Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[hdbuck]

Watch this space closely, there's some serious smoke emanating from the JPMorgan Chase data centers ... I've been following this for a while and piecing the bits together it looks like JPMorgan might be effectively pwnd, and perhaps a targeted attack by a geo-political enemy. Given JPMorgan is the commercial arm of the Federal Reserve acting in the markets (or vice versa) it's significant far beyond the headlines letting on

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-05/jpmorgan-had-exodus-of-tech-talent-before-hacker-breach.html

The breach went undetected until mid-August, months after hackers initially exploited a flaw in the company’s website to gain entry to internal systems,

‘what the hell is inside of us?’

There is a war between JPM and GoldmanSachs. I dont see JPM as FEDs arm. If one it would be  more GS. Friend of mine working in quants in JPM in london told me they are under constant pressire because of GS.

Edit: and just by checking the list of bankers "suicides" you can clearly tell who is loosing that war... ^^

[empowering]

And hey man, i think you have two eyes and some read skills to check the address of your car dealer is the correct, don't you? Don't you trust yourself?

Check it against what?

You get a copy of the sales contract with the address and the QR-code before you transfer the coins.

... a contract which you downloaded from what seemed to be their website?

That is how I always buy a car... I download a contract from the internet... and wait for the car to come through the modem/G4 connection

always worked so far....  and car garages have always just sent me the car without ever setting eyes on me...  simples


ps Jorge... if you were not actually trolling... you might put you brains to some use!  find solutions... come on you are actually a computer scientist no?
instead you seem to actually enjoy repeating the same old shit over and over again...  far from tire from it.

[JorgeStolfi]

Jorge, in the top left of your screen, there is some data about how much time you've spent trolling these forums.  Would you mind sharing that with us?

You mean, how long I have been logged in? 67 days, 8 hours and 0 minutes.  (It should be much more, because since January I leave at least one tab permanently open on this forum, even while I am not here.  Presumably the forum software stops counting after the tab has been inactive for some time.)

[grappa_barricata]

[JorgeStolfi]

For anyone that has not seen the video posted by Jorge, of Jorge playing with his balls please view here
http://youtu.be/rFEGFEGMDBc 

I also posted a lesson on how to double your money without leaving your desk; but that does not translate well into English, unfortunately (and it was done well before I heard of bitcoin, which has made it obsolete):    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9i6XwhH_jo

[spooderman]

You've spent 67 days trolling these forums?

I respect your dedication to....naysaying?

[grappa_barricata]

I can't imagine how this researcher seems to not understand cryptography. Or even how a university professor has the balls to talk about cults. And do not let me started on his interpretation of what is an irrefutable proof.

[empowering]

For anyone that has not seen the video posted by Jorge, of Jorge playing with his balls please view here
http://youtu.be/rFEGFEGMDBc 

I also posted a lesson on how to double your money without leaving your desk; but that does not translate well into English, unfortunately (and it was done well before I heard of bitcoin, which has made it obsolete):    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9i6XwhH_jo

Really really splendid stuff....   I can see how this fits with the other highlights of your career.

