Naked Short Selling Bitcoin

[kjj]

What exactly is it that you imagine Gavin to be dancing around?  Even better, how did you make it two months on this forum without learning about this?

I imagine Gavin dancing around GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles).

Actually, I'll ask you the opposite. Do you see any easy-to-use software advertised here on this forum that is upfront about:

1) bitcoins could disappear from your wallet
2) transactions will get their timestamps changed in some obscure ways

I'm not talking "upfront" as "discoverable here on the forum after two months of reading". I'm talking "upfront" as popping up a message when that happens or having any other mechanism to alert the user about those occurences.

It doesn't take two months to learn that.  I don't think it even took me 2 hours from the first time I heard about bitcoin to understand how and why chain reorgs happen.

At any rate, you are right that chain reorgs need better handling in the stock client.  It has been a frequent topic here on the forums, and on the dev list.  What isn't at all clear is what to change, or how.

Outside of the billions incident a while back, I don't think there has ever been a reorg involving more than a few blocks.  And we sorta think that no one has the ability to actually redirect a transaction right now, or even will have the ability in the near future.  Also, while we are pretty sure that we, as humans, can tell a benign reorg (every few days) from a hostile one (never, so far), writing an algorithm to do it for us isn't so easy.

This is a pretty big subject, with lots of technical and philosophical issues, and this isn't the right thread to discuss it in.  You can find a lot of it in the development and technical discussion area.  Or, if you want to make a new thread on the subject, I can try to fill in the details for you.

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[2112]

Outside of the billions incident a while back, I don't think there has ever been a reorg involving more than a few blocks.  And we sorta think that no one has the ability to actually redirect a transaction right now, or even will have the ability in the near future.

This is true only on the "public" block chain. I'm inclined to believe Tom Williams' story (of Mybitcoin's fame) that his machine had seen some sort of prepared, non-public block chain due to an attack.

Having seen the inside of the software and having heard of the testing methodologies that it undergoes I' thinking that the further failures related to mishandled chain reorganizations are inevitable.

Or, if you want to make a new thread on the subject, I can try to fill in the details for you.

Personally: I'm disinterested. But for the wider community some sort of anti-propaganda would be an asset. Something along the lines "Conscientous accounting auditor's guide to the bitcoin internals."

I think the saddest part is that you (presonally) are one of the very few bitcoin-positive people who is actually willing to admit problems and discuss the deeper philosophical issues related to its implemenatation. I have this unfortunate experience that the full 100% of the bitcoin-positive people I've got personally acuqainted with were either fraudsers, gross-incompetents, fly-by-night operators or some combination of that.

[kjj]

Outside of the billions incident a while back, I don't think there has ever been a reorg involving more than a few blocks.  And we sorta think that no one has the ability to actually redirect a transaction right now, or even will have the ability in the near future.

This is true only on the "public" block chain. I'm inclined to believe Tom Williams' story (of Mybitcoin's fame) that his machine had seen some sort of prepared, non-public block chain due to an attack.

Having seen the inside of the software and having heard of the testing methodologies that it undergoes I' thinking that the further failures related to mishandled chain reorganizations are inevitable.

I don't buy his story at all, at least not the version I heard.  Here's why.  Nodes forward valid blocks.  This is obviously true in the window between accepting the block and having it overturned, but it is also true after a new longest chain has been accepted.  Hell, it is even true if the blocks are stale at the time they are received, if I recall correctly from reading the code a while back.

If his node had been fed blocks that were later overturned, his node would have shared those, and they would have spread across the entire network, meaning that we'd all have copies of them.  Certain people that have a keen interest in the block chain, like Theymos, would have noticed proof of a spend redirection attack in the wild and would have announced it widely.  I gave up on reading the crap sloshing around in the mybitcoin threads, so I might have missed it, but I'm pretty sure that I would have come across it eventually if it had been announced.

I don't necessarily think that he stole the coins, but I'm pretty sure the attack did not come through the bitcoin side of things, even if he really did count deposits after a single confirmation.

Or, if you want to make a new thread on the subject, I can try to fill in the details for you.

Personally: I'm disinterested. But for the wider community some sort of anti-propaganda would be an asset. Something along the lines "Conscientous accounting auditor's guide to the bitcoin internals."

