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End of bitcoin?

Posted: February 7th, 2014, 7:18 pm
by Alan
Mt Gox insolvency?

End of bitcoin?

Posted: February 7th, 2014, 8:01 pm
by farmer
Even if it is not as serious as insolvency, it makes bitcoin look like the province of idiots. Together with other major players getting arrested and confiscated. When I started watching mtgoxlive.com some time back, I noticed their uptime was frequently set to 0. This was one of the very few pieces of data deemed important enough for the page. I wondered what kind of an idiot would brag about his uptime when it is always going down? What kind of a financial site even has a true "down" moment? What kind of people use that site, where the information that it is always going down is useful to them?Seriously, what kind of an idiot gets $100 million in bitcoins, only to get arrested and lose them all?

End of bitcoin?

Posted: February 7th, 2014, 8:25 pm
by farmer
Maybe time for a little TARP from the Bitcoin Foundation?

End of bitcoin?

Posted: February 7th, 2014, 10:29 pm
by Alan
yes, the bitcoin idiocy factor is setting all kinds of records.CNBC has a great series "American Greed", where they often reenact the final days of notorius scams.If it plays out the way it smells, this one will be a classic. My protest at MtGox offices-- 5 to 7 February, 2014, Tokyo, Japan

End of bitcoin?

Posted: February 7th, 2014, 11:01 pm
by farmer
It is interesting. I read on one of those links mtgox is "Magic the Gathering online exchange."When I lived in Boulder around college age, there were various kids who got caught up in some sort of "magic" thing. There was one who thought the sun was a source of nutrition, and would practice looking at the sun without squinting. I figured it was adult-onset schizophrenia.There was supposedly a place out in the woods in the mountains where they all gathered. I heard rumors they lived out there without shelter. One time I was hitch-hiking past that area, and ended up getting stuck in that area after dark at like 9,000 feet with no traffic on an unlit remote road. Some weird hippie picked me up, and drove to his house. I had no choice but to accept his offer to sleep in his son's bed with the spaceship sheets, while his son slept in the livingroom.This was before the Internet was big, like 1998. But this hippie had his own Internet service provider, with some sort of colocation facility in Nederland, Colorado. He was up all night monitoring his up time, and even left to drive to the colo at some point.There was another guy who lived out there named Lee who introduced me to .Net and ASP I think even before it was released. I don't doubt those hippies were technically capable. But they would probably start jumping up and down like monkeys if the FBI came knocking. They were not built for activities that come into contact with human civilization.

End of bitcoin?

Posted: February 7th, 2014, 11:13 pm
by farmer
It seems like they had some error in the withdrawals. I don't know how it all works. Could be they lost track of a few bitcoins, and need to straighten it out and find out where the money went and give it back to its rightful owner. But if somebody got money he shouldn't have, there is a good chance he figured out how he did it, and did it about 10,000 more times before they figured out what was happening.Or maybe the police just made them put in some tracking system to find out who is getting the illegal money, and the system broke while they were trying to implement it.No sane person can be putting money into mtgox right now. So if there is any bid for bitcoins, it must be people who think they have a better chance of withdrawing them than withdrawing USD.

End of bitcoin?

Posted: February 7th, 2014, 11:25 pm
by farmer
Their supposed next status update is Monday. If you can't do USD withdrawals over the weekend, that makes sense. They can work at their leisure to fix the chain errors. It even supports the fact that you can't withdraw bitcoins, since some people may have bitcoins that need to be clawed back to their rightful owners.But on the other hand, it could mean that the bid for bitcoin will switch back to a bid for USD as Monday approaches. And the thing will drop to $10.

End of bitcoin?

Posted: February 7th, 2014, 11:37 pm
by farmer
Here is another thing to consider: One of those links had a post from a guy who interviewed at mtgox as a programmer. Another had a guy who stood outside all day with a video camera. Would you ever get that sort of thing from people applying to operate, or standing outside, nuclear missile silos?They are sitting on at least $100 million in untraceable cash that can fit in the palm of your hand. If their security were even remotely adequate, we would not even know where mtgox is.These fuckers probably hired off craigslist, with no background screening. I wish I had thought of it, I would be posting from my private island.I think somebody got in there, and withdrew all the money.QuoteI personally have been waiting for over a week on five BTC withdrawals, totaling to quite a large sum, that never made it to the blockchain due to double spending.We're not talking about french fries, or bags of garbage. We are talking about money, whose most common trait is to be all gone.I subscribe to the theory that this is the end of bitcoin. A currency that evades the law is a theft magnet. The only reason it is still trading at $700, is because people are afraid to even upload their codes to sell them.

End of bitcoin?

Posted: February 8th, 2014, 9:48 am
by farmer
Here is an interesting thing that I think I have learned about bitcoin: You cannot know if your bitcoin hasn't been stolen unless you attempt a transfer to yourself.*Mark Karpeles insists mtgox has the coins and they are safe. But he cannot do an internal transfer, since they are in cold storage at various backup locations.So even the guy who runs the place has no practical way of determining if his bank has been robbed, and if he has any money. Such a transfer is not necessary just to prove to customers the exchange is solvent. It is necessary for the exchange itself to even know if it is solvent.If I am wrong about this, please say so.*And by typing that number off a piece of paper into your laptop, you again introduce the risk of theft, making the exercise futile. You can never know who has your bitcoin, or if it is about to be spent. It is like if they designed a money to make it easy to steal.

End of bitcoin?

Posted: February 8th, 2014, 9:56 pm
by Traden4Alpha
QuoteOriginally posted by: outrunThis guy made 330 bitcoins last month!!http://ponzi.io/If he did exactly as he claimed he did, then he had 330 BTC come in and 330 BTC go out to the donors of the first 275 BTC. The last 55 BTC given by participants will never be returned.

End of bitcoin?

Posted: February 8th, 2014, 10:27 pm
by Alan
QuoteOriginally posted by: outrunDamn! He just took it down. Probably couldn't handle farmer's volume. Is was a "transparent ponzi"He promised to give you 1.20 bitcoin for every bitcoin you gave him as soon, as he recieved enough to pay youIn the mean time, while waiting, he parked the money at mtgox

End of bitcoin?

Posted: February 8th, 2014, 10:58 pm
by Traden4Alpha
QuoteOriginally posted by: AlanQuoteOriginally posted by: outrunDamn! He just took it down. Probably couldn't handle farmer's volume. Is was a "transparent ponzi"He promised to give you 1.20 bitcoin for every bitcoin you gave him as soon, as he recieved enough to pay youIn the mean time, while waiting, he parked the money at mtgox A Ponzi scheme losing it's money to a Ponzi scheme. I smell recursion!

End of bitcoin?

Posted: February 9th, 2014, 3:14 am
by farmer
It looks to me like mtgox.com has intentionally been taken offline. I have tried a couple different routes, I don't care enough to send DNS requests.Why would they do that? Any site can put offline messages, put maintenance landing pages at different IP addresses. Or, if there was a hacker of some sort working in their servers, they would unplug the network cable.Can you confirm mtgox.com does not resolve to any IP address that will accept a TCP connection? If so, one good explanation is they unplugged the network cable, to stop the guy who has taken all the bitcoins.There is not enough evidence, just from my experience not being able to get mtgox.com, to hypothesize all the coins were stolen. But on the flip side, I don't see how it is possible, with the NSA and hackers inside everything it seems, for all the coins to not be stolen. Even before recent events.You can't hang a piece of bait in the water that big, and not get chewed on.