While I am no expert in Japanese law, I can tell you that in many jurisdictions there is a law on the books called "criminal negligence". I.e., doing something harmful when you should have known better.

I think "losing the key to the box containing $500m of customer money" would qualify for that.

People are using Beta? Like, for longer than it takes to file a complaint and then click the "classic" button at the bottom of the screen?

I don't know about your biology, but my hands are lower down than my face. When I look at my phone, it will usually be...perhaps nipple high, with the screen angled upwards towards my face and the camera angled harmlessly towards the ground. Nobody nearby could mistake this for filming (except maybe filming the pavement a meter or two in front of me).

I definitely do not make a habit of looking innocently at my phone while pointing its camera at strangers faces.

Surely you can see the difference between that and having a camera pointing wherever you're looking?

This may seem like stating the obvious, but- divorce issues are based on marriage law, not parental law. You can be married to someone who is not the parent of your child (crazy modern world, eh?). And while custody battles tend to favour biological parents, it is not a solid point of law- it is entirely possible for a step parent to be granted custody over a biological parent, if the court thinks a case is compelling.*

*I have witnessed this in real life. An acquaintance of mine got custody of both children when he divorced his wife, even though one of them wasn't "his". That was because he had raised him in a father role for more than a decade since he was 3 years old, the mum was very unstable, and the bio-dad was completely off the scene. The mum contested it, but the court found that the child was better off with his step dad than his biological mum.

The Swiss Franc is a difficult example, because it is used as a "safe haven" investment in exactly the same way as gold is. It is badly effected by speculation, and in a way that almost exactly mirrors the speculation patterns gold experiences. Considering that the Swiss Franc itself had a distinctive pattern of value changes (the value in comparison with other currencies shoots up at the first sign of world troubles, and collapses again as soon as the troubles are over), it is difficult to use it as an argument AGAINST exactly the same volatility patterns in gold.

For most people, value can be measured at it's basic level in absolute terms. I.e., how much is their labour worth (their pay), how much are their savings worth, and how much "stuff" (groceries, utilities, luxuries) can they buy with their money. By this measure, the USD, EUR and GBP are far more stable than gold. That is, Compare the value of a loaf of bread, a car, or someone's pay in any two years and the change in currency terms is far more predictable (a steady march of 1-5% price inflation, mostly) than in gold (which yoyos). You can argue if you like that gold and other safe haven investments are the only things in the world with stable value, and EVERYTHING ELSE (including every thing in the world with any day to day use) is volatile in a uniform way. Or you can argue that the value of everything else is relatively stable, and it is gold that is volatile.

Frankly it doesn't actually make a difference- it's a point of philosophy which way you look at it, not economics. But for most people, the important measure of "stable value" is in knowing in a predicable way how much stuff can be exchanged for their labour and savings at any given point. Gold does not pass that test.

(And nor does BTC).

If your premise were true (that the volatility in the dollar price of gold is down to the volatility of the dollar, not the gold), there would be two easy ways to tell:

1) Gold can be bought using any currency in the world. There are hundreds of currencies other than the USD. If it was the value of the dollar that was changing, and not the gold, you'd expect to see the gold-to-other-currency prices change entirely differently. The price of gold in one currency might have gone down when the USD price went up, while others might have been very stable, and others could have gone up notably more than the USD. Even though the recent financial crisis has been pretty global, not all countries were affected equally, and past crises have been far more focused- the evidence for "the dollar is volatile, not gold" should be evident in the long term figures.

2) Dollars buy things which are not gold. Bread, cars, coal, toasters, silver, people's wages, etc. If you're telling me that when the price of gold shoots up 100% in one year it is because the value of the dollar has halved (and not anything to do with the intrinsic value of the gold, nosiree), you'd expect to see all of the other things priced in USD shoot up by 100% too. If the value of bread, cars, toasters, coal, silver and human labour all remain aproximately the same while the USD value of gold doubles, you can safely assume it was the value of the gold (not the dollar) that has changed.

