Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: jr2 on February 28, 2014, 07:19:29 am
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http://gizmodo.com/mt-gox-is-filing-for-bankruptcy-protection-1533202032
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:wakka::wakka::wakka:
This situation is highly ferrous.
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Schadenfreude doesn't quite reach the levels I'm feeling now.
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Sadly the bitcoin community seems to have neatly integrated this into their rigorous system of denial and trundled on with business as usual (that is, a steady decline in prices ever since the bounce-back from the Great Crash of China).
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"sadly"? Never try to impede natural selection at work, especially when the Darwin award nominees are so adamantly invested on being selected!
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Sadly because I want to see Bitcoin go down in glorious flames, not limp along slowly decaying.
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It is going down in flames! Hundreds of millions of dollars worth were just "lost" in Mt Gox? It's burning already and the funny part is they don't even realise it.
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All aboard the Ferrous Wheel! :D
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lol Monopoly money
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63.6 million in debt associated with the bankruptcy filing. Awesome.
I can't help but cheer for some friends of mine who mined them initially, hung on until they were selling for $$$$, and then promptly sold them off and bailed out.
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I thought this was funny but I didn't know it was deep:
http://explosm.net/db/files/Comics/Rob/givemeyourcash.png
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/shrug
what can i say other than.... not bothered
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I am bothered by this story. A lot of people should be. This has nothing to do with problems of bitcoin at all, but rather a shady company.
It's very very similar to how MF Global shutdown, client money went missing, and bankruptcy filed days later. MF Global was to the tune of $1.6 billion missing. As the case was with MF Global is all too similar with Mt. Gox for having a barely detailed reason that really only outlines "poof" for what happened to client and company funds, and quick to file for bankruptcy.
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Except MF Global's relative stature in global finance was nowhere near that of Mt. Gox in the Bitcoin market.
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They still had their near identical similarities. I'm not suggesting past MF Global had anything to do with Mt. Gox of course.
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Bitcoin will survive this. The price is stabilised at about $500-600 now for a week. I just hope this will teach the bitcoin community to be careful about the choice of an exchange (that Mt. Gox is not very trustworthy was known known long ago) and most importantly, to not keep big sums of money in an exchange.
By the way, the total sum lost could be around half a billion
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303801304579410010379087576?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303801304579410010379087576.html
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Now what about mt. gox's clients money that just vanished.
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Mostly gone, I assume.
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turns out this was still the government's fault anyway (http://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1z9fv7/if_us_regulators_had_allowed_a_us_bitcoin/)
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Of course! How dare the government have rules and regulations to stop things like this MtGox debacle from happening! Never mind the shoddy coding of the site, or the lack of a track record for the operators, it must be the government Doing It Wrong AGAIN!
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I loved the way the second post put it.
stupid usa regulations got me kidnapped. i really wanted to get in the cocaine refining business but all the laws here meant i had to go to colombia. then the farc got me. stupid us government, they made me do it.
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It's funny with that reddit thread with someone saying that people had to use gox. Of course people didn't have to use gox in light of other bitcoin exchanges popping up. But, a lot of people who chose gox probably did so out of the fact that it was well known, popular, and had been around for a while. Most reasons for not using gox include an easier and faster time converting your currency into and out of bitcoin with an exchange that's a lot closer, also other exchanges were cheaper to buy bitcoin as gox had an inflated price.
Other than that the blame game on reddit there is just down hill :blah:
Who cares whose fault it was, but i wouldn't place the blame squarely only on the people who did business with gox. This is like saying that it should have been expected that corrupt gox was going to disappear with everything and offer basicly no reason for it.
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Again, if people want to play with Monopoly money, they shouldn't be shocked if/when they get burned. I'll stick with my full-faith-and-credit, thank you very much.
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I am not here defending bitcoin, but his monopoly money currently still does have value (this is a separate topic though). It could easily not have value at a moments notice (also a separate topic). Now when a company that deals in physical currency that decides to pull a move like gox did to clients the reaction should somehow be different? Would you still then fault that physical currency such as the american dollar if that is what that business had used, and is used all over the world just simply because you didn't like it?
That's ok if you and others don't like bitcoin. But, i don't see how bitcoin itself makes much of a difference when the company just made off with everyones stuff. That the clients all dealt in monopoly money should be that they all should get robbed, punished, and have their noses rubbed in the ground for doing business with gox?
This has nothing to do with the folleys of bitcoin, this has to do with gox running off with everybody's stuff. Any business can run off with everybody's money no matter what kind of currency it uses. The folley of bitcoin will be when that damn currency actually collapses and then people all over the world get ****ed. What gox did shutting down running off with everybody's money has nothing to do with the folleys of bitcoin. I just don't trust that it does when gox can't give a clear explanation, story, reason, or cause when all they give out is vague statements.
