IMO the most hyperbolic speculators are confused.  The exchanges are modeled after forex, and forex is a very useful analogy that almost always suffices when talking and even speculating about BTCUSD or BTC-Gold or what-have-you.

But, when one's purpose is to analyze the macroeconomics of Bitcoin and develop long term real price movement expectations the "currency" analogy breaks down.

First, BTC has no intrinsic value basis.  In fact, as with fiat currency, there is arguably an intrinsic negative real value expectation since there are costs associated with printing and carrying around and so forth (although these ultimately must be weighed against the real costs of the barter system which are clearly quite significant!)

Second, expected long-term intrinsic minting costs are (arguably) much higher with respect to BTC than typical fiat currencies, by design.  So much so, I would argue, that a "backed" currency (like, say, USD in late 19th and early 20th century) is clearly a far better analogy.

Third, even this model is deficient since, although not huge, gold, being shiny, malleable, conductive and so forth, does have real intrinsic value which creates a kind of "speculative floor."  Even if somebody figures out how to effortlessly fabricate gold from dirt, it will still retain some value because there will always be a market for it so long as civilization has not utterly collapsed.  Bitcoin has no such intrinsic value.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if we are modelling rational expectations, then the near-guarantee of scarcity and relative-to-aggregate supply-side minting difficulty (barring, I suppose, dramatic and unexpected advances in crypto-math) forms the sole basis for for any speculation about long-term price movements, by way of a demand function determined solely by the utility of BTC as a means of exchange and storage of wealth.

This means, I think, that our mid-to-long term expectations of real Bitcoin prices won't follow the same patterns that we are accustomed to seeing in forex or commodities markets.

Put another way, who fucking knows what will happen!?  It's fascinating to speculate about, but any sort of "return-to-mean, ldo" hypothesis, intrinsic value hypothesis or other chart-whisperer hypothesis probably has no basis here.  We need to think way, way outside of those boxes because the supply and demand functions of Bitcoin don't answer to the same fundamentals we are accustomed to seeing in other commodities.

Wow.  Just, wow.  Never knew about this.  Will be incommunicado for the next three days catching up on this important information.

Cause his Ma works him 110 hr/wk in the salt mines, ldo.

Tell her Coinonymous said you deserve that allowance for risking your life every day

Heh, Occam's Razor slashes Gordian Knot.  Film at 11.

Wow, that's incredible, because I have an invention that takes electricity as an input and spits out perpetual motion machines!!! If we just use your invention to bootstrap the process, by my calculation we could convert all matter in the universe into perpetual motion machines by 2031!!!

If CoinHunter is a natural born leader I dread to see what someone too emotionally fragile and immature to lead would look like.

That being stated, speaking from a position of relative ignorance, I have yet to see a technically compelling explanation of the claims that the changes he made to the Bitcoin heuristics are intrinsically detrimental to network security (which is not to say that those claims are incorrect, just that I don't understand them, and I'm not about to presume that they are true just 'cause some people said so in the middle of a flame war).

I don't usually make inflammatory flameposts but this is going to be one.  mobodick, I don't like you.  I'm not going to debate any of this with you because you are clearly well beyond the capability of reasonable discussion on this stuff.

OTOH, mobodick, your people have won, and mine have lost, for the most part, in the battle for control of this world, so congratulations on your victory, I sure hope you are enjoying your utopia.

Now, what the fuck are you here for?  Bitcoin can't possibly be the right currency for somebody like you.

BTW, a small plug: my recent (and, effectively, first) blog post tangentially relates to this dicussion, check it out at http://btcz.tk/.  even mobodick is welcome to read but he probably won't like what I have to say.  Sorry for the crappy writing, though.  It's a work-in-progress.

And yet, a court of law clearly is a mob of people.   

Aren't you forgetting:

4.  It's completely legit?   

+1

Really?

OK, have fun in your new 'leet forum where, I must presume, only people and opinions that love you are allowed.  I guess I'm probably not invited since I never joined your fan club or fucked your sister or anything like that.

