The objectification of women in Asia must stop.  Consider the plight of Rina Bovrisse in Japan.  Even the high commission for human rights and women's equality in the United Nations Forum for the Development of Human Dignity for the Twenty-first Century has spoken out in favor of valuing women for their brains, not their looks.  According to UN high ambassador Kofi Butros Butros Aly, "women will play an increasingly productive role in the knowledge industries of the 21st century"

JUST KIDDING.  Carry on...

I'm new to this thread.  Without reading all 989 pages of posts, can somebody summarize the prevailing Zeitgeist of this thread?

Shouldn't it read, "Bitcoin collapsing, Gold is steady"?

It reminds me, as a gold bug, of the 'collapse' in gold the last few years.  Since my average price is well below $1000 an ounce, I don't really care if it falls from its all time high, as I'm still above water.

Is it the same with most of you BTC holders?  Or did you buy at the peak?

TonyT

Update:  weeks after I uninstalled Armory, I found out my hard drive was failing.  Not sure if it was related to the problem I had with Armory taking several days to install.  In fact, you could argue that the installation of Armory put my hard drive onto its last legs.  Luckily, I had SMART turned on in the BIOS and it told me the HDD was failing, and shortly thereafter I was able to clone my HDD onto a new one with no data loss or need to do a reinstall.  So everything is cool now...but I am not going back to Armory, sorry!

TonyT

For you 'old timers', meaning you remember 1999 and the dot-com bubble.

BTC = Back To Cleveland

Get it?  Enjoy the ride (down)!

Awesome.  This is a truism come to life: "making money is an art"!

I do have questions about how you managed to get this wood imported to the USA, which has very strict import laws (even Fender guitar has problems with getting rare woods imported).

Maybe you have connections, or found some local source, or don't care to say, that's fine.

TonyT

Some economists have opined on BTC. 

Translation of the below paper:  good news and bad news about Bitcoin. 

Good news:  Bitcoin is here to stay, as you will always be able to use it in the black market. 

Bad news: governments will regulate it so it remains in the black market.

TonyT


http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2531518

The Political Economy of Bitcoin
November 28, 2014
Abstract
The recent proliferation of bitcoin has been a boon for users but might pose problems for govern-
ments. Indeed, some governments have already taken steps to ban or discourage the use of bitcoin.
In a model with endogenous matching and random consumption preferences, we find multiple mon-
etary equilibria including one in which bitcoin coexists with regular currency. We then identify the
conditions under which government transactions policy might deter the use of bitcoin. We show that
such a policy becomes more difficult if some users strictly prefer bitcoin because they can avoid other
users holding currency in the matching process.

I read the paper quickly.  What Augur seems to be is:

1.  A prediction market, using bitcoin as the medium of exchange, but also allowing you to use other currencies, including it seems, Truthcoin, and, for stability (ironically!?) the US dollar

2.  using Augur one can avoid the numerous anti-gambling laws that apply to prediction markets (sad but true, as I am a fan of prediction markets; iPredict in New Zealand is one such example)

3.  using Augur you can buy or sell shares in a prediction, and it is locked in the Augur blockchain.  If your prediction comes true, then somehow (not 100% clear how) you can collect on your bet, if: (i) a super-user, or users, with high "reputation", reports that the event occurred as predicted, and, (ii) once this super-user(s) (with typically many such super-users reaching a consensus) says a prediction has occurred, then the Augur blockchain is 'unlocked' and people who made bets one way or the other can collect, via the blockchain, on their bet (if they won), or, if they lost, their bitcoins/truthcoins / USD amounts are also transferred to the winners.

4.  From the OP " If such an individual is dishonest, they are punished, and if they tell the truth, their reputation increases (this is discovered via principal component analysis)." - what is the punishment?  A hit in their Reputation points?  I suppose so.

Can any reader confirm the above?

TonyT

Best of luck.  My only small complaint is that the Augur website, powered by simple machines forum, looks exactly like the Bitcoin Forum, which is somewhat confusing.  Best if you change the design layout a bit so not to give the impression it is part and parcel with this forum.

TonyT

Yeah and remember, the copy editor writes in the caption below their photo that they're still virgins who model to pay for their medical school tuition... *cough* *cough* ... and their photos are not Photoshopped  ...*cough*.