I think the saddest part is that you (presonally) are one of the very few bitcoin-positive people who is actually willing to admit problems and discuss the deeper philosophical issues related to its implemenatation. I have this unfortunate experience that the full 100% of the bitcoin-positive people I've got personally acuqainted with were either fraudsers, gross-incompetents, fly-by-night operators or some combination of that.

Thanks, I appreciate that.  But I don't think the community is quite that bad.  It is certainly true that a lot of knowledgeable people have given up on the forums and moved on, but there are still a bunch around.

On this particular issue, the philosophical issue is this:  Should the bitcoin client be an accounting platform?  My gut says no.  Accounting is not a monolithic thing, it is a collection of different practices and procedures, with many, many differences from place to place.  Even if proper accounting was a function that was appropriate for the client, there is no possible way for it to do everything that everyone would need it to do.  So, accounting should be in a different layer, in different software that talks to the client.

I would even take the next step and say that the client does too much stuff, already.

[Lolcust]

What exactly is it that you imagine Gavin to be dancing around?  Even better, how did you make it two months on this forum without learning about this?

I imagine Gavin dancing around GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles).

Actually, I'll ask you the opposite. Do you see any easy-to-use software advertised here on this forum that is upfront about:

1) bitcoins could disappear from your wallet
2) transactions will get their timestamps changed in some obscure ways

I'm not talking "upfront" as "discoverable here on the forum after two months of reading". I'm talking "upfront" as popping up a message when that happens or having any other mechanism to alert the user about those occurences.

It seems to me you are operating under the assumption that bitcoin is " money".

With all due respect to your experience with both software and accounting, that seems like a strange view, as bitcoin has as much  in common with any typically known form of money as a wifi-sniffing UAV has with a seagull (flying noisy things )

[newguy05]

Anyone doing this yet? There must be a great market for naked short selling of this stuff. Come on
exchanges and you Bitcoin bulls, there is a market waiting for you to put
your money where your mouth is and offer naked short selling!

why the f*** do exchanges want to share naked short selling with YOU when they can do it already with almost no margin limit and front run the orders.  mtgox controls at least 50%+ of the bitcoin market, they can and do short the bitcoins at will.

1) fill all buy orders down to a threshold with enough support  (~$5 currently)
2) fill all sell orders up to resistance (~$10 currently)
3) rinse and repeat.
4) and you cant do anything about it.

Same happened  on wall street back when they were still trading out on the streets.  I think it was outlawed in the 40s.

[2112]

It seems to me you are operating under the assumption that bitcoin is " money".

My personal views are really immaterial. My personal position is in reaction to the various efforts to legitimize bitcoin as an investment vehicle in the EU. People whom I would otherwise respect (like eg. various Pirate Party functionaries) got involved with some frauds and/or fly-by-nights. The bitcoin millieu had attracted a lot of various social sediments. Unlike the run-of-the-mill financial frauds the bitcoin promoters feel that by operating on the uncharted territory they are free from any legal constraints of the existing societies.

It is quite fortunate that the frauds attraced by bitcoin are also typically unsophisticated and small time frauds. They get really surprised that the laws against their favourite scam are on the books for a long time, just under a different name.

[Lolcust]

It seems to me you are operating under the assumption that bitcoin is " money".

My personal views are really immaterial. My personal position is in reaction to the various efforts to legitimize bitcoin as an investment vehicle in the EU. People whom I would otherwise respect (like eg. various Pirate Party functionaries) got involved with some frauds and/or fly-by-nights. The bitcoin millieu had attracted a lot of various social sediments. Unlike the run-of-the-mill financial frauds the bitcoin promoters feel that by operating on the uncharted territory they are free from any legal constraints of the existing societies.

It is quite fortunate that the frauds attraced by bitcoin are also typically unsophisticated and small time frauds. They get really surprised that the laws against their favourite scam are on the books for a long time, just under a different name.

Well, as far as "investment vehicle" is concerned, in my very humble Belorussian opinion, any thing people are ready to pay for can be an investment vehicle, irrespective of whether it is remotely sane (in the sense that it does not have to pass giggle test) or technologically sound.