Focussing only on bitcoin is what gox wants people to do since that will pull people's attention away from the bread crumbs on the trail to find out exactly what gox did.
I just can't follow you mongoose.
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(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bh1f1t4CMAA3yLg.jpg:large)
Jesus ****ing christ, let the darwin award continue! I fully support these kinds of experiments!
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Uh, what?
1. No regulated exchanges in USA.
2. People turn to a Japanese exchange.
3. People get burned.
4. It's all the fault of regulation.
What the actual ****?
You win a ****ing golden medal in olympic-level mental gymnastics. Jesus titty-****ing Christ.
I think this summarizes that reddit page good enough for the dominating of stupid versus smart on it. It's not worth reading, it's full of misinformation all the way from the first post made by someone who deleted their account. Someone just wanted to make one post methinks. It's not worth reading.
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(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bh1f1t4CMAA3yLg.jpg:large)
Jesus ****ing christ, let the darwin award continue! I fully support these kinds of experiments!
I love self-described anarcho-capitalists. Generally it's a red flag that the person probably hasn't thought their position through.
"I am going to abolish the state and all regulation and the free market will rule all people will never do anything antisocial because OH LOOK SPRINKLES AND SPARKLES AND UNICORNS SHINY!"
Edit: really, autocorrect? Four attempts to get anarcho-capitalists by you, but unicorbs isn't an issue?
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I just can't follow you mongoose.
Look, I'm not saying that the people responsible for this shouldn't get the book thrown at them; they definitely should. But at the same time, I'm of the opinion that people going head-over-heels for Bitcoin as a concept are no better than those poor souls out there who think those e-mails they get are really from Nigerian royalty who want to send them millions. Sure, someone else is scamming you, but at least some of the blame falls back on you for being that stupid to fall for it in the first place.
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Ok (http://dailyanarchist.com/2013/12/12/some-things-almost-all-anti-bitcoiners-have-in-common/#more-8636[/url). I find nigerian scammees and bitcoiners incomparable. I know you have your reasons for coming up with your opinion of course. The only thing I would say in support of your comparison is that bitcoiners of gox made a very bad decision leaving their bitcoins in an online wallet with gox since in my own opinion, i think gox clients definitely got scammed. Gox did turn off the ability to withdraw, but you could keep depositing (shady).
Following up with those people is gox setting up a call center (http://mashable.com/2014/03/02/mt-gox-call-center/).
Even with coinbase, as soon as i got my bitcoins from them, i immediately transfered them to my laptop. A web wallet is really only good for temporary holding if your intention is to sell all the contents in your web wallet immediately on the exchange.
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(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bh1f1t4CMAA3yLg.jpg:large)
Jesus ****ing christ, let the darwin award continue! I fully support these kinds of experiments!
I love self-described anarcho-capitalists. Generally it's a red flag that the person probably hasn't thought their position through.
"I am going to abolish the state and all regulation and the free market will rule all people will never do anything antisocial because OH LOOK SPRINKLES AND SPARKLES AND UNICORNS SHINY!"
Edit: really, autocorrect? Four attempts to get anarcho-capitalists by you, but unicorbs isn't an issue?
How do you know that person is an anarcho-capitalist, and not a minarchist or libertarian? In that case, there would be no hypocrisy, since those agree with the existence of state and some minimal government intervention (like punishing frauds).
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Claiming that "Free Market means no regulation", and in the same post claim that that does not mean that people are free to steal, and later claiming that there should be laws that are enforced to keep the market honest, is a sign of a mind deep in the grip of cognitive dissonance.
No matter what particular philosophy you claim to follow, that position is incoherent. You cannot have an unregulated market with rules that punish wrongdoing, simple as that.
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When people speak about market *regulation*, they generally mean higher level state interventions, not basic things like outlawing frauds or stealing. Free market does not mean free to steal. Do not confuse free market with total anarchy.
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Then where do the regulations to outlaw fraud and steal end, and "high level state interventions" begin? Because, if I recall the thread correctly, one big point under discussion in there was this idea that "this wouldn't have happened if US regulations hadn't made running a bitcoin exchange prohibitively expensive".
Which is true, to a degree, but those regulations? They're in place to protect customers against exactly this sort of thing. So, would those regulations have a place in a free market?
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Yeah no I don't think it's inherently hypocritical to desire a state which exists to punish those who steal but doesn't intervene otherwise.
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Probably not. Although I don't think that such a system would ultimately serve the people living in it very well.
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Without regulation, how are you going to know fraud took place anyway?
Someone perpetrating a deliberate fraud in an unregulated business can very easily make money disappear. Then they can simply claim something along the lines of "Server and administration costs ate up all our money so we had no choice but to go bankrupt" How are you going to dispute that without the paper trail that regulation requires them to leave behind them?
