Sentences like this are the reason people think you are high. It doesn't make any sense and surrounding it with Internet tough guy talk doesn't help.

Conveniently forgot to mention that 155% is external debt -- at least I assume so because Germany certainly does not have 155% public debt, the figure that normally gets compared. A large external debt can be worrying but it's not a meaningful figure alone, without knowing how much the country lends and to whom.

Greece on the other hand has 160% public debt, more than double the number for Germany and France. That's why everyone thinks they're fucked.

If you are saying we should care more about _external_ debts instead of total of all lending, just say so: I might be inclined to agree. But somehow claiming that Germany is doing just as badly as Greece based on that... seems a bit far fetched. The point isn't that Germany is safe from some future bursting of a bubble, the point is that Greece cannot pay its lenders _tomorrow_.

I'm guessing you've not seen the cash flow of a small item store? There's a significant percentage of money you end up "losing", regardless of payment system. Actual counterfeit bills, con artists confusing clerks to give wrong change, credit card companies pulling back payments even weeks after the fact, even debit payments can be denied if the store didn't check the signature... It's useful to realize that bitcoin isn't competing with perfect systems: all of them have these hidden costs, and so far the costs related to bitcoin seem small in comparison. I have no idea if bitcoin will be used in day-to-day shopping at some point but this issue does not seem relevant to me.

As to your example: doing a double spend attack on a $250 purchase (that is handled by a competent payment processor) is just not financially sane. So yes, I absolutely believe a store that handles such small amounts will accept 0 confirmations. The tiny risk might be taken by the payment processor or the store, that remains to be seen.

What kind of adoption is held back with 10min block time versus 2.5 minute block time?

• everyday in-shop purchases shops can accept non-confirmed transactions -- the risk when handled properly is minimal compared to things like counterfeit cash or credit back claims
• web shops can always wait for confirmations if they want -- 10 minutes will not affect a two-day delivery
• Waiting for a confirmation on a major purchase you only make every few years (say, a car or a house) is not a big deal

I can't think of a use case where waiting 2.5 minutes is acceptable but ten minutes isn't. What did you have in mind?

Didn't see this reply before... better reply late than never  I guess.

My logic isn't faulty: No-one promised you a 7000% profit from bitcoins -- or if they did, they were scammers. The point isn't that massive profits are impossible or that arbitrage does not work, the point is that massive potential profits mean equally big risks. These guys claim no risk, zero. They seriously claim that every day is not only profitable, but very profitable.

As an addition to the original rule about recognising scams: Even if you start to believe these guys have found the holy grail (a risk-free high-profit investment), you should ask yourself the second question: Why on earth would they give the profits away to some small time internet investors? They could just invest their own money -- even taking a mortgage is no problem since it's totally risk-free

btc-arbs is a scam, there's no other explanation that passes Occams razor.


Do you happen to need any bridges? I have several really good ones on sale.

No, we don't, not in the sense that we could say "there must  be one person that (thinks that he) owns all the coins in this one address". The Mt Gox incident showed very clearly that a lot of people (far more than I imagined) are totally ready to give control of their coins to some other entity that typically will consolidate the coins to a small number of addresses.

So you say. Unfortunately that's not enough. You could be scammers. You could be incompetent. Your website isn't doing anything to convince me of either point:

• You don't publish your real names -- that tells me none of you is ready to put their reputation on the line
  
• You don't publish your company info -- do you even have a company?
  
• Your TOS and privacy policy do not exist -- why should I trust your security policies if basic things like this fail?
  
• The only explanation of your security policies is "We use 5 layer security system" -- Is this a joke?
  
• You never mention that you will store the private key and have full control of all the coins in the wallet
  

I'm sorry if I sound grumpy but that's not acceptable...

I go to great lengths to avoid giving control (private keys) to anyone. I would definitely never give my coins to an operation that had the above bullet point list.

"sneak in"? Bitcoin tools have been in Debian for years before that article was written...

The article makes some good points, but Debian obviously has the right to make their own decisions -- that's what open source is about.

Personally I think many programs would benefit from out-of-distro distribution methods, but those either don't exist or aren't well integrated. That accompanied with the fact that bitcoin developers don't even provide debian packages means that the article (wrt debian) translates to "please don't use bitcoin on debian"...  That's not constructive.