Gold price is quite apparently so huge only due to a very long-lived "glitch" in human perception of value. If a fairly unspectacular element (that isn't even fissionable   or something, lol) can have absurdly huge price just because market is full of agents with a kind of weird response to the very notion of "gold", so can abstract  digital thingamabobbles made of some kind of eldritch mathemagics, if the market just accumulates enough agents with a peculiar response to the notion of abstract    thingamabobbles born   out of weird math

[2112]

Sorry for the bleated post:

I don't buy his story at all, at least not the version I heard.
[...]
I don't necessarily think that he stole the coins, but I'm pretty sure the attack did not come through the bitcoin side of things, even if he really did count deposits after a single confirmation.
[...]
But I don't think the community is quite that bad.

I can agree to your opinion only on the condition that you really trust the publicly visible portion of the bitcoin community. From where I sit, I see the underbelly of bitcoin, and the picture I see isn't pretty at all.

You and many other people make an assumption that Tom Williams ran unmodified Satoshi bitcoin client. Or if not unmodified at least competently modified. Since his servers were FreeBSD, he had to at least recompile, or more likely hire somebody to recompile and integrate it for him.

From my brief experience I envision the following events: (1) somebody offers him "bitcoind Enterprise Edition", (2) he buys it, (3) "bitcoind EE" is diverging from the "official bitcoind". Then there are two variants:

(4a) from the start there was a remote exploit and the subcontractor bid low assuming that he'll do a "remote self-help" later
(4b) there was a dispute between him and the subcontractor about the scope of work. Subcontractor later on used "remote self-help" as a form of collecting its overdue fees by exploiting some old vulnerability that Tom Williams refused to pay to patch.

Obviously it is possible that the above isn't the true story of MyBitcoin. But from my experience this is or will be the story that will unfold later about some other Bitcoin deployment.

[cypherdoc]

You should really stop saying "chargeback".  It isn't even slightly similar to what actually exists in the bitcoin system.

Tell this to your accountant. How about "wholesale transaction reversal and freshly mined coin destruction"? Does this sound better to your ear? It certainly is more true.

Chargeback is the proper term of art when writing about accounting in English.

Here's the Gavin Anderson dancing around the issue in the section of this forum related to the alternative currencies.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43465.msg520923#msg520923

Since that section is the "wildest of the Wild West" it may have been missed by many of the readers of this forum.

it appears you as a technical person potentially sees more than i as an investor.  but i have some serious concerns about your claims.

first of all, Gavin wasn't dancing around anything in that single post of his regarding Namecoin.  everything he said in that post was in regards to Namecoin, not Bitcoin.   am i wrong?  the reason Namecoin is susceptible to a rewrite of its block chain is b/c its so new; w/o the hashing power of a Bitcoin to protect it.  in fact, if anything, he was perhaps intimating the strength of Bitcoin as it currently has several large hashing power players that have the strength to squash any competition just because they can.  this is the advantage of being first to market.  its a competitive world; the fact that BitcoinExpress backed off his threat for now is a Godsend to Namecoin.  i'm assuming he is a Bitcoin supporter and he has every reason, justifiably in my opinion, to eliminate competitors if he so chooses.  i'm sure he has an economic interest in doing so.  this is life.  just like i fully expect the US gov't to try and squash Bitcoin.  this is the risk i take by investing in Bitcoin and knowing i might lose that investment to a gnarly attack. 

one of the things i use to monitor whether strange things are happening to the block chain is this:

http://blockexplorer.com/q/reorglog

this is theymos's reorg log.  as you can see a block gets changed every 5 days or so and this hasn't changed since July when he started monitoring this.  very stable i must say and very encouraging.  no one is losing coins haphazardly in Bitcoin.  its almost 3 yrs now since it was developed and thats a long time by my estimation.  i personally am very confident in how its working so far.

you obviously think  you're seeing something specific to Bitcoin.  i would love to hear something more concrete.

[bonker]

Anyone doing this yet? There must be a great market for naked short selling of this stuff. Come on
exchanges and you Bitcoin bulls, there is a market waiting for you to put
your money where your mouth is and offer naked short selling!

why the f*** do exchanges want to share naked short selling with YOU when they can do it already with almost no margin limit and front run the orders.  mtgox controls at least 50%+ of the bitcoin market, they can and do short the bitcoins at will.

1) fill all buy orders down to a threshold with enough support  (~$5 currently)
2) fill all sell orders up to resistance (~$10 currently)
3) rinse and repeat.
4) and you cant do anything about it.