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Meanwhile, the mystery of how all that money went missing is solved (http://pastebin.com/W8B3CGiN).
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Is there documentation for that bug? I don't read PHP....
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I don't either, but it's apparently just really ****ty code in general.
e: note that the money is stored using floats
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Ars Technica (http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/mtgox-code-posted-by-hackers-as-company-files-for-bankruptcy-protection/) already wrote a short report on this.
There's also an ongoing discussion on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7332391)
It seems the paste is just a part of Mt. Gox's server-side code which was most likely written by Mark Karpeles (CEO). I'm not sure if there's an exploit in there but since this code handles all transactions anyone with access to it would have been able to redirect them.
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The Bitcoin World is like currency speculation microcosm.
Why anyone would want to actually use a currency as unstable as Bitcoin completely escapes me, but it's good high-risk speculation if that's your thing.
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It's a currency speculation market backed by naive techno-anarcho-capitalists and the black market in drugs. Quite elegant, in a certain way.
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It seems the paste is just a part of Mt. Gox's server-side code which was most likely written by Mark Karpeles (CEO). I'm not sure if there's an exploit in there but since this code handles all transactions anyone with access to it would have been able to redirect them.
I don't believe the code matters too much except in the area of being able to be controlled by certain gox employees which is of course a given since it's their code. However, if the code reveals something like where all bitcoins go, then that'll be fun :nod:
The vague reasons for why all the money vanished are just as good as the bull**** that was fed to gox customers about disabling withdrawals (http://www.businessinsider.com/mtgox-halts-withdrawals-2014-2). They just make this **** up as they go along :lol:
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This just keeps getting funnier. Someone is going to be eating a $620,000 slice of humble pie (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/bank-that-claimed-to-solve-bitcoins-security-problem-robbed-shuts-down/).
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It's a currency speculation market backed by naive techno-anarcho-capitalists and the black market in drugs. Quite elegant, in a certain way.
The assasination attempts are a cherry on top.
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It gets weirder (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2573863/Bitcoin-exchange-CEO-dead-home-suspected-suicide-age-28.html). A bitcoin exchange ceo for flexcoin is dead. I think it's safe to say for myself that just getting all up on mt. gox for disappearing with funds is possibly what didn't happen. There's some kind of big conspiracy with the world of bitcoin getting a shake down.
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This may just, you know, be an unrelated suicide. Bitcoin isn't that important.
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True, i was more or less following currently closing down bitcoin exchanges.
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dear god you cannot make this **** up (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=474730.0)
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their next project will be about reversing Entropy. i mean, they seem to have the basics of that one covered.
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dear god you cannot make this **** up (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=474730.0)
A bitcoin gambling game that got popular with bitcoin gamblers; i love the name.
Apparently they had some problems of their own, but no one got fleeced (http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/possible-scam-ponzicoin-seems-to-have-made-off-with-7000-in-bitcoins/). The guy operating it is potentially a good guy.
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*facepalm*
"I'm going to invent a currency that will appeal to nerds and crooks and be free of regulation and oversight. What could possibly go wrong?"
"Well, sir, human beings could be themselves."
"Nah. That doesn't seem likely at all."
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what i love about ponzicoin is that it shatters the illusion, the ideology is now open for all to see, everything has gone totally transparent.
and they reek on it! they love the fact that it *is* a ponzi scheme!
"let's play ponzi against each other! nothing can go wrong! we are supermen dealing with forces mere mortals cannot comprehend let alone master!"
Ahaha.
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AND THE DARWIN AWARDS CONTINUE!
AT THIS RATE THERE WILL BE A DARWINIAN AWARD HYPERINFLATION!
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BiZbwc2CUAAwAws.png:large)
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Well since none of them are actually dying, they can't win a Darwin Award. We need an award named after a famous economist to award these people. :D
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The Schumpeter award?
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Any reason why that person is particularly appropriate? My knowledge of economists is limited.
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He's the guy who coined the term (and the idea) "Creative destruction".
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Well since none of them are actually dying, they can't win a Darwin Award.
Technically, a person doesn't have to die to receive a Darwin, though that's the most common scenario. Simply becoming physically unable to further pass down your genetic material to future generations is enough.
Accidentally chop/rip/explode your own testes off? Darwin Award. Accidentally schedule yourself for an oophorectomy and sign all the forms without reading them? Probably a Darwin Award.
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Yeah, I know. In fact the original version of the award required that the person had no offspring either so as to be certain their genes weren't passed on.