"Jorge was a tireless worker and would spend long hours at the lab. Rumor
had it that he lived on a clock that had 26-hour days, so he would precess and
shift his sleeping time from day to day. As far as I know he spent ten years in
California without ever learning how to drive, and his wife Rumiko would come
to pick him up. I have many memories of coming to the office in the morning to
find Rumiko waiting for Jorge to come down and go home.
Jorge combines deep mathematical intuition with remarkable programming
skills – many people have one or the other of these capabilities, but the combina-
tion is rare. Even more rare is another aspect of Jorge’s intellect. Jorge is able,
better than anyone I have ever known, to put clean mathematical structure on an
amorphous set of vague ideas and produce elegant and informative mathematical
abstractions that allow insightful formal reasoning on a problem. I cannot count
the number of times that I walked away from a technical conversation with Jorge
thinking that now, finally, I understand the essence of the problem we’ve been
discussing. Jorge likes both his ideas and his programs (and yes, not to forget,
his LATEX macros) to be clean, well organized, and surgically appropriate to the
task at hand. In this respect, and in balance overall, I think Jorge was more of a
teacher to me rather than the other way around.
I want to close by mentioning another characteristic of Jorge, his remarkable
diversity and versatility, as demonstrated over a long and distinguished scientific
career. Jorge’s curiosity is not limited to any one special topic. Besides computer
graphics and computational geometry, he has made many other contributions to
interval arithmetic, splines, image search, the reconstruction or archaeological
artifacts, elasticity, and even the Voynich manuscript analysis.
So happy birthday, Jorge, and my best wishes for many more productive years
to come. Even after all these years, I still miss having you around – and in that
vein let me publically remind you that you promised to come spend a sabbatical
at Stanford "

are you tenured prof?  

It seems bating Bitcoin followers and folding notes and playing with balls seem ... a little.....  well.... pointless.

Like I said.. moments ago.. it seems to me you could put yourself to much greater use... to humanity as a whole ... by maybe fixing problems that you see
rather than wasting time here... unless you simply enojoy wasting time nowadays... or feel that you are not able.

Anyways...  as you were

[Erdogan]

Obvious troll is becoming obvious.

It is a student question automaton. The purpose is, by means of automation, to support the students in their quest to understand bitcoin, and a test to make sure they can answer all expression of doubt with adequate clarity.

As new and ever greater waves of students enter with the passing of time, the learning starts on the base level, with the same problems. The automaton saves time that otherwise would have to be expended from the hodlers. Of course, should a student go astray, the real teacher's are only a click away, scanning the messages boards while simultaniously staring at bitcoinwisdom.

The propositions the students have to adequately refute, are presented in a round robin manner. Note that there are some inconsistencies, and there is some truthiness to some of them. This is just to sharpen the brain of the students. Here is the list (reading it before exams constitutes fraud):

It's a ponzi.

It's a pyramid.

There is no intrinsic value.

There is intrinsic value.

Transactions are expensive.

It's unsecure

It's not needed.

Price will go to 10

Killed by governments

You need a big company

Governments work as specified.

You are not supposed to be free.

They can be produced infinitely using alternative chains

It's not anonymous

Used for drugs

Its too volatile

It is not a unit of account

Nobody can understand bitcoin

There should be a bitcoin central bank

There should be a different coin in each country

When you trade using bitcoin, you have to convert currency trice

ISIS use them

gold is the only money

Nobody can afford a bitcoin

Mining monopoly will kill it

Mining is too expensive

There is no backing

There is no redemption

You can not eat bitcoin

The world is unfair

Rich people should never be allowed to decide where the factory should be located.

Girls use bitcoin

Bitcoin can run on solar power

An asteroide will hit the earth.

I should not go to bed now

   

and "truthiness" brilliant word.

(if you watch this show....... and I hope that you do)

I do, sometimes.

[mmitech]

if you have some Litecoins to play with go here: www.liteluck.com

[JorgeStolfi]

That is how I always buy a car... I download a contract from the internet... and wait for the car to come through the modem/G4 connection.   always worked so far....  and car garages have always just sent me the car without ever setting eyes on me...  simples

Come on, I used "car" to suggest a sizable amount.  Replace it with "plane tickets" or "home theater" or whatever if you wish.

But isn't bitcoin supposed to be used to pay for everyting through the internet, from chewing gum to a mansion in Bali? 

(And if you buy a gold-plated Rolls Royce from a reputable dealer 1000 miles away, why would he not deliver it to your home -- after he got your check and cashed it?)

A couple of weeks ago, some famous bitcoin guru (Matonis?) explained in an article how in the future one would walk into a car dealership, choose a model,  point the smartphone to the QR code on the windscreen, and drive out, without interacting with a single person.  He did not mention satoshi-testing, air gap, brainwallet -- or what the client would to if the sticker on the windscreen turned out to be fake.