Same happened  on wall street back when they were still trading out on the streets.  I think it was outlawed in the 40s.

Listen up dipstick, I just want to locate a short selling outfit so I can make some quick green off Bitcoin.
 They are easy to set up, you don't need an exchange, just cash and a tiddly bit of infrastructure.

Now take your mumbo-jumbo and skeddadle.

[tvbcof]

Listen up dipstick, I just want to locate a short selling outfit so I can make some quick green off Bitcoin.
 They are easy to set up, you don't need an exchange, just cash and a tiddly bit of infrastructure.

Now take your mumbo-jumbo and skeddadle.

Sorry the guy lost you.  I'll try to be helpful again.

You want to short with someone elses liquidity?  Go to Bitcoinica.

You want to _naked_ short (and be on the winning side)?

 a) find an exchange who will work with you on the ponzi scam. *

or

 b) set up your own.

* If the Bitcoin network goes down before you run out of participants who will take something you are asserting is a bitcoin, it's not technically a ponzi operation...just good business.  If you can induce the Bitcoin network to go down by virtue of or as a side effect of your naked short operations, congratulations, you've won.  Good luck with that.

[Lolcust]

I can agree to your opinion only on the condition that you really trust the publicly visible portion of the bitcoin community. From where I sit, I see the underbelly of bitcoin, and the picture I see isn't pretty at all.

Um, could you kindly hook me up with any of the kingpins of said underbelly ^__~ ?

You and many other people make an assumption that Tom Williams ran unmodified Satoshi bitcoin client. Or if not unmodified at least competently modified. Since his servers were FreeBSD, he had to at least recompile, or more likely hire somebody to recompile and integrate it for him.

From my brief experience I envision the following events: (1) somebody offers him "bitcoind Enterprise Edition", (2) he buys it, (3) "bitcoind EE" is diverging from the "official bitcoind". Then there are two variants:

(4a) from the start there was a remote exploit and the subcontractor bid low assuming that he'll do a "remote self-help" later
(4b) there was a dispute between him and the subcontractor about the scope of work. Subcontractor later on used "remote self-help" as a form of collecting its overdue fees by exploiting some old vulnerability that Tom Williams refused to pay to patch.

Obviously it is possible that the above isn't the true story of MyBitcoin. But from my experience this is or will be the story that will unfold later about some other Bitcoin deployment.

Such scenarios are not specific to bitcoins.

Such scenarios could take place with any kind of system where an agent hires the lowest bidder as subcontractor and fails to carry out due diligence.

If you hire "dude from Sandcraterstania who looks tooootaaallllyyyy leeegiiiit" to code a system intended to manage thousands upon thousands of dollars and pay him a penny, you have it coming.

Whether you deal in exotic products of arcane mathematications or more traditional subjects of trade is at that point irrelevant.

[bonker]

Listen up dipstick, I just want to locate a short selling outfit so I can make some quick green off Bitcoin.
 They are easy to set up, you don't need an exchange, just cash and a tiddly bit of infrastructure.

Now take your mumbo-jumbo and skeddadle.

Sorry the guy lost you.  I'll try to be helpful again.

You want to short with someone elses liquidity?  Go to Bitcoinica.

You want to _naked_ short (and be on the winning side)?

 a) find an exchange who will work with you on the ponzi scam. *

or

 b) set up your own.

* If the Bitcoin network goes down before you run out of participants who will take something you are asserting is a bitcoin, it's not technically a ponzi operation...just good business.  If you can induce the Bitcoin network to go down by virtue of or as a side effect of your naked short operations, congratulations, you've won.  Good luck with that.

Are you high? Nothing you write makes any sense.

Look, it's simple, Bitcoin is all about free markets and liberalism and all that jazz. So I'm just saying I want to naked short sell.
Dude, if Bitcoin can't cope and shits itself up its own anus then that just be market forces.

[2112]

Such scenarios are not specific to bitcoins.

That's true, but partially. Satosh bitcoin obfuscated code base and its mizantropic build process are such that they greatly increases the chances of exploits and errors, no matter whether they are intentional or not. Add to that the attitude of majority of the supporters who claim "chargebacks never happen" and you have a extraordinarily fertile substrate for incompetency and fraud.