In all seriousness, personally, I'm agnostic about all this drama/witch-hunt stuff.  Lots of hyperbole and careless language flying around lately, obv., but I fail to see how these are irrelevant or frivolous topics, or popularly perceived as such, as you seem to be suggesting.  It's a guilty pleasure, perhaps, but this whole thing is pretty amusing, frankly, for those of us with sufficiently limited pecuniary and/or reputational exposure.

Anyhow, don't let the door hit you...

Pretty vector art ITT.  I wish more .pdf's had interesting shit buried at the [100*(2^~5)]% zoom level like this!   

+1

I've also done this, but it does not always work.  Since I have no reason to suspect theymos is fibbing, I guess there must be a high enough correlation between IP's that have been banned due to actual abuse and IP's that are tor-exits or intermittent exits.

I can't really expect the forum not to block IP's that are repeat abusers so I don't have any brilliant ideas.

__
-?

...

lol, just kidding, whose post do you think you are reading?  Of course I have a brilliant idea

If you have root, there is a fairly clean, surgical solution to this problem.  Instead of banning the IP's in the forum software, ban them in iptables (or in whatever network-level tcp filtering is available in the server's operating-system).

This way, tor will discover the blockage and route to an exit node that works*.  Even if this fails, at least the connection will appear to time out or fail.  This is vastly preferable to accepting the user's http request but allowing the forum software to do mean things to the user.  Note that the most annoying thing about being blocked in this way occurs when the user constructs an elaborate post, hits the "post" button, and then has their post rejected by the forum software.  Once the post is blocked, you can't just press the back button to get it back, it's gone.  Worse, even if you were smart enough to save your post to the clipboard, and try to repost, the forum software will still reject your post as a duplicate if you use the back button (presumably because it is using a hidden html form input element to keep track of posts and prevent dupes).

* note: I am making an assumption here.  I briefly tried to find confirmation that tor actually does include some support for learning not to route requests to an exit node whose exit policy permits exit to a certain tuple, but which is in fact prevented from successfully connecting by something without tor (i.e.: packet filtering, great firewall of china, mis-configured routing table, etc).  Although I couldn't find a completely solid confirmation of this, I did find some evidence that I'm right.  Given the goals of the tor project I really hope my assumption is correct but I admit I'm not sure.

Better yet, just stop blocking blutmagie!  What is the point of blocking one tor exits and not all!?  You just make access easy for the bad guys and difficult for the good guys!!

So nobody has claimed the "going under-ground" guide?

I'm an anonymous entrepreneur -- by which I mean, to be clear, that I am doing non-anonymity-related entrepreneurial stuff behind a veil of anonymity -- and as such, I have found myself effectively taking a never-ending crash-course in how to effectively use various technologies, social techniques and common-sense measures to protect my anonymity while also permitting me to actually get stuff done.

I am planning on doing a write-up about this -- a kind of how-to guide, but not of the laundry-list-of-unexplained-instructions variety -- because, going forward, I will need an anonymity training regimen in place so that I can bring new staffers up to speed on how to protect their own identities and that of my enterprise and avoid some of the pitfalls that I learned the hard way.  Plus, I could definitely find some ways to put 10BTC to use

So, not sure what the original vision for this was but I'd certainly be keen to take a very serious look at the possibility of taking this on.  Can someone let me know, whose bounty is this exactly?  Yours, da2ce7?

@whomever-is-offering-the-bounty: can you please elaborate re: what sort of guide you are envisioning (medium?  topical emphasis?  tone?)... I need a get a better idea as to what you are looking for because the description in OP is rather general / vague (even if my write-up plans are not perfectly synergistic, I still very well might be able to adapt/expand my plans to stay consistent with your vision once I understand a little better)?

Thanks!  Post or PM is fine.

That sounds like a good idea.  I'll give it a shot.

Heh.  This thread is rapidly degenerating.  Here's some interesting content for you though (I'm apperently too newbish to post url's so you'll have to type  "http://" yourself):


How many of y'all were using your compromised password on Stars/FTP?

I don't have a lot of verification on this story from anyone I particularly trust yet so please take it with a grain of salt for now.

For Christs sake, MagicTux, IMO at least quit camping/having sex/sleeping/flying in aeroplanes/etc for 10 minutes and just freeze all transfers in/out of MtGox until this is sorted out!  At this point any concern about how such a thing might reflect on your business or Bitcoin is surely dwarfed by the bad PR these theft allegations are generating?

