Thanks for the information and you make a good point on the first but not the second. I read the news Wiki articles and it appears there is evidence to support your point about the 1954 Coup and John Stockwell.

The posts about Snowden are allegations that the government gave information to US companies but there is no evidence cited to support this allegation. His supposition is built on the premise that the US government had access to the information thus they must be giving it to US companies.

It appears that China and France are actively engaged in Industrial espionage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Thanks for that post. Very insightful.

What were the charges that the Feds used against gangsters back in the day? The tax implication will provide a mechanism to go against those using Bitcoin illegally. I do not believe miners are criminals. However this news does put them in a sticky situation.

What are the facts to support these claims?

The Feds next step will be to start regulating transactions on/off exchanges. To assess tax implications you will need to provide a social security number and address for tax purposes. At that point they will process the ledger and link transactions to individuals. Will this spell the beginning of the end of Bitcoin?

I agree with you on the point about the recent problems with the financial services sector. Advocates of Bitcoin need to acknowledge that Bitcoin is not a panacea. I believe there are other fundamental flaws that have yet to be discovered.

Good point. That looks right.

The point is to compare the magnitude of the MTGOX debacle in terms people can understand. The malleability feature was one of the points that was exploited for this major theft. How many more security holes and flaws are in Bitcoin?

The frequencies 2305-2310 MHz provide bandwidths of 0.05-1MHz for full duplex analog or digital modes. Amateur operators appear to be secondary operators on that band however. Appears that most digital modes are low rate and low bandwidth. These would not provide bandwidth to approach data rates for EDGE let alone WCMA and LTE. The ARRL could have chosen to lobby Congress and the FCC years ago change rules to allow for more experimentation at higher bandwidths and frequencies.

I agree. What is the better way to wright it? Also, do you agree or disagree with my point?

You missed the point. If this were to happen in the financial services sector you could't just wave you hand at it to make it go away. Bitcoin foundation says on their website the software is new. There are no doubt holes in the protocol that have yet to be exploited.

The stakes are high and people will play any game to get a piece of this action.

The MT.GOX theft of 850,000 Bitcoins is 7% of the approximately 12,000,000 [1] in circulation. To put the impact of this into perspective consider that the top-50 largest holding companies have assets totaling $15,681,169,806 in thousands of dollars. Seven percent of this total is $1,097,681,886 which equates to someone stealing all of the assets for Goldman Sachs Group and Capitol One Financial Corp [2].

If this were to happen in the 'traditional' currency market the entire system would be in dire straights. Members of the Bitcoin foundation are trying to minimize the damage and dismiss this as 'bad actor' with poor security. Could it be that this is the first of major faults that will shutter this emerging virtual currency?


[1] - https://blockchain.info/charts...
[2] - https://www.ffiec.gov/nicpubwe...

The MT.GOX theft of 850,000 Bitcoins is 7% of the approximately 12,000,000 [1] in circulation.
To put the impact of this into perspective consider that the top-50 largest holding companies have assets totaling $15,681,169,806 in thousands of dollars. Seven percent of this total is $1,097,681,886 which equates to someone stealing all of the assets for Goldman Sachs Group and Capitol One Financial Corp.

If this were to happen in the 'traditional' currency market the entire system would be in dire straights. Members of the Bitcoin foundation are trying to minimize the damage and dismiss this as 'bad actor' with poor security. Could it be that this is the first of major faults that will shutter this emerging virtual currency? [1] - https://blockchain.info/charts... [2] - https://www.ffiec.gov/nicpubwe...

The phrase "same stuff different day" comes to mind when I think of the future of Bitcoin. In the last 10-15 years we have witnessed the Dot.com bubble, Energy bubble (remember ENRON), real-estate bubble (CDOs, Credit Default Swap, etc.) Bitcoin is the brave new world for the Wolf's of Wall Street.

Bitcoin advocates talk about a lot of positive aspects to the system. People naively assume that everyone will 'play by the rules' and do what is best for the long term stability of the currency. Wall Street will continue to invent creative and complicated ways to fleece others of their money. There is truly no honor among thieves. I for one will not be holding the bag when Bitcoin implodes due to dishonest games by white collar criminals.

[1] - Reference from Stephen King novel but a little more vulgar in the book

Yes. I have heard about reverse engineering on posts on the Internet. I also have read that many base band processors are implemented in ASICs (QUALCOMM) which are difficult to hack. The base band processors are done with ASICs because they are ultra-low power. A software based band processor will eat your battery very quickly.
So there are reasons, besides hacking prevention, to guide one to make hardware based units.