The icing on the cake are fly-by-night-s: mostly miners. They claim "yeah, we are in for the long term", and yet you can see one-way ticket out of the country for December 2012 (or whatever is the date of first mining knee) that is hanging from the front pocket in their shirt.

[2112]

it appears you as a technical person potentially sees more than i as an investor.  but i have some serious concerns about your claims.
[...]
you obviously think  you're seeing something specific to Bitcoin.  i would love to hear something more concrete.

I've met investors, I've met gamblers and I've met investors who occasionally liked to gamble. Your way of arguing puts you in my opinion clearly in the gambler group. It is hard to argue with somebody, whose emotions are so tightly wrapped up that his heart aches anytime somebody says something unfavorable about your beloved bitcoins.

If you maybe try to untangle your emotions a bit you'll notice that when people talk about bitcoins, they actually talk about different things:

1) bitcoin as an abstract idea and its current valuation in terms of FIAT currencies: I talked next to nothing about this
2) bitcoin as implemented by the "Satoshi client": I talked a lot about this, I consider this implementation very bad, and the sooner somebody else implements full bitcoin protocol in a clear, modular and understandable way, the better it will be for everyone with exception of scammers and various guerilla-job-safety-C++-programmer types.
3) bitcoin as represented by its promoters and supporters: I talked about the ones I've met and they were uniformly 100% in the spectrum of incompetents, fly-by-nights & fraudsters.
4) something other that I neglected to think of.

Anyway, the Bitcoin Disneyland is now open: https://bitcoin.org.uk/forums/ . There the threads that may hurt your feelings are clearly marked ATTACK ON BITCOIN. Bitcoin enthusiasts and supporters have now option to play amongst themselves in a safe environment that is professionally moderated by one of its own.

[cypherdoc]

it appears you as a technical person potentially sees more than i as an investor.  but i have some serious concerns about your claims.
[...]
you obviously think  you're seeing something specific to Bitcoin.  i would love to hear something more concrete.

I've met investors, I've met gamblers and I've met investors who occasionally liked to gamble. Your way of arguing puts you in my opinion clearly in the gambler group. It is hard to argue with somebody, whose emotions are so tightly wrapped up that his heart aches anytime somebody says something unfavorable about your beloved bitcoins.

If you maybe try to untangle your emotions a bit you'll notice that when people talk about bitcoins, they actually talk about different things:

1) bitcoin as an abstract idea and its current valuation in terms of FIAT currencies: I talked next to nothing about this
2) bitcoin as implemented by the "Satoshi client": I talked a lot about this, I consider this implementation very bad, and the sooner somebody else implements full bitcoin protocol in a clear, modular and understandable way, the better it will be for everyone with exception of scammers and various guerilla-job-safety-C++-programmer types.
3) bitcoin as represented by its promoters and supporters: I talked about the ones I've met and they were uniformly 100% in the spectrum of incompetents, fly-by-nights & fraudsters.
4) something other that I neglected to think of.

Anyway, the Bitcoin Disneyland is now open: https://bitcoin.org.uk/forums/ . There the threads that may hurt your feelings are clearly marked ATTACK ON BITCOIN. Bitcoin enthusiasts and supporters have now option to play amongst themselves in a safe environment that is professionally moderated by one of its own.

wow, and i thought i was actually being nice to you. 

who's being emotional?  contrast my post with yours.  sounds like you may have had some alt chain coin at risk.

100% of bit coin supporters incompetent, fly-by-nights & fraudsters?  who the hell are you?  thats quite an insult to everyone around here.  clearly you can't provide any concrete examples that i nicely asked you for.

[tvbcof]

Are you high? Nothing you write makes any sense.

Look, it's simple, Bitcoin is all about free markets and liberalism and all that jazz. So I'm just saying I want to naked short sell.
Dude, if Bitcoin can't cope and shits itself up its own anus then that just be market forces.

You clearly have no idea what 'naked shorting' is...which is a good reason not to play around with it (or any form of leverage.)

 - Shorting is borrowing something, then selling it.

 - 'Naked shorting' is simply selling that something without bothering to own it or borrow it in the first place.

The idea is to buy it back later at a better price and return it to where you got it, and pocket the difference in the price.  That difference is in your favor if the value of the item goes down.  That is why 'shorting' is 'betting against'.

So, if you can sell BTC to someone without having any to sell, go for it.  I am sure that some people can do just that.  I doubt that _you_ will ever be able to.

