bitcoincharts.com now (finally!) lists OKCoin. (Maybe next century they will admit the existence of Huobi too.)  You can get the summary data from the site, at 1 minute intervals, since the site started (but only 2 days at a time).

You can get transaction logs for Huobi and OKCoin through bitcoinwisdom's API, but I don't know how far back in the past.

I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU GUYS, but I cannot understand an idea unless it is written in uppercase with a bold red 60 pt font. 

Do you think that he knew that it was you calling? (E. g. because you had called him from the same phone before.)  Have you tried calling him from a phone that he cannot recognize as yours?

Has anyone else tried to call him?

If he is not answering *any* calls, then other explanations seem much more likely.

His last major investigations were about (1) Brock Pierce and (2) Gonzague Gay-Bouchery, and their connecitions, on which he worked  energically up to the eve of his disappearance.   However, given the almost complete lack of interest of the community, he may have just got fed up with that topic.   (I would have given up much earlier.  I hope he will devote his energy to something more rewarding than trying to protect this community from the scammers and incompentent entrepreneurs it seems to love so much.  )

On his last day at this forum, he posted about Black Arrow, another miner manufacturer apparently delaying its shipments, and referred to AMT, yet another one which seems to have been an old bone of his. 

If he was indeed "convinced" to shut up, there is no lack of suspects...

For the record, this seems relevant to this thread too:

CoinReport, Posted On 16 Jul 2014
‘A Strong Stench of Fraud’: Butterfly Labs Allegedly Buys Buttcoin.org
https://coinreport.net/butterfly-labs-buys-buttcoin-domain-reputation-management/

You wrote "his sudden refusal to accept a phone call from me", but a more accurate description of the facts  may be "no one is answering the phone at his home,".  Is that so?

May be of interest to someone:
This Chinese article seems to be about a Chinese project to build an open-source software base for crypto exchanges:
http://www.lupaworld.com/article-240781-1.html
The project is supposed to be on Github but unfortunately the the article does not give an URL.
Google transates the project name as "brave open source" which is probably wrong.

When Risto asked us to make predictions for (the rest of) 2014,   back in 2014-04-14, I provided two sets, the "bear-masked" one that was just re-posted, and the following "bull-masked" set:


Admittedly it makes no mathematical sense to have two sets of probabilities for the same events (that could be a good definition of schizophrenia).   But, anyway:

On that day, Apr/14, the price at Bitstamp ranged from 408$ to 475$.  After that day, the the price has ranged from 420$ (May/06) to 683$ (Jun/01). 

So, one event for which my bullish half gave 40% probability of happening has happened ("price will go above 500$").  All the other events, for which I gave probability 40% or less, have still to happen.

So, can we wait until the end of the year before deciding who was too pessimist and who was too optimist?

And they do, unfortunately.

That proposed regulation, and other existing state and federal regulations, apply to any foreign based companies who sell products or services to residents (of the respective states, or of the US).  Foreign companies are supposed to ask customers where they reside, and comply with the laws of the client's country, as well as of the country where the company is located.

If the foreign company fails to do so, and sells to US customers violating US federal or state laws,  the US may try to prosecute the company, asking for extradition and/or cooperation of the local authorities.  (IIRC, at least one foreign-based fund out there warns right away that they don't sell shares to US residents.  And, IIRC, Mircea Popescu -- a notable bitcoin stock exchange operator in Romania -- got a letter from the SEC about that; I don't know how it ended.)

If the customer lies about his place of residence, and the US finds out, I presume that *he* may be in trouble instead.

Hey, those probabilities are MINE! All MINE! If you want to have probabilities too, go get your own!

 

In my reply to JJG I said clearly that I do not see how one can make 'fundamented' predictions.  Anyone can make guesses out of thin air, just from 'intuition' (which is 'prejudice' to others, of course  ).

Those were my BEAR-MASKED estimates, just from 'intuition', with the bear side of my brain turned on and the bull side turned off. 

But yes, it is quite possible that the price will crash to 100$ or lower. MtGOX actually did not have much of an impact; for one thing it was mostly a Western problem that did not affect the Chinese speculators very much.  The only significant impact of MtGOX was on Feb/10 when Mark announced a "bug in the protocol", but price immediately recovered when the claim was dismissed.

The really bad events were the PBoC decrees, and rumors about them.    The correlation of Chinese bad/good news and large drops/rises is quite obvious.  They caused the fall in early December, and several large drops in 2014, reaching briefly down to 350$. The recovery in late December was due to Huobi and then OKCoin finding workarounds to the decree.

If the price dropped to 350$ on unfounded rumors, promptly dismissedm, it is easy to predict that, if China were to take a much harder stance on bitcoin (and there is no way of telling whether they will) the price would surely fall to well below 350$.

