Bruno is now @Gleb_Gamow.

Does anyone know whether SMBIT accepts investments from US citizens/residents?

That is about 600'000 USD. I would not call it "big money"; it could well be the life savings of a moderately well-paid professional, for example.   The whole fund is worth ~45 M USD.

You mean men rui?

Google wants to know which search results you choose to follow.  Thus, instead of  giving you a plain URL to the site XYZ, it gives you a URL to Google.com that says "the user clicked on the site XYZ".  Google  takes note of that, and then redirects you to the site XYZ.

Actually, last time I checked Havelock was registered in Panama, but not as a stock exchange; and operated with bitcoin, presumably to evade regulations by the US SEC and other agencies. IIRC, Neo&Bee "stock" was rather misleading to investors: the fine print said that it was not equity, but "shares in the profits of the first 2 years".  And the "business plan" did not explain how the bank could make money. The "stock" was primarily issued in another "bitcoin stock exchange" operated by Danny Brewster himself and registered in London, which traded only the Neo&Bee "stock".  Someone else did some sort of arbitrage between that and Havelock, where the "stock" was traded too.   When Danny ran away, the London "exchange" closed, and the "stock" was soon de-listed from Havelock.  All investors lost their money, except perhaps for a few lucky ones who sold their shares before the crash.

That is precisely the sort of scam that  the SEC was created to prevent.  (Whether it performs its mission thoroughly is another question.  It may well approve the COIN ETF, for example.)

Thanks.  But I knew the basics of the math (none of which was invented by "Satoshi", by the way). 

And thanks for the batch of fresh promises in the Economist. 

Brunos's account is now @Gleb_Gamow.

Would it be snobbier to ask "would you like kava or cauim"?

If I understand correctly the suspicion is that "a certain company" simulated a large buy order from "a certain mining enterprise" via BitPay, when in reality the bitcoins used in that order came from the company itself.  It is suspected that the purpose of that manoeuver was to hide the real source of those bitcoins.  Presumably BitPay was used merely to convert the large pile of bitcoins into a large pile of dollars. 

For that hypothesis, it is not necessary to assume any cumplicity from BitPay.  The mining enterprise would have sent BitPay a bunch of bitcoins, mined not long ago, asking them to pay the manufacturer in dollars.  How could BitPay find that suspicious?

IIRC, the Shrem Karpelès & Friends Foundation explicitly promised that all the bitcoins sent to them would be received at that address, as part of their pledge to be transparent.  Am I wrong?

Sorry if it was a false alarm.  However, note that the attack I described above does not generate spurious internet packets and does not depend on a second pool.  The only external symptom, most of the time, would be a loss of performance.  The theft of resources would be visible at the internet level only once every six successfully mined blocks, by that block having a different address in the coinbase transaction.

To make sure that the attack is not happening, one should monitor the attempts that are sent to the ASIC rig by the mining software.

I don't know anything about Ripple except that it is to be run by banks... If, at some future time, the world will have to choose between Ripple and Bitcoin, my bet would be on Ripple, yes. 

That is nonsense... Computing and the internet were extremely decentralized in the late 1980s and 1990s. The megatrend, unfortunately, is towards centralization, where user-programmable personal computers are being replaced by sealed terminals of cloud computing and storage, and fully distributed services like SMPT e-mail, USENET, and institutional ftp servers and webservers are being replaced by centralized services, all provided by a handful of mega-corporations - Facebook, Google, Amazon, ... -- which are beyond even the weak public control that democracy provides.

Bitcoin itself, by the way, is decentralized only in appearance.  Decentralization is supposed to be good because it gives control and privacy to local communities and individuals.  But the idea of bitcoin is "we cannot trust banks and local governments with power to control the monetary system, so let's give all the power to ONE global robotic Network that handles all money in the world, and cannot be controlled by humans".  To me, it sounds like the plot of a 1950s sci-fi movie...

The Brazilian bitcoin ponzi BitcoinRain (already collapsed) promised their clients something like 9% return per month, minimum.  The founder claimed that he could get that much by doing arbitrage between exchanges.

The synodic period is what someone on the Moon would call an average day - that is, the mean time from sunset to sunset.

If, at the time, buying at 600$ was cheaper than mining, then those people are still better off today than those who mined coins at a cost higher than 600$.

Indeed.  It reminds me of the letter that Danny Brewster sent to the Central Bank of Cyprus when they denied a bank license for Neo.  Although nominally addressed to the CB, it was obviously not written with the intent of getting them to reconsider.  It was meant to the public, to paint himself as an innocent victim. 

Many years ago, a colleague here was a asked by the police to help them crack the password of a custom-made bookkeeping computer that they had seized from an illegal gambling site.  He just dumped and disassembled the binary, then, intead of trying to deduce the password or looking for the places that called the password-checking routine, he just changed a one-byte opcode in the latter, so that it would accept any password except the correct one.

May be fun doing the same to the AMT binary, perhaps.

Uh, ok... is that what people mean by 'cut your loose'?