Bitcoin/Mastercoin transactions don't have a "from" address and problems like the above come from that.  If you try and dance around it you encourage address reuse (or worse!) which is a bad practice and has some security/anonymity problems.

You've got 5 candidates and 5 board seats, just call the election and sidestep this stuff.  The blockchain really doesn't work for voting.

$2000 is a lot for any Bitcoin company, especially for one in the mining business with its small margins.  I can't blame stockholders for not relaxing.

Can you post a 2014 income statement so stockholders have an idea of how long it will take to make up for the loss?

He's doing the same stalling tactics that Pirate, Ukyo, Nefario, Ken Slaughter and many others have done.  The goal is to get people to forget about the whole thing and continually put off other investigations/legal action.  At least he's not threatening to withhold deposits from the troublemakers!

I read somewhere about 419 scams using completely implausible statements in order to filter for the biggest of suckers.

Their confidence man gave you confidence that this isn't a confidence scheme, eh?

I had originally marked this up as bASIC 2.0 but when I saw the contract with eASIC I upgraded them to BFL.  I have now learned my lesson - never doubt the incompetence of Bitcoiners.

BTW, am I 4 for 4 on my checklist?  The first point maybe not (sounds like he did some coding) but the large amount of engineering work he hasn't done makes the point more true than false.  IMO.

edit: also interesting to see all the names which no longer grace this thread...

It's possible that the coins are held up in a court order/gag order but it is in no way probable.  Remember that Ukyo's

• traveled outside the country
• distributed some of the money back to users
• been pretty active on the forums asking people not to act

Ukyo would be forbidden to do all of these (or at least told to sit tight by a lawyer) if he was involved with or under some kind of investigation.  There's no way in hell Ukyo could have done any of those three if he was under the national security letter gag order.

Instead, we've got a guy who has an incredible thirst for capital:

• owns a profitable securities exchange
• owns a profitable payment processor
• still needs to finance himself by issuing personal debt

Why does Ukyo need so much capital?  The probable answer is that he's pissing it away on gambling or bad investments.

I sorta understand that pictures of the hardware setup would give piece of mind to Active Mining shareholders.  However, don't you guys remember BFL's first generation of ASICs?  There were lots of pictures of equipment and assembly space spread out over the period of six months or so.  None of it mattered because none of the chips were on hand.  So I don't understand why people are crying for proof when we all know it doesn't tell us anything about the company's bottom line.

Not true at all, people had pirate's name and even knew his past criminal history (the thing about writing bad checks - pirate even acknowledged it was him).


I'm not suggesting it's a scam - I'm suggesting that Ukyo did something criminal with the funds and is now throwing out stalling tactics just like Pirate did.


But I didn't reply to crumbs

Anyone else remember when Pirate said that people making a stink would be at the end of the queue to get their coins back?  It was right after BrightAnarchist got a bunch of people together to hire a lawyer and see what could be done.  No more than a day or two later Pirate came out with that announcement and the group disappeared instantly.

It's certainly possible that the coins could be seized by law enforcement and Ukyo might not be able to discuss the details there.  He also might have burned through the money in any number of criminal ways and doesn't want to say anything that could be an admission of guilt.

Because bitcoiners don't understand finance?

Anyway, some interesting thought.  I don't know if I have enough info/background to make numerical estimates, but I imagine this is what their per-customer margin looks like:

bitcoin dust
less: marginal cost of mining servers/generic work servers
less: marginal cost of advertising (acquiring customers)
less: marginal cost of promotions (avg lottery payout)

The dust revenue is just so, so low do you think that you'll be bumping against problems with just the marginal cost of having a constant connection to a server and getting new shares?  The cost of one network connection to one mining pool has got to be incredibly tiny but so is the revenue you're making from dust.  Bitcoin mining is both your most reliable source of income but also your most server expense-hungry and concurrent network connection-intensive choice.

Advertising: really tricky as you're still being trapped under the upper bound of your dust revenue.  How do you keep your average cost of acquiring a customer that low?  I guess raising tons of investor money in a formal investment series gives you a pass here for now.

Finally, I don't think non-bitcoin sources are going to be moneymakers for these guys.  People who need scientific computing aren't known for their deep pockets - they are funded by grants.  The web scraping thing makes it sound like you've already got a customer which is cool, but I don't see the sustainability for that business model (and I don't know who would pay for it in the first place).  People scrape the web so they can store, index it and query it at a later time.  Your army of smartphones is only going to give you a small bandwidth saving compared to downloading the pages yourself.  Does the cost of outsourcing it to a 3rd party with an elaborate system to manage its workers (aka higher per-scraper cost) going to work out financially?

Any mining gurus want to speculate with me on what IntelliHash will be?  I'm guessing something like variable difficulty - something that increases the nonce search space and cuts down on chatty communication.  Or maybe just 48 bit nonces.