Still, we could use a nice summing up for what a Schumpeter Award is. Darwin awards can easily be summed up along the lines of "Natural selection states that genes which are unfit will over time remove themselves from the gene pool due to their inability to survive long to breed compared to fitter genes. A Darwin Award is granted to those people who prevent themselves from breeding through their own spectacular stupidity." We kinda need something similar summing up the economics version. :)
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It's not a good substitute - I can't think of one. "Creative destruction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction)" was the closest in darwinian spirit that I came with, but it doesn't really fit with this :) (it's more about the innovations destroying older activities rather than the process of selection itself).
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I'd be tempted to call it the Elop Award since on the face of it, that's an example of stupidity leading to a loss of vast amounts of cash, but there's some suggestions that Elop may have actually deliberately ****ed Nokia over in return for a pretty huge bonus soon after the Microsoft takeover.
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No bitcoin
mockery discussion is complete without a mention of the fact that Mt.Gox was originally Magic: the Gathering Online Exchange.
A magic online card trading site becoming the major bitcoin exchange is hilarious on its own, but somehow the people runing it seem to have become less competent at coding and security in the process (or maybe it's just full of scammers like many things in bitcoin land) :drevil:
Regarding bitcoin itself, bitcoin tends to get advertised because
1) no regulation
2) it's deflationary (Ron Paul 2016 End The Fed, wake up sheeple :rolleyes:)
3) no chargebacks
4) fast transactions for free
No regulation? Gee, that seems to be working out perfectly well since all actors in a free market are rational and, in all transactions, have perfect (or sufficient) information. Anyone breaking the rules will get caught by The Invisible Hand of the market, people refusing to trade because of scammer tags and ~reputation~, or hired hitmen, depending on who you ask.
Deflation? Ah yes, many economies have benefited from long term deflation, such as ___________ . An economy is not at all healthier or more able to grow if money is used instead of hoarded, and "I have 2% of all bitcoins so I should hold onto them and be worth 2% of the future world economy" is a reasonable and productive thing to advocate. Oh, and infinitely divisible bitcoins (by adding more decimals to your balance, so you can split it into smaller units) are not a roundabout way to inflate your way out of deflation related problems in any way, no sir.
No chargebacks? Overall, scammers and shady businesses Captains of Industry win, customers lose. If everyone's honest, it makes literally no difference.
Fast transactions? Sure, everyone waiting about 10 minutes at the bar for the transaction for their pint to be confirmed sounds like a good idea! Also there's totally no fees, except for the fact that transaction fees are a thing and transactions not paying the fee tend to get stuck in the queue for days.
e: In addition, the blockchain thing itself is a problem. IIRC, it currently hovers at around 15 gb and would grow by terabytes every day if it actually included all the transactions happening worldwide...
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deflation is actually what has pushed bitcoin from irrelevance to worldwide phenomena. While you are absolutely right that economies shouldn't be deflationary, if you want an alternative "coin" to present itself interestingly to a whole new group of people, there's nothing like a ponzi-scheme-like bubble effect to kickstart the "revolution". Especially when everyone convinces themselves it's not really a ponzi scheme, it's the Next Big Thing.
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deflation is actually what has pushed bitcoin from irrelevance to worldwide phenomena. While you are absolutely right that economies shouldn't be deflationary, if you want an alternative "coin" to present itself interestingly to a whole new group of people, there's nothing like a ponzi-scheme-like bubble effect to kickstart the "revolution". Especially when everyone convinces themselves it's not really a ponzi scheme, it's the Next Big Thing.
However, it makes bitcoin a commodity to hold and sell before the next great crash, and actually makes it less suitable as a currency. Crashes are hard to predict, and small "investors" more or less randomly lose money or get nominally rich (and have trouble cashing out when their exchange implodes).
e: additionally, there is no reason why bitcoin (or litecoin or feathercoin or, god forbid, dogecoin) in particular should become the world digital currency. Contrary to the claim that bitcoins are scarce and backed by math, their actual value for buying stuff is backed by internet libertarians believing really really hard in their value, people selling shovels to the gold diggers GPUs and ASICs to the miners, and silk road clones.
As the ridiculous number of alternative *coins that people have sunk money into demonstrates, cryptocurrency scarcity in general is only constrained by how many people copy-paste an existing piece of code and edit in another name (read: they aren't actually scarce).
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Relevant: Glorious Hatcoin!
(http://www.nerfnow.com/comic/image/1246) (http://www.nerfnow.com/comic/1246)
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I fully support any and all hat-based currencies.
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So do I. If only for the reason that if hats were currency, I could get the drunks who ruined my old one (it was my favorite!) into some very serious trouble... :)
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Another one bites the dust (https://vircurex.com/welcome/ann_reserved.html)
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In which Bitcoin users discover runs on banks and suddenly realize they aren't backed by the FDIC.
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the hidden costs of bitcoining (http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/21gc2x/i_ate_a_hat/)
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Can't say I didn't see that coming