I challenge you to find evidence to back up either of those points. To the best of my knowledge:
1) The peaks and troughs of the value of gold are mirrored pretty evenly in the prices in any currency you care to mention, especially once you strip out events which definitely do affect the value of the currencies (which are well documented by official inflation/deflation figures). The price is near as damnit the same whatever the currency.
2) Official USD inflation figures (which take an average of all sorts of goods and services) are in the low single digits, and definitely don't show any doubling or halving over the last few years. And the comparitive value of gold and other commoditiies (other metals, raw resources, fuel stuffs, etc.) does not stay in sync- when the value of gold spiked, it spiked in comparison to most other commodities as well as in comparison to hard currencies. The only things that spiked in sync with gold were other commodities with the same properties (i.e. precious metals with "safe haven investment" status)- and even then the values still decoupled.

That IS the value of gold being volatile.

Let's say a loaf of bread is $1. You could also exchange that $1 for X BTC or Y gold, and then exchange those BTC or gold for a loaf of bread (assuming your grocer is amenable).

Now let's say you go back one year later to buy some bread. Now that bread costs $1.03 (damned inflation). Or it costs 0.001X BTC, or 1.5Y gold. The value of both the gold and the BTC can be seen as mor volatle, in grocery terms, than the dollar.

This is actually what has happened in the last couple of years. Dollar inflation remains in low single digits. In the meantime, BTC is 10,000x more valuable (in dollar or grocery terms) than it was a couple of years ago, and gold has lost about a third of it's value (again, in dollar and grocery terms) over the same period. This isn't just the dollar being volatile- otherwise the price of bread (and everything else) will have changed wildly in that time in dollar terms, which it didn't (or at least not as much as it did in gold and BTC terms).

Or to put it another way- if you had converted all of your wealth to gold a few years ago, you'd be able to buy far less actual stuff (groceries etc.) with it today than you thought you could a few years ago. That is value changing, not just a "volatile dollar".

I believe the theory would go like this:
MtGOX had in it's virtual vaults other people's bitcoins.
They decided to make use of this money (to bridge a shortfall, or to embark on some new business venture- it doesn't matter), and so took $1X worth of (other people's) bitcoins out of their vaults, and sold them for actual currency (using their or one of their rival's exchange services).
They now have $1X (in real USD) in their possession to pay for whatever it is they wanted to pay for.
They intend to use $1X USD to buy back $1X worth of BTC in the future to pay back into the business, so that their customers can have their money back. Perhaps they intend to do so "on demand", only if and when their customers actually ask for their money back in sufficient numbers.
Suddenly, the value of BTC skyrockets. Each of their customers is now much richer. In order to buy back those BTC they owe, they'd now need to spend $10000X USD. They do not have $10000X- they only took $1X out, and haven't made THAT much money since.
They hope like hell that enough of their customers keep a balance with them at any one time that they never get called on it until the problem fixes itself (either the value of BTC collapsing again, or them managing to make more profits).
The value of BTC doesn't collapse fast enough, they find themselves unable to pay back customers making withdrawals, and their business collapses.

The fact that there is a step there for "convert BTC to USD" doesn't particularly matter- that's obviously doable (hell, it's MtGOX's actual business!). Other than that conversion step, it's a classic bank run.

Might I guess that you are involved in "litecoin" somehow (i.e., mine some, have bought some, whatever)?

I've never heard of it. Ever. Admittedly I'm not the sole arbiter of when something becomes brand-recognised, but I do read a lot of tech sites and I've never heard the name come up before (or at least, not in any way that has caused me to remember it). Can't see why you'd think that it has broken out of the "other" category. Frankly, Dogecoin is better known- and that's a take-the-piss.

Which mostly happened generations upon generations ago; there isn't a soul alive today who is evenly tenuously connected with the European colonisation of America. There hasn't been a major European war since WW2, and there hasn't been much in the way of colonial aggression since the Suez. Every European empire has now been completely wound down.

I like to think that we've well and truly learnt our lesson about those sorts of shenanigans.