How much below that?  It is hard to tell what would be the price if China had never entered the picture, but I am convinced that without China the 2013 rallies (April, October, and November) would not have happened, and the price today would be below 100$.  That is where my guesstimate '40% chance of below 100$ in 2014' above came from.

C'm'on folks, abstractions only go so far... bitcoin mixer operators know very well that they are being used for money laundering, and they warmly welcome that clientele.

I also had a set of bull-masked probabilities. And I prefixed them with something like "what the heck, everybody is playing, why not me too".

And I refused to bet on those probabilities at the time, too.

Well, that goes against all I thought I knew.  Or, rather, both sentences describe money launderins, only that one is the process, the other is the goal.

AFAIK, money laundering is indeed exchanging "dirty" money, that came from illegal activities (in this case, theft), for "clean" money, that (hopefully) cannot be linked to the dirty one, and appears to have come from legitimate sources.

But that does not matter. AML enforcement agencies are not that dumb; they undrstand that one way to launder money is to convert it to other assets, like gold, stocks, art, boats, real estate, etc..
How stuff works: Money laundering basics

Indeed, and you deserve much applause and respect for that.  But generally that seems to have been ignored.

Actually I was not thinking to his past troubles with the law, which one could even pretend that are no longer relevant.  Methinks that bitcoiners should worry about his creation and management of IGE, that cornered the game money market, and the way he got "elected" to the board of drectors (is he president?) of the Bitcoin Foundation -- even though his previous activity in the bitcoin scene seems to have been very small. Will he try to do with bitcoin what he did with game money?  Is Realcoin the first step in that direction?

I am almost 64... 

If you exchange 500'000 USD in cash for other cash, you are not making change. You are, quite likely, helping someone keep money that is 'dirty' in some sense out of reach of the the police; and you kow that.  That is what 'money laundering' is.

In principle not, if you received that dollar bill in good faith.  If the police is after someone's money for some reason, they don't want the same baknotes, only a certain amount of money.  So the question is: how much will the courts demand from each of the people who cooperated in the illegal act (including anyone who consciously provided money laundering services), to make up for the stolen money, evaded taxes, fines, damages, expenses, etc.

It is not up to the bitcoiners to decide whether bitcoins are fungible or not.  Fungibility of bitcoins, or of dollar bills, may be a desire of their users, but it is not a legal right nor a mathematical consequence of the protocol's design.

Bills and bitcoins are fungible only if those who receive them cannot be expected to check their origin.

Dollar bills are generally fungible because those who receive them cannot be forced to check their serial numbers against a police database of stolen cash.  But, if the Bank of Smallville was robbed yesterday, then a dufflebag full of neat 100$-bill bundles, with "Bank of Smallville" printed on the paper bands, will not be fungible at all.  A car dealer who accepts a few bundles out of that bag could be charged with knowingly receiving stolen money; and that charge may stick in court.

Ditto if a bank receives for deposit a large pile of loose 100$ banknotes, since the bank can be expected to check at least some of their serial numbers against said database.

If thousands of BTC are stolen by a hacker, any address that receives them, pure or mixed, will be suspected of being controlled by the thief, or by his accomplces, or by other people who may be trying to hide other money from the police.  Therefore, anyone who accepts a large BTC payment and does not make a minimal effort to check their history may get charged with etc. etc..  That check may be rather impactical at present, but if the police were to set up a database of addresses containing 'dirty' bitcoins, updated in real time as they move in the blockchain, then people may be legally required to check that database when receiving a large bitcoin payment. (Note that one must be connected to the internet when using bitcoin, but not when using cash.)  If that comes to pass, bitcoins will not be fungible at all.

Just in case: Huobi has launched a new exchange in Hong Kong, "BitVC" https://www.bitvc.com/
Trades BTC, LTC, and CNY (or CNH?).  Currently open only to invited users, but the daily volume seems to be over 12 kBTC already.

Sigh.

I have tweeted a warning about the BFL scam to my Brazilian followers (if there are still any active ones), with links to this thread and the "20 million mail fraud" thread.  That is the kind of appropriate action anyone can take to help.

Spamming the BFL inbox is sort of OK, but will only give them an excuse to ignore client emails. 

Pestering CoinDesk, the Bitcoin Foundation, and other bitcoin outfits that are guilty by their silence on the matter would only be fair, and may be more effective.

But mass spamming other sites and people who have nothing to do with bitcoin or BFL is a terrible idea.  Add up the time spent by users and admins of all the sites you intend to spam, and it will easily be more than the amount BFL owes, and certainly much more than what they are likely to return as a result of this campaign (which is quite probably zero).

It is not a matter of "keeping the high moral groud in the fight against BFL": people who do that sort of thing for that sort of motive are scumbags, no matter what their grievances are.

(And, since I or my employer may end up being a target of that spamming, of course I have all the right to complain here.)