Nah, just caught me on a bad morning. I thought "two month", and then had the brain fart :-)

Yeah, I doubt I'll manage to use it in the time I have left. Better ask for that refund now.

I'm just pointing out that 12 hours ago the site was happy to collect money from me, with no mention of a deadline for using that money.

Shachar

Just yesterday I put in $10. Now I have one year to use it.

Shachar

I think I see a flaw in your cunning argument: First, all trades are honest as long as it is not made under duress. And any macroeconomic teacher will tell you that in a trade both people get something they want, so the more trade you have, the better the economy is. People are operating under a wide variety of misconceptions regarding high speed trading, and only a few of the criticisms are valid. High speed trades mean that the value of a given stock or financial offering is much closer to the line where supply and demand cross. It results in less money being wasted either because the price is too high, or too low. What high speed trading does, in essence, is reduce the delta. Conceptualize a curved line, and then consider a number of equally-spaced rectangles under each approximating the volume of the curve. The more rectangles you have, the more accurate you can recreate that curve. High speed trading simply improves the delta of the supply and demand curves, so that the spread above and below the point where supply and demand cross is very small.

People get confused between high frequency trading and algorithmic trading. High frequency trading carries benefits for both buyer and seller. Algorithmic trading, on the other hand, can and has resulted in huge losses. Like most algorithms exposed to unexpected input, they behave erratically and in unanticipated ways, and once one algorithm goes off the rails, as it were, it can lead to a cascade failure where different financial agents within the system also see something that was unanticipated and then in turn fail. Because these algorithms control a lot of different financial products, these cascade failures can spread and crash entire markets, dozens of stocks, etc.

There are valid criticisms for algorithmic trading. I see none for high speed trading, however. And I do not know why people banter about about "dishonest" trading -- the trades themselves are public record, and only executed because the seller and buyer agreed on a price. There is no coercion or manipulation in the trade itself. The dishonesty in the system comes in over or under-valuation of a financial instrument, or from insider trading. This is external to the trade system itself, and comes from people using information not publicly available, or from deceptive accounting practices.

But here again, the algorithms themselves, nor the computers executing trades, are responsible, and using them is neither dishonest nor something that "only the rich" can afford to do; Sites like e-trade offer consumers a wide variety of tools which can execute high speed trades when various conditions in the market occur, such as the price rising above, or falling below, certain points, and these systems are available for use by the everyday person for reasonable fees. The dishonesty in the system is largely on the CEOs, senior management, and accountants, who collude to profit at others expense.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with the systems themselves, and I really wish people would stop spreading the idea that there's this mythical beast living in data centers in New York gobbling up poor people's money -- those live in the Penthouse, not the basement.

I posted something similar, but wish I could have retracted it... since the bet, as stated, is in USD. AFAIK, the contracts part of bitcoin can only manipulate bitcoin.

Ooops. Just not in USD... ouch.. .need coffee....

> Since it would be almost impossible to take the parent up on this offer, what would you call it?

No, once the "contracts" part of bitcoin reaches adoption, it should be trivial... I think.

> It's stunningly good for microtransactions.

My understanding of the situation is that in the long term (because of the cap on the total amount of bitcoin), there is a limit to how small bitcoin microtransactions can be (and still be practical), because transaction fees for mining blocks will need to replace the current incentive to mine (which is the production of new bitcoin).

Am I wrong?

I can't judge that without knowing what's in your heart, what your intentions were and why you held them.

All I can say for certain is: if I rushed to make a judgment without that information, I would become what my previous post was so clearly against. That was my point.

In American legislation, you're not supposed to grasp the principle. You're supposed to keep trying many different iterations on it, until there's a War on Everything. How else are we going to dictate to people how they shall live?!

Please reconsider doing this. The infantile, emotionally reactive, spiteful imbeciles who would make serious accusations against your character while feeling no real burden of proof don't deserve this sort of concession or accommodation. It validates them and lets them know they have influence; they deserve neither. Let them live their miserable lives of vocal desperation. Let their appetite for someone else to be "wrong" so they can feel superior for a whole moment be starved. They were never interested in constructive criticism, but not feeding them this way is a constructive act you can perform for them.

Besides, these days absolutely everything and anything can be branded "racist". Soon the word will have no meaning and everyone will be so used to hearing it thrown around that it will gather no attention at all. Right now it's about halfway there. It once meant a belief that one group of people is genetically and inherently superior to another group, some time ago. Now it means "I don't like what that guy says but I lack the sophistication, intelligence, and patience to be an individual who can explain what is wrong with, it so I'd rather act like a spoiled child and focus on group identity".

It's a shame that real instances of actual injustice that deserve to become known are probably getting lost in the noise produced by misuse of this epithet. Anyway, I respectfully urge you to reconsider catering to a bunch of puerile, broken individuals in the hope that they may yet reach emotional adulthood.

He said "I MIGHT [emphasis mine] want you to die a painful death..."

I see the elegance of producing a terrific strawman troll by merely omitting one word, but really, this doesn't qualify for Insightful mods, puh-leeze!

Or (for those who think there shouldn't be the death penalty) triage.

Based on a tweet by one of Zerocoin's developers, they have decided to launch it as an independent currency, therefore requiring that one or more Bitcoin / Zerocoin exchanges will spring up to enable increased Bitcoin anonymity.

> Since mixing services have fundamental problems of a non-technical nature, it just won't work.

OK, interesting. What are these problems? Isn't Tor just a "mixing service", yet the documents from the NSA which have been revealed up to now claim that even that bastion of binary processing power is capable of de-anonymizing only a small fraction of the Tor network's throughput?