"Ursus" and "taurus" are Latin; "Minotaur" is "Bull from of Minos" in Latin, Anglicized.

Even though bull is "touro" in Portuguese, the Minotaur is "MinotAuro".

Well, if the company was functioning normally, why did those two persons complain to the police?  Why didn't Mr. Brewster get in touch with them to give them the private keys to their wallets?

And how did you know who those two people were? The newspapers did not identify them.

Are you still in Cyprus?

"Assets" are company property, money in the bank, money owed to the company. All that the company has now, not just what come in and went out last month.  Assets and debts are essential to figure out how much the company (and its shares) are worth.

These are all the posts of @CAFE_NEO. Note that they are on different threads.
That was quick, you left some other country on Friday ~07:30 European time, and by the end of that day you had traveled to Cyprus, visited the central office and the store, assessed the financial situation, and talked to the police about the coins.  Did you drive, or did you take the high-speed train?

Add BitVPS, Havelock Investment Fund...

There is a thread that was supposed to keep track of scams, heists and failures: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0  But it is no longer being updated it seems.   

These are all the posts of @CAFE_NEO. Note that they are on different threads.
That was quick, you left some other country on Friday ~07:30 European time, and by the end of that day you had traveled to Cyprus, visited the central office and the store, assessed the financial situation, and talked to the police about the coins.  Did you drive, or did you take the high-speed train?

Sory, it seems that this is not the best time for idiotic jokes... Peace and love. 

Every transaction has a buyer and a seller.  Therefore at least one idiot is necessary for any trade to occur. 

Obviosly I can't predict unpredictable events... But if Huobi can keep some bank account open after Apr/18, the price may recover the 500 CNY that it lost on Mar/27 because of the Caixin leak.  However, the descending trend that has dominated since Feb/06 will probably continue.

If, on the other hand, all bank accounts get indeed closed next week, the price will probably drop by at least another 500 CNY, as it did on Apr/10 after the ICBC closure. (Since that drop was cut short by the new Huobi note, such final frop may be much deeper than that.)

The December 213 statement posted here earlier only lists income and expenses. What about the assets and debts?  Didn't the company own some bitcoins?

As far as I can tell with Google Translate, the note  now on their site  (dated 2014-04-11 16:45:16 local time) says that

(1) they believe that the aim of the December decree was to prevent abuses like money laundering, and they are totally willing to cooperate with the government on that, they are already doing a lot in that area with customer identification, reporting large movements etc; and that if they are forced to shut down, those abuses will move overseas where they will be harder to police;

(2) they have received closure notices from two banks (ICBC and Merchants Bank), they understand that each bank is interpreting the PBoC order differently, with different dates, so perhaps some of the banks may continue to work with them.

I think these views are consistent with the theory that the new "PBoC circular" did not originate with PBoC (which does not seem worried about those "virtual stamps" anymore).  Bitcoin is no longer a threat to the monetary policy, which is the PBoC's main concern.  But is still a potential tool for money laundering, bribing, subversion, etc..

IIRC, the December decree was said to be the joint decision of five ministeries/agencies, of which PBoC was just one.  I think that the March decision, to tighten the December decree by closing the bank accounts, came from the law enforcement and national security agencies, and was issued through the PBoC only because the banks are subordinated to the PBoC.

Also, point (2) above may explain why the price bounced back to the level of Apr/09.  The previous note of Apr/10, about the ICBC closure, implied that all  bank accounts would be closed, with no negotiation possible, thus confirming the Caixin article.  This note restores the uncertainty of last Friday by suggesting that some bank accounts may remain open.  The timing of the last drop (07:00 am local time) and the  bounceback (11:00 am local time) seems consistent with the timing of the note plus insider trading.

Each displayed page would still contain 10 posts, whether normal ones or placeholders for deleted posts.  (The pagination must be preserved to keep Google Search working.)

So even pages that had been heavily spammed would have at most 9 lines saying " [ this post was deleted ] ".   I don't think that readers would be very upset if some pages had less than 10 readable posts.

Pages that had all their posts deleted could be omitted from the page lists.  They should still be reachable through links in quotations or through Google Search, so that readers would not be confused.

I suspect that @arij does not understand the distinction between "non-voting share" and "profit-only share".   Or perhaps I do not understand it.  AFAIK the owner of a non-voting share is still the owner of a slice of the company, not just of its profits.  Am I wrong?

However, since these bitcoin companies are intentionally created and operated outside any legal framework, perhaps any word intheir contracts and prospectuses means anything that anyone likes it to mean... 

Graphical display of events affecting Bitcoin's price

The following plots show the BTC price at Huobi and Bitstamp from about December 16, 2013 to about April 11, 2014. The labels near the top show the dates of events that appear to have had a significant effect on the price.

Huobi (BTC/CNY):


Bitstamp (BTC/USD):


Source: Bitcoinwisdom.com, 6h charts.