I'm in the UK, my job is 40 hours per week and my paid holiday is 4 weeks for new starters, increasing to 5 weeks at the rate of 1 day per year of service. If I work overtime (as long as it's agreed in advance, rather than "ad hoc") I either get overtime pay (at I believe 1.5x salary) or Time Off In Lieu. I've worked some monster weeks in my time there, but I always get recognised for it in my bottom line.

I like my job, and I like my work-life balance. I also have some affection and loyalty for my company. I honestly don't know how anyone can live with the crushing mistreatment that some people seem to enjoy bragging about in this and similar threads. Do people not have any self respect?

If I were going to regularly work 60 hour weeks, I'd need to be paid a lit more than I am today, and I'd need to like my work an awful lot more than I do now. Anyone doing a job they dislike, so many hours that they're exhausted, for mediocre money- they really shouldn't be bragging about it.

For the record, my wife is a teacher (UK, primary school age) so I have many years of first hand observational evidence.

Her normal working pattern is this: be in the classroom to start work by 8:00 absolute latest, and never leave the school before 6:00. Doesn't get a lunch break per se (as there are always children to deal with over their lunch breaks), so that's already a 50 hour working week. Consistently works 2 hours each evening after dinner (marking, prepping etc.), so that's 60 hours. Regularly works 3 hours each on Saturday and Sunday (mostly planning and general assessment)- so that's 66 hours.

That's the standard. You can up that to 3 hours in the evening and 5 hours each on the weekend (so 75 hours a week) on special occasions, such as assessment time each term. Her school was recently inspected by OFSTED (look it up if you care), and that week she put 15 hours (at least) for 5 days, plus some time on the weekend. Must have broken the 80 barrier that week.

Technically she gets quite a bit of "holiday", but she has to do work during that too. She consistently works for 3 days in each 1 week "half term", and generally at least 1 full working week in both the 6 week Summer holidays and 2 week Easter holidays. Once you do the maths, she gets an amount of paid holiday each year comparable with the generous end of standard corporate holiday policy, with the slight drawback that you don't get to choose when to take it.

Pretty brutal, considering the pay.

That would be true if our economic system made a lick of sense. But it doesn't.

Mark Zuckerberg is a multi-billionaire (net worth something like $27 billion) for creating Facebook. By all accounts, Facebook is a Nice Thing, that the world is generally better off having it than not. But did he really contribute billions of dollars of value to the world? Someone who grows food on a farm might earn....$25,000 perhaps in a year, working 12 hour days, physical and skillfull labour, and with a high degree of risk of failure (crops can fail in the slightest of bad weather). So, did Mark Zuckerberg really add more than 1 million times the value to the world as someone who produces food for several hundred people?

Let's say the answer is "no". How much value did Mr Zuckerberg add to the world through his personal labours? 1000 times that of a farmer? 10,000? If the answer was "10,000", he would have made a "mere" $250 million from his creation. Still ample reward for his work, most would agree. But that $26.75 billion dollars we're talking about being in the balance- if he hadn't harvested it from other people (customers, investors, whoever), they would still have that money. It would be distributed differently, not "destroyed" because he doesn't have it. Admittedly in this example we're probably talking about mostly the money being held either by the very rich Zuckerberg or his very rich investors- but the same logic applies to each of the investors too. If each of them were rewarded fairly for their work (rather than over rewarded, in comparison to the rest of society), then you'd pretty quickly find yourself talking about people that actually need the money.

Let's say one of the rich investors of Facebook from the example above made his money in manufacturing. His factories buy resources, pay workers to work the resources into products, and then sells them to customers. He pays each of his workers an average of $25,000 a year for their labour. His profit comes from the sum "Sale Price of Goods" minus "Cost of Resources" minus "Cost of Labour". So, if he paid his workers more, he would be less rich and they would be more rich- a strict one for one exchange. If he paid his workers more and was himself slightly less rich (but still plenty wealthy enough for the job to be worth his time), he will not have added less value to the world than if he had paid his workers less- the world benefits in exactly the same way either way, it is only who gets to enjoy the fruits of the labour that changes.