[fonsie]

For anyone that has not seen the video posted by Jorge, of Jorge playing with his balls please view here
http://youtu.be/rFEGFEGMDBc

 

OMG

You must be quite the goofball too waste so much time:

1) Getting the balls
2) Putting the balls in the container
3) Shake the balls while filming for 47 seconds
4) Putting this shit on YouTube
5) Realizing nobody cares that he has some little balls to play with

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[NotLambchop]

ITT:
We bitch about JorgeStolfi's manipulative appeal to authority

...
The reason that I referred to Jorge's "professor" status in a snarky way is because it does (and should) NOT matter whether one is a professor or a snotty nosed 5 year old in order to post decent ideas in this forum....

...because he stuck his PhuD in our faces

...
In the beginning, he displayed his credentials rather prominently in his posts...

...we learn that he didn't

...
If so, I was wrong.

...so now we want him to

...
are you tenured prof?  

[oda.krell]

Come on, I used "car" to suggest a sizable amount.  Replace it with "plane tickets" or "home theater" or whatever if you wish.

But isn't bitcoin supposed to be used to pay for everyting through the internet, from chewing gum to a mansion in Bali?  

(And if you buy a gold-plated Rolls Royce from a reputable dealer 1000 miles away, why would he not deliver it to your home -- after he got your check and cashed it?)

A couple of weeks ago, some famous bitcoin guru (Matonis?) explained in an article how in the future one would walk into a car dealership, choose a model,  point the smartphone to the QR code on the windscreen, and drive out, without interacting with a single person.  He did not mention satoshi-testing, air gap, brainwallet -- or what the client would to if the sticker on the windscreen turned out to be fake.

I fail to see why you think that applications built on top of the Bitcoin network are fundamentally any less secure as a payment method than applications built on top of the legacy banking system.

(For a response to the following argument, leave Matonis or any other Bitcoin proselytizer aside for now, please. I don't enjoy arguing strawmen.)

The Bitcoin applications and their security can (and will eventually) exhibit the same amount of security (or lack thereof) as those tied in with the banking system. That part is obvious, because the Bitcoin protocol doesn't address the security of this layer in any way.

EDIT: I should say "reach at least the level of security of applications on top of the banking system", because of the possibility to built Bitcoin applications as open-source applications, which seems to have a better track record wrt security compared to closed source applications.


What is fundamentally different is the security of the underlying transfer mechanism itself. In the case of the legacy banking system, built on central authority, it allows high-level interference if conflict resolution is required. In the case of Bitcoin, no such interference is possible, because the decentralized consensus cannot be changed by any individual (or any group below ~50% of network computing power).

So, to summarize: the only additional security that comes from applications on top of the banking system are

a) better, more secure, more intuitive applications - which is not a fundamental problem, and will be solved over time, with more time and ressources being invested in creating them. Go check out electrum in the meantime, to see what an already pretty good application looks like.

b) security through central authority revisions - this part is by design, and it is not at all obvious to me that the positive effects (justified execution of central authority) outweight the negative effects (unjustified execution of central authority). We probably won't be able to answer this question without reference to some principles that we do agree or do not agree on, but I am pretty sure that any case of justified execution of central authority in finance you can bring forward, I or someone else will be able to counter with a case of abuse of such power.

[spooderman]

LOL Phud is amazing.

[empowering]

That is how I always buy a car... I download a contract from the internet... and wait for the car to come through the modem/G4 connection.   always worked so far....  and car garages have always just sent me the car without ever setting eyes on me...  simples

Come on, I used "car" to suggest a sizable amount.  Replace it with "plane tickets" or "home theater" or whatever if you wish.

But isn't bitcoin supposed to be used to pay for everyting through the internet, from chewing gum to a mansion in Bali?  

