it has a slow adoption rate and will be many years before it removes the headache of >$1k transfers. So, with that now we have China, Japan and Germany able to exchange relatively easily between them. Only 190 more to go.

I think you missed my premise. I'm talking about larger transfers. I don't know the limts at Virtex but at coinbase they make it near useless for larger quantities.

Bitcoin has many immediate benefits including 0-friction ecommerce (no user accounts), low liability and fees in a purely Bitcoin enclosed market, micro payments and real escrow, just to name few. But the prophets peddling the idea it will have a huge impact on banking and commerce, how it is so much more efficient for international money transfer, are just downright misleading and actually distract people from fixing the problem.

This video touts how low the fees are for transfering money internationally with Bitcoin but limits itself to the example of $1000. All the benifits fall apart once the amount is >$5k. Let me give a real example.

I have a family member in the US that is part owner of company. A majority owner was leaving and so that presented an opportunity for me, in the EU, to send them $50k to invest. I could take profits from BTC as an early adopter or I could dip into FIAT savings. The former seemed ideal and seemed to be perfect for BTC according to the prophets. So I started looking into how to do it. On the US end MtGox can be used but with a long delay for 4 to 8 weeks and some marginal fees (0.5% exchange fee, $10 transfer fee). A bit ridiculous. But the other exchanges are worse, in a different way. For example Coinbase has 2 to 3 day transfer but a daily limit of 50BTC. That means it would take at least 9 days to sell enough BTC to convert into $50k. Assuming all these abstraction layers work out it would take 2 weeks to get the money with some fees for exchange (1%). CampBx doesnt really state their BTC sell limits clearly but do state a $1000k per day withdrawl limit. 50 days is nuts. Guess there is a wire transfer option but not knowing the BTC limits its just not clear if this would work. A p2p exchange such as #bitcoin-otc would have a 5% margin from my experience so this also seems a bit much. Localbitcoins and in fact most of the other exchanges have such low volume this also has to be considered.

So no, Bitcoin is just not good for money transfer (unless you are sending to Japan or China). In the end FIAT>FIAT internationally was way less of a headache, less time, and nearly the same or less fees than using Bitcoin in the BTC>FIAT route.

Is Bitcoin broken?
Well no. The other non-money transfer benefits are huge and will bring real growth. But they are limited to the sub $1k realm. The prophetic windfall from large commerce is not coming soon. It makes no sense for Paypal or Western Union to utilise Bitcoin. If exchanges have to reduce volume and limits or incur huge delays you could only imagine the volumes that these players would need and be unable to obtain stably with Bitcoin. They of course *could* solve them as Paypal did in the early days. But they would have to take upon themselves a huge headache that the exchanges already have. (It'd be a Heisenburg like headache but where all the cash is legal.) One can expect they will stay far away from it until this is solved. So if you see posts or comments from large players considering to utilise it for anything other than micro or <$1k payments, forget about it. It's several years away.

Conclusion: It seems to me that to fulfil the prophecies Bitcoin will either have to become completely regulated at the exchange level AND more or the community will have to stop living in the fantasy that the problem is solved and focus on innovating on the p2p exchange models. Bitcoin.de had a potentially working model before they paired with a bank and limited activity to german citizens alone (edit: limited to citizens of several EU countries, not just germany). Each user makes that transaction directly between their banks. Exchange only escrows BTC to ensure transaction and reputation. A better system could avoid the whole user verification entirely, or find ways to obtain additional trust without taking on the liability of enforcement.

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