[2112]

This is exactly what I'm talking about:

I talked about the ones I've met and they were uniformly 100% in the spectrum of incompetents, fly-by-nights & fraudsters.

100% of bit coin supporters incompetent, fly-by-nights & fraudsters? thats quite an insult to everyone around here.

The emotions inhibit understanding. I haven't met you nor anyone else on this forum.

This whole fracas reminds me of the good old days of fuckedcompany.com. I remember marketing executives making emotional pleas in the same style as yours: intentionally distorting their mother's tongue. Commenters were joking "shiftless!", "undercapitalized!". After months of back and forth the dirty laundry was finally taken out for everyone to see. The public psychoanalysis of those well-known executives was really interesting and educational: this is an early warning sign.

The whole psychology of this is really worth studying.

[cypherdoc]

This is exactly what I'm talking about:

I talked about the ones I've met and they were uniformly 100% in the spectrum of incompetents, fly-by-nights & fraudsters.

100% of bit coin supporters incompetent, fly-by-nights & fraudsters? thats quite an insult to everyone around here.

The emotions inhibit understanding. I haven't met you nor anyone else on this forum.

This whole fracas reminds me of the good old days of fuckedcompany.com. I remember marketing executives making emotional pleas in the same style as yours: intentionally distorting their mother's tongue. Commenters were joking "shiftless!", "undercapitalized!". After months of back and forth the dirty laundry was finally taken out for everyone to see. The public psychoanalysis of those well-known executives was really interesting and educational: this is an early warning sign.

The whole psychology of this is really worth studying.

please point out my "emotional pleas".  my original post to you was written in respect of your self proclaimed expertise in the technical arena.  i actually do wish to hear your views on the perceived weaknesses in the protocol but instead got back a venomous emotional response to a simple request.  i pointed out my interpretation of Gavin's post which is contrary to yours but still accurate in my opinion.  your response makes me question your integrity on this issue.

[Lolcust]

Such scenarios are not specific to bitcoins.

That's true, but partially. Satosh bitcoin obfuscated code base and its mizantropic build process are such that they greatly increases the chances of exploits and errors, no matter whether they are intentional or not. Add to that the attitude of majority of the supporters who claim "chargebacks never happen" and you have a extraordinarily fertile substrate for incompetency and fraud.

While I can make no argument as to quality of code, being a mere graphic designer, the build process is something a person with simpleton brainmeats like mine is definitely capable of mastering with some input from nice  souls in the community (I know this for a fact since I did craft together  and compile an alt-chain bitcoin fork to tentatively call my own )

I doubt that a cleaner, neater client would save the hide of someone who hires a John Doe to write business software for him and has zero code audit (which usually comes hand in hand with hiring Does). Scenario you present is not a "bitcoin has *insert term* quality of code or documentation" issue, scenario you present is "a guy who's entire business is a bunch of code running on a box somewhere hires lowest bidder and has no audit" issue.

The icing on the cake are fly-by-night-s: mostly miners. They claim "yeah, we are in for the long term", and yet you can see one-way ticket out of the country for December 2012 (or whatever is the date of first mining knee) that is hanging from the front pocket in their shirt.

I can relate to those lads.

Having said that, I don't think that the first knee would necessarily cause a miner exodus (depending on overall market response, the opposite might happen)

This is exactly what I'm talking about:

I talked about the ones I've met and they were uniformly 100% in the spectrum of incompetents, fly-by-nights & fraudsters.

100% of bit coin supporters incompetent, fly-by-nights & fraudsters? thats quite an insult to everyone around here.

The emotions inhibit understanding. I haven't met you nor anyone else on this forum.

This whole fracas reminds me of the good old days of fuckedcompany.com. I remember marketing executives making emotional pleas in the same style as yours: intentionally distorting their mother's tongue. Commenters were joking "shiftless!", "undercapitalized!". After months of back and forth the dirty laundry was finally taken out for everyone to see. The public psychoanalysis of those well-known executives was really interesting and educational: this is an early warning sign.

The whole psychology of this is really worth studying.

Could you point me to a concise and preferably online (being Belorussian I have a hard time ordering from them amazons) sources pertaining to "The public psychoanalysis of those well-known executives" ?
I just find that turn of phrase intriguing...