If you could contrive a system where money (and by extension all of the stuff money can buy) was distributed more evenly (i.e., the gap between richest and poorest was smaller), do you deny that the poorer people would have a better quality of life than they do today (at the expense of a slightly lower quality of life for the richest)?

There is the obvious question of HOW you contrive a system where wealth is evenly distributed. That is as yet unsolved. Classical Communism and early Socialism has obviously fared rather badly at it, and Capitalism is god awful at it. If anyone can come up with an answer to that one, immortality beckons for them.

Linking it back to the topic thread in hand- Star Trek "post-scarcity" society. Star Trek never bothered to go into detail as to how we go from modern Capitalism and Socialism to their magical society where everyone is happy. That's because that's the hard bit.

Quite so, yes. If you're a billionaire, and you have yachts and diamonds and silks, you have those things and somebody else does not. It is binary. Those things didn't magically appear when you became rich; they are the product of (a very large number) of other people's labour. That labour was directed solely at making you happy, and not at making someone else happy- that too is binary.

Let's take the case of the yacht. One of those big billionaire's super-yachts probably took 10's of thousands of man hours to create. It also took factories, and education for the workers, and materials from the ground, and so forth. Perhaps you paid $100 million for it. Those factories could also have been used to manufacture other things- fishing boats, farm machinery, affordable family vehicles, whatever. Let's say that I took your $100 million and magically distributed it to some poor people- they could have spent the same money, used the same resources, and the same labour to create things that would be useful for them. You can't both have it; if the factories, labour and resources are making yachts, they are verifiably unable to make other things at the same time.

Let's take food. You're a billionaire, so you decide to host a great big feast for all of your swanky friends. You order 100 dishes, each made with a dazzling array of ingredients, enough food to feed 10 times as many guests as you have coming (but you just must do it that way to ensure you don't run out of the best bits!). At the end of the night, after you've all eaten far more than you could possibly need to eat, you throw out 80% of it. Farm land, farm labour, fertilizers, feeds, pesticides and so forth were all used to make that food- and not make food for others.If your wealth were more evenly distributed amongst hungrier people, the same amount of food from the same amount of farmland (et al) could have been more usefully distributed. As it is, you had the food and someone else didn't- food wasted is gone for good. It is binary- your excess is directly linked to other people's suffering.

And let's not even get on to the misery involved in the production of luxuries such as diamonds.

To pretend that wealth is not finite might be less "dreary and depressing", but it has consequences that you can't deny simply because you don't like the sound of them. If wealth were truly not finite, then presumably it would be possible for every single person alive to be a billionaire, living a billionaire's lifestyle. Everyone can have a super yacht! Diamonds for all! Obviously it's a nonsense. The things worth having in the world are not infinite, they are limited- if someone has a lot of "stuff", other people will, as a consequence, have less.

One day we might have increased the pool of "stuff" in the world (through those magical replicators and almost limitless sources of energy we keep hearing so much about) to such a point as everyone's wildest material desires can be fulfilled easily, with "stuff" to spare. But until that point, rich people are and will remain rich at the expense of the poor.

One obvious thing would be "food". We already struggle to grown enough food (and food of the right sorts and in the right places) to feed everyone alive today (citation: pick any famine-struck country). Arguably we are already farming most of the "easy to farm" land (populations have been living in most places for between centuries and millennia- we've had plenty of times to nab the easy stuff). That means farming using modern methods to feed more people than are alive today will mean converting even more land into viable farmland; see "destruction of the rainforests" for how that one works.

It's possible that we'll keep coming up with new technological breakthroughs to keep raising farm productivity, and it's possible that this will be enough to stay ahead of the curve until Earth hit's peak population (at which point, that problem solved). But there's no guarantee of that. Nor are they all going to be problem free- using ever increasing amounts of fertiliser and pesticide in order to increase yields is not guaranteed to be without harmful side effects.