One other observation.  There is a striking plurality of newbs purporting to be affected by this... which, to some extent, might suggest that the real nature of this attack might be some kind of weird social engineering trick either to make MtGox look bad or create Bitcoin FUD....

That's just an idea though -- sincere apologies to any innocent victims who I may very well be falsely indicting with that line of reasoning -- still it needs to be considered.  By hiring a handful of guys to repeatedly start new forum accounts and post that they were robbed on MtGox, an anti-Bitcoin-villain could create quite a bit of understandable anxiety about the safety and efficacy of BTC.  Anybody good at fingerprinting forum posters?

Just a note, looking into this I tried to log in; I was using tor at the time and it said:


Which suggests somebody is staging some sort of semi-brute-force dictionary attack.

This is consistent with the hypothesis that someone is executing an attack plan along the following lines:

• collect passwords -- or maybe just javascript-generated-hashes of passwords -- perhaps by peeking at tor exit node traffic, or perhaps by managing to secure VPSes on the same LAN segment as other popular bitcoin sites
• replay those passwords/hashes (I'm too lazy to figure out exactly how MtGox's login system works) at MtGox
• steal teh maneys

As has been pretty much suggested already in this thread.

 

:popcorn-eating emoticon:

IMO the US Constitution is unlikely to exert a meaningful influence on the outcome of Bitcoin.  Especially if the DOJ, FBI, NSA, CIA or any other US Federal TLA's are involved -- US Federal LEO's mostly think the Constitution is an historical relic and anyone taking it seriously is probably some kind of "Taxi Driver" type whose phone should be tapped as a safety precaution.

If I had to bet, I'd bet that a US Federal campaign to destroy Bitcoin will happen sooner or later.  Because Bitcoin offers a kind of anonymity it will be labeled as "money laundering."  However I suspect the Feds will go to great lengths to ensure that Bitcoin never gets its day in court, unless, of course, an opportunity arises to prosecute an individual or group who is jurisprudentially clearly guilty of a bunch of crap unrelated or tangentially related to Bitcoin (i.e.: wire fraud + racketeering + tax evasion + money laundering, all using Bitcoin).

As others have posted, it may take them a while to figure out what Bitcoin actually is.  But don't expect Feds to live up to their infamy as misinformed dolts in 2011.  In the Internet era, facts are cheap.  Anyone with access to Google, git, and an abacus has the requisite tools to figure out what Bitcoin is and the Feds will make sure they have at least a cursory understanding before they send the goon squads to round  up their citizens.

Here's my reasoning: since 9/11, it has become -- I suspect -- sacrosanct in the Federal LE community that highly traceable, highly seizable money is going to be the cornerstone of a new anti-terrorism and internal revenue enforcement regime, and that protecting the control and monitoring of the movement of all practical money instruments is a a top priority -- much higher priority than, say, enforcing actual laws.

So once Bitcoin reaches a certain critical mass -- and I fear it looms dangerously close already -- its going to light up pretty big on their radar.  Even if the real money supply of Bitcoins were to remain unexpectedly small, a high velocity of money could still threaten the control of the Fed and the Feds over their money-power security blanket -- by which I don't mean an actual high velocity of Bitcoin, just the perception that it is possible for Bitcoin to accelerate in the future without real expansion of the monetary base.

Personally, I'm just grateful for Bin Laden -- that could very well have bought the US an extra six months or more.  I wish I were kidding  

On the other hand, I think any US Federal attempt to shutdown and outlaw Bitcoin will most likely fail.  I suspect that, due to the design of Bitcoin, they will be forced to trample on some fairly fundamental human rights or to implement some sort of Great Firewall to fight any "war on Bitcoin;" ultimately it will be a PR disaster.  Eventually some US administration will be smart enough to know when to back down.  I could see it being put into some sort of legal-gray-area status or even recognized as legal but with some onerous tax accountancy burden attached to it to make any real-world, practical usage of Bitcoin a de jure crime even if it's technically allowed.

Of course this is all wild speculation and even if I'm right, the whole process could take decades.  But if I had to wager on an outcome it would be something along those lines.