(And if you buy a gold-plated Rolls Royce from a reputable dealer 1000 miles away, why would he not deliver it to your home -- after he got your check and cashed it?)

A couple of weeks ago, some famous bitcoin guru (Matonis?) explained in an article how in the future one would walk into a car dealership, choose a model,  point the smartphone to the QR code on the windscreen, and drive out, without interacting with a single person.  He did not mention satoshi-testing, air gap, brainwallet -- or what the client would to if the sticker on the windscreen turned out to be fake.

Right.. however the reality of it is........using as you did , cars as an example.. then the answer "sales contract"  is the simple way... and most cars are infact sold in person most of the time....

But if we are talking other high ticket value items, that are sold online, then there are other solutions..and looking into the future a trusted and reputable third party escrow style service/some sort of multi sig/ protocol based decentralised(?) set up..  that is trusted by both parties (ie general public, and business) in the event that there could be any "confusion/gaming" as you suggest , that could easily solve the problem.

Also Jorge... you must surely realise that , yes you can come up with theoretical problems, and good for you (it would be better if you propose solutions too but you know that all depends on how useful you want to be) but how many of them are practical? and how many of them will be solved or are being solved as we speak?  

Also does money , paper money, and electronic money have problems too?  paper money/electronic money gets stolen each and everyday in a million different ways, there are many weaknesses in the traditional forms of money, always have been... and will continue to be...


 It seems that the lady doth protest too much, and also that you have a very static or linear point of view... try coming up with solutions to problems you think are real,  and looking forward rather than backwards all of the time.

Just a thought.


 

[grappa_barricata]

Also, maybe it is time to restate the obvious.

Bitcoin 'ownership' is the knowledge of the private key. Bitcoins can't be 'stolen', but the private key can. This is a technically unsolvable problem. Not only for bitcoin, but for everything.

To make it clear for kids and professors alike, let's consider a Retinal Scan authentication system.
You can't practically brute force access to it, but of course you can take the eye of another.


A victim of the evils of retinal scan authentication

[JorgeStolfi]

You must be quite the goofball too waste so much time:

1) Getting the balls
2) Putting the balls in the container
3) Shake the balls while filming for 47 seconds
4) Putting this shit on YouTube
5) Realizing nobody cares that he has some little balls to play with

Most of those balls were bought by a student of mine while he was spending a year at the UWE in Bristol, working on his thesis on photometric stereo.  We needed some targets with specific known shapes, and the balls were meant to be embedded on another ball object to make many tiny "warts".  He bought them by mail (500 balls was the minimum amount, came in a small envelope through ordinary mail) and were paid with my credit card, IIRC. I visited him at Bristol shortly after that and helped him with some xperiments. In the end we did not use the warty ball (we made other targets with table tennis balls, rubber balloons, muffin cups, nails, house paint, and other such stuff).  When I left I took the rest of the balls with me.  I also added to the "collection" a few dozen larger balls that I got from dismantling old floppy and CD drives (they are inside a stabilizer gizmo that sits atop the spindle to prevent it from vibrating as it speeds up).

At some point I noticed that some of the balls climbed up the walls of the plastic container when it was shaken, apparently because they picked up static charge and repelled each other.  Static electricity from friction and and repulsion of electrically charged objects is usually demonstrated with bits of light insulating stuff; I was a bit surprised to see it happen with relatively heavy and conducting objects.  It seemed as a good a subject as any for my first YouTube video.

[empowering]

Also, maybe it is time to restate the obvious.

Bitcoin 'ownership' is the knowledge of the private key. Bitcoins can't be 'stolen', but the private key can. This is a technically unsolvable problem. Not only for bitcoin, but for everything.

To make it clear for kids and professors alike, let's consider a Retinal Scan authentication system.
You can't practically brute force access to it, but of course you can take the eye of another.


A victim of the evils of retinal scan authentication

sexy