Would you mind expanding on that a little? Are you going to take EU (SEPA) customers?

Also, I don't see an option for two factor authentication... I would have imagined an end-to-end security policy would have included that -- or am I just not seeing the option?

It's not just the massive profits they claim to make. It's also the question why do they want to give these massive profits to you? As you said, even a reasonably small investment of their own would allow them to make loads of money for themselves... but for some reason they don't want to do that, and instead give you the guaranteed profits.

I've translated this to english: "I think someone (but not me of course) should reward Mt Gox with $500000000.00 for being incompetent (or frauds)".

If this could kill bitcoin, then it obviously wasn't a very good idea to begin with. Why do you want someone to give away 500 million on a bad idea?

Ok, then we agree. The only reason I asked is that I thought you said the opposite in the post I quoted: that we would not need MtGox logs for this.

So have you been logging those transactions that never ended up in the block chain? Because I sure haven't.

Number one method of recognising scams: calculate the yearly profit percentage from the daily figures they use to confuse. If it sounds too good to be true, then it's too good to be true.

In this case, they advertise 0.1% to 10% daily profits (this should already be a massive warning sign: if you can make an insane 10% daily profit, then you are taking extreme risks and must have days of bad losses as well. These guys claim to only have profitable days). But let's estimate based on their reported profits for the month: they claim to have made about 1.8% profit per day on average. Maybe that sounds like it's possible, but calculate a yearly profit from that first: 100* (1.018^365 - 1) = 67287%

67287% -> SCAM

This is incorrect. Maged is describing what happens to competent exchanges with the malleability bug in the quote -- and it seems MtGox was not one of those.

The claimed explanation for MtGox was:
* MtGox sends a transaction
* attacker modifies the txid
* modified transaction goes in the blockchain, and bitcoin ownership changes
* attacker complains MtGox "I didn't receive my coins"
* MtGox searches for original txid in blockchain, doesn't find it  (<-- this is the bug)
* MtGox thinks they haven't paid, apologizes and sends a second, totally separate transaction of the same value

So there will be two transactions in the blockchain (Maged even says so in his post "Under no circumstance should you just issue a completely new transaction like MtGox did. That is how they lost some bitcoins"). Identifying the pairs could be very difficult as the sending and receiving addresses might be different.

Whether coins have numbers or rfid is not relevant in any way: this is exactly what I was trying to show by modifying the mugger-example... With most things property ownership is the most important value so your expectation holds: you get the exact stolen item back even if it means that later trades that were made with best intentions have to be canceled. The crucial exception is money and several things like it: When money is stolen, your property rights are _not_ the most important thing, security of transactions is the most important thing. This means if the mugger used your money to buy things at the store, you cannot get that money from the store: you need to get the mugger to give you the same amount of money instead.

It's possible that bitcoin will be considered a commodity in some court (I wouldn't bet on it), but I really doubt that applies in your situation. MtGox had the bitcoins, not you.

You make it sound like bitcoin needs to be considered something like  legal tender by only mentioning cash. In reality there are quite a few exceptions to this rule (depending on country of course), D&T mentioned a few.

I'm not that interested in how the law is currently interpreted in some specific jurisdiction right now (no horse in the race either), but I would like to see someone actually argue why bitcoin should not have the same exception as these existing exceptions "to facilitate trade and commerce by favouring security of transactions over the protection of property rights in certain common, but risky, trading situations". Personally I have problems making a good case against that.

+1

That whole post was what I wanted to express but wasn't able to, thank you. It will be interesting to see the actual legal decisions when they start coming up -- I bet we'll get both interpretations initially but my guess is the same: bitcoins may not be formal currency but handling them as unique pieces of property makes little sense.

You understand that this is language (or culture) -dependent more than it is currency-dependent right? In english "10$" is always wrong (or at least not the preferred form) but in many other languages that would be fine and putting the symbol before the value would look just weird. The same thing will happen to BTC.

This poll is basically asking "where does your native language put the currency symbol".

Er, no. My own guess is that in the native language of most EU citizens, the € comes after the value.