Looks like my condition #6 has already occurred a few days ago...

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29950946

7 November 2014 Last updated at 11:37
 

Huge raid to shut down 400-plus dark net sites

The BBC understands that the raid represented both a technological breakthrough - with police using new techniques to track down the physical location of dark net servers - as well as seeing an unprecedented level of international co-operation among law enforcement agencies.

Prof Alan Woodward a security consultant from the University of Surrey who also advises Europol, said that the shutdown represents a new era in the fight against cybercrime.

"Tor has long been considered beyond the reach of law enforcement. This action proves that it is neither invisible nor untouchable," he said.

I tend to agree.  Not only is Bitcoin dying, because of price decay, but also most people (mainstream people) don't care too much about anonymity, and are turning to their smart phones to do digital transactions.  You don't need a crypto-coin, just MasterCard/Visa.  See more here: http://www.juniperresearch.com/viewpressrelease.php?pr=382

A company called Monitise is already partnering with Visa/Mastercard/IBM.  http://www.valuewalk.com/2014/11/monitise-future-mobile-money/    (Note this telling quote: "Implicitly, Monitise has acknowledged the key ingredient to banking is trust between the institution and its customer. Just as a no-named ATM draws suspicion, so too does an unbranded mobile application. By providing a customizable open interface platform to banks, Monitise can leverage its technology through the customer’s trust for their financial institution. ")

I do hope Bitcoin's price recovers however...

Must read.

TonyT

http://thefederalist.com/2014/10/31/medical-science-doesnt-support-official-rhetoric-on-ebola/

This year a team of researchers has already found more than 300 genetic mutations in the Ebola genome that now “make the 2014 Ebola virus genomes distinct from the viral genomes tied to previous Ebola outbreaks,” a portion of the findings reported in Science. This means that the strain of the virus that now threatens Americans (or could threaten the country a year from now) just might be transmitted with more casual contact than in the past.

Yes, the concept/theory of a poisoned node is correct.  It is because, like Skype actually, every time you use a full wallet (like Armory) it broadcasts your IP address every time you boot up and/or send or receive (it's not clear to me which, but it's one or the other).  From this information a dedicated person can track your activities--if they have specialized software like the researchers from the paper below.  Or, as in the paper involving Tor, they can set up 'poisoned nodes' next to yours (possibly geographically located, so they are the first nodes to greet your PC when you boot up), and intercept your bitcoin communications that you think are heading to Tor, but in fact are going to the poisoned nodes.  But to do so, they need to have lots of such bad, poisoned nodes (the article mentions renting lots of servers), to trick the good nodes, which is something only either a big government agency or a very sophisticated criminal syndicate can afford to do, not your casual basement hacker.

TonyT

 
https://www.getbitcoin.com.au/bitcoin-news/investigation-white-paper-anonymous-bitcoin

Although numerous Bitcoin clients exist, none of them are specialized for data collection. Available clients often need to balance receiving and spending bitcoins, vetting and rejecting invalid transactions, maintaining a user's wallet, mining bitcoins, and, perhaps most detrimental to our study, disconnecting from "poorly-behaving" peers; these were precisely the peers we were interested in.  Because existing software had integrated functionality that interfered with our goals, we decided to build our own Bitcoin client called CoinSeer, which was a lean tool designed exclusively for data collection. For 5 months, between July 24, 2012 and January 2, 2013, CoinSeer created an outbound connection to every listening peer whose IP address was advertised on the Bitcoin network. We maintained that connection until either the remote peer hung up or timed out. In any given hour, we were connected to a median of 2,678 peers; for the duration of our collection period, we consistently maintained more connections than the only other Bitcoin superclient we know of - blockchain.info. This data collection effort required storing 60 GB of data per week

The article was lightweight, tin-foil hat stuff but it was good for the links therein, I thank you for that.

From the study below you can see how using a specialized piece of software, you can track IP addresses with bitcoin send/receives.  Note also the author can figure out how much each person has by tracking 'unusual' requests (which is somebody sending money to themselves).  The other link shows how to construct a poisoned node that will listen to and intercept your bitcoin traffic, even if you are trying to use Tor.