If it is a fatter nonce/bigger search space will this up stale rates?  Do you build some kind of interrupt so you can restart on the new share right away or do you just let the other hashers finish and give them the new share when they're done?  I know jack shit about the tradeoffs here and this EE stuff.

Massive, massive insolvency.

Can one of the YES votes post one or more of these BS-laden post from this guy, I'm looking at the first few pages of his posts and seeing nothing dumb.

Security-wise what does this get you?  Or is this just a 'fyi, we moved' thing.

I don't see any bugs/issues open on Github for any of these projects.  If you're looking for external developers to join you should keep a TODO list or a bug tracker somewhere (even if it's just you working on the project for now).

You might want to Options->Wrap lines.

http://www.mergely.com/nSpOy3ho/

The people in the know did give technical feedback, but they did it one abstraction level above the one you're working on now.  Didn't you see this thread?  The bitcoin maintainers came out of the woodwork to say "no, stop, this is a terrible idea."  retep even compared mastercoin/dacoinmeister to BTCST/pirateat40.  The message is unified and clear: do not implement Mastercoin, these ideas are all deeply flawed.

Haven't read the thread, but may eventually.  If this stuff was brought up before that's great, otherwise idk how everyone ignored it for so long:

General notes:

• if you can get a PKI in the blockchain using this system that single feature would make MasterCoin actually viable.  Seriously, everything in here is schlock compared to that.
• URLs in the prospectus messages is a pretty useful idea, it's probably worth having your MasterCoin foundation buy a domain and use it as an official shortener.  Alternatively if you still want everything in the blockchain I'd have a special URL message type with the ability for other messages to refer to it and the ability for the URL messages to succeed each other.
• Pretty much everything here would benefit from a 'prospectus' parent message with a numeric ID (or pubkey) and 'update' messages that reference the parent rather than re-specify all the bajillion little details
• Even if you're not coding you can start outlining a test suite now

Data streams:

• You use strings but don't mention encodings?  What have you been working on for the past 10 years of software experience?  The 80s are over brah.
• I think you're greatly underestimating the value of identity for a data stream, especially for one where you have to pay to get the data into the blockchain[0].  If you're going to the step of paying to put it into the blockchain and distribute it publicly like that it's likely that people are interested in your exact stream and not a generic category like Commodities::Metals::Gold.  So why keep the categorization in the blockchain and waste your precious transaction space?  Why use the serial number (unique identifier in the spec) at all?  Why not just stick to the source address as the identifier for a stream and leave it at that?  Nobody's interested in "Gold", they're interested in "The gold spot price at xyz exchange as published by the xyz exchange".  The whole category system is pointlessly wasteful.
• It would be cool to keep data feeds optionally encrypted for paid services but this might necessitate a PKI (also another useful thing to build)
• It would be cool to have the feed choose what the multiplier goes against (another sub-currency or another feed).  That's a much more useful use of transaction space than the category c strings.
• You need to have 'update' and 'prospectus' message types to save on size/cost

Bets:

It seems like you would be better served by implementing a scripting language allowing you to express conditionals for contracts of all types rather than the somewhat specific bet transaction type.

Smart Property:

• This is woefully under-specified.  Issuing new shares is a critical part of financing any business.
• Why do you waste space on another string identifier (redundant, addresses fill that role much better) but don't leave space for a URL (something actually useful?)
• Once again a place that would benefit from a scripting language for contracts/trades

Currency stabilization:
In general this is antithetical to the idea of a decentralized currency - someone in authority needs to pick a data stream and use it for your hedging.  So why keep all this stuff in the blockchain if it's not decentralized?  You're making an inefficient and wasteful service by keeping it there.

• You need to specify the formulas/algorithms that are going to be used for hedging!!!!!!!!
• You need to publish a paper modelling these algorithms and showing possible outcomes, measuring risk and generally throwing the wall at it under simulation.  Anything else is not due diligence.
• Another string as an identifier, wtf mate

You might have experience as a programmer but I take it you're not a systems guy.  Find someone who is and have them draft the spec.  You might not be familiar with hedging algorithms but you've got one implemented for the currency stabilization process.  Either find one and have them write a paper for you or dig up what the finance guys have in their literature and refer to it.  You don't have a bibliography and that's a bad thing, there is a whole lot here that is not novel and needs to be referenced so everyone knows you're not butting heads with what's generally held to be true.  tl;dr shoddy work designed by the clueless and implemented by the fools that follow them, stay away

I'm seeing the opposite on that graph.  Looks like the difficulty growth levels out for a day or so after each adjustment.  That would be consistent with people looking at their mining revenue after an adjustment and deciding to shut down their rigs.