The events marked above are

  Jan/31 15:00 Start of Chinese New Year holiday week.                            
  Feb/05 21:00 End of Chinese New Year holiday week.                              
  Feb/10 09:00 MtGOX first press release, blaming "bug in protocol".
  Feb/20 09:00 MtGOX second press release.                          
  Feb/24 03:00 UNKNOWN EVENT                                        
  Mar/15 15:00 UNKNOWN EVENT                                        
  Mar/26 21:00 Caixin leaks a PBoC directive to close the RMB channels.           
  Apr/02 12:00 BTC38, FXBTC announce closing of their bank accounts.      
  Apr/10 04:00 Huobi announces closing of their ICBC account.            
  Apr/11 03:00 PBoC official compares bitcoin to stamps.            

Sugestions and corrections are most welcome.

Thanks for the link!

It seems inevitable that the Chinese exchanges will shrink considerably after April/18. (Just compare BTC-China before and after the December decree.)  Who knows whether their "overseas" reincarnations will succeed.

I am still puzzled by the price movements since Mar/26.

It seems that the only permanent effect of all the developments so far was the drop by ~550 CNY on Mar/27, after the Caixin leak.  That drop makes sense.

But when the report was confirmed on Apr/03 by BTC38 and FXBTC, and re-confirmed by Huobi on Apr/10,  there were additional large but temporary price drops.  These I do not understand:

  * if these drops were  dumping by traders who had doubted the Caixin report, why would the price recover in the next couple of days?

  * if all the traders had believed the Caixin report when it came out, why would them dump when it was confirmed?

[ Apologies if this has been suggested before, I did not find it with "search". ]

The "delete" button should not delete the post completely, instead it should leave behind an empty placeholder record.

Currently, when a post is deleted, links to that post are broken in a rather unfriendly way. Also, all subsequent posts in the thread are repaginated, which makes the Google Search cache obsolete from that point on.  (A user recently deleted hundreds of his old posts in many threads, messing up that cache completely.)

This is a link to a deleted post:

A reader who clicks on the link in that quotation will be shown a page with unrelated posts, none of them containing that text.  How could he guess what happened?

The suggestion is that "delete" should leave behind an empty placeholder post, which would be rendered as one line saying "[ this post has been deleted by the author ]", with the original date and sequence number.  That way the pagination of subsequent posts would not change, Google Search would point to the correct place, and readers who followed links to that post would not waste time reading the wrong entries and trying to make sense of them.

Even if the deleted post was the last one on its thread, it cannot be "hard deleted" since some reader may have already saved its URL in order to insert it in another post, or some page external to the forum.


Perhaps one should retain a "hard delete" facility, but for administrator use only, with the nderstanding that it may cause the above problems.

Here:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=24.0

EDIT: actually I shoudl have written "sub-forum" not "thread".

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Sunday April 13

Prediction valid for: Sunday 2014-04-13, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 2609 CNY.
Bitstamp's predicted price: 417 USD.


Plot legend

The data point of Apr/12 UTC was a good one (S = 0.0029, W = 0.846), and right on top (ahem!) of the previous trend.  Therefore it seems reasonable to assume that trend will hold for one more day. Weighted least squares fitting to the points of Apr/07, 08, 09, 11, and 12 (assuming that Apr/10 was an outlier) give A + B*(d-d0), where d-d0 is the number of days since Apr/07, A = 2796.66, B = -31.24.

The Bitstamp prediction, as usual, is the Huobi prediction divided by the currency conversion factor R, which was assumed to be 6.25 CNY/USD. It was 6.24, 6.32, 6.16 at the last three Slumber Times.
 
Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Friday 2014-04-11, 22:50 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Saturday 2014-04-12, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~20 hours later)

Ahem!

Huobi's predicted price: 2634 CNY.
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 2643 CNY
Error:   9 CNY (~1.44 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 422 USD.
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 423 USD
Error: 1 USD
 
NOTE: "There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale
    returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." -- Mark Twain

I do not know more about this case than any random reader of this thread.  However, the transition from incompetence to criminality seems to be common in similar situations.

When debts pile up and plans fail, a manager often chooses to risk some irregular workarounds (like mislabeling losses as long-term investments, using funds that he should not use, etc.) rather than admitting his incompetence (and perhaps losing his job).  When those workarounds too fail, he would be forced into even bigger violations of the rules to "fix" them.  At some point he recognizes that he has become a criminal, and then he will start planning and acting like one.  The CEOs of Enron, Worldcom, and even Madoff seem to have slipped down this path.

Another way a manager may slip into criminality is by paying himself and/or friends an exaggerated salary at a time when the company has more debts than capital.  That may seem a negligible risk at the time, but if the company goes bankrupt such generosity will be noted and it may get him charged with fraudulent management.

About those clients who bought bitcoins from Danny that were never delivered, for example: it may be (just an hypothesis) that Danny used that money to pay urgent debts, hoping that he would soon get some revenue somehow that would allow him to buy the bitcoins and honor the deal.  Or perhaps the deals were struck in September, he did not buy the coins immediately, and then found he could not do it after the price increased 5--10 times.