TonyT

Good link: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-tor-may-good-idea/  (your neighboring listening node may be a poisoned node)

https://www.getbitcoin.com.au/bitcoin-news/investigation-white-paper-anonymous-bitcoin  (bitcoin not anonymous)

Although numerous Bitcoin clients exist, none of them are specialized for data collection. Available clients often need to balance receiving and spending bitcoins, vetting and rejecting invalid transactions, maintaining a user's wallet, mining bitcoins, and, perhaps most detrimental to our study, disconnecting from \poorly-behaving" peers; these were precisely the peers we were interested in. Because existing software had integrated functionality that interfered with our goals, we decided to build our own Bitcoin client called CoinSeer, which was a lean tool designed exclusively for data collection. For 5 months, between July 24, 2012 and January 2, 2013, CoinSeer created an outbound connection to every listening peer whose IP address was advertised on the Bitcoin network. We maintained that connection until either the remote peer hung up or timed out. In any given hour, we were connected to a median of 2,678 peers; for the duration of our collection period, we consistently maintained more connections than the only other Bitcoin superclient we know of - blockchain.info. This data collection effort required storing 60 GB of data per week


 Discovering Anomalous Relay Patterns
When we began analyzing our collected data, we manually looked for interesting
behavior. The following are specic cases that led us to believe that transaction
relay behavior may be used to map Bitcoin addresses to IPs.
Case 1:
On August 31, 2012, we received a transaction from a single IP that
was never relayed again. This \single-relayer" transaction is highly unusual for
a P2P system using a gossip protocol; we would expect to have received it from
the majority of the approximately 2,500 peers we were connected to at the time.
6
On September 3, 2012, a new transaction with the same inputs and outputs was
relayed network-wide and accepted into the blockchain. Given this information,
can we assume the sole relayer of the rst transaction was its creator and thus
owns the Bitcoin addresses inside?
Case 2:
On August 22, 2012, a single IP sent us 11,730 unique transactions
within a 74-second window. The median rate we received transactions was
only
43 per minute. Because these transactions were already in the block chain, they
were not relayed by anyone else, making them \single-relayer" transactions. Us-
ing connection metadata, we saw that this large transaction dump corresponded
with this user upgrading to a newer version of the Bitcoin client he was using.
Could all of these belong to the single relayer?
Case 3:
For 52 days, beginning on July 24, 2012, we received the
same
transac-tion from a single IP approximately once every hour; no one else on the network
relayed it. The peer then disconnected, only for a new IP to connect and exhibit
the same behavior for the next 23 hours. This occurred again with the appear-
ance of a third IP, nally going silent a day later. Why would a transaction be
continually rerelayed, and what connection does it have to its rerelayers

There was a academic study reported in the Economist this year that found trading during long, cold northern winters was bullish (the colder the weather, the more bullish).  Data mining IMO.

TonyT

I "dated" her sister once, but she was inflatable.

I see.  So that means buying bitcoin in person, or using an escrow agent?  And then using Armory or a heavy wallet that does not rely on a server to crunch the blockchain?  And possibly using a BTC-paid proxy server or VPN or Tor when receiving money or sending money through Armory?  Is that it?

That's exactly what I do: cut and paste never type.  Except I use an encrypted Excel file not a text file.  I once almost got into trouble when Microsoft used to encrypt Excel (over 10 years ago) with a certificate that resided in your hard drive, and then, when I took my Excel file to another PC far away, running the same version of Office, I could not open the file since the root certificate was different.  Luckily I was able to get a trusted friend to decrypt the Excel file on my original machine and send it to me.  Microsoft has since fixed this bug and apparently Excel's encryption is supposedly pretty good now, unlike the way it was over 10 years ago.

Here's my "algo":  take a ruler, print out the chart of BTC price vs time for 2014, line up one end of the ruler at the high peak of the chart and the other end at today's price, and notice how well the intermediate points fall in between (except for the volatile month of October).

Prediction:  Bitcoin will continue to decay.  The 'resistance' seems to be early 2013 or 2012 prices.  That's < 10% of today's price.

Advice: get out. 

You are welcome.

I get the same error in Electrum 1.9.8 with 0.0004 BTC stuck in the wallet.  That's about $0.16 USD and not worth fighting over (I plan to uninstall Electrum).

TonyT